Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

This is Saturday’s blog written Sunday morning because I fell asleep in front of the TV last night and couldn’t summon the energy to walk to the computer and do a blog, because I’d violated the rule, or what should be a rule at any rate, but since I violate it all the damned time it’s a bit hypocritical of me to even refer to it as a rule: don’t smoke when you’re already stoned enough.
Yesterday was a good day.
I got Helena and Isabel to meet me at the Love Trumps Hate rally on Wenceslas Square, although they didn’t want to stay long. They are the women of the family, and it was a women’s rally, predominantly, but, like most people in the world, the vast, vast majority, they are less interested in politics than I. Sam was off ice skating with friends and couldn’t be bothered at all.
It was a good event. There were about 400 people there, which is nothing like the 250,000 reported in Chicago, but it’s not bad for Prague, the most politically apathetic city in the known universe. I remember rallies against the Iraq War back in 2002 or 3, (war in Iraq has become such a persistent thing), when we couldn’t even get a dozen people.
The tone, I felt, was just right. I was worried that there would be too many people there focused on moaning about how Hillary was cheated, and since I’m of the viewpoint that it was Hillary who cheated, that would have been enough to push me away, but most of it was just straight up anti-Trump and where do we go from here, I saw one guy standing with an anti-Putin sign and he was probably a counter demonstrator but nobody was paying him no mind and the most entertaining protester was a crazy old man who was walking through the crowd waving a huge blue flag with nothing at all written on it and he would bump into people and block everybody’s vision but he apologized so sweetly that he had everybody, even the security folks, who are usually a grumpy group of old fucks, laughing. There was an almost aggressively good vibe coming off of the crowd.
My friend Maggie, an actor and comedian, who is perhaps a bit more militant than I, thought it was perhaps a bit TOO mellow. She was angry that they’d played ‘Let it be.’ “No!” she said. “Don’t let it be! Don’t let it be!”
And she’s right. Yesterday’s rallies must be just the beginning. The Trump presidency is a slap in the face to intelligence and human decency, and we can’t just ‘let it be.’

I’m not going to talk too much about the inauguration, although those guys with the all black suits and the black flags were just about too perfect a TV director’s idea of what a hip, urban anarchist should look and act like. I suspect Jimmy O’Keefe. I can’t prove that and will happily update as more information comes in, but it’s got all the hallmarks of a Project Veritas thing.
I’m a bit over a third of the way into Lord of the Rings, and just got a new book on Kindle, Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett, and it’s absolutely brilliant. So, at any given moment I’m torn between picking up one or the other, but the different advantages of Kindle and old fashioned make the decision an automatic. The Nac Mac Feagle shall travel with me in my bag on my peregrinations around Prague, just because of size, and I will peruse and relive the adventures of Frodo and friends here in the comfort of home, because damn, it is cold outside.
Good night.

I had an interesting conversation Monday evening, during a marijuana break at the poetry reading, about stream of consciousness writing v. thinking about it and editing as you go, as I do, and I have to admit I should try the SOC method more often. Certainly as this blog is at least partially intended as a writing exercise it makes sense and also as it was a fairly uneventful day today in my real life, which is not a bad thing at all, uneventful means know special problems, it means that stream of events which is the backdrop for our consciousness is a lazy, broad, slow moving, unchanging river and that’s a good thing more than it’s a bad thing because any thing which is a survivable thing brings good along the way and at the end of the tunnel.
The stream of thoughts that goes into my writing can get a little bit weirder, there’s one girl in my gymnasium classes who loves to natter on sometimes it seems like stream of consciousness just because she talks so much and it sometimes seems to me like a class conspiracy, like the other kids in the class commissioned her to just talk a mile a minute, too fast for me to interrupt, so they can all sit around and play on their laptops, and today she was talking about remembering your dreams and how you could train yourself to do that by waking slow and that was an interesting thing, I guess that was my learnsomethingneweveryday moment.
Stream of consciousness can lead to beautiful things because your mind gets a bit detached in the rush and you don’t know where you’ll go but also it means the blog gets written quicker, much, much quicker.

I had had this idea for a poem kicking around in my head for a couple of weeks but really left it till the last minute and got it written on the tram on the way to my poetry reading Monday night. Pressure means focus. This is good.
It’s a much darker piece than I usually write, but that’s O.K., a bit of dark among the rainbows and puppy dogs, some writers are constantly dark so it’s much appreciated when they have a moment of levity so I’m going the other way.
Anyway, it was handwritten, and I should add at this point that I have really bad handwriting. Always have had. It was a thing I was known for in elementary school, that my mother often commented on, that everybody who has ever seen it has commented on. That’s one reason I appreciate this modern world of ours, writing things out is becoming a thing of the past and my bad handwriting is not so much a factor as it once was, it’s certainly no bar to communication.
Here’s the poem, because the point of this story depends on it:

We are at a random place
in space and time, in time and space
and as we wander here and there
across this lovely planet’s face

We’re breathing in the sweet, sweet air
it doesn’t seem to be so rare
and it’s the same with time as well
it seems that there’s a lot to spare

But, beyond this fragile shell
is space, as cold and black as hell
Here, everything is nice and bright
but after that, we just can’t tell

As we stare out into the night
at emptiness, no end in sight
We know the nihilists are right
We know the nihilists are right

I got up to read it but in the first stanza, where I had written ‘this lonely planet’s face,’ in keeping with the dark tone, I read the n as a v and it came out of my mouth as ‘across this lovely planet’s face’ and it brought it back to sweetness and light for a second before that descent into the ‘we’re all going to die and none of it has any meaning’ ending, so as far as my overall body of work goes, it’s a bit of light in a dark piece in a light collection.
I’m taking it as an omen and leaving it this way, although it could have been the other and, in some alternative universe, undoubtedly is.

It seems that just about every day the last couple of weeks I see an article in my Facebook feed from the New York Times, or Huffpo, or theHill.com, or some other fake news site, offering up an explanation of how Hillary lost. Somehow, they almost never mention Bernie Sanders.
I think they’re asking the wrong question. Instead of asking ‘Why did Hillary lose?,’ they should be asking “Why did the Democrats lose?” It’s a preferable question since, presumably, Democrats wanted a Democrat to win, not just specifically Hillary Clinton.
Another reason it’s a preferable question is that once you ask it like that, the answer pretty much jumps right out at you. The Democrats lost because Hillary Clinton was the candidate. No matter what shit Donald Trump said or did, the argument was already about Hillary. He had scandals. She had scandals. He said self contradictory things all over the place. So did she.
Sanders did not have the same problem. He would have, therefore, coasted to victory.
It was clear at the time of the convention that she was a weak candidate. She was neck and neck with the short-fingered Caligula then, and her electoral record is not one of winning come from behind victories. Also, the cheating had already been exposed, to anybody who was paying attention. That made it real hard for Bernie’s people to get enthusiastic about her. Damned near impossible, in fact.
Those Hillary supporters who say “Well, I’m not sure Bernie would have won, either” are just clinging to their completely debunked ‘stronger candidate’ argument. Because Hillary lost to Trump, they’re assuming that any other candidate would have, too, which is nonsense. Trump was an awful candidate. Barely 25% of the country voted for him (about 50% did not vote at all). If the election had been between Donald Trump and “whoever is behind Door Number 3,” Door Number 3 would have kicked his ass.
That’s what a weak candidate Hillary was.

In other news: RIP Gene Cernan. You were a true hero.

Also, I’m glad Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence, but I don’t get the delay. How did he come up with the May 17th date? It’s like, “O.K., I’ll throw the liberals a bone, but make her suffer a few months more.” I mean, what was wrong with just saying tomorrow?