Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Today was not a busy day, by  any  stretch  of the  imagination, but it  was a nice day, not a hard  day,  and a couple of positive  things happened.

I got to my 8 o’clock class at 8 o’clock on the  dot, but my  student is  almost always late, by  about  10 minutes or  so.  I rang the bell, but wasn’t surprised there was no one  in the office  yet.  I waited fifteen  minutes, then sent  him a message.  So far, that’s pretty much our routine, and he usually  texts right  back  to say he’s stuck in traffic and he’ll be there shortly.

But he  didn’t, so I went for a walk, it was a lovely morning, not cold  at all, or actually raining at the moment, (I would  still have to teach his  colleague at 9 o’clock), got a couple of donuts, and then he texted.  So I had the lesson  after all, but  we agreed that, starting next week,  we’re going to move the  start time back  to 8:30, which is great for me because it means I can drop off  Isabel at school and still make  it on time  easily.

Came home, went through my e-mail, browsed facebook for a bit, took a nap for an hour, got up and reheated some mashed potatoes for lunch, with ham and eggs, then  added a couple of poems to my poems about paintings page.  One I wrote  about 3 weeks ago but never heard back from the artist so, what I do in that case is to try and find the same subject matter done by some famous and, most importantly, dead artist.  Sue me.  While looking for that, I found a poem I’d written around the same time which wasn’t inspired by a painting at all but, any waterfall would do for an illustration, so that one was easy.

By this time it was already 3:30 and I finally got down to the proofreading I was supposed to be doing.  I can’t say I did a lot, but did discover I’m further along with it than I thought, and we should finish the book by tomorrow with any luck.

All for tonight.  Pleasant dreams to all.

Antonin Scalia is dead and I’m happy about  that.  The man was an evil piece of shit, and the  world is a better place for him no longer being in it.  He was so pro death  penalty that he once said something along the  lines of “It doesn’t  matter if they’re innocent, if they’ve been proven guilty  in a court of law, it’s O.K. to execute them.”
Some people have  defended the quote, saying that  he was technically correct, it is within the law, but since he said that with regard to a case where someone was actually awaiting the  death penalty for a crime of which he’d been cleared, it’s pretty damned heartless, not to mention totally ass backwards.

There were a lot of  jokes going around facebook this morning:  Ding Dong, Antonin Scalia’s dead, What’s Clarence Thomas going to do now?, He  probably went  hunting with  Cheney, and, my  personal favorite, a  pre-emptive riposte to anyone who was about to say ‘too soon,’ not soon enough.

Some people say that we shouldn’t do this, it should be hands off when somebody dies and, of  course, Obama made a nice, gracious speech praising him, because Obama’s a classy  guy, but I’m not.  The  way I see it, we see police officers murdering people right in front of our eyes, we see people being killed by American bombs and nobody bats an eye, we have publicized death to the point it no longer shocks.

Sure, his family and friends are in mourning.  Hitler and his henchmen had family and friends, too.  Every drug lord who has been executed by the DEA in  the war on drugs had family and  friends, it didn’t stop the right wingers from gloating over their deaths.

The game has changed.  The gloves are off.  Know, if you are an evil shit who believes in using the courts as an instrument of oppression,  or starting wars for political expediency, that  people are  going to laugh about your death on facebook, drink champagne, and dance on your grave.

I will celebrate when Cheney dies, as well.

What a day.  I read Tarot cards for almost 9 hours straight, with just a half  hour break for lunch, for which I probably did not charge near  enough  money, but it is a thing that I do that I love.  I am emotionally and mentally exhausted, but I feel really good.  It’s kind of like sports.  After a  long, brutal,  exhausting match of almost  anything, you feel exhilarated, but exhausted  and sore.  It hurts good.

It was a Valentine’s Day event at  a wax museum, which seems to be  a very  cool place and I am looking  forward to touring it some time  when I am not  working.  I only saw the tiny corner of it  where I was  working, but even that was impressive.  Those wax statues look real.

I don’t  remember  a lot of specific details of the readings.  From the time they opened at 10 o’clock I had a  fairly steady stream of customers and didn’t notice  the passage of  time  because I was so focused on each one, struggling to get the words  right, to try to  apply them to each stranger’s individual situation, trying to guess  who they were from their  appearance and the  way they spoke, to be kind when the  cards were not, and to leave everybody happy while giving them some enlightening  information.  So much can  happen in so little time that time both passes more swiftly and yet, so much new  information  comes in that  at the  end of the day, it seems as if weeks have passed.

I thought  I  was doing great  with  my steady stream of clients, but then, in a down moment, I looked over at the lady reading palms – she had a queue that  went all the way across the room to the  back wall.

About an hour after that, I realized I had a queue, too.  Not as long, but still.  No rest.  Then, an  interesting development  happened.  One  couple  asked  if a joint reading were possible and I said  ‘Sure, why not?’ because anything  is possible, the cards are a tool, we use them, they don’t use us.

After that, that  seemed to  be what most  people wanted  and the Tarot  reading  turned into a session of couples  counseling, for which  I’m fairly completely unqualified but, in fairness, so is everybody else in the world, even those doing it  professionally.  Who knows what  goes  on inside other people’s heads?  It is  an undiscovered country.

Anyway, I’m doing  it again tomorrow and very much  looking forward to  it.

These two things  are interconnected,  sort of, in that they are different aspects of a thought that  has been bubbling away  at the back  of my mind for many years.

This first quote appeared on my  facebook page today  and  it’s an interesting philosophical concept from a philosopher I’d  never heard  of before.  Meinong’s jungle.  Alexius Meinong was  an Austrian  philosopher, contemporary with Freud.

If you ask “Where are the non-existent objects?” the answer is, “Each in its own possible world.” The only trouble with that notorious thicket, Meinong’s jungle, is that it has not been zoned, plotted and divided into manageable lots, better known as possible worlds.

— Hintikka, Jaakko, The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic

Then, with that  thought sort of still in mind, but also inspired  by a poem someone else had  posted on the Occasional Poems page I frequently contribute to, I wrote this:

The poems we write
are thoughts we think
expressed in words
writ down in ink
as brick by brick
and block by block
we’ve built the world
through which we walk
so poem by poem
we fill our shelves
with abstract essence
of ourselves
a new day dawns
and we will find
a brave new world
of many minds

which  I kind of like.  All for  tonight.

It looks like the mess at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, the battle of Burns, Oregon, is over at  last.  Cliven Bundy, the  rancher who started it all in 2014 when he gathered a militia to protest against having to pay  any  money to graze his cattle on land that did not belong to him, was arrested as he landed at Portland airport on his  way to join the Moron Militia.

The four men  who are  left  inside seem to be ready to give up, although they are still shouting insults at the FBI.  “You let Hillary Clinton run for president!!”  It shows how long they’ve been in there, how isolated they are.  Wait till they hear about  Bernie Sanders.

I think the incident could have been handled better. I don’t understand why the compound  wasn’t surrounded and cut off as soon as the occupation began.

But, in the end, only one militia  dude is dead, and he was as  big a moron as any of them.  I’m sure Lavoy Finicum will be missed by his friends and family, but not by very many other people in society as a whole.  No civilians, no children, and no law enforcement officials were killed or  injured.  So, it was handled far better than Waco, for instance.

It’s a point for Obama,  and a lesson for the future.  Restraint is a good thing.  Time can be made to work for the  good guys.