Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I thought of writing a blog last night on the storming of the capitol, but thought I’d wait until morning to get answers to some basic questions, like who was the woman who was shot and who shot her, but I wake up this morning and find that 4 died, and we still don’t have a name or very many details for the first one, except that she was a Trump supporter. One might assume from that that she was shot by police, but in a crowd which is commonly heavily armed, it’s also possible she was shot by one of her own.
We don’t know anything at all about the other 3. Were they shot, were they trampled, did they have heart attacks caused by tear gas inhalation?
I’m not against reasonable limits. If they’re not releasing the names until they notify next of kin, they should say so. Other than that, the public has a right to know. Despite the egregious behavior and, in fact, the offensiveness of the very existence of the people in this gun-totin’, bible thumpin’, white supremacist crowd of multi-generationally inbred morons, I still don’t think the police should be able to kill large numbers of them indiscriminately.
With regards to the storming of the capitol itself, and some bozo standing on the podium wearing something that would even confuse people at a costume party (Are you supposed to be Davy Crockett, or a Viking?), I am kind of envious, and wish we had that much fire on the left.
I remember an anti-Viet Nam war protest on the steps of the Iowa Capitol Building, cca 1970, so I was still in high school. There was a line of police at the top of the stairs and, being the think outside the box kind of guy I am, I walked around to a side entrance on Grand Avenue, and sauntered right in, like any tourist on any normal day. I walked over to the glass paneled doors and looked out at the crowd, between the row of policemen. I waved at people, tried to get their attention, pointing and mouthing “Go around to the side!” but nobody saw me, or at any rate nobody moved.
The left just wants to make their case, do their symbolic gesture and go home. The right wants a fight. I wish there was some middle ground between those two courses of action, between those two states of mind.

Hooray! Whoop-dee-doo! Fireworks going off inside my head! My newest book of poetry, entitled “A Country’s Just a Place” as you can see in the banner which replaces “Every Day’s a Butterfly” as my latest new book, is now available to the general public, i.e. published. If you go to www.gurukalehuru.com/poetry you will find it, and you’re in plenty of time to buy a copy or two for Valentine’s Day, or somebody’s birthday, or any other occasion where you think poetry might make an appropriate gift.
Or you can just go there and have a look, read a bit of it before buying. It’s not everybody’s Cup of Tea (that was the last new book before Every Day’s a Butterfly, and there are about 14 or 15 before that one.)
It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, as evidenced by one critic over at Rattle’s Anything Goes poetry group, who called my work ‘forced-rhyming tra-la-la poetry,’ which is kind of spot on, in a way.
Of course ‘forced rhyming’ sounds terrible but, when you think about it, all rhymes, like all words put down on paper, are forced. Words don’t just jump onto a page of their own volition and start running around and swinging on the monkey bars. The idea is to make it sound natural, to feel like it’s an even flow, and I think I’m pretty good at that. You be the judge. Go. Read. Then there’s the tra-la-la thing, which she apparently meant as a criticism but, since I want my poems to have a light, musical cadence, and there are lots of great songs which have tra-la-la in there somewhere, I’m pleased with the description.
If you’re looking for something more in line with most modern poetry, which doesn’t use rhyme, is pretty darned casual with maintaining meter, and leaves you scratching your head and wondering what it’s about and feeling illiterate because you don’t quite understand the symbolism, then I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere. That’s not me. That’s not the kind of thing I write.

We’ve had four years of mixed horror and laughter at a Republican administration, so now be prepared for four years of horror and laughter at a Democratic administration.
Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo) delivered the opening prayer at a session of congress the other day, and, as far as politically correctness gone wild and flat out dumbshittery, it was a doozy.
First, let me state for the record that I don’t think they should be opening with a prayer at all. If you work in an office, or a factory, you probably just show up at your position at start of shift and start working. They should do it like that. It’s a place of government, not a church.
But, it was the ending line of the prayer itself which was so comically stupid. Amen and Awoman, Cleaver said. Leave aside the fact that, if the idea was just to be gender equivalent, he should have said Amen and Awomen, so plural matched plural. Really, leave that aside.
If we are to substitute female nouns and pronouns everywhere we see male ones in the language, even in words which have no natural gender, you come up with things like herstory, which is a rather clever neologism to mean ‘women’s history,’ which is, admittedly, an undervalued part of history. But, you also come up with a hell of a lot of stupid shit.
It is an over compartwomentalization of huwoman womentality, in which we are fundawomentally experiwomenting with language, sort of a PC pig Latin. Why do we say herpes and not himpes? Why do we say “Wake up, sheeple!” if half of them are heeple? Even if people did start talking like that, which they won’t, it would not change the relationship between men and women in our society.
That’s going to be the work of generations and is only going to come about through a lot more communication, and understanding of the psychological and physical differences (and similarities) between actual men and actual women, and not just the various syllables which relate to us.

Anthony Quinn Warner, who committed suicide in quite spectacular fashion in Nashville, on Christmas Day, by filling up his camper van with explosives, parking in front of a building of a company he didn’t like (AT and T, something about 5G technology), and blowing himself to smithereens, after giving people plenty of time to evacuate, because he was apparently a nice guy like that, was quite a quirky character.
He was convinced, for one thing, that Lizard People are on the Earth, and pretty much running the show. I’m hoping we find out more details about his beliefs because, tragic as his death was, the whole Lizard People theory is pretty hysterical, and nobody else died, so it’s O.K. to laugh about it.
Here’s my idea for a TV series. The theme song, of course, is Downtown by Petula Clark, because that’s the music that was blaring from the van just before the blast. Every episode, the evil alien lizard people conspire among themselves, eating lizard people food and speaking a lizard people language (lotsss of sybilants), to implement some nefarious new way to torment the human race but a plucky band of neighbors, or maybe little kids, or a dogged and persistent ambitious young journalist, inadvertently foils their evil plot, sometimes coming near to exposing them, but they always revert to status-quo ante, and each episode ends by revealing that somebody you trusted is actually a lizard person, and thus the cliff-hanger.
You could splice in interviews with real life people who believe in lizard people, both to add a bit of reality to it, and to mock them, of course. It’d be a hoot.

I just saw a great quote on Facebook. It was not the kind of great quote that you see and say “That’s it, that’s exactly right” although I like seeing those from time to time, too. This was more of a “Whoa, that’s something to think about that I’ve never thought about before” kind of quote. It was from psychologist Erich Fromm and unfortunately I am not able to either copy or link to the quote, but it was something like this: we tend to measure the insanity in our society by the number of insane individuals, but maybe we should consider that our society as a whole is insane.
Baboom! On the one hand, we are all individuals and some of us are a bit nuttier than others, and others are even nuttier than that, but on the other hand we are all a part and a product of the society, the human environment, in which we were raised, so we can’t help being a little bit nuts, just by being part of that great, crazy collective.
Is it insane that people all own cars and drive everywhere, because we know for an absolute fact that that is destroying the air we breathe, and yet we keep on doing it. It is insane that we all know the media is lying to us non-stop, and yet we still look to them for information. It is insane that vacant buildings and homeless people both exist in the same reality, because a bit of simple mixing and matching would solve that problem. It is insane that we have continuous wars for no other reason than that the arms manufacturers want to make money.
Although it’s a bit frightening, it’s also pleasant to consider that maybe we, as a species, as a society, are insane. Because that lets us, individually, off the hook.