Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I’ve been called a Russian (not that there’s anything bad about that. I’ve known many Russians I liked very well), a bot, a Russian bot, a troll (well, sometimes I do stir up shit, but not just with the intention of stirring up shit to deliberately anger people because I think that’s funny, so I’m outside the technical definition, but O.K.), a hater, a traitor, a low-life, a cynic and a fool because I plan on voting for the party who’s platform most closely reflects my personal opinions, i.e. the Green Party.
It’s not coming from Trump supporters. I don’t know any Trump supporters in real life, although I have a few among my Facebook friends, I suspect. Politics has not been my only criteria for adding friends.
It is not coming from the Libertarians. I respect the Libertarians, in a way. I think they’re kind of nuts, and their political and economic viewpoints range from misguided to cruel, but they believe what they believe and can usually make a coherent argument for it.
No, it’s coming, of course, from the vbnmw, eat the half bowl of shit that’s put in front of you Democrats. They are outraged that there is opposition.
It’s cool. I’m an adult and my self-esteem is not likely to be greatly affected by a bit of keyboard outrage.
It does irritate me, though, to be called a cynic. If you can look at the state of the world today and not be cynical, you need stronger glasses.

Today I took a walk over to Malastrana and visited my favorite bookstore, Shakespeare and Sons, and drop off a couple of copies of my latest book, ‘Every Day’s a Butterfly,’ which has existed for at least 6 months now but we’re just getting our first copies from the printer, part slackness on my part, part slowness of delivery.
Anyway, my visits to Shakespeare and Sons are a long, almost invisible but very real thread through my life over the past 10 or 15 years. I average about one new book of poetry a year, maybe two, so every 6 months or so, sometimes a year, I’ll head down there and drop off a new book, and see if they’ve sold any of the ones there. Sometimes, it’s zero, sometimes it’s two or three. I’m not actually a famous writer or anything.
Today was a good day, for a few reasons. It was a lovely day as days go, bright and sunny and perfect for a walk through Kampa park, and I am very pleased with this new book, most of the poems are solid and there are a couple of hum-dingers. Also, they’d sold one book.
Now, more successful writers might see that as kind of a puny thing to be pleased about, but when it’s the difference between being ignored entirely and knowing there’s somebody out there reading a book of my poetry, that they actually paid money for, it makes a mark.
And that book was 155 Sonnets. I don’t know if it’s my best book, but it’s one I’m seriously proud of. It’s a hard format, but I set my goal and I got to it and there are 155 individual, original thoughts in there which are worth reading about.
So, that’s my blog for tonight. Sleep well.

It was actually quite lovely today in Prague, gray clouds in interesting shapes, a bit of rain here and there, enough to leave puddles on the ground but not enough to really get soaked. Just the way I like it.
So, it keeps things in perspective and maybe there’s no cause for panic, but the temperature the other day in Death Valley reached 130 Fahrenheit. That’s a fraction over 54 degrees Celsius, but Fahrenheit sounds much scarier in this case, being a higher number, although in fact it’s the exact same heat.
I also use Fahrenheit because that was the temperature in Death Valley, which is in California, which is in the USA, where they don’t understand foreign measurements, or math, or science, or much of anything, but I digress.
It’s a bad sign. It’s not a record (there was a hotter day in the same place back in 1913) but it does seem as if every summer is getting hotter, that’s been generally true for the last decade or so when you average out temperatures around the globe, a chunk of Canadian glacial ice the size of Manhattan broke loose and floated away from the mainland about a week ago, and several wildfires are raging in California (fire tornadoes, even!) as I write this.
The planet is most definitely not happy.

All generations
just like all nations
religions, professions
and ethnic groups
all have their fair share
of both good and bad people
different ingredients
in the same soup

That’s sort of a silly poem I wrote in response to a meme this morning, which had the Big Lebowski smoking a blunt as a representation of Millenials, and other frames depicting Gen X, Gen Z, and Millenials. So many false divisions, so many generalizations.
There are honest people and there are liars in every generation, there are people of principle and opportunistic social climbers, there are brilliant people and dumbasses, saints and sinners, rule following middle of the roaders and flat out deviants.
Sure, younger generations spend a lot more time on their phones, and older people are confused a lot and like restaurants with affordable, fixed menus. These are not fundamental differences. And the lines are not as fixed as most people seem to think.
When I was a child, I didn’t really think of myself as a boomer. I was the tail end of the boomers, in fact sort of the tail end of the hippie generation. Now, I’m viewed as smack dab in the middle of the boomer generation and the Hippies, unfortunately, have mostly been erased from the conversation. Maybe that’s why I enjoy smoking pot with younger people. Restores my faith in the future of humanity. Or maybe it’s just because I like smoking pot, and they are the people I’m most likely to do it with.
At any rate, point of the blog is that these are arbitrary dividing lines, the way that people think you’ll have a different personality if you’re birthday is May 18th, or one week later on the 25th. Or, if you use the Chinese Zodiac, according to what year you were born.
So, I don’t really object to these memes any more than I object to memes about the zodiac, or even any of Facebook’s lame personality tests.
As long as nobody takes them too seriously.

I don’t have much to write about tonight, politics has become a boring, repetitive topic, so I’ll just write about the last thing I watched on Netflix which was a comedy special with a guy I’d never heard of before, the blog titular Bob Rubin.
Very funny guy, I strongly recommend.
The thing with T.V. special stand-up comics is that they have become so common that the overall level has dropped and I find less than half of them funny, so a couple of minutes in and he’d given me a couple of chuckles so I kept watching and he was talking about drugs a lot which is a subject with which I am familiar and his jokes did seem to indicate some actual experience so I kept listening and there were a few times he’d pause and then just tell a few Stephen Wright style one-liners like “If I wasn’t here right now…..these clothes would just be in a pile on the floor” and a lot of it was stream of consciousness stuff which began semi-coherent and then ended with a rant about how he was going to have a second nose surgically implanted onto his forehead, but upside down, so it was kind of a strange and surreal show but about halfway through it I realized what was different. No bad language. Or, if there was, it was so casual I didn’t even notice it. And no mean jokes, either. Nothing about bitches, no nasty racist jokes.
Just weirdness and some pretty funny stuff.