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Twas the 18^th of April, ‘75

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year

And the midnight ride of Paul Revere

The kids were both in bed with us this morning and I was firing trivia questions at them, as my wife and Sam quite enjoy.  They would get questions like “what is the capital of Mongolia?” and “where are the pyramids?”  For Isabel I had to ask questions like “What is your middle name?” (she drew a blank on that one) or “How many fingers am I holding up?” (she got that, after a bit of coaxing)

A good time was had by all.  Then, I got to some question about the American Revolution and I remembered today’s date.  So I google the poem and read it aloud to the kids, who had totally lost interest by the middle of the 1^st stanza, but I plowed on through, reading it aloud to a houseful of people who were much more concerned with watching cartoons and making breakfast.

I like that poem because it tells a story, I like that poem because I liked it as a kid and I like that story because it is mnemonic history.  I will never forget that the battle of Concord and Lexington, where the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world (but that’s from a different poem), happened on April 19^th, 1775.  Over a year before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Oh, I know that it’s more about poetry than history, that William Dawes is written out of the  credits just because “Revere” has so many good rhymes and that not only is no one alive who remembers that famous day and year, there are few alive who even remember the poem.

But I can never remember if it was one lamp or two.  (It was two.)

Anyway, the world needs more mnemonic poems to help us remember great events from history.  Maybe I’ll get to work on that.

We’re going to go to the zoo this afternoon, and I’m really looking forward to it.  I hope to get a nice, schmaltzy Robert Fulghumy blog out of it after the fact, but for now, let me share some of my thoughts about zoos.

Of course, that comes down to my thoughts about animals.  I consider myself an animal lover although maybe animal liker would be more accurate.  I eat meat and I wear leather, so I can’t say I’m overly sentimental.  I have worked on farms and killed my own meat.

I don’t, at the moment, own any animals except for some fish in a tank in the kid’s bedroom but really, as any animal owner will vocally verify, that doesn’t count.  I don’t want to own a dog as long as we live in the city, because I don’t want to follow him around picking up poop.  I like dogs, but not that much.  That’s why I say animal liker and not animal lover.

So, I understand those people who say that zoos are just prisons for animals and by visiting them and gawking at the animals, who have thoughts and emotions and a right to privacy of their own, we are enabling an immoral institution and perpetuating the evil of animal oppression.  But I love watching the penguins, and the otters as they dive into the water and play.  I love watching the monkeys interreact with each other because they are so human like.  I love watching the big cats as they move, so sleek and graceful.  I love seeing the mountain goats, they are probably my favorite at the Prague zoo, because they have a big, rocky hillside which is just perfect for them.

I like seeing animals in an environment where they look natural.  The ones that depress me, specifically at Prague zoo, are the elephants and the polar bears.  The elephants live on a slab of cold concrete, with no green grass, no trees or bushes in their enclosure at all.  The polar bear seems to be very confused by that big, white plastic cube which I guess is supposed to look like ice, at least for the human visitors.

I think zoos should limit themselves to fewer animals, those that they can give a really nice environment, and everybody would be happier.

My kids, for the most part, like riding on the train and eating hot dogs and ice cream.

The Tea Party is over.  April 15^th has come and gone.  They’ve had their big “Showdown in Searchlight” which provided a couple of days of business for a small town and probably didn’t hurt Reid’s reelection chances a bit, which is a bit of a twisted shame, because the only thing I like about Harry is that the teabaggers hate him so much, otherwise he’s always struck me as your average political weasel.  They’ve had their big coast to coast caravan, the girlfest up in Minneapolis, the event in Boston that even Scott Brown, the only person in the world who owes the teabaggers anything, wouldn’t speak at their pathetic little tea party, out of embarrassment.  They’ve had their big rally in Washington, with some of the most godawful musical entertainment the post Les Paul world has ever experienced.  Throughout, there have been hysterical signs and costumes.

But that’s it.  This was the climax.  There’s nothing more on the schedule.  If they planned an event now, they couldn’t find a speaker.  All of the teabaggers have already teabagged, and even they have to grow bored and go home at some point.

Of course, some will say that their next big test is in November.  They will be forgotten by November.  No candidate is willing to be seen with them, except that Haywood guy in Arizona, and I’m of mixed feelings in that race.  I’m hoping that Arizona goes Democratic this year and I think there’s a good chance of it, since the winner of the Republican primary will either be a senile, delusional, warmongering opportunist or a teabagger.  However, it’s Arizona so it could still go either way.

There won’t be any candidates running in November who have a –T after their names on the ballot.  They aren’t a real party.

So, all of these teabaggers are going to have to vote for an –R or a –D, and a goodly percentage of them won’t bother voting at all, because it is an off year, after all.

Sure, some commenters will call any close race where a conservative won a teabagger victory, and they will forget to mention those that went the other way.  But it will just be repetetive, like a fading echo.  They are finished.  And, by this time next year, they will be forgotten.

O.K., finally, after a long delay due to technical factors beyond our control, because we are not really computer people, the April book of the month is in.  Give it a read, I think you’ll like it.

One thing I love about Prague is the parks.  I don’t just mean the big parks, with their beer gardens, their spectacular views and their lawns dotted with beautiful, beautiful bodies basking in the sun.

I mean the little places nobody knows about, and they’re all over the place.

Today, I took Sam to football practice.  Now, I enjoy watching my son play football, it warms the heart and all that, but this is twice a week for two hours.  It gets old.

So, I went for a walk.  Now, there is the park right behind the sports complex and we’ve known about that for about a year now.  There’s a playground for the kids at the bottom, which is the only part any people go at all.

The thing is, this park is not accessible by any major road.  It’s tucked in between an uninspired neighborhood of shops, Prague 8 town hall, a medical clinic and the sports complex around its outer edges, and the river, although it’s actually a backwater of the river, at its base.

But there is a path I had never taken, and since my sister-in-law was babysitting Isabel I was not required to go directly to the playground, so I followed it.  It was a beautiful point in space and time.  The path went over the crest of a hill and leveled out on the other side, with a wall of slantwise flat rocks to the left and a view over the backwater and one of those little brick lined streams which are really sewers, but still, it’s running water and running water is a beautiful and fascinating image to meditate on, like flames. And there was nobody there at all, nobody in sight.

There was a bench and I sat down, which changed my point of view.  The hill below me was steep, so as I looked out I could not see down, but was looking right into the tops of the trees.  I watched a blue bird flitting around.  I deliberately did not write that as one word because I am not an actual birdwatcher and I don’t know if it was a bluebird.  Just that it was a blue bird.

It was a nice afternoon.

A few days ago I blogged that I wanted to write a book of poetry which has to do with the growth and evolution of human consciousness, and the spark of intellectual curiousity and how magic, religion, science and art were, at the dawn of intelligence, not necessarily differentiated, and animal shrieks and natural bodily reactions, such as widening of eyes, raising of hands, shifting of balance gradually became words, and words became oral history, and then somebody came along and invented an alphabet and things got written down and their were records and history and then eventually, thank his noodly appendages, fiction and gradually things began to solidify, stories became legends, then fairy tales,  then a part of the human psyche, then somebody invented the printing press, then somebody invented the computer and now we have a swiftly developing universe which is entirely imaginary, or maybe something between imaginary and real, the noosphere, and we need to build a bridge out to it, find some kind of transition to it.

The next day I wrote to add to that that I wanted to write something that actually raises consciousness to a different level, that addresses the choices of futures we have in front of us, where do we go from here, how does the real world relate to the noosphere, how do we want it to relate, what is the next stage in human consciousness and how do we get to there from here.

Today I realized that there’s one important part of it I left out which is the whole family of man thing, because by tracing DNA scientists know that we are all descended from a single ancestor.

Anyway, to keep this from totally being a big cheat, where I just cut and paste previous columns, I have written the introductory sonnet to the book.

This is meant for future generations

It is to them this humble book belongs

The past is gone, despite our lamentations

And the present isn’t going to last too long

We didn’t start the fire, the poet said

It has been burning since the dawn of man

Just trying to survive and get ahead

Everybody does the best they can

When I was young, I thought the world would change

I felt our true potential was untapped

The future could be perfectly arranged

And all good hippie children could adapt

And so it changed, but not as I’d foreseen

History’s a complex situation

We didn’t do so well is what I mean, so,

This is meant for future generations

My kids, my kids’ kids and my kids’ kids’ kids

I hope that you do better than we did