Having been literally killed by my diet, I am trying to adjust. But this country doesn't make it easy. Fair Warning: Generally unsafe and far too vulgar for any human environment.

gerardvanderleun : May 16, 12  |  Your Say (1)  | PermaLink:

HT: The Anchoress

gerardvanderleun : May 16, 12  |  Your Say (4)  | PermaLink:

DREAMS OF MY TWO FATHERS: World's Most Important Autobiography Revised and Uncloseted

GLIDE PATHS AND PORK CHOPS: Principles of Porcine Aviation

REVOLUTIONARY RELAXATION: How to Unwind with Small Shooting Sprees

COMPROMISE ECOLOGY: The Handbook of "The Friends of the Sierra Club and Halliburton's Earth."

STIFFED: Around the World in 80 Lapdances

LOOK MOO, NO THUMBS: A Cow's Guide to Instant Messaging

BOYFOOT BEAR WITH TEAKS OF CHAN: Zen Puns for Every Occasion

FUELISH: The Future of Electrosolarlunamethanecorn-powered Vehicles

SEX MIT SCHLAG: The Tangled Histories of Love and Dairy Products

THE 7 COMPULSIONS OF HIGHLY DEFECTIVE PEOPLE

WE'RE TWELVE STEPPING: 12 Foolproof Square Dances for AA Shindigs in Rural America

THE SPEED OF DARK: Measuring the Slowest Thing in the Universe

GENDERLENDING: Same Sex Marriage for Heterosexuals

DUCT-TAPE DROMEDARIES: Beyond Balloon Animals

MY GIRL: The Life of Jenna Bush, 46th President of the United States As Told by Her Father

PRONE YOGA: Asanas for People Too Pooped to Sit Up

THE PEOPLE, MAYBE: The Progressive Professor's Guide to Making Sure Only Smart People Vote

THE I-CHANGE: Fortune Telling with the New Commemorative Quarters

YO, GOD: The Revised Standard Hip-Hop Version of the Gospels

Vanderleun : May 15, 12  |  Your Say (5)  | PermaLink:

All great ideas are simple:

HT: Never Yet Melted

gerardvanderleun : May 14, 12  |  Your Say (7)  | PermaLink:

 
Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun -- then and now

Her earliest memory is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota in 1918. She would have been just four years old then. Now she's 90 years old and she comes to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three inch heels, and a six foot long purple boa. She's threatening to sing Kurt Weill's 'The Saga of Jenny" and dance on the table one more time .

She'll sing the Kurt Weill song, but we draw the line at her dancing on the table this year. Other than that, it is pretty much her night, and she gets to call the shots. Which is what you get when you reach 90 97 and are still managing to make it out to the tennis courts three to four times a week. "If it wasn't for my knees I'd still have a good backcourt game, but now I pretty much like to play up at the net." [Note 2012: Alas she had to give up tennis two years back when her knees finally gave up. She didn't. Water walking twice a week.]

She plays Bridge once or twice a week, winning often, and has been known to have a cocktail or two on occasion. She still drives even though it causes my brother to fret. This is a good thing since he's the kind of man who sees the incipient disaster in everything and it's good for him to fret about something that has a smidgen of reality to it.

She keeps a small two-bedroom apartment in a complex favored by young families and college students from Chico State and, invariably, has a host of fans during any given semester. She's thought about moving to the "senior apartments" out by the mall, but "I'm just not sure I could downsize that much and everyone there is so old."

Vanderleun : May 13, 12  |  Your Say (36)  | PermaLink:

"Our kids give us great inspiration for our music. When Jon's 17 year old daughter said how much she loved this song, Jon decided to try it. He experienced a flood of inspiration. "Never has a piano part come together this fast" Jon says. Steve experienced similar inspiration while composing the cello parts. Since the lyrics suggest a bride walking towards the groom in a ceremony we thought we would include a quote from the Bridal Chorus by Wagner in the climax of the song. (It is carefully disguised)." -- The Piano Guys

gerardvanderleun : May 10, 12  |  Your Say (6)  | PermaLink:

"Fools rush in where fools have been before."

I'm with Dorothy Sayers on this one:

As I grow older and older
And totter toward the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom

We've got a lot of problems with marriage in this country, but can't we take a step back and draw a deep breath, smell the winds of change and admit that Gay Marriage is a done deal?

It's here. It's queer. So what?

Enough with all the whining and carping and running about with one's hair on fire screaming, "Oh! Gay Marriage. I got the fear!" If a couple of normally insane Americans want to get a bunch of friends or Elvis impersonators together, seek out a whompingly liberal priest, rabbi, minister, or Marryin' Sam to hitch them up... so what?

Speaking as a twice married, twice disappointed, compulsively heterosexual male, I have heard the arguments and seen the yearning and felt the love of gay and lesbian couples from sea to shining sea. And I have felt their gay pain and now wish only that they share my straight pain. It will bring us together faster than Obama explaining economics to stoners everywhere on the Daily Show.

Deep down all our fellow gay Americans want is to be allowed their right, at long last, to enter the, ahem, Holy Realms of Sanctified and Blissful Matrimony. I take them at their word.

And I say: "Bring.... It.... On! Get... Down! Let it be, at long last, Mission Accomplished!" It is the morning of a decade of fabulous parties in America, and not a moment too soon.

Vanderleun : May 9, 12  |  Your Say (103)  | PermaLink:

As the country's majorities again confirm at the ballot box they are not in favor of gay "marriage," the nation's ostensible leader continues an evolutionary decloseting whose speed is lapped, so to speak, by the platypus. The delay is puzzling to me. Given the fact that Obama is the gayest straight man ever to hold the office of the president, I fail to see what the problem is in his coming out of the closet on a rocket.

Oh, wait, can it be that African-American church ladies and gentlemen do not support the idea of homosexual marriage? Why would Obama care? Those groups are doomed to vote for him no matter what. In addition, those groups do not, as groups, have a lot of money after years of record Obama-induced African-American unemployment. In contrast the amount of money gay groups are expected to pony up for his campaign coffers is, in Hollywood alone, gigantic. When has money not trumped spirituality in Obama's career? Short answer, never.

Now it would seem that tomorrow we may at last see the latest "evolution" of this strange anti-American life form currently getting his free food-stamp card refilled daily at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Gee whiz. I wonder if Obama will come out or not. He could of course avoid taking a "position" simply giving Andrew Sullivan one hot evening in the Lincoln Bedroom and leaking the photographs to Blueboy.com, but some things are just too revolting to evolve into.

gerardvanderleun : May 9, 12  |  Your Say (15)  | PermaLink:

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. --- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Sometimes small notions indicate issues of larger moment. In the discussion of a previous post, a commenter delivers a vest pocket critique of America seen from abroad. The salient part reads:

As for the last paragraph - well, personally, I don't give a damn whether Americans kill themselves through gross overeating and under-exercising, filling their food with chemicals for short-term profit or turning their cities' air into poison gas - not to mention handing terrorists billions of dollars to kill Americans (and others) with.

What I do mind is that Americans are setting a bad example for everyone else; as a small example the streets of Britain are filled with grotesquely large 4x4s. I am quite sure the fashion comes from across the pond. As another, the Chinese might well ask why they should restrict their economic growth when America already uses many times more fuel than they do - and they'd be right.

What I do mind is various American corporations not only trying to foist their Frankenstein food on us, but trying to make it impossible for us to tell that they are doing it - did you know that Monsanto are claiming in various court cases that labelling of food containing GM soya is against free trade treaties?

I could go on - but I won't, except to say two things. Americans' bad habits are a poor example for everyone else - and America's gluttony for oil in particular, and their actions to make sure it gets fed, and the money transfers resulting from it, make the rest of the world much more dangerous

Just as it was when the Soviet Union lived -- and is still to be found on the islands of socialist utopias still extant -- once the propaganda mills are relentlessly anti-American, a real picture is hard to come by. One is pretty much a slave to one's choices of input. Not much can be done to change a mind fed a constant drip-feed of plaint from the current America-based "My country wrong or wrong" crowd.

I can see how the commenter comes by his impressions. I grant that he comes to them fairly by using what he is given to draw his conclusions. They simply don't map well to my experience of ordinary life in America in 2007. As American life, or a simple driveabout will teach you, "the map is not the territory."

It is not my purpose here to flense his critique point by point, only to note that his intellectual malnutrition is, of necessity, determined by what he feeds his head.

By way of example, my day-to-day experience tells me that while the lumbering results of having "way too much food" are more than visible in America, so is the cult of "way too much exercise." The buffed anorexic and the wobbling obese are the opposite ends of the bell-curve. In the middle I see that most Americans are mindful of what they eat because they can afford to be. Making this possible is a system of food production and distribution that delivers such a wide-spectrum of food choice at cheap prices (organic, non-organic, and junk) to every niche of the landscape. Indeed, the system is so advanced and sophisticated that we have achieved a society in which one of the major problems among the poor that remain is obesity.

The impression that Americans are "turning their cities' air into poison gas" is likewise well meant but ill informed. It is demonstrably not true.

It is not true from a glance at the steadily declining levels of emission in a steadily increasing and mobile population over the decades. It is can be seen to be obviously untrue from the simple fact of living in America for six decades -- decades that have seen more deep and lasting social change than at any other time in the history of the country, perhaps the world.

I was, as constant readers may know, born in Los Angeles six decades ago. I remember the poison air of the 1950s. I remember the smog alerts, the soot that would settle on the windowsills and grind its way into the clothes. I remember the black smudge that would be visible within a block of my front yard. I saw it that same black smudge some three decades later, not in Los Angeles, but in London.

Today there is still a haze over Los Angeles on most days, but you have to stand back some to see it. You also have to stand back in your mind and know that Los Angeles, depending on how you define it, is now home to between 10 and 18 million people (Up a tad from the 4 million of my childhood when only every family and not every individual had a car). The only way that air in Los Angeles today could become perfect would be if you gave every resident a unicycle for transportation, a mandated vegan diet, and forbid flatulence under pain of death.

In short, the air in American cities is today more than acceptable and is not, by any stretch of an imagination not twisted by false impressions, "poison." And it improves daily. Could it be improved more? Certainly it could and inevitably it will.

The same observations hold true for our rivers, our reservoirs, our parks, our homes, our communities, and for all other nation-wide measures by which one might discover the true quality of life. We tolerate high gasoline prices in large measure because we will not drill and pump our vast reserves nor will we build new refineries. This indulgence can be reversed whenever the political will to do so arrives. And it will.

At the same time, as it would be in any imperfect human society of 300 million souls, it is perfectly possible to find the pockets of poison and the ghettos of despair in this protean country. Viewed over an inch of time you would note they are shrinking, but you could still stand on a street corner in South Central or Harlem and focus a camera in such a direction and frame the images in such a manner you could deliver the impression of a vile and selfish society in which the poverty-stricken obese were crushed under some corporate oppressor's boot.

You could, and many still do, ferret out an example of racism daily if you look hard enough. But it’s an evil juju only the most poisoned of our people waste their lives in pursuing. It is the witchdoctor’s feathered fetish shaken in America’s face daily by the race-hustlers and rent-seekers in the Democrat Party and the present administration in order to preserve their plantations of colonized minds. Free men know it is only skillfully shaped propaganda and does not represent anything close to the truth of the American experiment and environment in 2009. Here even our poor are filthy rich measured against the world's poor.

As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter -- in my critic’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad -- a mindset in which "the perfect is the enemy of the good." It is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange masochistic pleasure. A country that permits all perversions will not shy away from perverted politics. Instead it will seek to fund them in perpetuity.

The commenter seems to feel that it is there is some implicit global responsibility of America to set a "good" example rather than, as he feels, its current "bad" example. He seems to feel that as America goes, so goes the world; that the Brits drive big cars in Britain not because they make that choice as free people but because some bizarre 'American mind waves' force them to do so against their will; that the Chinese, if impressed by some future America's return to some eco-idyllic state, will shrug off the desires that the increasing wealth and semi-liberty of their situation affords them and peacefully return to the days of the ox-cart, the rickshaw, and root-grubbing famine. In short he places too much power in the hands of America and too little in the hands of the human individuals in the rest of the world. To this way of thinking the example is all, and that only if the example is a "good" example can the world be perfected.

To a small extent he is correct. The global reach of American media is a force in the world, but a deeply confusing one. Our media's main export is a mixed message. It constantly tells the world about our shortcomings ("Alas, we have not yet perfected our country. Here's how..."), but at the same time shows the world our achievements ("Check out the good life, the very good life, and get some for yourself. Here's how..."). What he fails to note, or perhaps perceive, is that the American Story rises out not out of agreement but out of the American Argument, an argument that we've been having here in the land where men have been able to freely speak and vote their minds for well over two centuries. It is an argument we're not finished with yet.

There are many ways of stating the American Argument with itself -- indeed, it is many arguments -- but one of the most straightforward is "How shall men be free and how shall a society of free men then be structured?"

From time to time the passions that animate the American Argument run to blood, such as the era that led to the Civil War and, to a much lesser extent, our current era. At other times, the Argument is pitched at a much lower level of intensity. But the Argument is ever present and any number can play. If you can get here and become a citizen you can participate as well. Hell, we'll let you participate even if you are here and not a citizen. We might even allow millions of you to become citizens overnight in order to join the Argument. You don't even have to learn English any longer.

We just had a big argument over that last concept and, even though it's over for now, it's not over yet. Now we are on to arguing over matters of life and death and who will, in the end, pay the reaper's bill. Indeed, the great thing about the American Argument is that it is never over. The Argument will go on and on prompting every generation to add to it and shape it as that generation wills -- for good or ill -- and trusting that America will self-correct over time as long as the Argument endures and is not won by either side.

The reality is that the American experiment continues its pursuit of the good and its flirtation with perfection. In this pursuit of happiness the American experiment continues to demonstrate to the world what a real egalitarian and free society actually looks like and is. Not what such a society could be, but what one actually is here, now, today. And we arrive there by our constant political argument about "the perfect" vs. "the good;" a "utopia tomorrow" via government intervention in all aspects of life versus individual liberty and the best "possible" world here and now. It is an argument that seeks balance rather than predominance, but when one side of the argument seeks a permanent win the social fabric that binds the country begins to tear. When this happens good citizens of either side will endeavor to patch it once again and continue the Argument.

Indeed, for all intents and purposes, the Argument is the American Revolution today. The Argument is an artifact of the American Revolution. It endures because the American Revolution endures, 233 years later, as the most successful revolution in the history of the world. The American Revolution did not start in 1776 -- that was just the shooting phase. The American Revolution began when men from the Old World first came to the New World and decided to make it new; when men of that world set foot here and came “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to their capacity for wonder.”

The American Argument emerged from the impact of this land on the Old World. This impact is chronicled in the first visions that the New World could be more than the extension of the Old; that it could be truly New. The vision of a world made new is an ancient one in this land. It predates the Revolution and the formal founding of the United States. The roots can be found in such documents as "The Mayflower Compact" and most clearly in John Winthrop's 1630 sermon "City Upon a Hill."

Many consider the Declaration of Independence to be the key document in the creation of the American experiment, but the seeds of it are to be found in many earlier expressions of what it was like to be new in the New World. Of these, the closing words of Winthrop's "City on a Hill" stand for most of the others:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Therefore let us choose life,
that we and our seed may live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,
for He is our life and our prosperity.

"Therefore let us choose life...." That's pretty much what we try to do here in America some 233 years out. We try in our halting, shambling, faltering way to always choose life; life with all its flaws and complexities and victories and defeats.

We don't try to be perfect -- although there are many among us who urge it upon us and expect it from us in order to feel more perfect themselves.

At the same time I would not deny that we are by default an example to the world -- if not the perfect example so many would prefer. Instead we are simply, warts and all, the best society in all its multifoliate aspects that currently exists or has ever existed upon the Earth. We are a nation that has never been perfect but always, if you could walk the land and know the lay of it, the warp and the woof and the thought dreams of it, much better than we have any right to be. If you could look at the world from orbit and see the people of the world flowing over its surface in some sort of schematic, you would see, when you came to gaze at the borders of America, many footprints going in and few coming out.

That's why I am always amused by the exhortations from within and without to "get perfect or get gone." They always seem to me to be filled with spleen on the surface but with an incredible yearning on the inside; a yearning that acknowledges in its very bitterness; in its very existence that this country of all the others is still "the last best hope of Earth." America-loathing knows in its bones that, no matter how much it dislikes the world with America in it, it would be a much less perfect and much more dangerous world with America out of it. Then again, given the shape of the world and the nature of the American argument, perhaps this wish may some day be granted and the world can again sink back into the tyranny of individuals, faction, and totalitarian state-control.

Perhaps. But that day is not yet. With all the rancor now on display, I still believe that we've got about two to five more centuries left to continue setting our "bad example." Hell, give us one century more to argue and our "bad example" might even get you your "perfect world."

Vanderleun : May 8, 12  |  Your Say (58)  | PermaLink:

An American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,... No sentimentalist .... no stander above men and women or apart from them...
-- Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

“I am not an American, I am THE American.”
-– Mark Twain

Remember when Hillary Clinton, during her last attempt to rule the world, stopped calling herself a “liberal” and rebranded herself as a “progressive?”

I do.

It was Clinton's desperate attempt to crawl out from under the vast heap of crap she and all the other “liberals” had piled on themselves

– notably during her own husband's administration.

And who, when trying to run, wanted to have that old liberal ball and chain around her thick ankles?

Not Hillary.

By 2007 “Liberal” had become so drenched in sewage liberals could only clean it through “rebranding.”

The new/old brand name chosen was 'progressive.'

And it worked for them and for Obama just long enough to get them elected by a credulous public who had seemingly never heard "progressive" before.

“Progressive...” it sounded so, well, hopeful. It was, after all, not "trans-" but "pro-"gressive.

After all, who can be against “progress?” Who is not pro "pro?"

Who, that is, except the vast majority of older Americans who had seen the wreckage that the progressives' “progress” had wrought wherever it touched down on the American landscape.

gerardvanderleun : May 6, 12  |  Your Say (7)  | PermaLink:

"My great great great grandfather married a Cherokee
The Harvard people sought diversity
I faked it to teach at Harvard Law
Now Teabaggers call me Indian Faux

Half of half of half of half of a half breed!
That's what I'm starting now to hear
Half of half of half of half of a half breed!
Could put a dent in my career
Half of half of half of half of a half breed!
She's a fake they warned
Wingnuts have been mocking since this story was born

We settled nicely into Cambridge town
When you play a race card, you can hang around
Right wing bloggers are now mocking me
Give her life tenure, she's thirtieth Cherokee

REFRAIN

I have my billet and I feel no shame
That's just how libs roll, tell me who's to blame
This Senate run exposed my ethnic scam
Now people can see me for what I AM!!

REFRAIN"
-- [Callmelennie made this]

gerardvanderleun : May 6, 12  |  Your Say (14)  | PermaLink:

The cheekbones that just keep on giving!

gerardvanderleun : May 3, 12  |  Your Say (8)  | PermaLink:

I don't usually pay any attention to "Dancing with the Stars." Last night, a close friend directed my attention to this and I had to change my mind. (For this one, at least.) I'm not sure but I think the face plant move at 3:33, the slinging around in circles, and the hauling of the lifeless form off the stage at the end had something to do with the compelling nature of this paso.

gerardvanderleun : May 3, 12  |  Your Say (7)  | PermaLink:

At just first light in surge and drift,
Within the darkling seas,
In sheaves they swirled -- as winter mist
Evaporates in the trees.

I show you here one diatom.
God's smallest lamp of glass and oil,
Suspended in our ancient seas,
Then frozen far beneath our soil.

Beneath our star these diatomes,
Misprisoned cells of oil in glass,
In drifts descend into the sand,
And melt to stone while eons pass.

Within such stone they liquify,
And flow in streams through granite glades
To slumber in their vaults of pearl,
And dreaming dream the dreams of shades.

Awakened soul and substance now
What dwelt in seas then leaps to fly.
We see their shadows, cold as mist,
When contrails sketch our frozen sky.

I show you here a diatom,
God's smallest lamp of glass and oil,
That keeps us in mid-heaven safe
And warm above our winter's soil.

In life's first dawn they scintillate
And merge in death to darkened stone.
In sheaves they fade into the mist...
Unplanned? Unsought? Unmourned?

I show you here one diatom.

Vanderleun : May 3, 12  |  Your Say (16)  | PermaLink:

'The thing about heroes, they don't brag' -- John McCain on Bin Laden raid

I've always been a physical coward. At least as far as I know. My own physical courage hasn't really been called upon or tested since the early years of high school, but I did not distinguish myself and have no reason to think I've changed. I've never been one of those who believed in "running away to live to fight another day." Instead I'm more like those who believe in "running away to live to run away another day."

When it comes to performing valorous acts my totem is "The Cowardly Lion:"

I recognize the Cowardly Lion in myself. As a result I've gotten very good at sniffing him out in others, even at a distance. That's why I find all the blather about what a "courageous decision" Obama made in failing to fuck up the killing of Osama Bin Laden hilarious. To avoid the Fail is not to be the Hero.

Obama has never had a iota of a jot of a scintilla of courage in his life. There's no way he attached some Snap-On Tool testicles to himself for the Bin Laden caper. Take it from me: after a lifetime of retracted testicles they don't just drop down on demand.

Still, progressive punks around the media, and in moronic "Foward" faction at the White House, seem to be slobbering all down the front of their Peewee Herman dickeys in the Playhouse. In the last few days we've heard -- ad nauseum -- about how "gutsy" this presidential pecksniff was when Bin Laden was shot to death in Pakistan a year ago.

Gutsy? Really? Let's review. Here's the "guts" it takes.

You knock off from a round of golf and make your way -- surrounded by armed guards -- into a building that sits at the center of a concentric series of defensive rings involving armor, artillery, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines of the United States of America. Did I mention that your house, among many other things known and unknown, has a Norwegian Advanced Surface to Air Missile System installed on the roof?

Going from the golf course to your home, you exist in a bubble of protection formed by some of the finest, most highly trained and heavily armed whoremongers in the history of the world. Your personal automobile is nicknamed "The Beast" and cannot be penetrated by an anti-tank missile. In addition it "is perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks and has its own oxygen supply and firefighting system built into the trunk. Unseen at a glance are two holes hidden inside the lower part of the vehicle's front bumper, which are able to emit tear gas."

Once "at home" -- in what is risibly called "The People's House" -- you take a little stroll surrounded by your guards down to the Situation Room in the basement. There a bunch of people will keep tabs on "your" take-down of Bin Laden through one of the most sophisticated global communications systems in the world. You take your seat in the corner like Little Jack Horner, and sort of hunch over while an admiral of the US Navy turns on a large screen TV and you watch whatever happens to come over the net.

When the TV show put on for you is over you knock off for the rest of the day and go upstairs for some refreshments. Then it's time to make an announcement and to begin to preen around the world. Your acolytes will abase themselves without shame. You will brag without shame.

On the far side of the world, Seal Team Six -- the men that got aboard the helicopters, rode them into a hostile nation at night, crashed one, ran into a building and shot the world's most wanted man dead and then got out -- will be, I trust, relaxing with a beer or two. The guy who pulled the trigger on the Islamic animal will have Seal bragging rights for the rest of his life. But guess what? He'll probably never use them. You, you yellow coward, you'll bring up your meaningless little time spent watch Pentagon TV whenever you think you can find someone to stroke your eunuch's unit for you. Why? Because you've always been a physical coward and you are used to the lies that go with the role.

You might, in another life, have been ashamed. In this one you simply have none.

gerardvanderleun : May 1, 12  |  Your Say (18)  | PermaLink:

Ah, the 80s. Ronald Reagan for the Right and Leather Bars for the Left. Talking Heads fitness videos for everyone else. What was not to like? Except PC, AIDS, mortgage rates north of 12% and its rollicking sidekick, an inflation calculated to give you a permanent facial twitch.

All that and the rise of the Psycho Killer as cultural icon.

"Hi. I got a tape I wanna play."

gerardvanderleun : May 1, 12  |  Your Say (7)  | PermaLink:

The river gouges its way down into the rock as the stoneland around it surges upwards. The cracked stacks of strata rise towards the vault of sky at a pace that makes the growth of glaciers seem a sprint. When the river's downward adze works through the strata's lift the walls of the chasm soar thousands of feet up until all they frame is a slim ribbon of blue slashed with contrails.

The road -- smooth two lane blacktop on top of an amalgam of granite, grit, arrowheads and dinosaur bones -- runs beside the roiling green muck of the Colorado whose banks are fringed with the sharp slate branches of tamarisk ringing patches of lime green cottonwood groves. Along this road mostly carved out of the cliff and still studded at times with sandstone boulders the size of a large house cars and semis scuttle like bronzed beetles catching glints of sun on their carapaces as they slide in and out of the chasm's shadow.

Across the river or beside the road the vast slabs of rust tinted sandstone tower and, towards dark, close in above you like hands beneath the sky closing in prayer. The red rock marches for miles along the river, unpurposed cathedrals of stone for titans long gone down into earth.

Vanderleun : April 30, 12  |  Your Say (15)  | PermaLink:

It's working. But, hey, how could it not work?

gerardvanderleun : April 27, 12  |  Your Say (17)  | PermaLink:

Four and a half months

Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Pick up on one and leave the other behind.
It's not often easy and not often kind.
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
-- The Loving Spoonful

No Answers Here. Just Observations and Anecdotes

Like most serious people in America today, I've had to struggle with my views on abortion. You are required, in this deadlocked and soul-locked society to have a view on this issue. "I don't know" just wont cut it. You've got to know. It says so right here in America: The Instructions.

But what do I know about Abortion? Here's what I thought I knew then and what I think I know now. Why today? Because I read the news today (Oh boy). And the news is only too happy to tell me that January 22, 2009, is the 36th Anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that released the crushing Abortion juggernaut to roll over the soul of America.

Vanderleun : April 26, 12  |  Your Say (66)  | PermaLink:

1. When I post under an assumed name, I can get in closer touch with my Inner Sociopath.

2. Through block-quotes and fisking I have the power to transform even the most harmless statements of my enemies into concrete evidence of their evil plans to enslave mankind and rule the world.

3. In all humility I do not seek to rule the world. I seek only complete agreement and total capitulation.

4. I assume full responsibility for my posts, especially the good ones that are just links to someone else's.

5. If, after publication, one of my posts should, through no fault of my own, appear to be irresponsible, I will be responsible enough to make it disappear, along with the Google cache of it.

6. Being more confused about the First Amendment than I am about copyright, I am free to reveal the obscene number of hours I blog at work, and the URL of my secret blog where I post the truth about my coworkers' hygiene, bodily functions, porn-surfing habits, and gender reassignment surgeries. I know my rights.

7. At either The Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs, most of what I post would be considered normal. In fact, it is.

8. I celebrate my compulsive flaws for grammar and syntax of sins, for without them I would have no writing style sowhatever.

9. My seething cranium does not need to writhe in silence while I can still troll my own comments.

10. It is regrettable that I do not know who I have to bribe to get a spot on Instapundit's blogroll. Maybe if I clicked on his Amazon links enough?

11. As I learn to accept the wheezing servers and brain-dead coding of Memeorandum, I no longer need to carry a gun to its developers' meetings.

12. I have also come to understand that it really isn't necessary to check Matt Drudge 25 times a day for new leads.

13. All my posts are beautiful and valuable, even the ugly, stupid, and disgusting ones that are, frankly, made mostly of links to other people's posts.

14. I honor all facets of my blather and freely express my spew, regardless of federal, state and local laws, or common standards of civility and decency.

15. I maintain careful and detailed notes in a large database of everything my fellow bloggers have posted since 1999, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so."

16. False rumors are better for traffic than no rumors at all, for, lo, people will believe anything about Barack Obama.

17. I accept that I will never outgrow my compulsion to fisk Paul Krugman with a chain saw until every part of him is reduced to steaming gobbets of bloody flesh.

18. A good flamewar in the comments is nearly as good for traffic as hosting a film clip of Michelle Obama trying on bathing suits.

19. It is a far, far better thing to be able to edit comments than to make them.

20. Why should I waste my time posting about whatever political fornication festival is at the top of Memeorandum when I can spend it worrying about what tomorrow's sitemeter will show?

21. I have accepted the fact that the only thing BlogAds, Google Adsense Ads, Federated Media Ads, and the PayPal Donation button have given me are slower loading times.

22. I am learning that trolling is not nearly as effective against my enemies as showing up at their front door with grenades.

23. I have conquered my shame at having, for about 10 minutes in the early morning hours of June 14, 2006, lusted after a three-way with Arianna Huffington and Anne Coulter. And I have deleted the photoshopped images.

24. I take solace in knowing that to read the entire blogsphere is not nearly as terrifying as having to write it.

25. I sleep soundly at night knowing that the complete lack of evidence behind what I write is the surest sign that I have posted the truth.

26. Joan of Arc heard voices too, but she was wise enough to have herself set on fire before she logged on.

27. I listened attentively to my friends and family when they told me to get a life. I did and this is it.

Vanderleun : April 23, 12  |  Your Say (18)  | PermaLink:

I.

Her sinewed arms bend oars downstream,
Her belly taut against the eddied swirls
And shifting shoals of sand and silt.

Soft plash of water against the hull,
As, on the lift of wind and loft of wave,
Her legs push and her breasts swell

To the slow rotating stroke on stroke
That guides her craft past rocks and reeds
Where bighorns graze and beavers slap the pool.

Her hair, rayed out, enfolds the sun.
Her downed thighs surge and shift
To the tempo of the current's heart,

And her shoulders roll, her shoulders roll
The long blue oars through shafts of sun,
Through canyons carved from time.

Vanderleun : April 21, 12  |  Your Say (3)  | PermaLink:

"You boys come a long way.
What you lookin' for?"

"Wisdom."

gerardvanderleun : April 19, 12  |  Your Say (24)  | PermaLink:

Their infernal machine lops and trims the green upstarts, the single emerald sprouts, the high stalk topped with the blue cornflower down to the level of the dull brown mass.

Their minds are the godless grave of words from which no living meanings can ever hope for resurrection.

Their secular "green" religion has its bad rap but no hymns.

Their dreams of a "better world" will become their children's small and shrunken lives on a nightmare planet where all men, finally equalized, will live like insects.

And yet, like zombies lashed to a dying animal, they persist in their death-in-life existence, seeking only the freedom of an approved and "assisted" suicide as their reward.

They call themselves "progressives" and flatter themselves that their thoughts and actions are "revolutionary" when they are as reactionary as can be remembered from history.

What happened to all those who, in my youth, marched and sang for "freedom?" How did they become so old, so hidebound, so mired in the past? When did they become stuck in "suppose?" How, from once striving so hard against colonialism in all its guises, did they allow their minds to become so utterly colonized by a matted mass of dim and discredited notions?

They chain themselves deep in the pit of pretend, and celebrate their servitude by bending heaven and earth to get you down in the hole that they're in.

They believe that the individual should become the mass, and that the mass should worship its apotheosis; that one who best reflects their ossified visions on which the anointing oil has long since dried to a brown crust of thought.

They are the monarchists of the mass. They seek a state in which the head that wears the crown may change but where the crown itself grows forever larger.

Vanderleun : April 19, 12  |  Your Say (14)  | PermaLink:

Watch out! You might get what you're after.
Cool baby! Strange but not a stranger.
I'm an ordinary guy,
Burning down the house!
-- Talking Heads

1.
Call him "Carl."

Many, many years ago I founded and ran my second magazine in San Francisco. In time, I sold my share out to my partner and, flush with cash for the first time in my life, decided to move to New England with my then live-in love whom I shall always think of as "The Socialite." The Socialite's family was one of the 500 and, although fallen on hard times, they retained their position within high Eastern society because of their illustrious name. Their family seat was in Newport, Rhode Island, and The Socialite would, years later, live there with her husband and their daughters. I think about her from time to time and saw her once five years ago. She'd turned into her mother -- slim, patrician, and slightly nuts.

But this is not about her, or those white nights, or even the oh-so-social summers at Bailey's Beach. This is about Carl, the most unwise lover I ever met. I'm telling you about him because by doing so it makes me feel less stupid about love and that's a feeling that's far too rare for me these days.

When the Socialite and I moved back to New England, we rented the oldest farmhouse and grounds in Litchfield, Connecticut. Litchfield is a Norman Rockwell village that is more of a Norman Rockwell village than Norman Rockwell's village.

Vanderleun : April 16, 12  |  Your Say (23)  | PermaLink:

Earlier today I was commiserating on the phone with an old friend when I happened, as is my wont, to mention "Pony Girls" and the men who make them trot around. My pal asked me, "What's a 'pony girl'?" To his dismay I subsequently enlightened him. He then reflected that I was the only person he knew that would 1) know what a pony girl was and, 2) mention it on the phone. [No, I'm not going to help you out here. You're an adult. It's entirely between you and Google and whatever government agency is so over-staffed it thinks you are worth tracking.]

I allowed that it had to do with my previous line of work and that the knowledge I gained there was only used in a professional capacity. I reminded him that the iron rule of sex on the internet is: "In the instant you believe that you have at last come to a site that expresses the absolute bottom of human sexual depravity... at that precise instant you will be given a link that takes you five miles deeper."

Half an hour later....

gerardvanderleun : April 15, 12  |  Your Say (9)  | PermaLink:

"When I was a boy I had a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye"
-- Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb

The inscape of our world is always with us, omnipresent; a third that walks beside us. We are the ones who shut it out, who lose the thread when tangled in the web of daily events, who forever forget that we can always remember.

To live always in the light, in the presence of the now is something that is perhaps only possible for saints, as it is, for brief moments, available to poets. The power and luminosity rising out of the base ground of being can easily overwhelm our reduced senses; can strike us dumb, leave us numb. But at the same time this state of being is the state that we seek in our blind tapping towards God, thirsting for the merest sip of it, listening for the smallest hint of it, when we are in prayer or meditation, or satisfied at last to sit silently with ourselves.

At times we despair and turn our back on it, the pearl of great price we shall never possess, never grasp in this life. But the hints persist and proliferate always in the natural world about us, haunt us in the shadows of our soul. To have tasted the smallest crumb initiates a hunger never slaked by the senses alone. Once seen, even in the briefest glimpse, the sight is never forgotten. But if we drop our shields just a bit, we can see glimmer of that greater light almost at will.

Here's one technique for reaffirming the basic evidence of wonder in our world; that the world is made of a perceptible mystery beyond our means of measuring, but not beyond all sight unless we will ourselves blind.

Vanderleun : April 15, 12  |  Your Say (11)  | PermaLink:

Get the fun pass. Trust me on this one.

A 9 year old boy - who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad's used auto part store - is about to have the best day of his life.

P.S. Gets better on the second viewing.

UPDATE: "2 days. 1 million video views. Over $73,000 raised for Caine's Scholarship Fund. Wow. Internet hug!" --(33) Caine's Arcade

gerardvanderleun : April 11, 12  |  Your Say (17)  | PermaLink:

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" -- Luke 24 KJV

This past year I spent 13 days among the dead and then was returned to life. Why and for what I still cannot say. What I can say is that, in some brief and infinitesimal way, I have had a small shimmer of resurrection shine upon my dead shadow and raise me back into the light. It was a tiny touch and yet it would seem that was all it took. This time. Next time I have no doubt it will require divine intervention. Perhaps it did this time. I have no way of knowing.

Nor can I say that I know what it "was like" to be dead because of my death I have neither shred of memory, nor the slightest sense of a blank space between one moment of life and the next moment of life. My mind holds only two instants; the one enjambed against the other.

In the first I am standing on the front porch of my house looking across the road at the playground sometime on the afternoon of October 13, 2011. There is the impression of small children running about in bright clothing. The sky is clear and there is sunlight from overhead. Shadows are small pools moving beneath the children. It is in the high 50s neither warm nor cold.

Then, in the very next instant, I am cold. I am lying in a bed covered with only a sheet. I am looking past my feet in a room ringed with drapes hanging on rails from a ceiling. At the foot of the bed a man in a blue tunic is sitting in a pose similar to Rodin's "The Thinker." His arm is bare to the shoulder and he has a Maori tattoo on it. I think, for a moment, that someone is speaking to me from the side, something about being in a coma. Then I am gone again.

Those are the two moments. One is right next to the other. There is nothing in between.

I lose track of what happens next and come to know it is not an instant between memories but 13 days and that I have spent that time in a medically induced coma after spending some unspecified number of minutes dead. It was nothing so dramatic as a crucifixion. It was simply a ceasing to be of which I had no awareness. What followed, as dramatic as it was for those around me, was a blank to me; something available to my soul only via hearsay. There were, it would seem, heroic measures involving tubes, machines, drugs, and methods of lowering the temperature of the human body and maintaining it lower for some days. For some minutes I was, it would seem, dead and for some days after that I was, it would seem, as good as dead. I was kept cold and under the stone of coma. Then, after 13 days, that cold stone was rolled away and I was returned to life. It was, I suppose, a kind of cut-rate resurrection. Yet it was mine and I was, and am, glad to have it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in this world.

I’ve spent no small amount of time wondering what it is I am to do with this “resurrection.” It seems as if I should do something; something more than I was doing before, something that is somehow “better.” I ask about this "purpose" in passing in the daylight and more formally in prayer, but I have to date received no answer, no voice out of the whirlwind or the burning bush. I don’t expect such although I would not be utterly unprepared if it happened. I’m used to the mysteries of the universe or the tricks of the monkey mind at this point. Still, it would be nice to get a message neatly laid out, sent in from God’s great cosmic sign factory in the clear and in a crisp typeface. It would be nice but it is clearly asking too much. “Still not satisfied” is not a good attitude to have if one has been resurrected. As they say in meetings, “The attitude is gratitude.” I had that for a long time. It slipped away. Maybe I should try to get it back.

Or maybe I should not. Maybe I should just drop that and drop the searching for the BIG MESSAGE. Maybe, just maybe, I should try to see again what we always forget, the here and now of the miracle. Maybe, just maybe, on this day, Easter day, I should recall that Christ is not just the Resurrection, but “the Resurrection and the Life.”

Today, resurrected, I sit here and look through my front window, across my porch, to the playground across the street:

“There is the impression of small children running about in bright clothing. The sky is clear and there is sunlight from overhead. Shadows are small pools moving beneath the children. It is in the high 50s neither warm nor cold.”

That was both then and, six months later, now. There is “the Resurrection and the Life.” Of the two it is the latter that remains the larger miracle.

Easter Sunday, 2012

gerardvanderleun : April 8, 12  |  Your Say (24)  | PermaLink: