I’m just trying to do this jig-saw puzzle / Before it rains anymore

Email from Blogspammer. Subject: [Data] The impact of COVID on jigsaw puzzle activity attitude to vanderleun@gmail.com via Gmail

Hi Gerard,

Lockdowns and social distancing measures led to jigsaw puzzles flying off the shelves this year as people searched for new ways to entertain themselves. As one of the world’s largest puzzle producers, we recently conducted a market research study to assess the state of puzzling a year on from the outbreak of the COVID pandemic outbreak.

Here are a few of the key findings:

• The COVID-19 pandemic boosted puzzling activity — 54% of respondents puzzled more (average number assembled rose from 4.28 to 6.25) than pre-COVID
• In the coming year, 98% of current puzzlers expect to continue assembling and 94% say they will continue to purchase puzzles
• More than 1 in 5 respondents (including 1 in 4 Millennials) say the crisis prompted a change in attitudes about puzzling

Would you like more information about this for? Please let me know and I’d be happy to share additional data. Let me know!

Best,

Victoria

Dear Victoria, American Digest is what you forgot to tell your spam letter  robot to include at the “for?”  And frankly my dear I don’t give a damn about your inane puzzling stats. I suggest you find a job that is not such a waste of life, but should you wish to flack on about nothing that is why God made the spam flag and the Delete Button.

Given the last year with the Communist Chinese bioweapon ravaging America and the world, I think the following is all I really need to know about Jigsaw Puzzles:

[continue reading…]

Just another fallen angel / Trying to get through the night.

[November 13, 2011] They tell me to always try to do “more,” but never do “too much.” When you are recuperating from coronary arrest and a subsequent two-week time-out in the ICU these are difficult quantities to judge. My solution is to try to add more to what I did yesterday. Once around the block today means one and a half times around the block tomorrow. Tedious but true. Never a lot. Always a little more.

Step by step, one by one,
higher and higher…

And sometimes that extra step leads you to a moment of strange revelation; revelation in which you do not know what it means other than that it may mean something; that it must mean something. Maybe something labeled in invisible ink “To Be Revealed Later.” Perhaps this life is just a series of encounters of matter moving randomly in the dark. Perhaps this life is something else entirely; something designed in some subtle way to keep you moving — climbing,
Step by step, rung by rung,
I’m climbing Jacob’s ladder.

So anyway… [continue reading…]

"There are disturbing reports of George communicating from beyond the grave with his supporters" is what I was hoping to readhttps://t.co/NavcNeQQyy

— HappyAcres (@HappyHectares) March 29, 2021

"The unspeakable horror of the site where Floyd o.d.'ed" doesn't have the same punch

— HappyAcres (@HappyHectares) March 29, 2021

So now all the black kids want to grow up to be George Floyd.
Great going.

— HappyAcres (@HappyHectares) March 29, 2021

The social psychology of race, sex, and prejudice is, at this point, no different from medieval philosophy. The conclusions are already known. The only question is how will this or that researcher arrive at them.

— Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) March 29, 2021

Google search results.
I checked and yes, I can stream George Floyd's rap. pic.twitter.com/S78UJrimQQ

— HappyAcres (@HappyHectares) April 5, 2021

[Written February, 2017] When the fog forms in Paradise all my ghosts come out, moving like wraiths behind the mist, believing no one can see them. But I do. Everywhere in this small town in northern California in which I was a young boy and to which I have returned as an old man, I often sense that boy and those long ago moments.

This morning the fog was thick here on the ridge as I returned from an errand down on Lucky John Road; a road I had not been on for over 60 years. Even before I came over the crest of the hill and started down the far side my back brain told me there was a brook at the bottom. And sure enough, in a moment, my car passed over the brook as it flowed in a culvert from one side of the road to the other.

Today there were a number of tidy cookie-cutter contractor-built homes on either side complete with their gardens, garages, and water-features. The once forest-thick pines were thinned out to garden specs.

The little old lady’s ramshackle homemade house was long gone to landfill… as was the little old lady herself. Still, as I pulled the car over in the fog and looked around, they appeared. Ghosts moving behind today’s new morning; a kind of Balinese shadow puppet epic projected on the far side of the atmosphere by the lantern of memory.

The last time I had been to the brook I was 11 and I walked. I walked from my house on the canyon’s edge half a mile to where the brook meandered out of the pines and under Lucky John Road. I did it because my father told me to do it. I did it because my father had decided that at 11 it was time I had “A Job.” My father believed in boys having A Job and having one as soon as possible.

One evening shortly after my 11th December birthday he called me aside. “There’s an old lady named Miss Helen over the hill who needs help,” he told me. “She’s getting on and she has no family. She needs help chopping wood for her heat and other chores.” (“Dad, please.”) “No backtalk. I’ve already told her you’d be there tomorrow afternoon.” (“Oh come on, dad.”) “Did I mention she was going to pay you.” (“Please, dad…. Oh? How much?”) “Four or five bucks a week….” (“When can I start?”) [continue reading…]

Amado con amada, amada en el Amado transformada!

“The Dark Night Of The Soul”

Upon a darkened night
The flame of love was burning in my breast
And by a lantern bright
I fled my house while all in quiet rest

Shrouded by the night
And by the secret stair I quickly fled
The veil concealed my eyes
While all within lay quiet as the dead

Oh night thou was my guide
Oh night more loving than the rising sun
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved one
Transforming each of them into the other [continue reading…]

“Why seek ye the living among the dead?” — Luke 24

Beginning on October 13th of 2011 I spent eleven 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 the 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 moments; the one melded against the other like some trick of Japanese joinery.

In the first moment, I am standing on the front porch of my house looking across the road at the playground 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.

In the second moment, I am cold. [continue reading…]

“If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea….” — Psalm 139

We rise in a banking curve of morning’s pure velocity
over fallow fields and grids of neighborhoods,
over ponds painted with slick scum oozing
— from the oil pans of countless sunken cars,
— from punctured sacks of toxic trash,
— from fleshless graves of abandoned murders,
of missing persons filed in muck.

We rise embraced by first-class armchairs,
pondering the crisply printed histories
of yesterday’s most meaningless events.
We rise up above our lives and lies,
above, alone, away, alas, good-bye
to families and to friends, to all terrestrial ties.
Our very cellulars, by strict law silenced
so that our murmurs not disturb
the delicate electronics on which so much
at this tremulous moment depends
that we dare not think on it, and so select
music of our choice from mid-heaven’s jukebox.

We rise in the faltering dark
into the pale flicker of a cosseted sun
slatted in flashes through fingers of cloud,
up into the white blood of the sinewed sky,
and so our day and world slips by.

We rise up to where all breath is snow,
so far that all above becomes below,
up until the sky is seen as vapor,
smeared white on blue construction paper
and framed by dark remorseless space.
[continue reading…]

A twue story about a wascally Easter wabbit:

Decades back in a universe far far away I worked as the Director of Drama and Literature for the FM KPFA/PACIFICA in Berkeley. One of my innovations in that job was to take the station’s remote broadcasting equipment and set it up in People’s Park as an open microphone so that anybody in the community could come by during its hours of broadcast and say anything, do anything, PERFORM ANYTHING, that they wanted. Once we hosted five stoned hippies doing a foghorn symphony using five horns made from long dried tubes of kelp. Another time we had a kind of choral rant by a local commune that called themselves “Third-World Lesbian Mothers for Peace.”

It was, dare I say it, “Open-Source Radio” long before open-sourcing would become popular.

Then came the open mike I scheduled for one Easter Sunday thinking that the natural religious “diversity” of Berkeley would make for an interesting mix of talents. So we had somebody on the bagpipes, then the Krishnas showed up, then there was I believe a group of folks using Kazoos as their backing organ for some of the worst sung hymns I’ve ever heard (and I was an Episcopalian until those churches got too empty.).

And then, just when I thought it was safe to flip the broadcast back to the KPFA studios, a van pulled up to the curb near the microphone in the park.

The back doors opened and a woman dressed in a purple bunny suit sprang out and began hopping about ululating with plaintive screeeeees. The notable difference in her otherwise normal purple bunny suit was that there were hemmed holes in the chest so her naked (purple painted) human breasts flopped about in time with her floppy ears above as she hippity-hopped along.

Did I mention that the crotch of her bunny suit was also missing so that her (dyed purple ) bushy muff gleamed in the light? No? Well, now I have.

Did I mention that I was gamely describing the hippity-hoppity event to the KPFA listeners at home as this was happening? No? Well, now I have.

After she had hopped about in front of the microphone with her breasts flopping and her bush… well, never mind… the door to the van flew open and a hippie with his face painted purple and inside of another purple bunny suit hippity-hopped out.

As he hippity-hopped about the microphone in the park I noted that he carried a very large stuffed purple satin penis in an engorged state above two satin testicles that were also stuffed tight. This odd phallus he bounced about in front of him as he hippity-hopped behind the purple female bunny with huffs and puffs as she ran circles around the microphone still screeeing at the top of her bunny voice.

Did I mention that he needed this stuffed set of equipment held in front of him as he hippity-hopped because his purple bunny suit was also missing the crotch out of which his not-all-that-remarkable human equipment did dangle? No? Well, now I have.

The dynamic purple bunny duo hippity-hopped about in the park around the KPFA open mike for about five minutes and the people who lived near the park had started coming out of their houses for a closer look.

My engineer said to me (It was the intolerant and still sane 70s that had laws against this sort of exposure), “Isn’t that illegal for him to be running around with his dick dangling?”

“It can’t be,” I said. “He’s a bunny.”

When I got back to the station that afternoon, the KPFA Station Manager informed me that the open-mike experiment was over. [continue reading…]

“We do not die period. We die comma.” — Rev. Donald Sensing

In all of God’s created universe, in all of God’s given time, one, just one, rose among the thorns we became and which we shall remain until….

In Advice For The People Running Biden ghostsniper notes: John A Fleming sed: “We’ve backed ourselves into a mess, we have.”
========
Some have, some haven’t. All must pay attention. There are producers and there are parasites and many ride in between.

Stay the course, I say, for yourself. You can’t change others but through example, but you can change yourself, instantly. So keep producing, keep bettering yourself, keep moving forward, and try your best to ignore others and lessen their impact upon you.

Country? Where?

There is no national allegiance because there is no nation, just one big free-for-all. This place, defined by imaginary lines on a globe, is mostly illusory and bogus.

Local, local, local.

Your sphere of influence, both ways, decreases as radius increases. They, way over there, have little influence over you nor should you let them distract you from your goals.

That old phrase is still true, “Do the right thing.”

Peace, Onward.