Climate Expert Alexandria Cortez says the clocks are ticking and earth is doomed. Here is how the apocalypse looked in Wyoming today.
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
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Well… look to the bright side. If the earth is doomed that means no more AOC, too. Nice.
Good. I have time for a big ol plate of bacon and eggs.
Cortez is a ticking blivit.
Move over Greta… TIME has named Karen the Person of the Year. So many annoying people, but alas, so little time left. https://babylonbee.com/news/time-names-karen-person-of-the-year
I have marked my calendar.
Just a little over ten years left?
Fine with me.
Just hope we get the whole show: Anti-Christ, Avenging angels, Whore of Babylon, and, of course , my favorite apocalypso band: Four Horsemen, and the Beast.
And Jesus returning for the closing act. Can’t top that!
JWM
Well, if I make it to the end of the world then that would mean I made it into my eighties. And if I make it into my eighties I’d have lived longer than any of the direct descendant males on either side of the family. Cool!
It’s as I’ve always suspected, when I die; the world ends.
Ghost,
Don’t forget the hash browns.
and JWM,
We can hope.
Those birds look ominous. Beady eyes. Nasty little beaks. Skinny legs. With scales on them, for G-d’s sake. Flying around just to taunt us. They are up to no good. NO good, I tell you. They LOOK like AOC. Ever see HER legs? No, you haven’t. Scaly.
So, January 21, 2031, give or take a day? Bummer.
I propose we all gather up at Gerald’s that day and have ourselves a time. I’ll bring the Shiner Bock, who else is in?
Gerard’s, dammit. It’s early and I haven’t had my coffee.
While stationed on the USS Los Angeles (SSN688), guys who were getting close to getting out of the service would start a short timer’s card, and mark off the days until they separated. I guess it’s too early to make one of those if there’s still 3,890 days to go.
I’m up for the meet up at Gerard’s. Especially since I have plenty of time to get there according to AOC.
John Venlet….when I was in the Nav guys who were within a year of discharge would trace the outline of a Playmate or Penthouse Pet on a sheet of legal sized paper. Then the artist would crisscross the drawing with squares, each representing one day and each square would be numbered from the number of days remaining until discharge all the way down to the “wakeup”.
Some guys would just use any color and shade in the day that had passed, headed toward discharge but a thoughtful artist would use colored pencils to fill in each day as it passed, and replicate, as close possible, the coloring in her skin and her outstanding virtues.
In those days of course there were no women aboard ship and we could usually get away with whatever our lustful hearts could imagine but the contemporary sailor, especially aboard ship, lives in a PC gender bent world that would have to be seen to be appreciated and a “short timer’s calendar”, as we knew them back then would most certainly gin up charges of sexism and lewdness, being put on report and very like Captain’s Mast with a reduction in rank and restriction to the base for 6 months.
But the strange thing, at least for me is, that I knew a bunch of WAVES or whatever the heck they’re called now and I didn’t meet a single one amongst ’em that could not out lewd any Salt I ever met. Those babes loved serving their country and their fighting men.
“I propose we all gather up at Gerald’s that day and have ourselves a time. I’ll bring the Shiner Bock, who else is in?”
I’m going to need a bigger boat.
Jack, the short timer calendars you describe are much more interesting than the ones used on my boat, back in the early 80s. I like your style much more. Maybe because they sound so interactive.
When I first heard about women serving on subs, I couldn’t believe it. There went the neighborhood.
The WAVES I knew during my Navy days were rather entertaining, not a Karen among them. Thanks for your reminisces.
I’d love to meet at Gerards, just to shake the hand of the fellow who has been entertaining me for twenty-some years. I’ll bring whiskey, a case. Be patient, gonna take me a day of hard driving to get there.
John Venlet, I understand. I was in from 70-74 and really, even were they allowed, no self respecting woman would have wanted to serve on the rust bucket USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42). You could get boils and abscesses from merely drinking the water which usually contained enough JP5 to set you on fire if you smoked too soon after eating.
We did have a couple of instances when some kind of female civilian engineer came aboard and spent a couple of weeks and the old salts were visibly bothered by her existence on the ship. There was/is some kind of a warning about women being aboard a man-o-war and after 15-30 years in the service, most of the time at sea, those cats were true believers. She was pretty fetching so after a few of them had a chance to see her they settled back into their old and usual routines of simply stating that they’d like to….. her.
Several years ago when I was on FB I looked into the FB page of my old squadron and the offices and line shops were filled with women who were ordnance handlers and who worked in jet engine repair and in the paint shops. Back when I was in those were absolutely the nastiest jobs, perhaps other than being an E-3 bosun mate that one could be assigned to and I made an off handed comment that “back in the day……that stick wouldn’t have floated….or something equally leading and some CPO jumped on me and told me that I wasn’t fit to serve in “his” Navy.
Pregnancies are rife on ships with females aboard and I laughed and thought how charmed he must feel himself to speak against generations of war time Navy vets, either on or off the line, who simply don’t believe that a couple of dozen women should be assigned to a Navy ship filled with horny fleet sailors.
I hope he catches the clap.
When I was in, 74-78, everybody made a short timer calendar as soon as they got to permanent party. Mine required 2 sheets of paper. It was the happiest day in a soldiers life when he could say, “One day and a wake up!”
Jack, the only time we had a woman/women on the LA was for a dependents cruise. One of them was my Mum, now 88 years old, and she still likes to talk about doing angles and dangles and being invited up to the bridge by the Captain as we pulled into Pearl.
Ghostsniper, I didn’t start my short timer calendar until I had 100 days to go, and it was on the backside of one of my hardcover, government issued green log books. I filled up six of them during my time on the LA (80 – 84) because I used them as personal journals. There’s some real bitching in those journals, but also some real interesting at sea stories, not to mention adventures while on liberty in foreign ports, and running around the islands, as I was fortunate enough to stationed at Pearl for my entire active duty stint.
Roughly ten Years? Count me in, I’ll only be 91 then.
Bigger boat Vanderleun? I’ll sail my Balboa 26 down, t’ain’t that big but if we raft up, adds a lot of space. I’ll brew and stow a few kegs of my White Night’s Stout, the extra ballast will be handy running from Prince William Sound to the Inside Passage, that run can be a wee bit dicey. After the Inside Passage, a run out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, hang a left & I’m just about in hollering distance.
Shouldn’t be too hard a run, way back in the day my Tlingit and Haida neighbors used to do it all the time, in open canoes to rape and pillage down in your neighborhood.
John V sed: “I was fortunate enough to stationed at Pearl for my entire active duty stint.”
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I remember we talked about that over at Improved Clinch way back when. You lucky dawg.
You should get those log books out and collate them into one big digital journal, all edited and supported with pix then get an online company to create a hardback version for sitting right in the middle of your coffee table.