“I could teach anybody to be a farmer. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. “
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2001-2022
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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be sure you’re sitting on it, bloomberg
Bloomberg, like a lot of today’s billionaires, made his bucks manipulating information and money. Contrast with Henry Ford, A.G. Bell, Wilbur & Orville Wright et al. Shows you how far we’ve come, or sunk, or whatever.
This has proven that it wasn’t Trump’s money, alone, that created his win. The people aren’t so stupid as that; I do hate the media and the Left for the shit they say about us.
Farmers. I’d much rather know a farmer than anyone from the Beltway. Those saggy-assed bastards. Not .01% of any of them would last a day on a farm.
While I’m at it, I’ll bitch about the Fux in Seattle.
When I used to live there, it became trendy for awhile, to say “How would you like to be from Forks?” Meaning Forks, WA, which is one of three logging communities in the Evergreen State. Loggers are low-breed, i guess was the idea.
So, I was guiding the Mt Rainier climbm and I was the number 2 guide of three of us with 12 clients and just picture us on the slanting ice slope of the east side, at I think it was 12,000 ft. The cuck of a lead guide pops off to me, “Imagine being from Forks?” I said, “well, my father was from Forks, and my grandfather, too.” He might have realized that his leadership as our lead guide was thin at that moment. He was a famous guy in Seattle, too. I piss on his grave, that cuck sonofabitch.
Any logger in Forks, with rock hard biceps and a 5,000 calorie a day diet, could kill him instantly if it came down to it.
Libs have nothing but contempt for people, and the more capable the citizen, the more contemptuous they are towards them. Imagine a farmer saying the stupid shit Brian Williams just said on the TV about 500 dollars. It’s unimaginable; farmers are seamless with the science of our Earth. Oh yeah. These are the crapweasels who’ve re-imagined farming as a shit-covered organic market. You pay extra for the shit covering, and never mind the bug holes and the small sizes of your organic veggies.
It’s not unusual around here to see a tractor on the road pulling an attachment that goes all the way across the road and hangs off both sides, and that is in the folded up traveling position. Right. Maybe 40′ wide. And the tractor itself has 2 huge tires on each corner, maybe 8′ tall. It would eat a Prius for breakfast and shit easter eggs for the next 3 days. When he sees 4 vehicles backed up behind him he’ll pull over and let everybody pas, then back on the road again. We used to it.
The Wagler farm down the road does soybeans one year and corn the next. A few years ago they installed an 8″ dia hose all over that field, underground. Down 1 row and back the next over and over, musta been miles and miles of hose. The end of the hose sticks up out of the ground close to the road and I’ve seen 20 or more semi tractor tankers lined up to pump their fertilizer in that hose. We’re about a mile away and for days after we can smell that ripe cow nectar like it was right here in the front yard and I don’t find it annoying at all. Come early Sept them stalks are 12′ tall and the ears are 14′ long and almost 4″ in dia. Eating 2 of them will fill ya up to the brim and you’ll have that shit all over the front of your shirt but you’ll be as happy as a clam. Some folks roast em but I’ve never been taken with the flavor or texture. I cut the base off with a razor sharp knife then put 2 on a big plate then in the nuker for exactly 8 mins. Take em out, careful, they’s hot as lava, grab the tassle and give it a good shake and the clean ear slides right out the husk with nary a hair to be seen. Where my salt and budda iz???
14 INCHES!
Out here in the hills of fly-over country we’ve learned that when the farmers have a good year, most folks do as well. Working part time at the local hardware store, I see more common sense and reason from loggers, craftsmen and farmers than anything on display in the media.
Mr. Klahn nailed it. Brian Williams replaces Warren “Best picture this year is La La Land!!” Beatty as the best example of living in a fictional reality created & reinforced throughout decades by a unicorn livelihood. When people say “I wouldn’t hire Hillary Clinton to so much as scoop up my dog’s droppings” they’re not necessarily talking about party affiliation or about being an unpleasant nasty unsophisticated woman. Some people just live in reality only so much as their situation requires that they do so, and then they have some situation that never requires that they do so. They shouldn’t be running anything anywhere.
Step five Mikey, spread fertilizer. In your case just open your mouth.
Hey Gnawbone, you work at Bear Hardware?
If so, you probably know Bruce. He’s a neighbor down the road by Echo Lake.
Okay, y’all know the tune, so sing out! . . . :
Old Mike Bloomberg had a farm
Ee-Eye, Ee-eye . . . NOOOOOOOOOO!
10-4 ghostsniper. Read your comments here @ AD over the years and figured it was time…
And now it’s come out that some of his campaign help was taking his money and telling people to vote for Bernie. That’s some operation you had there, Mikey…
GJ, I’ll tell ya, I’ve been in a lot of hardware stores over the years and Bear is probably the best I’ve seen, though a little pricey. It’s very rare that they don’t have what ya need. Clean and orderly too. Curt runs a pretty tight ship. Are the tenderloins out there in Gnawbone as good as they were about 10 years ago or so before they shut down? Been meaning to stop in try one on but don’t get out that way much.
“I could teach anybody to be a …undertaker…. You dig a hole, you put a ….politician… in, you put dirt on top, add ….lye… , up comes the corn. “
too soon?
And crazy old Joe got his licks in to:
At the end of December, Biden was explaining why his Climate Change Program won’t disrupt the lives of coal miners if it is enacted:
“Anybody who can go down 3000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well.”
“Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7ND17Zf68s