Los Angeles residents defy fireworks ban, light up sky citywide on 4th of July https://t.co/7zXSFlOnL2 pic.twitter.com/eU9rL9UroQ
— Disrn (@DisrnNews) July 5, 2020
Los Angeles residents defy fireworks ban, light up sky citywide on 4th of July https://t.co/7zXSFlOnL2 pic.twitter.com/eU9rL9UroQ
— Disrn (@DisrnNews) July 5, 2020
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
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
from “1054 AD”
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
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
My Back Pages
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Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
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
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
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
Chimes of Freedom
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
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
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
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
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
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
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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Same here. The cities didn’t have fireworks displays because of WuFlu and fire danger. The citizens took matters in their own hands and lit up the night with illegal fireworks purchased legally from neighboring states. It was a sight to hear and see.
The two bleach blonde bubble headed Karens on the broadcast were hilarious
In the Twin Cities, it looked a lot like that, especially in the vibrant neighborhoods. I thought this year might be a bit more subdued, or that folks had blown the fireworks budget already, but I was wrong. Window-rattlingly wrong.
The only things legal in Minnesota are sparklers and rather tame fountains. No bottle rockets, Roman candles, star shells, and especially no firecrackers. But Wisconsin is just 20 miles east, and they had a new thing this year. They have these really powerful mortars that pump a big explosive into the air.
According to the Wisconsin sellers, they have to get a signed affidavit from the buyer that they know how to use these properly. I can assure everyone that the people in north Minneapolis know how to ignite these. The launch thud is pretty loud. The explosion about 1.5 seconds later will rattle every window on the block, and if you’re within 100 yards outside, you’re going to feel it also.
It seemed like there were fewer of the star shells like the ones in the video this year. But oh, man, those mortars. Thousands of those mortars. There’s also some new thing about the size of a breadbox. Light it, and get the hell away because there is one hellacious BANG! and then 12 little star shells fly off in three dimensions, to explode about 15 feet from the source. All of this takes place at ground level or within 15 feet. It definitely gets your attention.
In Socal, Tijuana is 150 miles, but then you have to smuggle them back into the US. Vegas is 5-6 hours across the desert. Arizona is at least 4 hours to Quartzite. There were just too many for families casually picking up a few on their yearly Vegas trip. In San Pedro, it’s been like this every night for a week. It goes on till midnight every night.
From a hillside, the whole LA basin was a solid sea of glittering starbursts for hours on the 4th of July.
There has to be a local black market that brings in massive quantities of this stuff. I have no idea of how to go about finding that market, but apparently everybody else know how to, and everybody thinks the risks are minuscule. Law enforcement is selective and a Potemkin village, respect for the law is rapidly diminishing. Only the middle-class fear the reach of the law.
“Only the middle class fear the…law,” John A. Fleming.
I hope the politicians and the bureaucrats and the law take note of this incredible scene of LA fireworks. See that? Every one of those explosions also represents a gun owner, and in between that are several more gun owners. Americans are gund up to their ears, and also we are madder than hell.
Casey sed: “Americans are gund up to their ears, and also we are madder than hell.”
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Right.
Maybe this Nov, rather than an election, there should be a turkey shoot.
Clean house, top to bottom.
Since they don’t want to do what they were hired to do….
Horses….man, leave them out of the curse. I’ve only met a couple that were assholes and they were made that way by some idiot who used violence to make them so.