… to accommodate his enormous balls.
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Previous post: It Was Greek to Me
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
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
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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We should petition those dictionary folks to put this gentleman’s picture next to the word “gutsy.”
Remember that extremely funny vid with Snoop Dog saying “Wally Gator”?
I’ve been a hunter since I was old enough to make rubber band guns and kill moths at around 6 or 7, Natchez, MS around 1956-57. I’ve never grown tired of the blood sports and I plan to bow hunt again this year from a climbing tree stand, IPF and all. Then, when it’s cooler I’ll get after ’em with my Roberts.
I’ve seen a lot of incredibly idiotic and non-sensical stuff in life too but the one simple thing I cannot understand is why Florida permits alligators to reside in its residential ponds and small lakes. And, on top of that, the damned things are protected by the State. Gators are apex predators and they will just as soon eat a human or pet as a decaying turtle and the job they do in the killing has to be seen to be appreciated.
A smallish one, like the denizen captured by D’Quandra, is fully capable of seriously wounding an adult and killing and eating a child or a large dog. I scratch my head……
The US Government protects gators, wolves, bears, coyotes and weird snails and such, but refuses to extend this courtesy to its own citizens.
If one of those reptilian devils approached a child in Florida, and the child’s father shot the gator, that father would be headed for jail.
There was a gas station owner near my mother’s retirement community in Brooksville who kept a guard gator in his office after closing at night to discourage the local burglars.
I’d bet a dollar to a donut that house was in a gated community, probably with a golf course. People pay big money to live in places like that, probably more than a million for a normal house in there. Part of the draw for those places is the idea of natural wildlife of which gators are members. Mostly, gators tend to mind their own business and stay wilderness oriented.
While it is illegal to harm or kill a gator it is also illegal to feed them. Not even a single french fry. Because, just like humans, they will become addicted to them instantly and seek them out. Same with popcorn, or any number of things “caring” people do, in violation of the law. Then, after the popcorn dealer has hooked the gator on his brand new fix the dealer gets all bent out of shape when the gator comes looking for it’s next fix.
Many, many years ago this issue was self resolving, back when people knew how to think and accepted nature as it was rather than how they’d like it to be. If it was up to me the wealthy people in the gated communities would not get their wish for a “natural Florida wildlife yard art” and the gators would be transported to a place more suitable for them, like the glades. As it is, when a gator is reported to have done wrong by a human the default reaction is for the authorities to shoot it on sight. In typical gov’t fashion, a loss for all involved, and a sense of bravado for the gov’t drone that killed it.
As far as Mikes comment below about the gov’t (not) protecting it’s citizens.
If for some reason I wanted someone to protect me it certainly would not be by entities that have demonstrated millions of times, gross incompetency, irresponsibility, and unaccountability, not to mention unbelievably enormous costs most likely in perpetuity.
In actuality the man doing the canning of the gator is a black Army vet and all the neighbors from nearby appear to be black as well. Gated? Maybe.
Dear ghostsniper:
1. The best situation would be in the government simply left all citizens alone and no noisome agencies were around to protect anybody.
2. The second best situation would be if the government decided that its citizens needed protecting. Agencies would be created to do just that, and taxes went up to pay for them.
3. The third best situation would be if the government decided that its citizens needed protecting and agencies would be created to do just that, but through incompetence and stupidity these agencies accomplished nothing. Taxes still went up to pay for them.
4. The worst situation would be if the government decided that its citizens needed protecting, agencies would be created to do just that, but these agencies decided to use their power to control citizens rather than protect them. Taxes still went up to pay for them.
We are at number four.
“See ya later, alligator!”
As a life-long Florida native, and well aware of the dangers of these critters, I have to say that that is most bad-ass thing I’ve ever seen…
Kept a wee one, a foot or so, for about a week in the dorm sink when I was at U of F in Gainesville over 60 years ago.
Walked him around campus on a string leash. Many if not most wore flip flops, thongs, whenever the little gator saw a moving toe he’d lunge, snap at it. If you think about the most common response to his actions, you understand where he got the name Damnit.
Didn’t turn out to be as good a chick magnet as I’d hoped.
& yep, took him back to the pond I found him in.
Ack. Should have made Damnit into a purse.
Better chick magnets: 1. money; 2. Mercedes; 3. masculine beauty.
Choose two out of three. I only had one of these, but that was quite good enough.
Best chick magnets-
Being very tall and “proportionately gifted”
A broad sense of humor.
A classic Harley-Davidson, AKA the “Milwaukee Vibrator.”
The ability to perform the entire Chinese alphabet with one’s tongue on a “soft surface.”
Damn. My list just got longer. I always had a sense of humor, mainly gained through stupidity and thus laughing at myself.