Blue states are very busy euthanizing themselves, but life remains great here in the red state heartland.
Something Wonderful: The Good Life
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Blue states are very busy euthanizing themselves, but life remains great here in the red state heartland.
Next post: Instructions For Wayfarers
Previous post: Please Redistribute as Widely as Possible
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
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
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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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If only we could give Cook County to Wisconsin.
Thank you for this, Gerard. Everything has been so horribly depressing lately. Sometimes simple and sweet can hit the spot. Song made me a little misty. My wife went to a Judy Collins concert not so long ago. She said that Judy’s voice is just as clear and fine as it was when this song was recorded.
JWM
Some people only see this stuff in videos.
I see it everyday with my eyeballs.
I’m richer than I seem, and know it, and appreciate it.
Oh sure, you get to see deer cavorting.. whoop-de-doo.
But have you ever seen a pack of rats running down a subway platform, fighting over a slice of Famous Ray’s pizza?? Or a flock of seagulls …real seagulls, not that whiny British synth band…
dogging the stern of the Staten Island Ferry, grabbing french fries that hoodies from Stapleton are tossing in the air??
No? Man, you haven’t seen it all.
Too bad we can’t post pictures. One of my lophophora flowered this morning. That is a rare sight.
JWM

So let it be written. So let it be done.
Grinning! My day has been made, and I thank you for it!
It’s hard to appreciate just how tiny these are in real life.
JWM
Way off topic but.. Gerard, can someone reach Old Remus? He has not posted in three consecutive tuesdays. This is troubling to me. He is an anchor and if he is missing, moving, shaking, I guess for some reason I need to know.
All the mid country/fly over states are under attack. They are being invaded by groups of out of state liberals (WA State). These young people are being moved in to flood the voting process, to act as agents of change, to take jobs away from the local middle class.
Here is one example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/technology/tiktok-grandma-trump-biden.html
Are there any R people out there acting so creatively? Or, are they just all waggin on about their guns?
I’ve written to Remus but have not heard back and no news is no news.
A most appropriate title,Something Wonderful:The Good Life.
Funny how the lyrics mean so much more today than they did then.
That blue camo dog at the 2.00 part is a k-9 to keep. Sweet.
Rats and sea gulls eating pizza and french fries?
That’s what you’re bringing to the table?
When I was an EMT on a call to a run down urban housing development I saw a very young negro child whose fingers were chewed off by members of the rodentia class. I lived in Florida for 40 years and once saw about a hundred sea gulls devouring a beached dolphin, vulture style, and it was ghastly. So yeah, nunnya, I’m familiar with those things too. I prefer the rural wildlife.
A good decade ago plus I was on an evening walk on the pier in Santa Cruz CA. Someone was feeding a large seal some people food. It barfed on his leg.