| Strange days have found us And through their strange hours We linger alone Bodies confused Memories misused As we run from the day To a strange night of stone |
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“Strange days have found us… Strange days have tracked us down…”
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
Strange days, indeed. Like some sort of cosmic Pandora’s Box has been open and everything is 180 degrees out of phase. I find I am simply weary of all of it. Want to kneel instead of stand for the anthem? Well, have at it asshole. Don’t know what flavah of human sexuality you are? Guess what: I couldn’t care less about you or your mental illness. Just stay the hell away from me. And the list of degenerate mis-fit toys goes on and on.
Interesting coincidence: Lately, I’ve been re-visiting another tasty Doors entree that really sums it up:
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t bother me
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t trouble me
I need someone, yeah, who doesn’t need me
Strange days, indeed.
The Crazy Years and more.
1984.
I’m delighted to be 80 and looking back, not 18 and looking ahead.
re: Dem’s debate
BIG WIND,HEAP DUST,NO RAIN.
I think you hit the nail perfectly, Gerard. This hand raising of the dems will be an iconic photo. One day, God forbid, the people in the new dark ages will look back and know that a democratic vote to kill our society was pivotal.
I’ve said this before, but I remain convinced that at least one reason why we are sliding into the Crazy Years is that anyone anywhere else but the deepest of jungles knows that it only takes one or two bad decisions to trigger Ragnarok. This has been the case for most of a lifetime, now, and it has to have seeped into the collective consciousness.
In my rear view mirror the sun is going down
Sinking behind bridges in the road
And I think of all the good things
That we have left undone
And I suffer premonitions
Confirm suspicions
Of the holocaust to come.
The wire that holds the cork
That keeps the anger in
Gives way
And suddenly it’s day again.
The sun is in the east
Even though the day is done.
Two suns in the sunset
Hmm
Could be the human race is run.
Like the moment when the brakes lock
And you slide towards the big truck
“Oh no!”
“Daddy, Daddy!”
You stretch the frozen moments with your fear.
And you’ll never hear their voices
And you’ll never see their faces
You have no recourse to the law anymore.
And as the windshield melts
My tears evaporate
Leaving only charcoal to defend.
Finally I understand the feelings of the few.
Ashes and diamonds
Foe and friend
We were all equal in the end.
Strange days indeed. Where we live everyone is busy stockpiling food. No joke. Whole Food has totally run out of quail eggs.
We needed to see this. All of it. We would not have believed it otherwise.
It Will get worse.
Richard’s Doors quotes hit the mark.
That bedroom. First glance,it was a gory crime scene. Closer inspection reveals rose embossed sheets.
“My tears evaporate leaving only charcoal to defend.”
No,we are not equal in the end. We’re not equal in the beginning or the middle.
Deal with it.
OK.
It’s drivin’ me nuts.
What’s the deal on the picture of the guys in white suits? Chernobyl? Sci fi? And why are the suits padlocked? I gots ta’ know!
JWM
Thank you Rabbit! Best laugh all week.
JWM,
The bunny suits look like asbestos to me. How about those four finger gloves!
I recently saw that photo of the Commie candidates with their hands raised. Might have seen it on AD but the things was captioned with “Who Wants To Lose The Election”? Each of them are the Devil’s own children if any ever existed and I think those fuckers only represent half of the pack that is begging for authority.
Preserving a democratic republic of free people requires a willingness to eradicate those who would destroy it and t’s simply too bad that US policy doesn’t demand that anyone who advocates or promotes their marxist platforms isn’t either lined up and shot or sent into exile, never to return.
The preposterous left hurts America so much. Could that be the plan? I have been alone a lot lately with my thoughts. And so I have come to wonder. Could the left’s collective insanity and consuming rage against conservatives have been visited upon them by the Good Lord Himself?
Most likely He loathes, in His way, the left for aborting babies.
January 22, 1973. Roe decided by a group of SCOTUS justices.
Say you are the Lord. You lovingly fashion conception as the point at which Your Grace and the love for Man come together and create a new being. Tiny and vulnerable yet in possession of that most miraculous thing, a soul. How can You, as the Lord God, bear the destruction of Your tiny new creation? It is one thing, and certainly bad enough, when an individual sins in this way. Forgiveness is a possibility for an individual. But when a collective, the left, unrepentant, pushes support for abortion in the abstract, thus opening the door wide for normalizing killing the unborn?
Well, isn’t God’s wrath is the stuff of legend?
If there is a God, heaven help the United States
These are interesting:
The Imaginative Conservative has a thoughtful series entitled Letters from Dante. These are essays on advice that ancient thinkers would give to people of today.
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/category/senior-contributors/louis-markos/letters-from-dante-series
Law and Liberty has an interesting series on Michael Anton’s “After the Flight 93 Election.”
https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/09/michael-anton-after-the-flight-93-election-symposium/
@ Jaynie Could the left’s collective insanity and consuming rage against conservatives have been visited upon them by the Good Lord Himself? +++++
Considering that most, if not all, of the Insane Left shares the common trait of being militantly atheistic, it seems to me that the self-induced God-sized hole in their psyches was quite predictably filled with all manner of lunacy. That these individuals who are hell-bent to live disordered lifestyles are now experiencing torrents of dis-ease, is only logical and to be expected.
Borrowing on your question, I recall an old adage that went something like, “Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” It’s a pleasant thought. . Just make sure you’re viewing from a safe distance.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting book by David Mamet titled “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture”. https://tinyurl.com/y3mpzxmv
Mamet makes numerous interesting points throughout his book. Among them was one I had never really considered. Specifically, what the left has attempted – and largely succeeded in doing – is to have removed predictability in our social relationships with one another. This must have a corrosive effect on our culture and society.