Oooooo the storm is threatening my very life today…
Then again it’s just a shot away….
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Oooooo the storm is threatening my very life today…
Next post: Pure Science | A Festschrift for Einstein
Previous post: Then again two riders were approaching….
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
The Stones’ elegy for Sixties innocence. My favorite tune by them.
I hear this and see myself sticking a sawed of 12 gauge into the face of some vermin thug, and blowing his head off while escape through the burning city on my Harley with my awesome babe on the back fender hanging on to me for dear life.
Searching for toilet paper at Costco just doesn’t have the same exciting vibe.
JWM
Walk into Costco wearing a duster, stop inside the door and whip out a 12 ga and say, “Where my shit paper iz?”
“It’s just a shot away.”
I’ll drink to that.
Toilet paper my ass. I would not stand in line for ass wipe for a minute. These dumb fools should have saved their corncobs for re-purposing.
Big bucks in ass wipe at the local flee market. Offered at $15.00 per single roll. Sixty rolls in a large Costco pack offered at $1200.00 (high price to discourage hoarding).
How to make your precious ass wipe supply last longer: Cut each square into quarters and use one quarter square per dump.
Vote Biden and you’ll never have to worry about toilet paper again. Dead persons don’t wipe their ass.
Long live President Trump!
@Terry
We need to get this toilet paper thing under control. Otherwise, people are going to re learn why lefthandedness once had such a negative connotation
I remember watching the opening scene of Scorcese’s “The Departed” in a theater. This opening guitar riff to this song was playing in the background during a flashback-to-the-Sixties scene. And it was as if a key unlocked a entire room of memories of those times.
That is the greatest opening riff to a rock song EV-uh, if you ask me
This, and “The Last Time”.
Up early after a no sleep night again. The return of insomnia. God, I hate it.
Stores here in So Cal are stripped.
First it was TP & bottled water.
Then wipes, Lysol, and hand sanitizer.
Then Ramen noodles & canned goods.
I went out at 8:30 last night.
Meat: stripped
Potatoes: gone.
Rice, beans, pasta: gone.
Shit is getting serious with breath taking speed.
And it’s all TV generated panic. I still see fools on social media listening to msnbc, and cnn, and blaming it all on Trump.
And like so many folks, I listened to Remus, but put it off for another day. And I never did buy that gun. Got an old .22 bolt action that hasn’t been fired in my lifetime. Not much good.
Our stores here at home are small, maybe a weeks worth of food. Maybe.
The ferals and orcs are out there, too.
Remembering to pray, own the fear, and not let it turn to panic. I gotta be strong for my wife.
JWM
“Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain.” – Friedrich Schiller after shopping at his local Costco.
“Toilet paper my ass”
The age that follows post modernism.
I nominate Terry for the win.
It’s the skinny fux hoarding all the shit paper cause I got it on good authority the fat fux can’t use it.
At least not for wiping their bloated anuses, they can’t reach em!
They shit, get in the shower, grab the shitter brush, scrub that rosebud, rinse, repeat as necessary.
“It’s all pipes!”
Hey Coach, I’ve worked “Gimme Shelter” into an entire Peopleskaraoke album side to include “Lay Off The White Cloud” (me), “19th Covid Meltdown”, “I Cant Get No Toilet Paper” (lyrics are stronger than the title)
Future Attraction: (Aisle) Three Fighting Man
Oops, forgot the link ….
https://thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=21334&p=231226&start&view=show#p231226