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: 2001-2022
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
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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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Never been much of restaurant person in the first place, maybe 5-6 times a year, usually the sit down variety (Applebee’s, Roadhouse, etc.), and have not been to one since Feb of 2020. Now, in light of all the idiocy, regardless of their reasons, I will probably not set foot in one again. You’ve heard of the “shedding” thing, right? That, plus, I see no need to reward assholes. Besides, the grub I fix here at the crib blows away ANYTHING out there regardless of price. And, the hygiene in the food prep here in the compound is unquestionable. Look at the people that work in the food joints, filthy, tatted up (hep C), misfits, and negro’s and every other vermin. I wouldn’t let these people mow my yard let alone touch my food. The very idea gives me the heebie jeebies. Over and fucking out.
My wife and I have a place that lures us in on Sunday for lunch and the food is great and the restaurant is run correctly. But you’re right, esp in regard to the types that work in most food joints….some very nasty, ass scratching MFs of every description.
I haven’t been to a restaurant in years. In fact, I cannot remember when was the last time. (Maybe it was a Chinese joint over on the northwest side of Oklahoma City ten years ago.) My own cooking is gourmet and just the way I want it—and there is no lisping and effeminate waiter scurrying here and there. And no tip is necessary—although any guests must bring the booze.
There is an entire cottage industry developed around restaurant workers and owners complaining and commiserating on YouTube about how bad their lives are during the “pandemic”. Truly, misery loves company. Most of these videos originate in—you guessed it—San Francisco, New York City and the tonier parts of big Democrat run cities. Gosh, I wonder how those restaurant folks got in such financial trouble? The irony of the answer escapes them. They complain about the actions of those they themselves put into political office. Democrat restaurant owner, meet Democrat politician. Now, wear your mask, get the “vaccine”, ridicule the “unvaxxed” and head for the unemployment office.
I hear that McDonald’s is hiring. After all you poor things, “you deserve a break today.”
I learned from a sibling in an unspoken city that a number of restaurants have gone moveable and secret. If you are on their wait lists, you will get a location and time to show up. Business is booming. No masks, no passports, no rents, no taxation. Democrats have ruined their blue cities by punishing the producers of wealth.
Such restaurants are like the true Catholic Churches in China. Or as Hemmingway would say, “a moveable feast”.
Well, I just got back from my Friday evening stroll around Bay Ridge Brooklyn (NYC),
and I can report that the streets were packed, and the restaurants were full. Dozens of restaurants, from low-end to chi-chi, full of mostly unmasked diners, both indoors and in the outdoor seating (the outdoor seating is jerry-rigged platforms in the street, where there used to be parking spots; after a year of this madness, many of the outdoor platforms have planters full of flowers, and decorations, heating systems etc.. The traffic is slow enough that they don’t have to worry too much about getting mowed down by a truck whizzing by. The Kettle Black (third ave and 87th) has a sign in their window, to the effect of “we’re not vaccine police, we not enforcing anything”; most other restaurants still have their “No Entry Without Masks” signs in the windows.