The Collapse

[pan]

OK, I'm an idiot - how do you upload video?

Watch this

[curt]

per annum....sorry, my english is ....it sucks. ;-)

[Mouse]

I confess I did try to enter the profiteering mindset for a while, tried really hard, could never master that bit where you only care about yourself. It doesn't have a point that I can understand when it ends with the children being cast out of the garden.

Without being religious any more, love and compassion are the only truly powerful forces that I ever encountered. Didn't mean to say that, it just fell out. Lasting impression of life and death, the touch of the embracing air.

Rotten birthday last Friday, 53, shhh. Almost as old as Bo. Found myself in hospital, tears dripping either side of the oxygen mask, alienated beyond bearing. Unplugged myself, fled in my pajamas, fortified by the parting handshake of a German doctor who emerged from the hostile, sullen side to discover why I was so upset and approved warmly of my passionate misery being put to work as it is, artfully. How rare that solidarity. Always my excuse, running away to protect my savage spirit from closed closed closed cruel coldness.

Excuse me, dog arguing, wants to run out and scream at screaming foxes pacing past midnight frosty deep garden amongst the sleeping houses.

Anyway, have been doubting personal survival likely much longer. After Woozle went heart broke. This week can't even paint. Don't dare even smoke an elevating spliff on the back doorstep. Don't dare drink gorgeous French coffee at all. Afraid of feeling feelings that make the heart skip and leap and hurl itself against the walls, trying to break out. Writing this, it is singing and dreaming and dancing its songs which I have to stop, the sorry, silly shambles. Leads to pain this week. Lots.

All the same planning to remain somehow, however alienated, witless and forlorn because these very feelings of ours sound harmonies amongst the humanness of us that matters. I know it does.

I've always known it does matter. Keeping the heart open. Lifting the face to the rain. Sometimes there's nothing left but that.

[BO]

and you say can't write, EM? That was beautiful.

Take care of yourself. Whatever ales you, I demand it be gone!

[Mouse]

Thank you Bo.

[waldopaper]

as Bo says, I demand it begone as well. Begone! black mongrels growling from beneath sleeping houses round frosty deep garden... Begone! Ah but Em... ye reach round the world to strike harmony in to a flinty ol heart that auch beats like stone against cages and ages and multiple rages... ye chased the sad shadows away from the moonlight Ning striking twice and the mice run down clock working universe... for better or worse... now I'll ring for the nurse... and begone!

[pan]

Em - it has only been recently I have not been able to automatically take my health and vitality for granted (I guess it has something to do with being in our 5th decade). We are, ultimately, fairly fragile beings who live for a relatively short time. Your pain and fear and annoyance at not being able to do what you used to do without a second thought should be accepted and embraced as part of a real human life. Your tears are evidence that you still feel, that "civilization" has not stolen your soul. Thank you for sharing your experience with us - that was a precious gift. Now, heal damnit.

[Mouse]

You are such dears. I don't think I've ever felt so popular before. Just for you I shall get better.

Writing this in textedit, not Ning thing, having lost long reply to Bo, and to Waldo's neat "Little Parrot Paradigm", so simple and true. The art of precis. Which I would like to repeat here so we may consider it from various angles in our sleep and see what novel responses arise from the deep in the coming weeks:


The Little Parrot Paradigm by Waldo

I. Be an obedient slave
II. Parrot the dogma
A. Never question anything
B. Help us brutally suppress anyone who does
III. Your reward is in heaven


It's that part 2b that I've found myself on the other end of all my life. I suspect that is the case for all of us here. Weapons of choice in England are usually cold-shouldering, sarcasm and contempt. Very effective. Crushing. Powerfully repressive. Reason for crying in hospital - humiliation, helplessness. Arrogant judgement loudly applied. Chief crime, smoking hubblebubble with a heart condition. Unimaginative lot.

Hasn't it really always been the same for dissenters? SMILING got me into awful trouble in my youth.

We mustn't ever forget to buckle our swashes. A little bit of ostentatious bravado never went amiss.

[waldopaper]

The Great Hate Divide

How many kids they've murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher...I'd make somebody pay
--Bruce Cockburn

Same deal. They see aborted fetuses like buckets of prawns. I see Iraqi girls with no legs. The mental picture (and it is mental... how many of us have seen fetus buckets or Iraqi girls "live?"). Each picture invokes the inhumanity of the other. The fetus-buckets to me are as remote as the stumped iraqettes are to them. Why is this? Perhaps each of us should ponder this question... but we won't.

I only know how much I hate them... you know... the triple-chinned prig-assed church-going chickenhawk cream-puff mall-shopping war-mongering fatties. They hate us right back... “…pornography, perversion and promiscuity …legions of crackheads, dope pushers and armed gangs roaming our streets.” How accurate is either picture? Who knows?

Key phrase: "armed gangs." So they arm themselves as well. Who's "they?" Doesn't matter at this point. Being the mono-brow steroid-pumped bullet-headed offspring of our British brethren, we will NOT be satisfied with "cold-shouldering, sarcasm and contempt." Since the USAns reject such rhetorical sparring as "euro-wimpyness," probably for the same reason they are blind to evolution. No, the Euros already did the buff-biff chest collision macho shit, and noted the results. Since their bullet-headed cousins think this lesson has nothing to do with "creating shareholder value," it will probably be repeated on their continent in ways to bizarre to imagine.

Now.., I aint advocating this... I'm just sayn... think of how cheap those knight-stopping pikes are,,, just from the historical perspective. As cruel as cold-shouldering, sarcasm and contempt are... dey not dum as rock to hed. Have pity on your English-speaking who have to to learn that rhetorics beat the shit out of rocket-launchers as far as day-to-day life goes.

Oh well. Jump in and hang on.

[curt]

Ah, and I thought (mistake) you were referring to the kind of pikes used up on Vinegar Hill and in the streets of Enniscorthy. According to Rutherfurd, the United Irish waited a very long time before deciding to rise up. The French came too late to help ; the rising was smitten. This ex-piece of tree has been with me since earlier this year, which should better explain where a USAn like me gets info like that. I heard the song and so I feed my head. It's just a slow eater! The key to it all (not gonna tell ya what all) is to wait for the right moment. Lemme see. Vinegar Hill was in 1798. Old Éire is still calling her Rebels to please come back home. Between you and me and a fence post....they won't. Even if they did, the Polish won't give up their newley found jobs & lives to make room for the once wayward. Such a transition and what a price to get an Island back on its feet. Above all, it took a very long time. But if you think about it, the "revolution" has been going on for a long time. This ain't no disco. It ain't no country club either. This is the USA!

I like a good beer buzz early in the morning
And Billy likes to peel the labels
From his bottles of Bud
He shreds them on the bar
Then he lights every match in an oversized pack
Letting each one burn down to his thick fingers
Before blowing and cursing them out
And he's watching the bottles of Bud as they spin on the floor
And a happy couple enters the bar
Dangerously close to one another
The bartender looks up from his want ads but

One of my many Great Granddads was an Iron Monger (up in North Riding of all places....White Rose et al). His dad may have been too. Those guys may have been able to monger out a pike or two and stash them in a place similar to the Liberties. Such knowledge is now absent ...in this fam damily. We still have our pride ! And one of two of us have gone "astray" as the left (not) behinders see it....moved on as we see it. Doesn't change a damned thing. Still keeping the faith and remembering what it is we're not in any hurry at all to fight or die for. Nope.

[Mouse]

Yes, we mustn't underestimate the power of the dismissive glance in maintaining cannon fodder numbers and a broken-willed underclass. It's certainly more sophisticated than a grenade launcher. It leaves no torn flesh and is barely ever mentioned at all.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndE...

But its more than education we need now, for all of us to achieve the necessary paradigm shift to understand what we're doing, how we're doing it, all partaking in the destruction of civilisations.

If we can understand how we've fallen so far from common sense, can we see a way back?

Painting is one of many effective forms of deep engagement, and I can tell you about one building in me now, inspired by a blurred image of the broken head of a child killed by a bomb.
I showed this image to a pair of preachers who came to the door, peddling their biblical devastation, their dreams of a special time just for their friends and families after the apocalypse has rubbed out the rest of us.
What a lovely flower...
No, it is a child, see his sleeping face, that blossoming of skull, his mind, his dreams..

And they are appalled that I have shown them such a thing, that is the merest dot of what they were smiling about, their dreamed-of cleansing.

[Mouse]

Sorry Curt, this is one slow person here. My mother's family were Irish through and through, and I went back in 1996, but they wouldn't let me stay. We were hedged around with promises like gossamer webs.

[waldopaper]

There those Hessian mercenaries are again... "The troops were not mercenaries in the modern sense of professionals who hire out their own services for money. As in most armies of the eighteenth century, the men were mainly conscripts, debtors, or the victims of impressment; some were also petty criminals. Pay was low; some soldiers apparently received nothing but their daily food." Hmm.. will the "economic draft" become more severe?

Meanwhile, another "outrage du jour:" we are getting together our very own Einsatzgruppen. Nice. Next door Robin Weirauch lost to Bob Latta, the book-smacking anti-abortion family values guy. The rubes are still buying it.

I really don't know why I even look at this shit. I got clinical depression so bad, I rarely leave the house any more. The better health efforts are down the loo because prolonging this life makes no sense. I can't talk to my fam about any of these goings-on because then I get shit about "negativity." Maybe they're right. But I can't go there.

This was not judgment day, only morning.
Morning: excellent and fair.

I keep thinking of Another Sophie's Choice.