The weather today is not so much scattered showers as scattered puddles; they keep appearing when my back is turned. But it’s cool, sprinkly and cloudy.
I love this time of year. I hope all of you who visited my little town this summer had a good time; sun, sand and surf. Nobody got swept out to a watery death, as far as I know. Anyway, good memories, I hope. Come again next year. And in the mean time, stay out. We need our solitude and our bleak, scattered puddles, for recovery.
Dangerous gonzoblogger Pete has declared this What’s in Your Fridge Week. I am not afraid. Well, I am, but not about this. Behold.
Click here for larger image.
The batteries in my digital camera are very low, and the flash didn’t work. One more thing for tomorrow’s list. So this is available light.
You’ll notice I use Silk milk, not real moo. It’s better for me, in ways you don’t want to see illuminated here. Whole grain wheat bread. That mystery lump of plastic behind the Emerill’s pasta sauce (Bam!) is a leftover half of a chicken salad sandwhich, a coffee house on Linden Ave., circa October 11, 2004. The frist half wasn’t all that great, I guess.
To paraphrase Richard Bach, Live never to be ashamed if everything you eat or don’t eat is published around the world, even if what is published is not true.
This is a tip I couldn’t wait to pass on. It’s so rare to find a dissenter from the war – an opponent of the election of George Bush – who thinks clearly and writes well. Most liberals are only good at one or the other. Present company excepted, possibly.
Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is on the staff at Berkeley. He writes on foreign affairs. I saw him in a debate on the issue of replacing the president, on the UC cable channel.
It has been clear for several months that the United States is losing its war in Iraq. What remains to be seen is whether Americans will come to realize this fact before the election or after it. The answer may well determine who sits in the White House in late January 2005. But whoever wins on November 2 will be confronted by the stark fact that in a bitter, fragmented country the United States has engaged itself in a guerrilla war that no more admits of a clear and easy resolution than did the war in Vietnam in 1968. And in Iraq, a country poised on the Gulf of Hormuz—the “choke-point” through which more than half of the world’s oil passes, making it the jugular of the industrialized world—the strategic stakes are much greater.
Check out his site. And here’s a link to the article from which I’ve quoted.
I made some spaghetti. I noticed that, as I removed it from the package, I broke it in half and dropped it in the pot. I’ve watched some people lay it in the boiling water whole, even though it sticks up. I suppose that, as it cooks and gets soft, it all falls in and makes the matter moot. Except that then you have these foot-long strands of spaghetti to spin around on your fork and attempt to slurp up and eat.
So what’s your method, break it or just let it roll? And how strongly do you feel about it, and why?
The Times has endorsed Kerry, in an opinion which is as much a comprehensive indictment of Bush’s disastrous administration. It’s one of the best columns I’ve seen on why George the Lesser must be cast out of office.
The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management.
My phones are FUBAR. They’ve been boogered for a couple of days, not
ringing sometimes. It’s not ’cause I didn’t pay the bill; I can call out. First, just
the fax machine would ring, then the fax and the bedroom phone, then
yesterday and tonight they were all working, including the cordless. I thought
they were over the spell, when I got a call from the California Democratic
Committee this evening.
They were very disappointed that I didn’t agree that my money was needed to
get lazyass democrats off the couch on 11/2. They need cash to help get the
word out? There are people in California who are registered democrats, and
somehow haven’t gotten word there’s going to be an election? They’re going
to be surprised when Bush is “re-elected,” because they stayed home and
watched Judge Judy instead of voting?
Anyway, the phones won’t work. I guess one of them is screwed up, but I’ve
tried unplugging them all, plugging each one in, moving them around. So
listen, you’ve got the cell number, right? I’ll be using that for a few days, until
Verizon sends out a techie.
So if you’re a registered democrat, like me, please bear in mind that our
people are generally a bunch of dumbass slobs compared to the republicans,
when it comes to voting in California. And there’s certainly no excuse this
year. If G.W. gets “re-elected,” we’re all in big trouble. He’s running this
country right in a ditch, and his most compelling exculpation is that he
doesn’t blink. He’s a danger to the health and well-being of millions, and the
planet itself.
It’s time for Mr. Bush to go write his book.
… Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950
. . . Bush’s Telling Non-Answers (washingtonpost.com):
“There, in brief, are the core reasons why polls suggest that undecided and independent voters are having a problem with this president. His tactic of never admitting mistakes is backfiring in light of events. And when asked to take responsibility, his first instinct was to direct attention to others by speaking of his supposedly mistaken appointments. “
These awards might be of particular interest to my friends Abigail and Joseph.
Time to update the old reading list. I stopped by the library today, returned Reservation Road, and checked out Toward the End of Time by John Updike.
Seems like Updike weather. I haven’t read him in several years. I had some existential indigestion with the Rabbit books, but I think I was just too young, as a reader, to deal with it.
Cool. And not a bad name for a punk rock group.
Metaphor 
