… Then the sea,
which is blue steel, winter cold
and hungry, in need of sleep.
Boats, oil rigs, islands, sea birds
lost and homeless, sick to death
of fish, and then the setting sky.
Ruby, saffron, tangerine, shouldering
cobalt and lapis lazuli….
from The View From Here
c.2006 Kyle Kimberlin
Hi.
Welcome to Peaceable. The blog is on a break, probably for a few weeks.
I’m trying to concentrate on my writing, life and time, and the itchy inconvenience of consciousness. I blog about that stuff at Metaphor.
Feel free to browse the archives. There are over 1700 hot and juicy posts in there.
Peace.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
A bit of advice for the neophyte blogger out there. If you’re going to do a blog with a theme or focus, pick what you love and stick with it. But have just one blog. Or suffer the consequences.
I’ve still got it on my mind that I may have to abandon this blog in hopes the other one will survive. It’s not getting hits, and creative writing is what I care about, far more than politics or social rhetoric.
I can be terribly indecisive. I am aware that it can be annoying to the point of homicide. Have you ever been stuck in a restaurant with some guy who just won’t put down the menu down, and the server keeps coming back, “Y’all need a few more minutes? I’ll come back” But you know it’ll be 20 minutes.
Just pick something! Get a sandwich! It’ll all be shit in an hour anyway!
It’s basically the same here, and I know it. It just doesn’t matter!
It just doesn’t matter!
It just doesn’t matter!
Do I even need to do anything? About anything? Should I do something, or just wait and see?
They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
— Andy Warhol
Perhaps this line from the movie Hook is more appropriate. Capt Hook is about to give Peter Pan’s son Jack an ear piercing, with his hook: “Now laddie, just lie your head like so and don’t move. ‘Cause this is really going to hurt.”
Michael Moore said on Thursday that the Bush administration has served him with a subpoena regarding his trip to Cuba during the making of his new film, “Sicko,” reports United Press International. [ Link]
Can anyone give me a good reason – beyond the motivations of punishment – why a private citizen should respond to a subpoena from the government, while criminal contempt hangs over the heads of Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolton for ignoring the subpoenas of Congress?
I hope Moore shows up with his Flint cap on, unshaved, dressed in jeans like the rest of us, and tells them to kiss his big pink Michigonian ass.
That’s what’s on the iPod this afternoon. Any Genesis fans out there? Sure. See how these lines from One for the Vine fit your brain:
In his name they could slaughter, for his name they could die.
Though many there were believed in him, still more were sure he lied,
But they’ll fight the battle on.
A funny for you, to lighten the mood just because it’s Friday.
A Mafia Godfather finds out that his bookkeeper has cheated him out of ten million bucks. His bookkeeper is deaf. That was the reason he got the job in the first place. It was assumed that a deaf bookkeeper would not hear anything that he might have to testify about in court.
When the Godfather goes to confront the bookkeeper about his missing $10 million, he brings along his attorney, who knows sign language.
The Godfather tells the lawyer “Ask him where the 10 million bucks he embezzled from me is.”
The attorney, using sign language, asks the bookkeeper where the money is.
The bookkeeper signs back: “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
The attorney tells the Godfather: “He says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”
The Godfather pulls out a pistol, puts it the bookkeeper’s temple and says, “Ask him again!”
The attorney signs to the bookkeeper: “He’ll kill you if you don’t tell him!”
The bookkeeper signs back: “OK! You win! The money is in a brown briefcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo’s backyard in Queens !”
The Godfather asks the attorney: “Well, what’d he say?”
The attorney replies: “He says you don’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”
“We’ve been tracking Cindy Sheehan for a long time, and we think it’s disgusting that she’s capitalizing on her son’s death,’ said Stephanie Hottenstein of Bethlehem. The wife of an Army National Guardsman was accompanied by her 5-month-old daughter, Karlyn, and 6-year-old son, Miles.” Link
Please take a moment and look around you, so you’ll know exactly where you were when you read the single stupidest thought uttered aloud by a private citizen of these United States in the year 2007. I’m wagering it can’t be topped.
I wouldn’t have thought Cindy Sheehan needed to be tracked. She’s been kind of on the visible side, from my perspective. So we’ve all been able to see the fun and profit she’s gained from her son’s death. Oh yeah, her life’s a damn hoot.
For the record, I checked the list of dead, and Hottenstein’s husband isn’t on it yet. Maybe we should check again later, and after he makes the list, she can give us her opinion again. Maybe she’ll have something to say about dead hubby. Or maybe Miles would like the war to stop so other kids don’t lose their Dad. Then some poor pitiful moron can criticize him for capitalizing on his father’s death.
I did find this:
| Sheehan, Casey | Specialist | 04-Apr-2004 |
The font is pretty small, for obvious reasons. There are a lot of names, amounting to a lot of grieving people out there, capitalizing on death dealt entirely in vain.
I spent a lot of time today thinking about Uncle Charlie. Not my Uncle Charlie. He’s a character in my novel. He’s pretty important, so I spent a couple of hours rewriting – from scratch – the first several pages of a scene in which I’m first trying to reveal his character.
Charlie left by the back gate, saying goodbye to the boys as he passed them where they played. The vegetable garden beyond the yard smelled ripe. The bottom gate, which kept the garden apart from the infinity of the farm, was made of mismatched wood and bits of wire, and hung from heavy wire instead of hinges. He unlooped the strand that served as a lock, and set the gate aside to pass through. He saw that the part of the copper where they laid there hands was worn brighter, like a penny, while the rest was weathered dull and brown. He whistled for Zeke, who was sniffing around the bushes in the yard, and set the gate in place behind them as they went.
The issue here is how to reveal someone’s essential kindness without coming out and poking your finger in the reader’s eye and yelling this guy is really kind. I mean he’s friggin Buddha. In other words, by showing not telling.
My approach, as I rewrite this chapter, is to show you how much Zeke loves Charlie. Enough said, but as I was thinking about kindness this afternoon, I listened to the 7/23 daily installment of Writers’ Almanac, which includes a poem called kindness. Here’s a sample:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
I’ve added a new site to my links in the right column. March for peace is the site of two young people who are in the midst of a march from California to Washington DC, for the cause of peace. They started at the Golden Gate on May 20, and plan to be in Washington on 9/11. Amazing. Almost 4 months on the road, on foot, meeting people and spreading their message. Check it out.
“Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and 45 fellow protesters were arrested at the Capitol for disorderly conduct in demanding the impeachment of President Bush.”
I guess she couldn’t retire just yet, bless her heart.
The Democrats in Congress suck. Amoral cowards. They refuse to do the right thing and start impeachment proceedings because it’s not convenient.
Airports warned about terror dry runs – Yahoo! News:
“The seizures at airports in San Diego, Milwaukee, Houston and Baltimore included ‘wires, switches, pipes or tubes, cell phone components and dense clay-like substances,’ including block cheese.”
Hey, this is nothing to be jokin around about. I’ve had the terror dry runs while traveling, and it’s … well, if you’ve ever known the pain and embarrassment …
Anyway, I think the worst seizures there are have to be those involving pipes and block cheese. That’ll really do for you – make you want to just stay home a while.
Metaphor 