writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime
It’s a disgusting national shame how many of our innocent, unprovoking citizens are murdered by other small-minded, blood-lusting citizens motivated wholly by hate and personal delusions of a superior bloodline while being criminally supported by institutional delusions of the same.
“…if we as a community had not been willfully blind to our institutionalized racism, Ahmaud might still be alive.“
#irunwithahmaud
#prayforamerica
I really, really wish I could believe all the bizarre hocus pocus things like astrology and palm readings and other pseudo-sciencey, pseudo-religiousy things so I could lay all my blame for all the unpleasantries going on all over this pretty yet petulant planet of ours (those dang locusts in Africa are biblically unrelenting) on a misaligned moon or star…
That said, Claire Comstock-Gay of The Cut has an interesting take on the subject, whether you want to believe it or not.
“Astrology’s skeptics and detractors like to make a fuss about how foolish it is to imagine that, simply by looking to the stars, we can know what the future will bring. But to argue this is to completely misunderstand one of modern astrology’s central purposes — not to find our destinies, but to find our actually existing, living human selves.”
Who Cares If Astrology Isn’t ‘Real’?, Claire Comstock-Gay, The Cut, May 14, 2020
#alonetogetherwiththeskeptics
Or something like that.
For all you computer nerds out there, this is an excellent read from Wired on the making, undoing, and remaking of a hacker.
Tried to highlight some of the spooky goings on of the Dark Web in my last book The Good Kill. That stuff fascinates me in an horrifying, schadenfreude kind of way…
Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he’d done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn’t be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime…
#alonetogetherwithmycommodore64
It’s hard to believe so many people have to live so miserably in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
This has become cliché and empty to say, especially from those of us speaking from our privilege, but since there are so many pockets of wretched poverty all around the country such as described in the following article, it’s hard not to say it.
“Hundreds of miles of roads are unpaved, so it can take up to three hours to get a sick person to help. It’s difficult to self-isolate because families live in one-room homes called hogans. Up to 40 percent of Navajo households don’t have running water, making it hard to wash hands. Cellphone service and Wi-Fi are limited, so it’s difficult to keep in touch and to get information about the epidemic.”
A Life on and Off the Navajo Nation, New York Times, May 13, 2020
#alonetogetherwithourprivilege
a green all its own
the swift verdancy of spring
lo! the cardinal bright!
#alonetogetherinnirvana
Don’t worry, my relentless efforts to completely overpower you politically is nothing more than a love-like expression… 😘
The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relations between two minds, which is of the essence of political power, the physical relation between two bodies.” He wrote that “all foreign policy is the struggle for the minds of men.” Genuine political power couldn’t be forced on people. It was complex, organic, unquantifiable. Elsewhere, Morgenthau compared it to love.
The Book That Shaped Foreign Policy for a Generation Has More to Say, NewYork Times, May 9, 2020
#alonetogetherexpressingourlovepolitically
You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless -there is only one thing to do with a novel [or anything important**] and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.
Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1929 letter from France, courtesy the New York Times archive
#alonetogetherwiththelostgeneration
*Even though it says Straight On Through and not Break On Through, I wonder how many first thought of the Doors…
**IMO
time doesn’t matter
to the purposed honey bee
tasting the nectar
When I was a kid a buddy of mine would occasionally drag me along to a Catholic church service with him, seeing how misery loves company, especially as a child. Even though I hadn’t a clue what was going on — being raised Protestant — I was always mesmerized by the outlandish garb, the thick incense, and especially the incomprehensible Latin that still kind of seemed to make sense. It all seemed so surreal, so magical.
I’m not m much of a church-goer, but I’ve never had that wondrous feeling at a Protestant service and I guess deep down I’ve always wished I had.
Perhaps if I had, I would have gone more to church.
Perhaps not.
More and more young Christians, disillusioned by the political binaries, economic uncertainties and spiritual emptiness that have come to define modern America, are finding solace in a decidedly anti-modern vision of faith. As the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns throw the failures of the current social order into stark relief, old forms of religiosity offer a glimpse of the transcendent beyond the present.
From The Future of Christianity Is Punk, New York Times, May 8, 2020
#alonetogetherbeingweird