We finally picked a grave, but I forgot to take a picture. It was 104 degrees but the spot we picked was cooler, shaded and calm. A long process, we began looking in April. It was hanging in the air and even this morning I said I don't know how we'll ever decide, and one place returned to for another look was taken. But then we saw a place we rejected early on and suddenly it was now clear it was the right place. The general manager came by excited and said Hi, family! welcoming us to the graveyard. There's even a spot next to our spot, for us, if we want a earthly home for eternity by Trudy and Joe. 

 I reread Pinchbeck and I think he's struggling with what it means to be a jew. He mentions jewish exceptionalism but I think he's waking up to the reality that he's been hoodwinked by the myth of Israel. 

 I've quoted Pinchbeck often, but today I thought of canceling my free subscription when he talked about how he loves Israel and thinks everyone around it wants to eradicate it, not mentioning the countries Israel has destroyed, and the ongoing genocide. 

 The mirror disappeared. I hope another mirror appears. If not I'll look into Lulu's eyes. Waiting not waiting to see what happens next. Silence is painful, wondering about the inhuman end of the human world. Will artificial intelligence be the final reflection of the world fully committed to the system of the catastrophe? I remember a mirror I took home from the street, the reflection flaked off. I looked through it a while then put it in the alley behind the chicken butcher. The chicken butcher who once tried to strangle me. I think of an abstract mirror reflecting no one. Does anyone here know where Bill went? Isn't it all, after all our endless reflection, abstract? What is a poem no one reads? 

 Olive Gnome Sane Palestine collage by Hilary Marie Shaeffer.

 

The full strawberry moon, swallows and seagulls, the sun rising over the lake, limned with saharan dust. 

You wanted to rule the world.

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

-Czeslaw Milosz

- I just finished Raising Hare and saw this poem. 

 It's 92 but it feels like 104. Lulu's tongue hangs like a limp pink flag at half mast.

 Mike tried to get Lulu to chase Lena. I said it's too hot, and we split, and then we saw them coming up behind at the little library where I found a book Riot Days, by Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot. Score! Lulu was kissing on Lena the whole way 'round.

 I bet this mirror is gone, it may still be there. Let it be said, there is no liberal zionism, or what does liberal mean? Liberal genocide? I'll see if the dispossessed mirror is still there. After all, we must know what zionism means. 

 Some of us were shocked by the genocide in Palestine, and we're still shocked every day, but what is truly frightening is how we've all been conditioned to accept any evil our government commits, how endless war, destruction of nature, and genocide have all been normalized. Blessed are the people who see through the lies of our time.

 Don't give up, and never let go. Think of the dead. Think of the living. Don't let your life be lost among the living dead.

 Worried mom's mobile home won't sell. May someone care enough to love it as their own, as it was for forty years. You can't realistically live without praying these days. The baby piping plover Mavis died, and the grief I read was poetry. Also Wendell Berry, What We Need Is Here. We can't live without poetry, without poetry we can't even properly breathe. And to all the lost ones—love on your journey. We may have lost you—You are not lost. 

 The empire is insane. The empire has always been insane. The empire will kill us all if it is not stopped.

The Trust Fall: Julian Assange. I didn't know it was from 2023. It tells the story up to his release, and then after The Conclusion it goes into a long sequence of schlock. What he did was expose the empire's murderous treachery. Anyone who cares to know can learn about it in past tense, and watch in present tense, as it still goes on. I hope Julian is doing alright, and I hope he will make a film about his life after his release from the belly of the beast.

 Double portrait in a dispossessed mirror. 

 I've been thinking about Julian Assange. There's a documentary out now, Trust Fall: Julian Assange. We watch tonight. 

 The library is still having troubles. The site says we're experiencing temporary issues with the delivery process. I found Maria Stepanova's The Disappearing Act on the new release shelf. I think I had it on order at one time, before the troubles, when I was shuffling my queue. It may have been slow like this years ago. Maybe what they call current issues will be the status quo. Anyway I'm reading Raising Hare now, savoringly, which Diana gave to R. and R. passed to me. 

 I was a stranger, and ye took me in. 

Billionaire ultra-zionist trans-humanist techno-fascist overlord Peter Thiel has moved to Argentina, where many Israelis have migrated to escape Israel and be with the ultra-zionist regime of Javier Millei. Israel will keep expanding until the collapse. This is all too much for my brain, and for a sustainable civilization. 

Wimbledon starts today, and it's the full strawberry moon. Everything happens all at once and we pray for the resistance and focus on sanity.

 We finished Shoot the People. The power didn't fail this time. Then we watched Motel Destino. Whoa. What a double feature. We live in the belly of the beast, but some of us are one with the beast, and some of us see the predicament we're in. It's escalating. Can we see what Obama actually did, is doing? Can we see what Israel and the U.S. are doing? Empire over all. Democracy of genocide? Can we look at these things as nature sees the giant saws and earth movers? Are we unconscious casualties of the death cult? Are we fit for life?

The condition of Palestine is the human condition.

Science and Nonduality: What Occupation Does to the Soul

 a parasitic entity can't stop being parasitic. 

 Word of the day, Otiose. I didn't consciously pick it, it's algorithmic. To be honest I didn't even know what it means. Well, I did, impishly, subconsciously. 

 No, it's not your eyes—the message decays in the heat island haze as you try in vain to read.

It reflects his sensibilities well. The windows on the southwest corner are covered and blocked with his prefab concrete civil rights speech. Neoliberalism, private enterprise, classism, gentrification, entitlement, arrogant domination and disdain for the commons. It's a hubristic touristic simulacrum of the neoliberal empire in the park. I'm not letting it go. I'm getting used to it now.

 I talk to Maw about the saga going on at the place where she lives now and Maw says When this is all over I should write a book. You oughta start now I say. It's like Peyton Place I say, though I never watched it, and it's way different, but she got my drift and laughed, heh-heh, yes. It's not like a soap opera, that's a euphemism, but I wonder what's really happening there and how the world looks from inside Maw's head.

By the way, when I took this picture a fellow behind me said People are funny, and a girl laughed, and they may have been talking about me, and as I rode away I said, True that, people are funny.

 I was thinking about distraction and then I was thinking about ennui and then I forgot what I was going to say about distraction. This is where meditation with a cat may come in handy. It's all one, as Dr. Bronner used to say, back when I used his soap for everything.

 When I tell someone I have to go to a memorial and they don't ask who for, I don't get annoyed, I just get sad for them, that there's no room for even a simple response or even minimal curiosity. That kind of distraction is rife in our world today.

 Just when I wake up thinking Don't let it go, Don't give up, and thinking, Fill my heart with love, then the fear comes of the drones they use in Gaza being used here next. Pray for us all. Cats of peace.

 Who would have thought this cat would come from the park to fill my heart.

 I wonder, whatever happened to Will.

 
My head as a reading chair in the coyote zone. 

Summer

There is that sound like the wind
Forgetting in the branches that mean something
Nobody can translate. And there is the sobering “later on,”
When you consider what a thing meant, and put it down.

For the time being the shadow is ample
And hardly seen, divided among the twigs of a tree,

The trees of a forest, just as life is divided up,
between you and me, and among all the others out there.

And the thinning-out phase follows
The period of reflection. And suddenly, to be dying
Is not a little or mean or cheap thing,
Only wearingly, the heat unbearable,
And also the little mindless constructions put upon
Our fantasies of what we did : summer, the ball of pine
needles, The loose fates serving our acts, with token smiles,
Carrying out their instructions too accurately –

Too late to cancel them now – and winter, the twitter
Of cold stars at the pane, that describes with broad gestures
This state of being that is not so big after all.
Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps

To a narrow ledge over the water. Is this it, then,
This iron comfort, these reasonable taboos,
Or did you mean it when you stopped? And the face
Resembles yours, the one reflected in the water.

John Ashbery

 We were watching Shoot the People when the power went out again. It wasn't God, it was ComEd. But thank God the Obamachron is always on, like a beacon of hope.

PROMISED LAND

 I wanted somehow to save them … And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead. 

Barack Obama

 Can you figure it? People call you a retard for being anti-genocide? Jesus!

 I rode to Pebble Beach, picked mulberries, and rode south, around the Point, to 63rd St. beach, to the end of the pier, around the outer harbor, the inner harbor, through the golf course, and the tunnel to the Obamachron. I'm still not used to living next to a tourist attraction, and I kind of hope it becomes a ghost town, but that's just magical thinking, it's urban renewal, it's the Jackson Park Obamachron now.

 magic tunnel and jesus pier. 

 Get thee hence, AIPAC monsters! Cats for Peace!

 I had a little spaz attack this morning, but I came back with a load of luscious berries and sweet pees, and I'm going for a swim. 

 So long, little Queen. 

 In "america" we're raised on violence from infancy, but some of us never get used to it.