protection                                                                                                                 algiz
sedge or rushes 
the elk 

control of the emotions is at issue here. during times of transition, shifts in life course and accelerated self-change, it is important not to collapse yourself into your emotions, the highs as well as the lows. new opportunities and challenges are typical of this rune. and with them may come trespasses and unwanted influences.
algiz serves as a mirror for the spiritual warrior, the one whose battle is always with self. the warrior's protection is like the curved horns of the elk, or the warning rustle of the sedge grass, for both serve to keep open space around you.
remain mindful that timely right action and correct conduct are your only true protection. if you find yourself feeling pain, observe the pain, stay with it. do not try to pull down the veil and escape from life by denying what is happening. you will progress; knowing that is your protection.


pshew, all typed with one finger. my new years rune, 2020, late anthrop. 2020

it's taking me a long time to recognize my father was a man who was hurt and hurting and who suffered himself as well as causing suffering. for so long i just thought he was mean spirited. but a mean spirit comes from life experience, and we never know really what our parents, or anyone experiences as trauma. even our own devolve into story and we become the teller of the tale. i want to get back to the feeling of the one who lived it, for whom it was not a story. i've carried the feelings so long, sifting through them in various therapies, but mostly intellectually. i'd like to feel everything, and let everything go.

tonight we shall eat hearty chili and potato chips and onion dip and choose our rune stones and do the 5th and 6th paramitas online with the open heart project. i'm not too well versed, i'm kind of a natural anarchist, but i want to try this, with r. guiding me. what i thought about is a dog can get to transcendence more readily that we, and be a bodhisattva without even studying or discipline. but we might have to meditate and even study. eek.

some of these peoples round here are so goofy, they got no i-dear about animals and nature and let alone wildlife please and they don't even look it up online they just jump right in and pontificate and stoke fake fear about coyotes in their profound and willful ignorance well i know peoples are sadly to our collective peril stupid and perhaps ineducable especially concerning the remaining natural world though their texting fingers are quite dexterous on their handy personal devices and in the virtual reality of social media their non-native habitat-tat-tat. we must just let the mystery be sometimes (are they pod people? trumpers? obombites? who the fug are they?) but we can prod the addled-by-devices human animal products in the gray matter just for the fun of it, gnome sane.

i was riding down cornell to get mister and i heard the distinctive liquid burbling sound that goes right through my conscious threshold and lights up my pineal gland, and i look up and i just see the trees and then i look over and see a guy pointing up looking over at me saying "sandhill cranes!" and i look and see a convex line of them pulling south, the lovely lovely primordial birds, and then he look at me again, peering as though through clouds of time, "doug?" and it takes me a moment to resolve his image and it's my oldest friend paul from high school in villa dark who i haven't seen since the war on terror began. uncanny.
what's uncanny is we fell out over the evil lie of the war on terror. he bought into it. we were peaceniks in high school, and i felt disgusted. i cut the relationship and we haven't spoken since til today. though it felt fine, i don't think we'll go into the old stuff, or even go on, who knows. we know nothing really. i do know the sandhill cranes are a native spirit animal of peace. so if we leave the thing there it's in a better place than the terror and the broken friendship. oh yeah, we also went to ram dass together, and he died last week. and now the w.o.t. or whatever the fucking hell the government thugs call it is almost twenty years old. 2020. 2020 vision. it's all hindsight now we know chaos is coming, but we don't know shit about chaos in the land of plenty.

hilde raided the hamper and ate some t-shirts and then a half a bag of pecans. i fear comet is beginning to follow her errant ways. he was staring at a chocolate cake with undisguised lust. i pose them with the gingerbread house to test their impulse control but if i step through the door i fear the control will leave with me.

i say happy new year margaret and she says what? i say happy new year margaret, and she says no, it's best wishes for the new year. we wish each other best wishes and she presses the button for the 13th floor button for me and i press on to 15. i make an angel falulu and she sniffs my angelic head just like mister do too.

mister pooping on the catholic theological union lawn, new year's eve day morning 2019. late anthropocene, chicago.

lulu plucks a wishbone for new years.

oh my angel of coyoteland

 may love live here to the last leaf.

i almost forgot it was winter duggles you know how i love the snow muds ok but snows fine gnome sane

 how bout you

i don't know what it means but for the first time i saw obomba not the real obomba, the huckster economic warrior, it was clear it was the spectre of of obomba in my dream. 
otherwise people seem to be mostly hip to the beauty of and welcome the nature of coyote as the thread on next door hyde park shows.
may there be more happy coyotes among us in 2020. and may obombaland be only a rich powerpuff's land grabbing imperial dream. and never our reality.

or we might perceive the way an attitude of aggressive cynicism, which restricts our personalities and our friendships, might have had its origins in a parent who let us down at a time when we couldn't contain our vulnerability, and thereby turned us into people who try at every juncture to disappoint themselves early and definitively rather than risk allowing the world to turn down our hopes at a time of its own choosing. 

alain de botton,
the school of life

ignorance and fear. i believe what people fear the most is their own ignorance. a woman just posted on next door a three exclamation warning about a coyote. she called 9-1-1 and they said they can't do anything, because there's nothing to do, the coyote live here just like fearful ignorant people do, among the sane, the insane, and the sane insane, they are smarter than we who could not live in their world like they do in ours. however, they are beautiful peaceful creatures i assume will shy away from fear and ignorance as they are drawn to peaceful curious humans. they're here, they've learned to live with us, let us learn to live with them and love them for they improve our sadly reduced world. i know some will cling tenaciously to their fear and ignorance, but i had to speak. i wrote a simple reply, please let them be. 
a fellow, oswaldo, put a heart after my comment.
that fearful lady should feel blessed to see coyote.

i'm sorry, there's a sadness deep inside, sad boy.

ABANDON ANY HOPE OF FRUITION.

i heard you missed me, petey. well i'm back.

wind of mr.

you can't see the wind but you can see the wind of mr. this morning he was tied up by  poodle and corgi like gulliver by lilliputians and he stood there smiling good naturedly. this afternoon he was assailed by a bonkers family pack of poodles at the hedgerow and he silently veered over and stood on the verge waiting bestilled til the raucous clump trailed off. he's become a beaming boddhisattva in his golden years. love mister boy. 

 

give lulu a lever and a place to stand and the girl will move the world.

in the face of a viciously competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement.
(the school of life)

~and we are eternally grateful. i remember the peas, the gray peas, and the clean plate club, damn memory, thanks dad, with your parsimonious presence and just desserts. just kidding, ole man, we forgive you a very long time. and i still walk away from the table, sumbitch. you made a slow leaning anarchist out of me. remember when i got 31 strikes in little league, it took them 31 pitches to get me out! i went on strike at home plate by not striking out! ha ha i was the strikout king of anarchy in little league? before i knew the rules or had the vocabulary! what rules! and i was looking at a spider monkey on the first base sideline the whole forking time! 
i was a precocious success in anarchy. bless you my pa-pa-patriarch. 
by the way i just scored 6 on the ace test, woo-hoo, we do the best we do.

how you feel? i feel good!!

you just got to go with the flow, duggles.

     2020 vision. no blood money. no money for war. conscientious objection to the military  empire. no more wholesale destruction.

                                    supple lozenges of light. sunny mind, night and day.

a brief storm passes through the city lights. r. looks out and says are those insects?

solar night.

i talk about insanity. i question mine. but the school of life says we're all insane. we're living through catastrophe. the best we can be is sane insane, and not hide it by acting sane in an insane place.

it is notable that, within the upper echelons of culture, there is no genre more maligned or discredited than self-help. the entire self-help category has become synonymous with sentimentality, idiocy, and hucksterism.
there can be no "solutions", no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. what we can aim for, at best, is consolation—a word tellingly lacking in glamour. to believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we'd like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible.
a philosophy of consolation directs us to two important salves: understanding and companionship. or grasping that we know what our problem is and that we are not alone with it.
it helps immensely to know that we are in company. despite the upbeat tone of society in general, there is solace in the discovery that everyone else is, in private, of course as bewildered and regretful as we are. this is not Schadenfreude, simply profound relief that we are not the only ones.

alain de botton,
the school of life


~i could go on, holding the book in my left hand and typing with my right index finger, but we would both get annoyed soon and my finger would strike. i'll try to refrain, but thanks to r. for the book. i like. i get so sullen, sorey, h.g.

we both got reputations. reputations hard to shake. there's a woman thinks mister a killer, and me a reprobate. we ain't perfect, but we do change, and we may have got uppity but we were never killers or reprobates. just trying to negotiate. people and dogs got to change. some people don't let you. changeless people want to stick you. changeless people don't stop us changing. we are change. our every cell has changed since the day we met.

jasper at the bath.