i've lived much of my life through daydreams, books, and films. i was thinking how little direct experience i've had of the things that have come to be part of my sense of self and  world. yet the things i experience all feel direct, sometimes more potently in the form of art. i guess i've had enough experience of the tangible world to experience parts of it i'll never be. i saw a film today called departures, about a suicide prevention monk in japan who was in a world of trouble himself, and looked to the people who came to him to prevent their own suicide to give him reason to live, while he continued to drink and work himself toward a second heart attack. 
he asked one of his potential suicides why do you want to die? because the waiting gets unbearable. and the monk was quiet. he seemed to be busy waiting himself.
the monk said to the camera, we live in an irrational world, where you are born and then you die. we're given life without choice and have to struggle along the path to death. it's a very irrational thing. when a girl said, life must have some meaning, he said, i don't know, does a river have meaning? i imagined her silently saying, but we are human, not river.
he said he saw suicides multiply, one by one. i thought that was an odd phrasing. one multiplied by one is one. he seemed ineffective in coming up with good reasons to live. you could see him trying weakly and giving up after a few desultory words. he just said, you'd have no more life to reason with, you would have nothing more to ask, and certain people would live the rest of their lives with the pain of your death. i wondered how many lives he had kept living. and then he would go to the disco and get wasted, then back to the hospital, then tell his wife, i just have to change my values. strange dude, that monk. i thought of what i expected of a film with a japanese suicide prevention monk, and i never thought he would be a slow suicide himself. we have ideas about monks, and japan, and other cultures, formed of fantasies. it's an irrational world and we keep asking rational questions, irrationally. 
then i saw dance of the forest spirits, about pygmies in the congo, living in the path of bulldozers seemingly unaware, except for a few items of brand name clothes, continuing their lives, knowing the white's are coming, within a days walk, and knowing they won't move, they can't live in the world of money, outside the forest being cut down everywhere around them. 
my life today is one walk with a golden retriever, sitting in a bed watching the sun move, and movies, and hoping my feet are viable to continue walking as i want in this life i found myself living in, like a daydream in the flesh.
some people live rational lives in a rational world, though, don't they?

another 
year
month
day
our
moment

passes

elapses
intervenes
creeps

you
take your own
sweet time
as the crow
flies

stops 

you too
ask how 

could we
could
a society become 
this way
irrespective of
the nature of
just lost units of
time


 
 
 
 

 little did i know
my camera was

about to end

and anyway, mister was hanging back, afraid of the ice, appealing to my good sense, browsing frozen rabbit turds anyway and this was the last possible picture.

maybe human stupidity can't kill everything. maybe that's where life begins.

god is watching us haha

i was in open produce getting some free pita and brochettes and a couple bananas fitty cent. my friend said a delivery guy was filmed drinking a customer's drink at the front door waiting for it to open and he even smiled like he was on camera and i said it's funny we act like we're not being watched while we know we are and she said my dad i mean her dad use to say there are microscopic cameras everywhere all the time watching you, her, and she believed him before they actually existend, now we're so inured i guess we don't give a fuck and smile away anyway, or scowl as the case may be. we may be deranged, we may be sane. i remembered to her every time i went in the village thrift the speaker music was singing god is watching us from a distance and i laughed as my groin sank that giddy cliff drop plum- plummet laugh and she said now god's an i-phone and we don't notice the eye of god upon us is dead i didn't say but now i said.

it is true that this's the way it is but it didn't half to be 
we're watching shadows half the time mesmerized
by our loss of autonomy, did we ever have 
it would be all changed inevitably if only everybody
who has a shadow follows shadows would
have empathy and enlightened self regard and see

there's a scuffling over by the windows i don't know if is the radiator or birds, then i hear a bird sing but i see no bird and i hear a radiant ticking.

mister was a delight this morning. even when my battery died and i was fallen inside i perked up noting his happiness. and he moved so good. soul good, you might say, i might say, for you. i leaned down and hugged him several times, and each time he bounded like a pony, my heart.

found a natural history of western trees, one bone, with woodcut illustrations, and a reptiles and amphibians golden book like i had when i was little, one bone, ex-library, and a little seahorse i as a kid also had, which i carried out in a pocket-size salt box- today that is.
we woke to a frozen world. it doesn't matter for us. we're not insects or birds or flowers dropping dead. mister danced. he loves the cold. i moaned but i was happy until my battery died after a few pictures. i charged it all night. it's not a metaphor, it's a dying, it could presage death, death in camera. i hope to have many many more cameras die before i do. i wake depleted. i might get a charge from rubbing mister and the cold rays. i and he do produce amber electricity.
i meant to put the seahorse on the forehead, but the camera decided it was a dumb picture. fate is my editor, after r. that is. 
there's a certain inevitability to chance. what is the ability in inevitability. is it to do with us somehow? what ability do we still have? what chance? 

it truly is about the benyamins, and the yahoos. the benyamins netting the yahoos. money, kid o, makes the world go down.

isn’t this the last thing we want to admit? that we are not sure what anything means or what we are supposed to do?

(photo by ben morgan cleveland, 
                          article by john yau)

the real is death-dealing societies that never gave a shit about human or natural growth, who poison our bodies, our heads, slaughter the living for money, and hide behind false humanist speeches

the real is that there has been, there is and always will be, men and women who fight indecency and institutionalised horror, despite the violence, despite the prisons, despite the fear


from 
           valérie massadian and the aesthetics of care

i don't want to think about characters like bannon and trump anymore than i wanted to think about clinton or bush obomba or stone. such a writhing mess of names, it makes me sick. i think about what they want to kill with their economic nationalism, which is more to the point than democratic fascism or neo-liberalism, it is the logical mundane daily level of hate so ingrained and widespread it can't be called evil, it can't be deemed prejudicial, it's just the system, the global fishbowl, it's everything you see, everything blindness, and what is seen beyond is just curved space, with no oxygen to breathe. but i wanna see the brink, the bannon doc. by alison klayman, because i'm a junkie for the banality of evil i guess. i want to see the face.

a kiss on the nose from r.

the more you spend it the more expensive it gets. it's nature. it ain't like money. you can steal it, but you cannot make it. more fools we, in our prison-industrial extractive economy.

every day i see penny cat in a hammock, but where's jazzbo? here he is! love that cat.

 and here he is meditating on trudy's puzzle.

dear glenn greenwald

dear glenn, 
i want to tell you how moved i am by your life and work, which comes home to me 
regularly, but particularly so today with the first animal matters. i’m tearing up as i write. 
when i was in college about 1980 i made a film about some pigs that i saw in the woods 
by a farmhouse. they were slim and ecstatic, running and rooting and shimmying 
with the trees. i filmed the farmer who said it was too expensive to feed them, 
so he freed them, and they lived in the woods across the street. 
further down the street was a factory farm run by the agricultural school. they wouldn’t 
let me film, so i just showed the free pigs and put a soundtrack of brian eno that they appeared to be listening and dancing to. 
oh sorry, i ran on, but the thing about learning empathy for animals is so essential 
to learning empathy for ourselves, and to beginning to live in the world sanely and sustainably.
we heard you at rockefeller center, and i hope you come back to hyde park soon. 
we are fighting here to save jackson park now, where trees and wildlife are threatened, 
as well as all the surrounding communities, by obomba and his real estate predator constituents.
thanks again, glenn, always,
doug shaeffer

post dat. haha-- rockefeller center. well, any where glenn g. happens to be is a center.

regarding animals.

i want to tell you about animal matters, a show glenn greenwald started today on the intercept. i love this guy. he has heart and passion. he has a keen appreciation for life.
most important he has a deep love of animals, dogs and humans alike, and all the animals that are imprisoned for life, or killed and eaten, or struggling in various ways to live in the world humans make.  he says that we can learn empathy. he says that that's just the way it is, is really just the way a system of injustice blocks empathy, perpetuating injustice. if we can learn empathy for animals we can learn empathy for other humans, and ourselves, and the natural world we depend on.

 

i was soul gloomy saturday. it's still saturday but i'm thinking like it's the past. it doesn't feel like the past but it feels like it is past. does that make sense. like we are living out the inevitable. i said at the produce store it seems like the inevitable and chance are together like yin and yang, and our heads are spinning and drooping like earnest blooms in a cold fug of  spring. all we got is change but we won't be spared the inevitable just with a mantra of change and spring. well i didn't say all that, in so many words, thankfully, but shit is happening. 
it was gloomy too. i said mister i don't have the heart to go to the island. he said it doesn't matter as long as i'm with you. oh you soul sweet i said, let's just walk around the blocks aimlessly and we saw suz dragging her overcoat in the puddles heading to the sale. it was too gloomy to go saleing and it was to gloomy to go to the liberry it was too gloomy to not take a picture with mister to see when i get home.

here's penny yesterday i forgot to post. this morning i saw (oops, a starling just pecked at the screen, goo'morning starling) my neighbor sarah dragging her times in with her cane, her cats peeking through her slippered feet, i mentioned i missed the cats, and she said she couldn't live without them, i said i get pictures, but i may have to knock when i need some tangible cat love.

here's the penny cat today. pictures are like symbols, memory aids, they call to mind what you're missing.

it's early yet, today is lying in. yesterday is being redacted for consumption tomorrow. breakfast is the most important meal. we used to read the cereal box like the boob tube, passive and droopy, our eyes bugging like sugar plum fairies. we were admonished for digging for the prize. it's supposed to be incentive, as if sugar is not enough. the weather this weekend will be bland with violent tendency.

i'm serious, is there a epidemic of lost memory? i can't member nothin'.
you too, huh?

like, what are we doing in the basement? i don't know. what did we come here for? i don't member.

 oh well, might as well make the best of it.

 how about this one?

imagine a bunch of dogs, and people, dancing like spiders in ecstasy, above the rush hour, on spider bridge. 

imagine this.

there are symbols of death too, a whole procession, a whole shadow line of precedents, funeral marching smiles arms raised in target salute, a death parade of cfo's, ngo's, lobbyists of lies and speechless predator drones pontificating free, trade, a fine mist of airborne blood and pfoa's.

i try and learn, but i never learn, you know? somewhere in time i learned to forget. i'm still somewhere in time. i'm in the bath and someone pulled the plug. i'm always learning but i never become learned. i'm always naked under my clothes. i always try and learn. i try things on and suddenly they're stained and rags. you naked, resplendent. what do you know? you who were born knowing. teach me.

a symbol of healing

means healing has not happened yet 
a symbol of healing means healing 
has not yet begun but the wish to begin 
to heal that began 
long ago when harm has done 
become a symbol 
symbolic of healing 
that may begin
any time now and then when the hurting stops 
beginning again

i put down the art of the wasted day. i'm sure there are things to glean in it but it wasn't my kind of writing. i'm very particular about how i waste my day. it started with montaigne, and maybe that's where it diverged from my way. montaigne's ok, but he was rich, and he could really get down into himself and waste the day any damn way he pleased. he didn't have to do anything but eat and breathe. and write i suppose, but just for his own pleasure and curiosity. i can't identify with he rich, but he's the kind i guess i would be, inheriting, not directly exploiting anybody, just putting the money to productive time wasting. but where there is money there are people who earned it who don't have time to waste and always have to get more, while the rich smile in big houses and leisurely waste the day. 
be that as it may, and it wasn't what i started out to say, i still like the notion of daydream, and the art of the wasted day. therein lies the art of life, not in the production of money, but in the bounty of daydreams. i'm glad i can write this way, like i eat and breathe, not for money.

so now i'm reading behind the mask, about the identity of japanese culture. 

the blackstone library is sending me memories of the future, by siri hustvedt, what you have heard is true, by carolyn forché, and a writer of our time, the life of john berger, by joshua sperling. 

time is precious, we have nothing but time. i'm searching for something, a way to think, to write about this wasted time.

reactions to the logan foundation vs the land grab. erring adums and lousie mo'curry say exackly the same lame thing they always say. the corporate party line.

margaret says yay, it helps level the paying field. haha thas no typo kids, either side of the midway it's all about the benjamins and the netting yahoos.

sometime you pretend to blend, and sometime you show up more. sometime it seem the whole thing run on corruption and dirty oil.

sometime you notice a girl mimic your dog lame walk. sometime you have to hold your dog from blowing sideways in a windbuilding vortex into the intersection traffic while waiting at the stoplight. sometime you laugh. sometime you cry. sometime a girl kid with bottle glasses says hi, honeys to the dog. sometime the dog just make your day. sometime you want to, like, melt with coyote through chain link fence. sometime you think there so much money to be made-- it's hopeless, incalculable, the cost of life. sometime we cannot calculate what we lost. sometime we just count time.

david was tickled by comet's bobbing tail. he handed the ball to hilde. his hand got slobbery. mary came with a friend and played chess and the dogs went gaga. i got a cookie. both dogs pooped at once and we went back the same way. i got another cookie.

when i got back to my bike and rode off my tail end was dragging back and i had a flat. 
i remembered old penny bitching when i locked my bike to the front stair hand rails. maybe her ghost drained the air. 

so i had the flat tired feeling and started sadly pushing home then i though of the bike shop and gave it a try (after dropping my phone which fell to three pieces) and charlie said bring it by though they weren't open yet and he fixed it and also the brakes while i waited and took this picture noting how the squirrels incorporated peoples' old tubes into their nest and charlie said yeah they love the tired tree. here's a shout out to charlie of blackstone bicycle works so reasonable and kind. and so i was normal tired but not flat tired and rolled smoothly with tight brakes to my next walk with mister. it's kind of boring perhaps but i kind of like the rhythm of the words comprising a day. 
while the through line is deflation and it seems we are destined in a strange incalculable way to making the world more toxic day to day and the government is captured by corporate lobbies and war is barely background noise to the clanging of the local machinery, the sinking line is lifted by a strange and familiar elation rising unbidden in the middle of the tired revolving bespoke day.

when g.w.ho said it doesn't matter we'll all be dead, i guess he meant everyone alive now will be the last ones that matter, or that it doesn't matter, because there will be no one to come after us. that's all i remember him saying besides mission accomplished. it's weird to think he's still alive, he's so quiet, just painting away the days that remain.

temptation is not enough to climb the stairs. oh lift me. oh carry me. oh be.

there's a traffic jam for miles accidental by the silent sea.

penny the cat of the day.

he rarely kisses me, we rub noses, but this time feeling inspired by the moment on the bridge when i say kissers? he kisses me, twice, but like the waves i capture the lapse before and after and in between.