Let's Walk A While

Let’s walk a while

How are you doing?
Things at home ok?
What is your opinion of current events?
Do you get the newspaper anymore?

Do you see shadows in the lighted halls?
See strangers standing in the hats?
Have we thought too litte? too much?
Can you taste the spike in the punch?

Look about and see,
There’s a strange breathing sound outside.
Something is huffing and puffing,
and I think it’s great.

What we’ve been waiting for is in flight.
Hiding by day, traveling by night.

Long ago I speculated that wicked things
Always fly straight.
But what’s flying toward us now I think is more like light,
Both particle and wave, both solid and serene.

Do you know what I mean?
Have you guessed such odd questions
In the private corners of your brain?

Have you caught unknown eyes on the train?

Which stop do we get off on today?

The usual?
Or the one where tomorrow is today.

Shade Of A Tree

See sideways settle down
See holes find purchase in your eyes
See happenstance decide

Perforated lines crisscross the planet
Bent to and fro
Moments from letting go

It will finally come

And though too many hear but the sound of the Drum
Remember those of us with ears for a Flute
Don’t pull back but twice shoot

Definitions tired and falsified will breakaway
Fewer tomorrows lost to today
There will be wholesome smiles, uplifted again

We all could stand to lose the weight
Sitting has danced its last with fate
Evil shall no longer pinch us twist chalk and slate

So continue your harvest as always
What will, will be
We know why, the shade of a tree

Always Forward

If the days measure fitful, you need first master the chaos inside.

If the days prove the depth of challenge, useful is that cool core within, as the marbled pillar of the temple.

It is your eyes that dance the line between the world’s pain and your own, as sacred stained glass buffeted by winds from far away lands and from the torments churning deep in your soul’s cave.

Your pain is your beauty.

It is not a cause of despair, but of delight.

Your triumph takes the breath from crowds, makes people fear their own paler skin, this I have seen.

There is nothing wrong with what has fallen.

Fruit of the Garden, stars from Heaven, leaves from the olive Tree.

The is no faith to be lost in the future.

Turns of the prayer Wheel, followers of the Hundred, sanity finding Sense.

Be not bedazzled by the flashing ripples of the water’s surface.

Know Blind,

but know the flowing flower form of the swirling fluidic expanse touching everything, as your oars work and push this row boat of your life Forward, though we are fated to only face behind us, to stare but at the past.

We are Always forward. We are the Shore.

Is The Ticking Getting Louder?

Hey Look, Post!

...ok, I feel better now.

Security Clearance

Another event had cast another person under some suspicion of berserker sympathies--this time not directed at a computer program. One of the more timid souls in strategic headquarters on Earth--in fact one of the premier's personal advisers--had recently put forward a suggestion that the space atoll called Fifty Fifty be evacuated. It was a small, exposed outpost, hard to defend against a superior force. According to this point of view, all Solarian forces should be pulled back much nearer Earth, preferably entirely within Sol System, where they could concentrate on playing a purely defensive role. A logical extension of this strategy--if one can call it a strategy--is that Port Diamond might as well be written off too.

The timid soul who came up with this proposal was promptly transferred Earthward, to a different and less important job. At least he had not advocated abandoning Earth herself. No one above him in the chain of command gave his ideas any serious consideration--except as basis for review of his security clearance.

-Berserker Fury, Fred Saberhagen

Eyelids' Blessing

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

-lovecraft?

Got Your Handbasket Ready?

This Is How Crazy It's Becoming

Suitcase With $134 Billion Puts Dollar on Edge: William Pesek

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- It’s a plot better suited for a John Le Carre novel.

Two Japanese men are detained in Italy after allegedly attempting to take $134 billion worth of U.S. bonds over the border into Switzerland. Details are maddeningly sketchy, so naturally the global rumor mill is kicking into high gear.

Are these would-be smugglers agents of Kim Jong Il stashing North Korea’s cash in a Swiss vault? Bagmen for Nigerian Internet scammers? Was the money meant for terrorists looking to buy nuclear warheads? Is Japan dumping its dollars secretly? Are the bonds real or counterfeit?

And Thus...

*Tending The Dirt Babies

OLD SPACE BLOB!

"A strange giant space “blob” spotted when the universe was relatively young has got astronomers puzzled. . . . But what’s most remarkable about this blob is its size: It's 55,000 light-years long, which is comparable to the radius of the disk-shaped Milky Way. According to many theories of the universe, nothing was supposed to be that big at that time in the universe. The other objects from that period are far smaller, Ouchi said."

-story

(you mean we're not 100% sure of our scientific theories??? damn it, I'm going back into the zombie shelter... er, blob shelter)

And Good Riddance

...the future, or the future as a lot of people are hoping it will be: pared down, more natural, more stable, less full of enervating overstimulation, of what Walker Percy called the "trivial magic" of modern times.

Some Common Yet "New" Sense For US Foreign Policy

In this volatile setting, direct American military involvement in conflicts where the U.S. itself is not attacked and its national prosperity is not at risk should be avoided. Otherwise, American military involvement could cause 21st century conflicts to spin out of control and confront Americans with regional alliances designed to contain American military power; alliances that but for American military intervention would not exist. It is vital the U.S. not repeat the mistakes of the British Empire in 1914: overestimate its national power by involving itself in a self-defeating regional war it does not need to fight and precipitate its own economic and military decline.

link

Another Light At The End Of The Test Tube

PORTLAND, Ore. — U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting.

"We have compelling evidence that fusion reactions are occurring" at room temperature, said Pamela Mosier-Boss, a scientist with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (San Diego). The results are "the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons from low-energy nuclear reactions," she added.

Link

Reminds Me Of Someone

"For more than a year McCoy had kept the secret of the still. Only a Scot could have done it, one gifted with all the caution and canny reserve of his race. Little by little he had exhausted the principal supplies of ti, and for many months now he had been able to obtain no more than enough to operate his still twice or, rarely, three times each week. A small stock of bottles, accumulated one by one, were hidden where he concealed the still when not in use; by stinting himself resolutely, he managed to keep a few quarts of his liquor set aside to age. In this manner, which had required for some time a truly heroic abstinence, McCoy was enabled to enjoy daily a seaman’s ration of half a pint of grog.

"His temperament was an unusual one, even among alcoholics. When deprived of spirits, he became gloomy, morose, and irritable, but a glass or two of rum was sufficient to make him the most genial of men. Mary had been astonished and delighted at the change in him. He conversed with her for an hour or more each evening, laughing and joking in the manner the Polynesians love. He romped with the two-year-old Sarah and took delight in holding on his knees the baby, Dan. With his grog ration assured, there was no better father and husband on the island than McCoy."



-Pitcairns's Island,
Part Three of The Bounty Trilogy,
Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Powered Panel

The overwhelming pain is less than I can bear.

The smallest fears threaten only my larger parts.

I’m too late to care if the appointment was missed.

She’ll never love who I am not.

The future creaks like a well-oiled doorway in a horror movie.

Tonight I will load my pistol and unload it.

The thoughtless harsh words I spoke to him never left my mouth.

My regrets of a lifetime have yet to be defined by my death.

Blindness seeks me, but I save vision insurance.

Murderers find me well prepared to defend.

Cataclysmic tremors of the earth belie not my adaptive foundation.

I will not, not.

I am what I am not, when resting in hell.

Salvation is a daily medicine
for what follows life as what traces the sound of a bell.

Noble Fear