Langston 2008

I think that this poem is very appropriate with the election so close. It's by one of my favorite poets ever, Langston Hughes.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

That isn't to say that this election is about race, or that it should be about race. It absolutely shouldn't. It should be about 2 candidates and their policy. But the giant elephant in the room that is the US is race. And after 232 years since the Declaration of Independence it's refreshing that we finally have a person of color in position to lead the executive branch of our government. It's an absolute bonus that he outlines a clear and coherent policy of change that will affect us middle-class peeps.

But, again, two people vying for the chief executive position. One stands for policies that will move us forward. The other stands for more of the same politics as usual. I think it's time for a change. Here's hoping...

Jacob's Chatter

Sedentary walls
Wailing cells in my ears
Leaving laughing living long ago
and far away

I hide away
Ashamed to not reveal
in front of roaming masses
teaming insipid ignorance

Tears rock chambers
spasms of heaving rib
gasping for hope
without air to breathe
expiring inspiration

Bottom rung
intrepid angel
challenge to a duel
walk 20 paces and fly away
not turn and shoot

Come back!
Outstretch a hand to hand
Shake or leave it
But don't fly away....

This really has no meaning....

Yesterday opens before me like the Encyclopedia Britannica -
Voluminously heavy
And oh so outdated.

Somehow I feel I could read each entry if only they were listed alphabetically.
No, instead it is indexed by the color of mood.
(And what mixes between crimson rage and the blues?)

(She says this as she chews a leafy green.)

Forever would make a wonderful book would it not?
Perhaps as a memoir...
No
A true crime thriller.

I laugh and say that it should be a sacred text written in Canadian
But translatable for all to read.

But would the translation make sense?
Latin would surely be more sufficient for the Word Of God.

But the Good News comes in all languages:

Yesterday I received a promise of unmentionable fortune directly to my inbox in binary code.
Shortly thereafter Yahweh's Witness knocked on my door promising
AN INSPIRING MESSAGE FROM GOD.

And the message was in Tenacious Persuasion -- a dialect perfected by
Tent revivalists
and Madison avenue over centuries.

Centuries?!!? Surely you joke.
But I tell you the combined years of talent poured into the delivery of GOOD NEWS
Is staggering. Televised meteorologists are ancient soothsayers incarnate today.
But the true sages of the now are the disembodied voiceover artists on the infocommercials.
(Wasn't that the guy from that show? No, it just sounds like him.)

No - it was God
We are all the guy from that show.

Thus the lingua dei we will change from Canadian to A440 hertz.
Tune me to your favorite lullaby hymn.
Do you hear in HD?

We laugh in ALL CAPS and make it a point to text again.

Soon.

keepintouch
ttfn

see you around the circle of 5ths

Constellations

Together for good and for bad
We weather each others' storms.
I rain on your parade
And you march along umbrella in hand.

We all run into something -
A bump somewhere that seemed trivial
Turns into major damage down the line
Yet nobody leaves the scene.

On a darkened cold night
With a warm room in sight
You stay out in the elements
Urging him on, a body to lean on.

And even though yesterday she broke your heart
Today she saves your life.
Last week his forkethed tongue pierced your bubble,
But this midnight his words lead you out of the abyss.

We all hurt each other, this is known.
Stars of such magnitude don't always coexist so peacefully.
His black hole of misery
Her manic supernova...

But somewhere in the gravity of it all
Nebulous seeds germinate new illumination
In the torrential violence of our being
Gentle love permeates the haze.

And from broken fragments of explosions and implosions
We are each others' sunrise.

-KP

Stridently optimistic

I decided, just now, to throw caution to the wind. How wonderful would it be to be optimistic without that adverbial modifier holding it back? Cautiously optimistic. How about nervously happy? Worriedly content?

We modify our language and we modify our thought. Today I am going to be optimistic. If I choose to modify it, I'm not going to use the prescribed modifier cautiously. Today I'll be stridently optimistic. Hopefully optimistic. Confidently optimistic.

Save cautiously for tightrope walking and brain surgery.

PKD Quote....

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)
US science fiction author (1928 - 1982)

Beaker has quite the set of pipes.

from Light: All that is seen and unseen...

I'm sitting at my desk in my office watching the sky turn to day with each bolt of lightning. It's such a beautiful sight: that momentary flicker when the pitch-blackness, for an instant, looks like day. There is an excitement involved in the cognitive dissonance inherent in a light sky at night. (Maybe I'm part Inuit.) Even if it is only for a brief moment. Funny how thunderclouds seem to bring night to day, yet they can bring day to night.

That gets me thinking about light and dark both literally and as concepts. Is there a more powerful metaphor for our existence? It's ages old, but never overplayed. Light and dark -- it is the perennial metaphor from which all being springs. And since existence as we perceive it is the mind's great metaphor, it is no wonder why we identify with this mother and father of all symbolism. Darkness falls, it is all encompassing, but light always shines through. Have you ever tried to completely darken a room? It's almost impossible without solid walls or special curtains. But light, light so easily permeates. It seamlessly eradicates darkness, irradiates the abyss.

Darkness is the great receiver. The vessel that light enters and fills fully. Without the darkness to receive we would never see light. Do we see the air we breathe? Does fish from the other age-old symbol see the water in which it swims? Darkness creates the vessel of the void. Without it there is no there there. Not only does light need a void to fill, it needs something off of which to reflect. So our great vessel is illuminated with all the colors of the spectrum because the matter inside absorbs and reflects the light, emitting varying permutations of the pure photon stream. Light and dark and all that is seen and unseen exist in their interplay.

How would we perceive dark without light? How would we know light without the vessel of darkness? What is beyond? What is light without dark, what the mystics think of as "the boundless"? Some believe that God is so great that it exists beyond light and dark. That God is the boundless that preexists light. That light needs the void. The void is the great receiver of the divinity. And all of existence springs from the distillation of this divine light -- from its pure boundless form to its contained state within the subatomic particles that give rise to our reality.

But the boundless light just is. Its purpose is unknowable to us, here in this universe. To us, the darkened void creates purpose for the light. More than just being, the light illuminates, irradiates, creates. But at its essence, it simply is.

So I ask, not rhetorically, what is light without dark? What is content without form? What is being without purpose?

He's Giuseppe Franco!!!

I was perusing the Mets blogs after last nights choke-attack and I came across this bit of awsomeness from Metsblog.com:

While walking on a street in Beverly Hills, a man stepped in front of me, smoking a cigarette, pacing and swearing while ranting and raving on his cell phone.

I turned to my wife and said, “Wait, that’s Giuseppe Franco.” Sure enough, we happened to be walking in front of his ‘famed Beverly Hills salon,’ as the repetitive commercial says.

That dude is a legend in my home! I love everything about GF. He comes on the TV and I just smile and giggle: "heh heh Giuseppe Franco..." My favorite part is when they mention celebrity clientele and then show a shot of him greeting Gary Busey. Gary Busey! What?! They couldn't get Nick Nolte?! It's one of the best things going on television.

Apparently the GF name is renowned. Because he says clearly, "I'm Giuseppe Franco. I'm not going to put my name on a product that doesn't work." I'm hoping that he branches out from hair-care, leaves his roots if you will, and develops other product lines. It could be like Newman's Own, but GF. How amazing would that be?

Remember, he doesn't own the company. He doesn't own anything about it. In the commercial it sounds like he's saying, "I don't own the company; I don't know anything about it." Which used to always make me chuckle. The fact that he slurs that line and you can't tell if he is saying know or own is funny enough. Don't they edit these things?

And then there are the Chia-dudes who are in the commercial. Do I want to look like them?! I mean, I already look like a slackerschlep. Don't you think they would pick actual good-looking men to push their hair-care product? Are they afraid that some decent man-meat may overshadow the striking good looks of GF and Gary Busey?

Oh well. I watch so much Mets baseball that I've been overexposed on GF and Verizon ads. Oh, and the Optimum guy. Don't get me started on that smarmball.

Long live Giuseppe Franco!

10 IN ROW! 10 IN ROW!

Praying to the porcelain God

Nobody wins unless everybody wins

The majority of the people who walk the surface of this planet are out of their minds. This is not to put myself above the rest of us; I say this not to differentiate myself from my brothers and sisters. But the more I try to find enlightenment - gnosis - my higher self - the more I come up against the cold hard fact that most of the people who walk among us are out of their skulls, batguano insane, nuts.

This makes it extremely difficult to attain enlightenment. One must cultivate the will to rise to levels to which most people do not aspire. Levels to which most people could not be bothered to even contemplate. This inherently puts The Aspirant at odds with the sleeping masses. The One must rise above while loving all else as his self. Hence the notion of the Bodhisattva - the one who forgoes the kingdom of heaven to stay behind and enlighten the masses. Because in reality every soul that inhabits this reality is an extension of ourselves. Even scientifically, break reality down to its smallest components and ask the question, "where do I end and my surroundings begin?" We are parts of a vast vibrating energy field where frequencies of energy bubble up into matter and form the particles that create experiential reality. We are all made of the same stuff, stemming from the same source. We are one - manifestations of one divine light.

For as Sprinsteen said, "Remember in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins."

Because in REALITY - the realm of the truly real - we are all enlightened. Somewhere outside of spacetime we have all merged with the one.

But we're not there until we're all there.

But paradoxically we're all there. Here. Now.

And we can all access this here and now when we experience a timeless feeling of joy. Sometimes it's ephemeral, but when we step out of the riverflow of linear time and experience the loving joy of the here and now we experience the eternal Grace of God. We reunite with The One.

ANIMAL WANT POPS!!!!

ANIMAL ROCK YOUR WORLD!!!

Lazy Saturday

So we're having this nice lazy Saturday, hanging out, listening to music. I decided to put this old gem on, from 1987. I remember watching the video on the MTV with my cousins on the floor of my Grandparents' living room. Remember when the MTV played videos? Good times, good times.




Whatever happened to these few-hit wonders?

I would TOTALLY watch the news if it were like this!

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

The only thing we have to fear is...

...fear itself.

When fear comes upon a person, one should know that there is none else but Him. And even witchcraft. And if one sees that fear overcomes him, he should say that there is no such thing as chance, but God has given him an opportunity from Above, and he must contemplate and study the end of which one has been sent this fear. It appears that it is so that he will prevail and say, “there is none else besides Him.”

Baal HaSulam
About Fear That Sometimes Comes Upon a Person

This makes me proud to be an American!

Taco!

Man, this brings me back:




And this is cooler than watching The Wizard of Oz with the Dark Side of the Moon playing: Weapon of Choice Taco mashup.

Do you do?

Feel like I do.

Strange question. Followed by a stranger demand. Well, yes, Mr. Frampton, I do do. I am, therefore I do. You are. You should know. But I refuse to feel like you do. Piss off. I am that I am and I am not to feel like you do. I do what I am. I do from whence I am and therefore I feel like I do from all that I am and do. Are we clear? Good.

Moving on.

I like to ask strange questions. I also like to give strange answers. Life gets far too boring if we stick to the tried, tired and true pat banality of expectation. (Sorry, Pat, but you're banal.) He who dares not deviate is as dead as a dried douche. You can use that. Add it to your list of idiomatic sayings. Yes. You're welcome.

What really makes this illusion of time worth suffering? It's the expectation of what I can make with this moment. If all I am going to make is the same dry dust I kicked up yesterday than I may as well pack it in.

Right now I am resisting the impulse to turn on the AC. A small concession to novelty, but pleasant all the same. There's a very kind breeze gently licking my face from the open window. When the breeze stops I get the urge to shut the window and turn on the AC. But then comes the breeze. First she touches each leaf, turns each branch over, inspecting the flora, then she reaches in my window, peruses some papers on my desk, brushes my bangs away from my face, kisses my forehead and clears my eyes.

Ah the silent miracles in deviation. Frost took the road less traveled. But the roads diverge more often than you think. And if there is only one road, use the hands that God gave you to build your own.

Stuck in time

We get stuck in time, don't we?
When the month turns over I find myself still writing the previous one on the date. From the 1st through at least the 5th you'll see that I've crossed out or written over the number. It just happened earlier, as I sat down to hand-write a page.

Well I got used to writing a "6", and it took me a while to get over "5". Now I have to move to "7"?! What the frig?

I can't help but notice a cheap and easy metaphor for my life in all of this. Change is a bugger of a bitch. And no matter how deftly I wade through it, or how positively things turn out, it never fails to knock the shit out of me. At least for a little while. It's a kick right in the psyche's groin.

But life really requires the fortitude to successfully navigate these changes. Because as perfectly eternal our platonic forms remain, the experiential world is a tumult of passing scenes. As one gives way to the next, there is often a nostalgia for what passed, and trepidation for what's ahead. Eventually, that which I once feared becomes comfortable. It becomes "life". And soon that passes away toward a new version of the cycle.

So here comes another one of those transitional periods. A chapter has just passed and a new one is just beginning. Only this time I am acutely aware that I have to write the next chapter. I guess I can start by writing the correct date.

Darkest before the dawn...

There's the well-established idea that in order to grow, we must break out of our comfort zone, experience the bewildering clusterf*ck of the unknown, flounder, and eventually master our new surroundings. It's a primal experience. When our experiential puddle stagnates, the waters of the real become a rocking basin of stormy waterspouts, tsunamis, gales and monsoons. Eventually, when all settles our puddle has become a pond, maybe after the next torrent it will be a lake, maybe a sea or eventually an ocean.

The point is that we can never grow until we test ourselves beyond our current level of mastery. It's the hero's journey. It's the arc of every epic drama, every life well-lived. It's the Universe's way of giving us the chance to build something better, with our own hands.

It is because of my firm belief in this principle that I was so delighted to see this article. In it, the author puts forth the assertion that George W. Bush has helped America more than we would ever know, through kicking our puddle into one of the greatest shitstorms we've ever seen.

Maybe he's exactly what we needed. Maybe Bush's brand of frighteningly inept politicking has been just the right kind of sociocultural emetic to induce a true purge of our congested system, just the thing to finally snap us out of our lethargy. Hell, sometimes you gotta go deep into the darkness to realize just how much you need the light.

So thank you, George, for exemplifying and embodying everything that's wrong with the neocon agenda, for serving as the final death knell of the failed conservative movement, of a once-noble Republican Party that's run out of ideas and has turned bitter and nasty and paranoid.

The Universe moves in cycles. Light is nothing without a darkness to illuminate. It's the Yin and Yang spinning in the alchemical egg of existence.....

Like the Resurrection...

"Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error.
If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live,
when they die they will receive nothing."
-The Gospel of Philip

It's All Good

And lo, he said unto the Globalites, "All is good, all is well, I jumped over the candlestick."

Yea, though they walked through the valley of the Hudson, they knew, for it had been said, "It's All Good."

And so it's been said...

...many times and many ways. Welcome to the Exegesis of Knippelroy Phuccnuggit. Come in, feast upon the delights. De light shines bright Knippelday and Knippelnight. Let there be Knippelroy.

It is good.