Not Robin Hood. Not Lionhearted. Just Wise.

I think the leeches are the people who benefit from the military fighting in the Middle East to ensure your supply of oil, the NIH studying flu viruses and developing vaccines, OSHA keeping their workplace safe, and the Department of Labor limiting their work hours to a manageable level. The people who drive over federally funded bridges and interstates and accept federal student grants, and then claim the federal government is unresponsive and worthless, and say they don’t want to contribute to it, in fact, say they want to take it apart and return us to some kind of backward Articles of Confederation when we agreed in 1789 that that was a dumb idea.

For Peace and Freedom

So they dug out this ash heap in Queens and built all these pavilions. They had cars already driving around in 1939. Cars were not yet drudgery and traffic jams and Jiffy Lube– they were leisure and freedom. They had an early television. Television was not yet aesthetic assault and battery everywhere you turn. You could see the Magna Carta. They had a dishwasher, which was about to make everyone’s life better (except for people who insist on living in minimally renovated pre-1935 housing like stupid, stupid me). They had a robot who smoked cigarettes. He was seven feet tall, spoke 700 words from the record player in his belly, and I would definitely go out on a date with him if his reconstruction goes as planned.

Getting A Grip

Slipping standards, slipping standards” will always be with me. It does sound like a prophesy from a robed, scraggly figure. I’ll probably find it laid out there in my cup, next time I check out my tea leaves. Like most prophesies, it has a seed of truth: standards are always in danger.

Annotated Bibliography: Is He Or Isn’t He; Hitting the Desert

“Tonight I’m pushing everyone away. I did it all day but tonight I’m vicious about it. I’ve camped out by my favorite window and no amount of harmonica playing, rattle of dishes, laughter of voices from other rooms deep in this house can draw me out…. I don’t want to be walking around peeling my shirt off these days. I want deep layers of Canadian blankets and fire. Red eye of fire. And dogs. And cold cold nights.” — Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles