boink
Ladies and gentlemen, our president.
He's on God's own acre but it's nothing without Himself. The first link goes to the Hill where Devin Henry discusses this with a link to a video hosted amp.twining produced by the White House wherein Obama shows us the sights, truly glorious, and teaches us about glaciers, prosaic, I think, this here machine went on mute. I caught the soothing sensible babbling of the brook then audibly a sudden descent from sublime to ridiculous the video becomes overlain with annoying pedantic yakkity-yak. Serenity now! Best muted.
13 comments:
He is such a wuss.
And, in his declining years, which really start the day he leaves DC, he will spend hours just gazing at his puss instead of realizing that he's just a breath (more like a belch) in the passage of time.
A friend of mine died Monday night. I didn't even know he was having a hard time but apparently he suffered terribly. Developed renal cancer that spread to his spine and elsewhere and had him in a wheelchair and a good deal of pain and the whole time I thought he was just being quiet.
And I was thinking about him fairly hard at that time too, almost as if I had conjured a warning it seems because I suddenly began dwelling about inviting him for dinner sometime and kept recalling the last time I did he said, "Sure as long as there isn't any chicken." And that stopped me cold. I had been thinking precisely about that back then. I discovered a new thing about flattening out chicken breasts, frying them up and having them crispy with gravy and a crisp salad and there went my plan.
That restriction led to thinking about other restrictions that people had that they told me about. Like my dad could not eat a salmon on account of having it too much on an isolated island along the chain near Russia.
And other people have similar restrictions, the whole lot have some kind of restriction or another and that takes the fun out of the effort.
What a bummer.
So I was thinking about that, then about ALL that, then thinking about what would be acceptable, and recalling a time in a Japanese restaurant he bet me a dollar he could eat his entire wad of green wasabi, the stuff that blasts through your nasal passages like a nuclear tunnel drilling machine. Over the period of the whole meal was the bet. He took the whole wad in his chopsticks and popped it into his mouth. His eyes watered and turned red and wept. His nose ran, creases appeared on his forehead, beads of sweat popped out and ran down, his whole face turned red then redder then redder still then pure white and steam blew out of his ears, nostrils, mouth, and tear ducts, he choked for air. I sat stunned looking straight at the spectacle. Silently, amazed, I reached into my pocket and grabbed all my cash pulled out everything in there and tossed it onto the table and pushed the wads of crumpled notes and coins toward him. There, yours.
That was so worth it.
Given that, a full range of options available, anything except chicken. I must clean up the place first. Boom. The guy dies.
Sorry your friend died. I always try to make it to funerals. My old man taught me it says so much to the grieving. So, I suck it up and make funerals. I don't hate them, and have been to some pretty good ones. I'm comfortable w/ death. I tend to not use euphemisms regarding death. We have some fucked up neurosis about death. Asians seem to have it down pat.
My mother would not cook fish. During the Depression, her family lived on codfish shipped down from Canada by family. Fish and beans was all the protein they got. A family of 13 kids w/ a no account alcoholic Irish dad.
The small but dense pop-up book A Piece of Cake came in the mail from Britain today. That was fast.
My transfer plan worked very well. I can feel what it is so opened the package right there asking the woman who works nearby if she knows who I am talking about, a white woman with two mixed-race kids, cute as the dickens, a boy and a smaller girl, both well-behaved. She does know. She does see the woman. They do have business together.
I showed the office woman the book and she squeed like a little girl herself as I showed her the story and explained the salient unique characteristics of the book. Literally squeed. The idea of passing along the book delighted her and she said so. It's like getting and giving a gift herself. It's fun. She said, "Okay, now I have to explain it each page to the kids so they don't tear it up." So, not just pass it along, but involvement in explaining it too.
That is sort of the whole point, to let little kids stick their fingers in there, explore the little doors and eventually tear it up. You know for sure the book is loved when you see it written in and torn up, that they're serious at taking up what's in the book, whatever it is they're getting out it, and not just goofing around as appears.
But I can see trying to protect them.
It's just such a drag telling kids, "Don't touch" all the time. It's how they learn, by feeling their way through life like little Hellen Kellers, understanding goes from their tiny fingertips up to their brains. Don't you recall being a little kid and needing to touch things?
So often they break.
"Where the golf course be?"
"We have some fucked up neurosis about death."
Philip Roth calls death the great catastrophe. Whether you like his work or not - I think he's a difficult personality but a great writer - that description of death - the great catastrophe - wrings a bell for many. I know it does for me. Is that neurotic? To fear the great catastrophe, the snuffing out, the end? Well, then I've got the neurosis.
ricpic, if you use death to remind you to actually live, it is a blessing. If you just focus on the end at the exclusion of missing the now, it is a curse.
ricpic, Your tribe has many neuroses, including death. Putting people in the ground by sundown the next day! Don't get me wrong, death can indeed be a catastrophe. A parent having to bury a child is the worst. But, if you believe the Good Lord will comfort our spirit for eternity, that sounds like a better deal than life on earth sometimes. This is the journey on earth, death is the destination. It's what I believe. To each their own.
I had hoped to withdraw and avoid because I had distanced myself purposefully, not from him specifically but entirely. I don't care to be around them anymore. But I was just now called and the call was direct and touching and I fell right along with it and now I'll be stuck for a few hours with people I'd rather avoid.
I KNOW politics should not supersede but they made it so for over a decade. Every one of them did and I can see this man who died sitting there answering my probing questions designed to challenge his faulted presumptions but never making the slightest headway against a vast swamp exactly one inch deep but goes on forever, there is no going deeper there is no challenge to that, it is permanent and coats everything. He taps his cigarette and answers smugly. Smirking. Republicans bad, Democrats good. That's all anyone needs to know and everything EVERYTHING devolves from that and everything is covered by that, and it solves every riddle that would otherwise puzzle. Every. Single. One.
Except one. The person who called.
So I try looking through his eyes. How does HE manage life among political crackpots so fierce in their opinion so solidly ironclad certain of their moral superiority that permeates everything every gathering even such as funeral memorials? How and WHY put having and maintaining such burdensome relations ahead of one's own socio-political concerns generously tucked away into the background? That was all fine then but look hard where indulging that and them brings us. I have NEVER had my friends indulge their ids to the extent they did by following the id of Kos down that open and vocal straightup hatred for elected president. I have never had friends tell me outright who I must hate politically and how much I must hate them in order to be thinking clearly and have that be their project. It's unacceptable.
I will not forget that.
I cannot forget how that ruined everything. Everything.
Then worse, force this malignant asshole on an undeserving nation in vengeance. Claim in constant chorus illegality for years, then use that claim for their own illegal actions later. Shrug off all the illegality as just more of the same political world. The entire lot supports them to the last person.
Except for the person who called. Mike, the elder, who spends half the year in Mexico and who knew most closely the guy who died.
Huntington House. Like I'm supposed to know that. The address rattled off like I'm supposed to picture it in my mind automatically like I'm some kind of taxi driver or something.
I look in Google Earth. Oh. That place. Jesus Christ. Before Google Earth gets there I see the building and know it. I had a painting there. A good one too. "An Offering" Sounds religious but it's nothing of the sort. I showed you, the one they made a cake of. Oddly, a copy (cake) of a copy (my painting) of a copy (photograph) in a book of a real painting. The elevator lets you off one side or the other. The elevator door opens BLAM my painting. Then you walk past it and don't ever see it again. Each condo takes half the floor. They're huge. On Cheesman. The equivalent to NYC is a place on Central Park.
This reception on a lower floor than the one where my painting was. Then the roof for a toast. It's a great spot and a great time of day for a fantastic Western sunset such as the one tonight. Spectacular. Dark purple clouds with pink bottoms like a painting. I noticed it and thought, "Holy shit! Look, Man, look!" This is Earth's gift to me day after day. It's astonishing when you notice its infinite variation and its infinite reliable regularity. It's blowing my mind.
It would be gauche to take my camera to a funeral reception just for those minutes on the Huntington House rooftop, but why not? I AM gauche. Own it.
And they're gaucher than regular gauche. My gauche is quaint compared to their gauche.
If you met them together you probably wouldn't like them. I don't think. The most creative thing about them is political. The couple who own the place, man and wife, hosted Hillary one time.
They make life so politically miserably unsustainable they've driven me off by force of magnetic repulsion. Now called back for a thing like this. I'd rather not.
The vibes are ALL WRONG.
But the one single sensible person did call. So I'll go along. The tenderness got me. Somehow sensing resistance that I did not express he told me John would want it. Why would he say that? It won't take that long anyway and it'll be all over soon enough and we'll all go our separate ways. Hopefully forever. And now, mangling things, they're mangled now and it wasn't me who did it, I see now how Obama manages to slide by time and again, repeatedly, we've seen this, by the very skin of his teeth, passing things people solidly DON"T want and that is NOT representing, rather the other way around, being represented Himself though laws and regulations passed upon us, and at the very last moment, again, that moment protracted, and stretched out, and extended, and pulled even more to tensile breaking point, there it is, there it is, there it almost is, vote, SNAP. Got it! Again. It isn't chance. Not by a longshot is that chance that it happens with bet-worthy regularity. It's system manipulation by both Parties. And all these people in their own way are part of all that. Except for Mike the eldest. This is pretty much the last of it, the last memorial attended against my first judgement, and I'm out. Intractability, fragility, death. Everyone spoken of is older than me I should focus on people around my own age or younger. I knew this all along.
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