July Poetry, Day 6 – Mary Elizabeth Frye

A really wonderful piece today on mortality, immortality, fantasy and life all in a very few words.

Photo by Z Deacon Blue

Do not stand by my grave and weep
By Mary Elizabeth Frye
 

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Z Deacon Blue’s Inconsiderate America

Z Deacon Blue’s Inconsiderate America

I was talking with a friend recently and we were talking about the changes we’ve seen over our lifetime, this is what old guys do when they get together.  I had to admit that the biggest change I’d seen in America over my lifetime is something that’s quite disturbing it is that America has become an inconsiderate nation.  It seems to me very often as if people believe they are alone in the world, as if their actions have no impact on another person at the least, and more disturbingly that they just don’t care what impacts they have.

The first place I really began to notice this was in movie theaters, first as VCR’s and then DVD players became widely available people seem to have lost the ability to differentiate between when they are at home and when they are in public.  At home they talk through the movies, make jokes and that’s fine, they are not disturbing anyone but their own family.  However in a theater they are now disrupting other people’s experience and this is completely inconsiderate.

Another place that people seem to have a unique ability to ignore the rest of humanity is the self-checkout line at the grocery store.  Granted grocery stores do a terrible job of clarifying where people should line up, but most people figure it out.  Inevitably, when the store is busy and people are lined up, someone will cluelessly, or so they pretend, stroll up right behind the registers and jump the line.

In these situations I can’t keep my mouth shut, it just seems so ridiculous to me that people should be allowed to benefit from either stupidity or being inconsiderate.  I try to be polite, at the grocery store I’ll say, “excuse me, there’s a line.”  People inevitably act surprised and say, “oh sorry, I didn’t see the line.”  Of course in order to see the line you would have to look for a line.

At the movie theater I also start to be polite, using the universal shh, however I have to admit it rarely works and sometimes people are downright dismissive when you ask them to be quiet.  Now I don’t recommend this but I’ve been known to be a bit militant at this point.  Being, shall we say, extremely verbally direct, even once firing an empty popcorn bucket across the theater.

Now I don’t recommend people react at quite that level, but what I would love is just for one day in America, it would be great if everyone who saw someone being inconsiderate would just say something.  Not get into get in an argument or whip a bucket of popcorn at them but just say excuse me, you’re being inconsiderate please don’t do that.  I think in the end this really does have an effect on people, they might react negatively but later it bothers them to have been an inconsiderate ass.

Unfortunately, I know this would never happen, people are somewhat justifiably afraid that if they say something the person will react angrily, or worse react violently and people don’t want to be involved in a confrontation.  I get this, but the simple fact is if people are never told, if never suffer any negative consequences for their actions, they’ll never change and we get what we have today in America.

How bad, well this is what I saw today at the college I work at.  A student came into the restroom to take a dump, he was chewing tobacco and hadn’t brought a cup to spit in.  So, he laid down some toilet paper on the floor and proceeded to spit onto the paper while he sat on the toilet.  Now that’s not disgusting enough, but after he finished, he got up and left and of course left the tobacco stained paper sitting on the floor.  People just suck and it’s time we do something about it.  So my hope is that he’ll read this piece and realize it’s about him and embarrass the hell out of him, I know a slim chance, but maybe less slim when I post copies in that restroom.

So folks, give me your examples of inconsiderate America and I’ll keep posting mine.  Let’s see if we can’t embarrass America into being more considerate, if not, I may have to resort to carrying an airhorn to movie theaters.

Burningman Anywhere, a beautiful post

My friend Kat found this, if anyone knows who the original author is please drop it in the comments I’d love to make sure they get credit for their work, it’s an awesome bit of writing:

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I had to share the best thing I’ve read all year about Burning Man. 🙂 Thanks to whomever the author is, and I found this through Loadie Camp!

Since most of us won’t make it this year, thought I’d offer some usefull advice on how to bring bunring man into your life off playa. Or – 20 ways how to have Bunring Man anywheres:

1) Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room.
Put on your most fabulous outfit.
Turn the fans on full blast.
Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.

2) Tear down your house, put it in a truck.
Drive 10 hours in any direction, put the house back together.
Invite everyone you meet to come over and party.
When they leave, follow them back to their homes, drink all their booze, and break things.

3) Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.

4)Buy a new set of expensive camping gear.
Break it.

5) Lean back in a chair until that point where you’re just about to fall over, but you catch yourself at the last moment.
Hold that position for 9 hours.

6) Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away.
Drain all the water from the toilet.
Only flush it every 3 days.
Hide all the toilet paper.

7) Set your house thermostat so it’s 50 degrees for the first hour of sleep and 100 degrees the rest of the night.

8) Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body.
Forget how you did it.
Don’t go to a doctor.

9) Don’t sleep for 5 days.
Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/emotion altering drugs.
Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.

10) Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift storesfor the perfect, most outrageous costume.
Forget to pack it.

11) Tell everyone that you’re going to a “Leave-No-Trace” event.
Shop at Wal-mart, Cost-Co, and Home Depot until your car is completely packed with stuff.
Empty your car into a dumpster.

12) Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until
you think you are going to scream. Scream.
Realize you’ll love the music for the rest of your life.

13) Spend 5 months planning a “theme camp” like it’s the invasion of Normandy.

14) Walk around your neighborhood and knock on doors until someone offers you cocktails and dinner.

15) Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house.
Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.

16) Tell your boss you aren’t coming to work this week but he should “gift” you a paycheck anyway.
When he refuses accuse him of not loving the “community”.

17) Search alleys untill you find a couch so unbelievably tacky and nasty filthy that a state college frat house wouldn’t want it.
Take a nap on the couch and sleep like you are king of the world.

18) Go to a museum.
Find one of Salvador Dali’s more disturbing but beautiful paintings.
Climb inside it.

19) Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.

20) Spend thousands of dollars and several months of your life building a deeply personal art work.
Hide it in a funhouse on the edge of the city.
Hire people to come by and alternate saying “I love it” and “this sucks balls”.
Blow it up.

21) Set up a DJ system downwind of a three alarm fire.
Play a short loop of drum’n’bass until the embers are cold.

22) Make a list of all the things you’ll do different next year.
Never look at it.

Occupy Wall Street has a long US tradition

Occupy Wall Street has a long US tradition

There have been worker revolts in the United States pretty much as long as the United States has existed.  However the revolts took on another tenor in the late 60’s.  During the civil rights movement these labor disputes began to be focused racial on blacks.  According to Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States, in 1966, seventy poor blacks occupied an unused barracks on an air force base.  After this event had been resolved, much in the way many occupy encampments were resolved this year a Mrs. Unita Blackwell said,

“I feel that the federal government have proven that it don’t care about poor people.  Everything that we have asked for through these years had been handed down on paper.  It’s never been a reality.  We the poor people of Mississippi is tired.  We’ve tired of it so we’re going to build for ourselves because we don’t have a government that represents us.” 

It’s amazing how 45 years in this country doesn’t seem to change much, this statement, albeit most likely with a little better grammar, would not seem even remotely out of place today.

Again from Zinn, during this time period A. Phillip Randolph advised the president, “ The Negro’s protest today is but the first rumbling of the ‘under-class.’  As the Negro has taken to the streets, so will the unemployed of all races take to the street.”

This is what the Occupy movement is about, not some socialist ideal but an opportunity for people to be treated fairly and decently in this country.  That of course is based upon the idea that it’s not fair or decent that the 1% of the nation live like gods while there are so many people hurting, that’s why people are in the street.  Now that may be a socialist ideal but basic common decency is a socialist ideal I can get behind.

The Monsters are due on Maple Street in 2012

The Monsters are due on Maple Street in 2012

So, the holidays are over, everyone had time to visit with friends and family.  We all ate too much and got nice presents and watched little kids go nuts and rip open packages, get new toys only in half of the instances to end up playing with the box all day.  Most of us did a lot of Christmas shopping this year, retailers had a bigger year than last year but one particular retail sector set records, gun stores.

 That’s right record gun sales in December, eclipsing the previous record set way back in November of that’s right, 2011.  Why are so many people in the United States arming themselves?  One of my favorite episodes from the original Twilight Zone series is called the Monsters are Due on Maple Street.  It’s a typical neighborhood in 1950’s America on a Summer night, washing cars, barbecues and kids playing in the street.  Then something streaks across the sky and a kid tells a story about alien invasion and ordinary people begin to turn on each other to find the monsters among them.  In nuclear paranoid America there was always an undercurrent of fear and paranoia that the big one would fall.  Take that tension and add just the right pressure and boom, neighbor against neighbor.  Of course it’s the Twilight Zone so at the end of the episode the camera pulls back and two aliens talk about how this is exactly how they’ll do the invasion, the kid was right.

Well, a lot of the conditions that made Maple Street ripe for chaos are present today in America once again.  We are in a world where the people of Arab nations are taking to the streets to free themselves from oppressive leaders.  Iran and North Korea are less stable than they have been in quite some time.  Occupy protestors are in the streets right here in the United States, and for good reason, our political system is broken, the current GOP Presidential race is more like reality TV than a process designed to possibly pick the next leader of the free world (whatever that is), our economy is dragging along on life support fearing the default of Italy or Spain, or Iran causing oil prices to spike.  The income gap in the United States is larger than ever and unemployment still flies well above 8% and a whole lot of kids are going to graduate with college degrees this May and not find work.

Now we no longer live under the fear of imminent nuclear war, although Putin is doing a dandy job of raising the nerves of Washington establishment.  However there is a lovely irrational fear that has permeated our culture, the Apocalypse.  That’s right the end of the Mayan Calendar has had a perceptible impact on the psyche of Americans.

Now do I think the world is going to end on December 21, 2012 of course not, I mean really, just because Zippy the Mayan Calendar Maker stopped his calendar at the end of a cycle a thousand years in the future doesn’t mean he had some mystical insight into the future.  Now I personally think ancient peoples get vastly under estimated for their level of intelligence and ability, but being psychic or having worked out the intricacies of plate tectonics, solar cycles, calculate universal gravitational constants and the rotation of planets imperceptible to modern man?  I don’t think so.

 The real risk from all of this Mayan silliness is the underlying pressure that it creates.  The impact it has on all of those new gun owners and new breed survivalists.  You see I don’t worry about the folks who have been building bunkers for years and setting up remote bug out locations.  The people I fear are the ones who are scared and semi-prepared or not prepared at all.  You see it’s that group of people who lose it for little or no reason.   Take the real tensions in our world, add in the irrational tensions of doomsday and then throw a combination of unexpected events and you have a recipe for disaster.  So say a heat wave this Summer triggers a power outage that crashes the grid for a couple of days, does a major metropolitan city meltdown under that scenario?  What if that power outage happens on December 21^st, how many of those new gun owners start shooting at their neighbors who want to come to their house to stay warm.  To me what this says is that Maple Street is ready for the monsters and as Rod Serling said in the epilogue to that famous Twilight Zone episode, “the monsters are us.”

Fun Friday: Snarky Sayings

It seems like lately people have been posting tons of snarky images so decided today to fire up a bunch for your reading enjoyment, happy Friday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fun Friday: Lighting up the darkness

Ok so a Fun Friday post to make you feel good about your fellow humans.  A simple problem and a simple and elegant solution is a beautiful thing to behold, yes this is an ad for a charity but only by showing a web address at the very end, not endorsing anything here since I haven’t had time to research the organization but seems like a worthy cause, anyway, enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOl4vwhwkW8&feature=email

 

Anti-Bullying rules show the hypocrisy of adults, what about equality?

Ok, before the darts start to fly and people comment without reading this post let me say in the very first line, bullying is bad, mkay.  No one should be subject to physical or mental abuse simply because of who they are.  I was a thin, short boy, with one of the first divorce families in a pretty tough neighborhood.  I took my fair share of abuse and without a doubt as kids will do, shit rolled downhill and there were people I wasn’t very nice to either.

Back when I was growing up, the mid-70’s, being gay, particularly for a young man was not acceptable.  Doubly if you were effeminate, and there were a couple of guys that suffered for that in my neighborhood as children.  It was wrong, we were all guilty of participating and it certainly has had long-term effects on these men.  One, seems to have adjusted well, is openly out and pretty successful.  The other, not so much, although I haven’t heard much in the last ten years, his life certainly wasn’t following the trajectory he had hoped for as a child.  Let this piece serve as a venue for a very public apology, especially to you Robert for the way I treated you as a child.

The world today is a more sensitive place.  Children are being made aware of bullying as are parents and educators.  Cyberbullying has gotten an incredible amount of attention after several teens committed suicide over the last couple of years after being bullied.  This is all good, unfortunately it doesn’t address the real source of bullying, the values put into the children (or lack thereof) by their parents.  Like racism or any other form prejudice, if what a child is hearing at home are things like, I can’t believe you let a fag beat you.   Well then, what do you expect that child is going to do at school when he/she encounters an effeminate or openly gay male student?  At the end of the day, until we change the values parents teach to their children, change will be slow in coming.

On the news the other day I was listening to a news story about all of the rules that are being put in place against bullying, cyberbulling and the use of language.  A lot of this has been especially focused on how LGBT students are treated.  However there is a signficant hypocrisy that exists at the core of all of this.  We tell our children that they are not to make fun of gay students for being gay, that in fact, gay students are no different from heterosexual students.  Then as a society in general we deny them the right to be married just like heterosexual members of society.  So what is it people, is a gay person the same as a heterosexual person, or should it be ok to bully them and treat them differently?  Because right now the answer in America is treat them like any other person until they are an adult, then you can discriminate against them with impunity.

Fun Friday: The Poop and Paddle

Fun Friday: The Poop and Paddle

Yes for today’s post may I present a short video via NPR Science Friday on the Poop & Paddle, enjoy:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10402

Burning Man – Temple Poem

Tendrils of the temple                                                                                                                                   8/24/11

It’s been a long fucking week
longer for some
than others
this week
one friend died
a friend lost her dad
several friends
will not make it home
back into the dust
but we will burn for them
and we will burn
things for them
and ideas
and burdens
and the shit of our lives
 

One hundred twenty feet of temple
will reach
with red tendrils
up into the darkened heavens
and give back all of these
to whence they came
tornados of dust
and fire
will take away our pain
and the wind will come
as it always does
and blow the calm
and the peaceful
back into our lives
that’s why I go