Comics / Tirinhas, Boobage &c.: Crossing the Rubicon ... or anti-crossing as may be.

Full moon yesterday. Which one is that? ... Hunter's Moon was it?

[Up, Down]

Flood Bay Street!
Toxic Zombies at Bay & King Streets, Toronto Noon on Friday October 31, Halloween.

The Toronto mayoral election is not over until the 27th. Please recognize that:

Olivia Chow & John Tory Are Two Cheeks On The Same Horse's Ass!

(a few posts below).

(And now back to a stream-of-consciousness already in progress ... or something.)

The Tourette's has moderated to "Oh, Come On!" or just "Fuck You!" or "Fuck This! "Nary a tinge remaining of what was (understandably but incorrectly) considered by some to be misogyny - back years ago when it was sometimes "Cunt!" & "Fuckin' Bitch!".

And I'm not strapping on explosives and heading for a crowded Second Cup or Starbucks either; just sitting here on a chair in this backwater of a moribund public library (completely under the sway of a more-or-less illiterate labour union); having had a smoke on the bench - dedicated to two women I know only by name: Mary Nearing & Dorothy Peacock - behind the (moribund public) library in the moribund public park (ditto 'under the sway'); in this quiet corner of the Internet, which is itself a minor current, minor symptom, of a moribund civilization; just here, like Vonnegut's Bokonon giving the finger atop his Pisgah as he finally succumbs to Ice-9; sayin' quietly, softly, but defiant-like:

Fuck You In Your Glass Eye!

(Thanks again to Daphne.)

I've seen the future brother, it is murder:

This park I walk in is not the park I step on.

Eldon Garnet: This river I step in is not the river I stand in.

"This river I step in is not the river I stand in," says Eldon Garnet in 1996. "This park I walk in is not the park I step on," sez I.

I began burning this candle in 2009 in the weeks before Copenhagen; and it got to be a habit. Careful & constant trimming can lead to a tiny blue flame - so that a single candle (the cheap ones from the Dollar Store) lasts for days, a week.

A corollary is that the flame is so small it sometimes gets missed at bed time. Uh oh! Burn the whole fricken' place down!

Not yet anyway.

Also in 2009 a volunteer yam began to sprout on my kitchen counter. I planted it in a window pot. Turned out to be a vine and five years later it is still going back and forth across the window.

I wonder if it is running out of steam (like its gardener) because lately it has started sprouting tiny pairs of leaves here and there. Unusual somehow. Not quite sure exactly why?

Two tiny yam leaves unfolding on the vine.

Many of my heroes are women, nothin' special there, and I have been cultivating my anima (if not my inner-child, who requires no cultivation, like a weed).

The last few childish & defiant acts were to order Naomi Oreskes' book 'The Collapse of Western Civilization: A view from the future', and Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate', knowing they'll never be paid for. (It is now chopped up and filed in the bin. We won't be havin' no more of that kind'a foolish nonsense eh? :-)

Must be instant Karma though, because both of 'em are disappointing.

'The Collapse of Western Civilization' is incomplete, unfinished; as it stands no more than a bit of sarcastic sophomoric rhetoric - monovalent yet! It might have been, should have been, could have been something more. I'll say this: she keeps me guessing ... I am surprised when Wham!, it's over without ending.

We find ourselves standing in the desert before the statue of Ozymandias. There's half an arch stretching up to somewhere above his topknot where it just ... stops. And suddenly the whole picture turns into a Road Runner cartoon: everything creaks and shatters, the arch falls over with a thump, and Porky Pig is sayin' "Th-th-th-that's all folks!."

All she (and Erik of course) had to do to see the defecit was re-read it a few times. Maybe she did and it was too much to think about fixing.

A few excerpts and opinions around Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything':

    12th: Naomi Klein in the Toronto Globe;
    13th: Excerpt in The Guardian;
    13th: Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian;

Culminating in one that 'resonates' ominously if you read it carefully by Suzanne Goldenberg on the 14th;

And a Guardian editorial: 14th: September 14; and a week later, an actual 'review' by Jenny Turner.

Ms. Klein gets so much of it right; but there are clues. Her obsessive footnoting f'rinstance - if she had a scientific degree she might have the confidence to simply state the conclusions she journalistically reports, which would have so much more force.

The disappointment comes in her refusal to accept the conclusions she arrives in front of. Unlike Pynchon's hero (in 'Vineland') who leaps annually through a picture window to gain his pension, she charges straight at it ... and then ... chokes!

The video of her recent panel discussion in NYC bears a close look.

Beside her sits Chris Hedges who - more politely and graciously than I expected having read his articles before I saw the video - simply takes her material where it is going:

Resistance will mean jail time and direct confrontation. Resistance will mean physically disrupting the corporate machinery. Resistance will mean severing ourselves from the dominant culture to build small, self-sustaining communities. This resistance will be effective only when we refuse to do what we are told, when we turn from a liberal agenda of reform to embrace a radical agenda of revolt.

That might seem to turn this post into sedition. Whatever.

"Curiouser and curiouser," says Alice (one of my animas) on discovering that some Russian has set up a mirror copy of this blog with a .ru suffix. What's that about I wonder? The password is not compromised as far as I can see.

Hmmmm...?

I need to make a note of this dream so I don't forget it.
Don't worry yourself. You're not going to forget.

The Barn Ramp:

In a potted eulogy the preacher calls my mother a feminist; not knowing her, never having met her; she must have the notion from my sisters. Mom was never a thinker nor her daughters neither so I doubt feminism - a wonderful vitality yes, ideology no. I challenge her on the spot and since it's my mother's funeral she goes away (of course without admitting any wrongdoing, why would she?).

When I get to be 6, 7, 8 years old, mom begins to take an active role in CGIT summer camps and I am taken along. There might be one other boy there, the unfortunate son of another counsellor but it's hit or miss if we can be friends.

One evening the girls in the neighbouring tent are babysitting and get curious (as they would). It isn't like they're going to hurt me, they just want to see a penis up close (and sure enough, I also - already - want to see a one'a theirs). Our negotiations are interrupted by my mother's return. "What are you DOING?!"

There is a river near one of the camps with slippery clay banks. I'm expressly forbidden to go there but go anyway - to get the clay and make things of it. This gets kiboshed when I begin to present bowls and ask how to fire them (having discovered that simply putting them at the edge of a campfire turns them to dust).

On the path that leads beside the field to the river are the remains of a hay barn - just the foundation slab and a large (,huge, almost perfectly) triangular ramp that the horses dragged the waggons up into the hay maw (the OED will give no clue on this word :-). It is made of mortared stone and I determine that beneath it is a cell in which young girls are imprisoned. My job becomes to liberate them. I steal a claw hammer from a tool shed and beat away at the ramp over several days.

Which is where she finds me - having been told that I've been seen going back to the river.

Which river I wonder?

Reminds me of a tiny story I wrote a few years ago: Sex. Oh yeah, sure ... I can see the mediocre minds drifting back to 'misogynist' like fricken' gravity - moths to a flickering flame of correctitude.

And oh! ... He's feeling sorry for himself the wanker! Not so either gentle reader. No. Had I been a Jew, then, I might have been one of the Hasids who went, dancing and singing or holding a loved one's hand, might have been, or a stranger's hand - for no good reason.

On the other side of this Rubicon is no fixed address, no computer to hide in among films & TV programs, a complete unknown (with no direction home).

Oh fuck! Oh fuck! No dentist?! No chocolate chip cookies?! No endless coffee?! ...