A Liturgy of Thursday

Mow your fucking grass
I hate to sound stereotypically old
But actually no I don't fucking care
Mow your fucking grass
There are millions of acres of open Nebraska I could be
if I wanted to have to worry about being swarmed in ticks and rattlesnakes
Motherfucker you are in town
Mow your fucking grass
If you are dreadful of going outside
Know that the best way to keep the cops away
out of sight of whatever chemical inspires you to nothing
is to Mow Your Fucking Grass
Mow Your Fucking Grass
Mow Your Fucking Grass
Mow Your Fucking Grass
Amen.

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I think a biannual cycle of flood and drought   would give the Prairie climate a welcome sort of headiness, an air of the distinctive or even exotic.  Something writers could use for atmosphere in love stories, spy thrillers, magical realist fables etc. 

You can try to tell an outsider how our climate is in its way already fantastic without human interference.  You can try to tell them just how extreme the difference between the coldest winter night and the hottest summer day truly is, and it truly is.  I have every confidence that I could dress comfortably and smartly for Doha and Reykjavik both alike.   But all they're going to hear is that our winters are cold and our summers are hot, and so what?  Just another boring white bread normal trait of a boring white bread normal land.  You need to give them something visceral or even carnal in order to impress them.  And now we have it.

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It I happened upon the real Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny having sex I would not commence to masturbate.  It would more like walking in on elderly neighbors or a married pair in which one is a distant relative.  It would be a shrinking and painful experience.  I would need to exile myself from my own social circle for a month or maybe two until they stopped talking about it. 
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Oatman, Arizona is cool.  Cool to visit I mean.  I'm sure if I lived there for any appreciable time  I would hate my neighbors and be hated to the point of being 'invited' to leave in turn.  There's a bar there.  Of course there's a bar, and of course it's covered in the same 'we are so fucking rustic and cowboy' theme of every village bar west of the Missouri.  Though in this case there is no small veracity to it and, it's cute you know?  The donkeys are not pets.  Their vegetarian dentals are strong enough to turn your hand into pastrami and the odds are low that doctors would be able to spare it.  Oatman is rustic. Veracity, like I said.  It's a long way to a surgeon or any other kind of modern help.  And the donkeys are not pets. They have no civil affection. There is nothing to stop them from joining forces in the dead of night murdering the most well-armed humans in their sleep and ruling Oatman as a savage junta forever.

I Drink a Good Deal Less Than I Used Too

But I still have a vaguely hungover feeling at the beginning of the week, tired and weirdly angry about something, that doesn't go away until I've had a good 24-48 hours without being in a social environment.  I rarely feel hungry anymore but I do generally avoid being outright revolted by food.  Usually.  This summer I'm going to drive a two-lane road through the fields to the Texas border and back.  I'll eat in village diners and feel better.   It's been several years since I've been to Dealy Plaza and I wonder what's changed. In fact since I'm going that way I'd might has well.  

This Tornado Does Not Love You. Nor Does the Universe in General

My aunt tells a story of when she was young. She was attempting to change a flat tire on some empty Nebraska highway before hearing a voice telling her to duck out of the way just before the hubcap flew violently into the air where her face had been. She takes this as proof of God watching out for us. Once when I heard it I suggested as politely as I could that maybe it was just luck. She laughed as if this was the asinine thing she had ever heard and said, "No it was God."

Certainly being alive and well when you statistically should be otherwise is a good reason to be happy.  I'm not one for telling people what they're supposed to feel or do but I would go so far to say that you had damned well better  feel happy about that.  Still if you are well against the odds not out of dumb chance but because something is consciously taking care of you; so what? How does that make it better? How does that make it feel better? I'm asking sincerely here.

 If you find comfort in thinking this means that you will be safe for so long as you are faithful and grateful; you know that's not true.  Most of us know someone who had no bodily vices but still died of cancer or something else 'natural' before 40, children traumatized by disease accident or someone else's viciousness through nothing remotely resembling there own fault. It is indeed the case that the more orthodox Abrahamic sects are the ones most eager to tell us that we do not know the day or the hour, that we are all spiders held over the fire, is it not?

These are the Great Plains.  There are millions of acres of empty that a tornado could harmlessly plow through while truly large cities are extremely rare.  For a tornado to slice the guts of a major metro is statistically a miracle, or an anti-one if you insist that miracles must by definition be good.

In this context Wolf Blitzer's question would still be asinine even if the existence of God were a known fact.  Should Rebecca Vitsmun   thank God for being spared her life?  No!  She's young with a baby who needs her.  The woman is god-damned entitled to her life. That's right entitled. The only favor God brought upon her was to steal her fucking house. Fuck God. And while we're at it fuck the coastal stereotypes that assume  a 'clean-cut' Prairie mother must necessarily be Christian. Mostly though fuck God.  

Yesterday I Made Some Side Money as an Amateur Moving Man.

 Helped a woman who's spent decades expressing her piano talent at a Seventh-Day Adventist Church in College View, Lincoln    move out of her house.  She's divorcing her State Patrol/State Capitol night guard husband in favor of a gnarly blues rocker with a decade-old Black Lab and a camper in his truck.  She has a huge amount of upper-middle class stuff that she insists upon keeping and I made fifty dollars in about four and a half hours of work.  Lots of books by James Dobson, Mike Warneke and the like, along with a pamphlet called 'The Antichrist' that explains how every Catholic Pope is exactly that, which I understand to be an important doctrine among the Adventists, kurwa nienawidzą.  The not-quite ex-husband spent the time watching the Kansas City Royals lose; and he struck me as exactly the sort of hyper-mainstream cat who feels the obliged towards regional nationalism, the sort of man who maintains KC's dully horrible sports teams as the television default in the Omaha-Lincoln area.  The new man agitates easy.  He aims to keep his weed habit secret from the mousy new girlfriend and apologized for not being able to share some with me.  

Overall I'd say it felt good.  The awkwardness was other peoples while the rewards were all mine, though I guess that blues man does have the woman.  Or they have each other more properly. I hope the collaboration leads her to make some real personal artwork of her talent.  I've written a fictional work or two along these very lines, somewhat more fantastic though.  A part of me had been worried that they were too soap-opera maudlin but that's taken care of now. 

I Suppose There's a Lesson Here

I'm liberal enough to consider being 'alternative' or even 'revolutionary' as a generally good thing. 

This is not to say, however, that any information that posits itself as 'militant', as offering the real Truth beyond how The Man spins it for his own ends, is ipso-facto correct.  Belief and the search for truth should not be understood as challenges to one's physical courage.  The conceit that this is the case most commonly leads to various forms of authoritarian fundamentalism and righteous struggle upon deviants.  But I suppose this conceit can be common enough among anti-status quo freedom fighters as well.

All of which is to say that, please,  Ms. Walker, for your own good and the legacy of your fine work; please drop the love affair with the motherfucking Lizard Men alright?  Thank you. 

So Okay

Maybe I'm kind of a hippie?  

I really do feel a soft ache for the amount of life that comes to these plains warmth and adequate rain.  Plus the mosquitoes haven't come yet.  That does make it a lot easier to love anything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mountains are fucking gauche; good for looking at quickly if you're driving towards and over them but otherwise they very soon become things that are just there.  I want to see for milesssssssssss.  

Soccer Top 10

In local news, good on ya'll Omaha South High.    It's only high school true.  But it's great to see an institution inside Ne's borders that really cares about this game finally win it.  They were due.  Haters down :)


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1. Bayern Munich
2. Borussia Dortmund
3. Barcelona
4. Paris St. Germain
5. Juventus
6. Real Madrid
7. Manchester United
8. Galatasaray
9. Newell's Old Boys
10 Napoli

My God

But I do have a true and powerful love for old-school glam rock, especially on warm late spring days.  It just be like damn right? 

Elton John is  frustrating man.  The entire LPs' of "Yellow Brick Road" and "Madman Across the Water" are just; so, fucking, good.  While the bulk of his catalog is just meh or worse.  It's like the difference between The Police and solo Sting except that only begins to describe how extreme the difference in quality is. 

I'm going to drink by the creek today, something strong but tasteful, nothing Mad Dog ghetto nasty or anything like that.  Then I'm going to MP3 roll on 'Panic in Detroit' fucking over and over again.  God damn right it's good to be alive son.  God damn right it is. 

Quick thoughts on Benghazi

I could point out which president it was who caught Bin Laden again, but Id' agree it has grown rather boorish to do so.  Still, let us get down to the fucking meat of it ehh?  Modern history has in fact proven that the Republican Party does not 'own' national security after all.  It has been objectively demonstrated that the GOP is not better at national security than the Democrats.  It has also been objectively demonstrated that more 'toughness' is not the self-evident solution to any given security threat. 

These are facts that cannot be changed through magical belief in one's own righteous force of will.  Nor will the increasingly operatic language about Benghazi magically turn it into a scandal on anybody's say so. There is no liberal media conspiracy damming back what would otherwise be instinctive public outrage on the matter. (Check the link here on your own as you will; front page of the politburo itself.)  In as much as it ever was the GOP is simply no longer perceived as the party of conventional normality in the United States.  It does not determine the overriding narrative of our times or what good patriots rightfully ought or ought not to be concerned about.  This road will get you nowhere except for even more nowhere.

This Is sort of About Limbaugh and Such Others on The Angry White Man Side of the Dial: But Not really Though

I am a rather extreme introvert.  Prolonged contact with even friends who I've known for years can bring some pretty intense unease.  So this might be the general human desire for oneself to be the One True Model for everyone, but I would go so far as to say that there is no such thing as anyone taking natural pleasure in either giving a three hour monologue or certainly not in being so monologued to.  Talk radio, whether the subject is sports, Costa Rican cuisine or politics of whatever persuasion, is totalitarian in itself.  Dictators speak for hours on end not so much to give the impression that they are filled with that much wisdom and truth but to make a show of being filled with the manly confidence in themselves that this is the case.  It's the same with talk radio shouters.  It doesn't matter that they probably are not sincerely filled with hours worth of passionate rage about whatever the subject of the day happens to be, every day.  The point is to represent a superhuman ideal of passion, assertion and self-confidence that even their supporters must know isn't actually attainable, but that they feel compelled to admire and aspire to all the same.  

It seems that the occasional talk of building a liberal counter to the right-wing radio industry have been mostly given up, good.  For one thing the mere existence of a president Obama has revealed their supposedly magic mind-whammy powers as being not so special after all.  More importantly than that, fuck talk radio.  The medium is essentially rotten and I'll not have any belief system of mine associated with it at any high level. 


As a postscript, I would suppose that Limbaugh's recent advertising problems are a longtime coming, but I don't think that it's going to change any meaningful thing.  His advertisers for the most part have already been the same shady pill-and-tonic crowd that's been bilking insecure older men since time immemorial.  He will always have a revenue stream from those who have no reputation to lose, and isn't sort of retro to even mention the old son of a bitch at all though? 

Quick Notes: Let's Hear it for Yankee

What this entails for our long-term culture I couldn't say. Nothing good to state the blindly obvious. It has been a somewhat traumatic century to be sure, though absolutely not exceptionally so by historic human standards, much of our own self-centerdness likes to think otherwise. It has in truth been largely our own vanity and bullshit that have led to many of our problems.  But I suppose that if suicide isn't all about good old American personal responsibility then what is?

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Step One:  Convince yourself that you are the fatherly keeper of the One True American path.

Step Two:  That as such you are of course entitled to do whatever is necessary to maintain that path

Step Three:  Become a mental infant.   

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Step Four:  Forget that the question of a state's right to nullify has been most emphatically settled in the negative,  and for that matter so has any pretense that the sons of the South are made of harder and more courageous stuff than those city boys up north. Now you'd better cut it out with the nonsense before we're forced to send our ivory tower elitists to kick your ass again.  


 

Soccer TOP 10

Yeah, Just going to go ahead and to this one before the game is actually over. 

1.  Bayern Munich.  (Serious G.O.A.T. candidates here.) 

3. Borussia Dortmund

7. Barcelona
8. Corinthians
9. Paris St. Germain
10 Juventus
11 Real Madrid
12 Manchester United
13 Galatasaray
14 Napoli

My Home Town

Is quickly turning into a physical desert as well as a moral, spiritual, and cultural desert. 

God's sense of metaphor is as settle as a script doctor for Lifetime movies of the week.