Prunella Vulgaris's compendium, or: A companion for the ingenious of either sex. The newest experiments in japanning, to imitate the Indian way, plain and in speckles, rockwork, figures, &c. The art of persuming and beautifying. Divers receipts in physick and surgery, with many other useful things. To make enamel of divers colours for gold, silver, or other metals. To which are added, many curiosities, and rare secrets, known to few, but very profitable and pleasant.
Redacted rants substituted by passive-aggressive folkies who say it better than I could, plus bonus extra tunes..
it's gonna be sudden it's gonna be strange i'm gonna turn on a dime give you 5 cents change it's gonna be long overdue it's all gonna come out out of me, on to you
out of me on to you
one of these days you're gonna push too hard we'll go on like we've always done till you go too far one of these days it's gonna reach the top then it's gonna start to spill and it's not gonna stop
out of me on to you...
no more
some people wear their smile like a disguise those people who smile a lot watch the eyes i know cause i'm like that a lot you think everything's okay it is till it's not
It's the time of the day when I'm most tired, the blood sugar plummets, the caffeine starts exiting the system, and I've been feeling like I'm swimming in a fishbowl way too long, and everything just makes me a little more nervy than usual and I find myself trying harder to maintain this smile, which turns to scowling when crossed with too many space cadets and the usual clowns. I don't want to make conversation, your attempts at chatting up are as unwelcome as a middle finger. Those who don't know me very well think I'm happy and kind and gracious all the time. I wish I was. That mid-afternoon is always my low-water mark. I haven't been what I want to be, and the harder I try to not be a jerk, the more exasperated I get all around.
I am so tired, and maybe a little burned out. The world depresses me and sometimes it's hard to believe that God is good when I see what I see. I haven't been sleeping well, which doesn't help, neither does the runny nose, the stuffed-up brain, the ennui of winter and illness and not enough sunlight. So yeah, that double-whammy of emotional and physical and maybe some spiritual weariness thrown in for some good measure.
I am thankful, I guess, for divine intervention into my suckitude, for tuneage, for naps, for herbal tea, for coworkers who are honest enough to tell me when I'm wrong and kind enough to not make me feel worse, who put up with my strange strain of crazy and the fits of melancholia. I'm thankful for movie nights and friends and that soon the days will be longer again. I can't wait for those days.
I should have played this on the show this morning, maybe, but there's plenty of other days to be mournful and angry and I feel like I'm permanent blast because it's election season and such. Last night was my grandma's birthday and we had dinner and while my grandfather and I don't see things the same way often, as he listens to way more talk radio than yours truly and I usually have to excuse myself, we were able to agree that as a country we have sucked fantastically (my words not his) at dealing with things, sacrificing freedom for "security," ill-advised ventures into sundry parts, an absurd approach to dealing with the day-to-day, the expansion of bureaucracy, an appalling lack of reflection on the who what and why. We are prideful and cowardly as a country, we continued to pass the buck and consume with gusto, because we're not the ones who are sacrificing anything.
We should have just moved on, he says, instead we've turned it into something else to buy and that cheapens it. Who needs a memorial? Who cares if someone wants to build a mosque over there? Life goes on.
Mind you, this isn't a peacenik talking at all. This is someone who's more close ideological to Glenn Beck than Glenn Greenwald, but even he's getting fed up with all this hagiography and the flag-waving.
I wish we could have done what Norway did when dealing with a national tragedy, sure there were the platitudes of coming together, but not fearing one's neighbor, welcoming increased militarization, moving on after dealing with wackjobs with weapons, not letting it change our day-to-day. I really respect that. I wish we had done that.
And then last night I ran into my movie night/softball homies at the gas station. We watched Stripes and drank sweet tea and talked about the way things were growing up for us, the indoctrination, the propaganda, each of us is a decade removed and grew up in very different circumstances. When I was younger, my anger was more abstract, now I'm way more chilled out but there's certain things that really angry up the blood more than ever. I say, happy to be among folks who aren't fearmongering with WAR ON TERROR! WAR ON CHRISTMAS! WAR ON DRUGS! WAR ON WOMEN!
I'm fed up with people trying to scare me. I'm fed up with other people being screwed over in order to maintain an unsustainable way of living that's starting to unravel. I can't be around the party-line-towers on either side because I find myself far to the ends of either of them. I want election season to be over, because I'm sick of the propaganda and the fact that my whole adult life has been a national nightmare.
The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
It went like this:
The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair
The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze
I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days"
You grabbed my hand
And we fell into it
Like a daydream
Or a fever
We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death
There are times the patience grows thin, and the lack of words is preferable to the usual kvetching. It must be the hormones, or the frustration with our perpetual brokenness and the baggage accumulated upon ten years of adulthood and the first tastes of heartbreak and things not working out the way we thought they would.
Some jumped in too fast, and now have the consequentials, and others of us crawled out from the wreckage, or saw enough of the damage surrounding to steer clear, but still there's that sense of longing, instilled by quasi-platonic ideals instilled all to young of missing halves, of fairy tales and platitudes, and destiny or whatever. It's always what we don't have, or what doesn't seem to be ours to possess isn't it? So as we get older, you'd think we'd grow up a bit, but this adult thing seems to elude us as a whole.
So my biggest pet peeve is to hear this laundry list of what the perfect girl is knowing damn well that such a person probably doesn't exist, because we all have our bad days and our not so bright moments and the times when we get PMS and aren't much fun, and c'mon dudes, you have bad days too, who are we kidding?.
And I hear the bemoaning of the lack of smart women or women who like good music and it's hard for me to take this seriously, because dude I'm standing here right in front of you and I'm waxing rhapsodic about galaxies and literature and history and bands that even you who reads the blogs on the Internets haven't heard of and not using it as social capital but just a wanting to share the sweetness that I've found. Oh yeah, and I can cook pretty well, and I can understand and enjoy sports even if I'm clueless about videogames, and I'm not going to make a fool of myself in public. But if you don't get it, than it's not worth my time, it says more about you than me.
And I've got friends who are like this too, but even if we're cute, because we don't look like that centerfold you drool over or That Hot Chick In That Band that got profiled in Revolver, or that girl who posts pictures of the doves tattooed on her hipbones on facebook, somehow we don't count, because we're not just getting our hair done and retouching our makeup, we're rocking out next to you, and therefore we're either one of the dudes more or less or there's the unspoken assumption that we probably swing the other way, and let's be real, those girls wouldn't hang out with you anyway, or it'd get old fast. You say you want a chick who likes the power chords? Especially in Clevelandia, raised on classic rock and grunge, we're out there, we just don't look like Angela Gossow or Cristina Scabbia or Zooey Deschanel, justsayin'... but who does?
And maybe we girls are guilty of this too, but I think it's easier for us to eventually get smitten by a good personality and a sense of humor and a general sense of decency or something, we're willing to take the chance that the attraction might come later, but perhaps we're expecting a bit too much to think that you'd be the same.
There were so many things that happened... a night at the cinema, social obligations akin to females involving the pending matrimony of friends, and I ducked out before the housewares came out of the boxes to start preparing for the dinner soiree but detoured to the Fun Wall and mingled among graffiti artists and skateboarders and those who love them, shooting photos of breakdancers and aerosol cans and little kids wandering around in the teenage wasteland of Clevelandia. Breakbeats and generator party soundsystems and a refreshing lack of corporate sponsorship, the only festival thing that wasn't institution related where people of every conceivable background if not age were hanging out together.
The hours dripped away, dinner for some old friends from the Parmastan and Kent years, waking up early to play guitar and sing to God praying through a hundred doubts and distractions and hearing the voices before me rise in a way that crystallized beyond any effort of mine, and afterwards we spoke again for the first time in years and while we had a lot to say, to catch up on, I knew that it would end there. And that's okay. I'm accustomed to a lack of requition, but almost three decades on and this just starts to get old.
And now I'm back here, dealing with ditzy undergrads and egocentric academics who understand the balance of power well and can make passes at women twenty years their junior without fear of recompense and so all I can do is scowl and complete the transaction with a minimum of eye contact. I just don't want to be here today.
Last night I drank an Irish coffee and met new people, and talked about things that are somewhat meaningful, and loved the passion that everyone had even if the things that really move my soul are other things.
And it's amazing how people will see what they want to see in your words, whether they assume you're in agreement and therefore do not listen or when they take your dissent from their point of view somehow personally, because history may be miscronstrued and twisted but the facts themselves don't lie.
Oh are you just being fatalistic? You say it doesn't matter because God will come back someday and everything will be ok? Everything's the same so why bother to change things, because this is the way it's always been and you live in the most powerful country in the world and they're imperialist and you don't do anything to change that because you don't have a problem with it, unlike me, from somewhere else that's not so important. You'd rather sit passive on the sidelines because you don't care.
Because nothing says mature and classy like twisting my words, seeing what you want to see, and resorting to ad hominem attacks without any knowledge of how I live my life or how I feel. My belief in the cycle of history, of the unchangingness of human nature, the way that lust for money and power drive the ambitious of the world, that the technology advances and the cast changes, but fundamentally, the cycle remains unchanged, doesn't mean that I think this is good or okay or something to stand by and watch idly. It's just an observation. The strong prey on the weak, those imbued with a sense of their own rightness often force that on others at the threat of sword or gun or nuke. If you listened to my words you'd know that this kind of thing makes me mad as hell.
Also, maybe it's that you're resenting my punching holes in your straw men and bringing up truth that shreds your theories? That the egalitarian French revolutionaires screwed over Haiti, that while Washington bullets destroyed a lot of lives, so did the ones made by Soviets, especially in the Ogaden, where weaponry was sold to both the Siad Barre and the Mengistu dictatorships so socialists could kill each other and anyone who was in the way.
and what if an Israeli rocket fell on your house and killed your
family, what would you do? You'd probably just stand there and do
nothing wouldn't you? Because you think that's just the way it is.
Look, when 9/11 happened, I wasn't crying out for blood vengeance. I'm still not. I grieved the loss of life here and hoped for soul-searching on the part of my countrymen in hopes that maybe we'd wake up and see what a wreck we make of the world. It's just not how I roll. I try to do that whole love enemies and pray for them because I'm a crazy fundie and try to live out this crazy stuff that makes no sense and goes against my most primal impulses. I try to practice this forgiveness thing and I feel ashamed of what my country has been and what it has become, and the perpetuation of these violent cycles.
But that means nothing to you. This is the inverse of the Jack Bauer Scenario that justified torture for suburbanites everywhere. Whatever. So much for discussion in higher education. This is why I can't bring myself to actually go back to school. Dumbassery like this on the part of both teacher and student. I am caught between polemics and platitudes, and neither reflects the reality of what I read, what I've learned, and what I see played out in my own small microcosm and on the world stage.
Acknowledgement is not the same as acquiescence, and if you took the time to listen to what I was actually saying, maybe that'd make sense, but since I don't believe in a socialist utopia where all the oppressed people come together to take down The Man without there being a followup of purges and reigns of terror, I'm somehow responsible for all the the stoogery of my own country. You accuse me of generalizing an entire religion, an entire group of people without knowing a damn thing about my circle of friends or my life outside of the hallowed halls, and you generalize me for happening to be born in this country. How fair is that? Not very.
So Bridget wanted me to write something, and this something kind of sucks.
It could always be worse, I guess. I could have to choose between Hitler and Stalin running wild through the country, I could have to choose between fundie wackjobs of one stripe and CIA spooks if I lived in Egypt. Instead, my society gives me an option: I get to pick from one who claims to care a lot, and one who makes few bones about caring at all. I hate election season with every fiber of my being because after being stupid in 2004, I can no longer do this whole "lesser of two evils" thing. I remember once looking forward to being old enough to vote, believing that it mattered, that I could change things by punching a card or filling a bubble and wearing a sticker, and then by the time that rolled around, 9/11 happened and everyone claims to love America more than the next guy and blame the other guy for all the problems that they themselves perpetuate.
It hit me for the first time how fucked up things really were when I started reading The Gulag Archipelago and realized that the way that the Soviets treated political prisoners in the gulag was the exact same thing we were doing here in the "free world." Stress positions, sleep deprivations, and so on and so forth, but oh it's not torture when we do it, it's been rebranded as "enhanced interrogation" because those "enemies of the state" are so dangerous just like those dissidents were behind the iron curtain. And that's the black sites. "Oh," people say, well we don't do that anymore because Obama's president" but I can't buy this because when the previous wrongs aren't dealt with, in the name of looking forward, it was only a harbinger of a continuation of the kinder gentler machine gun hand.
And I wonder if it all boils down to our lack of value for human life on both sides, for when it's inconvenient or deemed not quite our equal, be it people of a different religion/look/orientation/birthplace/place in the gestation period/place in the social hierarchy, because let's be honest, very very few of us believe in real equality of people. We think some people are better and more valuable and more important than others, that others don't have the right to exist or enjoy the same rights that we take for granted, and dehumanize those others, whoever those others may be, and strip them of their dignity and often their existence.
When both resort to cost-benefit analysis when lives are involved, be it with welfare or war. Employers who realize that they can slice and dice, who see humans as resources rather than as souls, who realize that they can have less people do more work or maybe less people do more work somewhere where OSHA and basic living wages don't exist and watch the money roll in.
The overlords don't care about us, and most of the time the unions don't either, so we're caught in this ideological tug of war where the ones in power take turns winning and the rest of us continue to lose. The younger Teamsters at my dad's work are paying into a system from which they will probably not see anything, the middle managers and CEOs everywhere tell us we should be happy because aren't we so lucky to have these jobs where we're undervalued, underemployed, and underpaid while they make six figures and don't see the cognitive dissonance, the yawning divide between our world and theirs. And these are just the first world problems.
Our government has tortured people, our government has outsourced that torture to our friends in strategically located countries. No wonder people hate us. I'd hate us too. And God help you if you're an undocumented immigrant trying to feed your kids because you're dealing both with gun-toting wingnut wackjobs and a merciless state where you can just kind of disappear.
Everyone takes turns getting shrill and flipping out because the other side is always the second coming of Hitler but what it's getting old to blame Bush for a war that's still going on, and one that's supposedly over but we've got mercenaries and drones there indefinitely, not to mention all the other messes we got in, for all the drones in Pakistan and Yemen and everywhere else. Our biggest export is killing machines. Oh there's less collateral damage for our side, but tell that to the parents and the siblings of those who've lost their kids, though evidently they don't matter if they're far away and practice a different religion or don't look like you, or because it's your president that you want so badly to still believe in, that you'll make any excuse. What I hear out of Democrats in 2012 is what I heard out of Republicans in 2004... we're in too deep, we can't change now, he needs more time to fix this, but remember where we were in 2008? That sucked, and I hope I'm wrong but I think 2016 will suck too.
There's enough of the crazy on both sides of the domestic front of the "keep your rosaries off my ovaries" and vice versa variety that people don't seem to notice that laws and decisions are made that are such that any cop being able to strip you naked and the Powers That Be being able to indefinitely detain you for any nebulous reason related to national security. Hey, we let them do it to people in other countries,, what's to say it won't be done to us too? Hell, it's been going on here in those neighborhoods on the other side of town for awhile now. Inhuman prison conditions, lopsided penalties for crack versus cocaine? Oh but that happens to other people who are bad.
Sure, there are crazy people with guns out there in the hinterlands who really hate The Man or whatever, but I fear them less than I do the state, because most of the survivalists might be crazy but usually want to be left the hell alone, and the other has a lot more structural weight behind it that can destroy your world if you end up on the wrong side. Maybe that's not terribly logical, but it's where I've come to.
So really, the only people that matter in the world to most of us is us. It's easier not to see, it's easier to blame the other side when they're really two sides of the same coin. Easier to freak out about straw men and endlessly debate intractable issues where this is no middle ground. I don't know if I believe in revolution because most of the time, it's just a new set of jerks with axes to grind and everyone on the bottom still gets screwed. I don't have faith in humanity, or political systems or much of anything except the big thing. I don't know if it's better anywhere else. I wish I could conjure up non-sucky jobs for the people I know out of work, I wish I could see people held accountable for the suffering they cause in this life. I think I manage to piss off almost anyone when I get going. It's a good thing only 3 people read this because I've probably done that to you too.
When one voice rules the nation
Just because they're top of the pile
Doesn't mean their vision is the clearest
The voices of the people
Are falling on deaf ears
Our politicians all become careerists
They must declare their interests
But not their company cars
Is there more to a seat in parliament
Than sitting on your arse
And the best of all this bad bunch
Is shouting to be heard
Above the sound of ideologies clashing
Outside the patient millions
Who put them into power
Expect a little more back for their taxes
Like school books, beds in hospitals
And peace in our bloody time
All they get is old men grinding axes
Who've built their private fortunes
On the things they can rely
The courts, the secret handshake
The Stock Exchange and the old school tie
For God and Queen and Country
All things they justify
Above the sound of ideologies clashing
God bless the civil service
The nations saving grace
While we expect democracy
They're laughing in our face
And although our cries get louder
The laughter gets louder still
Above the sound of ideologies clashing
Above the sound of ideologies,
Above the sound of ideologies,
Above the sound of ideologies clashing
Glass ceilings be damned, I've never cared for women running the world any more than men. It's just a different kind of absurdity, less skirt-chasing and good old boys clubs, but rather the machinations of bitter and unhappy romance novel readers who consider everything their business and are unable to see that their casual cattiness and cruelty has sowed seeds of dislike and dissent, of alliances formed and sealed lips. I don't buy this solidarity of women thing for a minute, because I think deep down inside we don't really like each other, and with a system already in place that stacks the deck, we've become extremely good at throwing each other over the side to get ahead.
You say we can't be friends and wonder why we're not friendly towards our betters, but when there's no trust, no rapport, just an oozing of condescension and we don't need to be stabbed in the back because we see the damoclean knife unhidden, it should be no wonder that we all pull back.
I might be more loquacious than some, but there are some I know better than to trust, as we all do, having felt the sting of groundless accusations and intrusions. I know it's not because there's any caring, maintaining of an image perhaps, but more likely the result of small minds discussing people for lack of any true thoughts.The camaraderie of colleagues, the sundry domestic dramas meant to stay within the hearth's circle, the glaring double standards, why should you care so much? Because it's painfully evident that you don't.
You'll be successful in life because you have such a wonderful smile. Did you know that they didn't hire people to work at the casino because they didn't smile. Let me tell you what I learn in sales training school. Smiling happy people have greater productivity! Corporate America is waiting for you. Rich people help people. Poor people can't help people because they have nothing. Rich people help other people.
Oh really. Not that there aren't generous rich folk out there somewhere, but what I see usually is that such gifts come strings attached or a giant spotlight rather than sheer altruism. There are some in my world with some means who I see helping out everyone around them, but they don't make a show of it, but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
There's a lot of stiff-lipped humorless individuals who have "succeeded" in life if that's your definition of success and a lot of us who do wear the perpetual grin usually work in the lower echelons of the customer service industry where other people are always right no matter how wrong they are. It takes less muscles, and sometimes if the teeth are showing and the mouth goes up far enough, you can't always see the curve of the cynical eyebrow, the frustration of being unable to respond in kind and knowing that this is our life destiny, for opting out of networking and ladder-climbing but still having to deal with those who do.
