Just Wandering (and wondering)

Yesterday’s Thought.

It will all be okay.

If not, pay the mortgage one more time.

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Today’s Thought.

Pen: Meet paper.

And leave the rest of us alone.

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Tomorrow’s Thought.

Don’t forget to take out the trash.

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I just want to go back when everything was so simple. You know, back when I could fax my love to you.

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From Don Quixote:

“I exaggerated her beauty and marveled at her virtue and understanding. She returned the favor, praising in me those things that she, as a woman in love, found worthy of praise.”

Sounds like the Obama campaign to me.

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Last week, I got a call from nowhere. The fine man on the other end of the phone said: “She liked your work. She died. And she left you a small sum of money with one stipulation: Do something that would make her smile.”

No problem.

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He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head.

— Jonathan Franzen, on his friend, David Foster Wallace

Indeed.

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Cut trees. Haul trees. Sell trees.

That makes sense to me.

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Is it me, or are we deep in elaborate schemes to make us all feel like we matter when the people pulling the strings think otherwise?

Just wondering.

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Sometimes there were even arrangements which permitted private entrepreneurs to utilize the manpower of the asylums for their own profit.
— Michel Foucault

Sounds like America to me.

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I read the profile of Gary Snyder in The New Yorker (10.20/2008). Oh Gary, why do they still think your love affair with nature is so …well… unnatural? But you handled it well. You freak.

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And then I went to my library and pulled my collected poems of your friend, Lew Welch. This was the poem I had marked:

The Basic Con

Those who can’t find anything to live for,
Always invent something to die for.

Then they want the rest of us to
die for it, too.

These, and an elite army of thousands,
who do nobody any good at all, but do
great harm to some,
have always collected vast sums from all.

Finally, all this machinery
tries to kill us,

because we won’t die for it, too.

Sounds like America to me.

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Oh, of course, we’re going too fast to think.

I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.

Really.

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Final thought:

We are free men. Now we must take our heritage seriously. We must stop defending civil liberties long enough to use them. We must attempt to give content to our formal democracy by acting within it. We must stop whining about our own alienation long enough to use it form radical critiques, audacious programs, commanding views of the future. If WE do not do these things, who will?
— C. Wright Mills

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We’ll know we’re getting someplace when the bastards opposed to freedom come to us to apply for a permit to rally against our happiness. Because our response will be: Your breath is your permit, now carry on.

Until then, I’ve got horses to feed and woods to wander.

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Dismissed.