235. DE MINIMIS NON CURAT LEX

From the Archives. (6 July 2006) My title, roughly translated, means the law doesn’t bother with trifles.

It does, however, consider torture chambers and journalistic censorship and phone tapping to be trifling, if you take the Boy Emperor’s word for it.

Meanwhile, his popularity is, understandably, waning.

If I were emperorgrrrl, I would make Ariel Dorfman and Garcia Lorca and Garcia Márquez and Neruda and Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness required reading and each and every citizen would have to discuss the characteristics of dictatorships before they could change the channel to American Idol.

Still, the Supreme Court did finally and unanimously agree that forklift operator Sheila White was discriminated against because she is a woman—and after only 9 years of this case winding its way through the system—so, who knows, maybe torture will be ruled against (again) in the end too.

•

I’m taking a break before cooking some wild mushroom risotto and settling in to watch Snow Falling on Cedars with Danishgrrl. Cinnamon the cockatiel is bang bang banging on her bell—let me out!—as Danishgrrrl sits beside me, researching assisted-living facilities for her father.

We spent July 4 helping a friend get her house ready for the market, then hung out with Jamie and her daughter and some other pals at the pool. Got home just in time to watch the NYC fireworks on TV (where, somewhere in the crowd, Danishgrrrl’s three kids were smiling).

We were supposed to go to the beach today but it’s pouring, so we went vintage clothes shopping instead and boy did I find the perfect pair of bright red cowgrrrl boots! I pulled them on and the shop owner and Danishgrrrl both said, simultaneously, those were MADE for you, Writergrrl! So now I’m grinning every time I think about them.

•

Meanwhile I read today that the video game Border Patrol, a web favorite, features Mexican drug dealers and pregnant women and mariachi dudes who cross the border in an attempt to reach the welfare office ... but only if the players don’t shoot them first.

Let’s take a guess which party endorses this game.

So tomorrow I must return to my sad work reality. It’s been a wonderful 3 days off and I’ve managed to not even think about the fact that I’m carless or how much this most recent repair will cost. Have also been looking around, trying to imagine another car I would like as much as my cute little lemon.

LISTENING TO: Danishgrrrl’s dog snore

READING: Susie Bright, who just pointed out that a perineal massage is nothing more than fist-fucking

SANG IN SHOWER: Phoebe Snow’s “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York, Cooooooome with me....”

207. YOU DON'T SEND ME FLOUR

From the Archives

i thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to send me a daisy
—e.e. cummings

Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in [an] unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- [or blog-] writer.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

(March 2006) Tonight I’ll attend a screening of Over the Farm: A New Deal Resettlement and Its Legacy. This independent film takes a historical glance back to the landless African American sharecroppers who were offered forty acres and a mule in Tillery NC back in the thirties.

Then, even though I have no Final Four men’s teams left in the office pool, I plan to cheer for George Mason University because the brilliant poet Carolyn Forché once taught there.

•

Meanwhile, here are the opening two sentences of Benedict Carey’s New York Times article about intercessory prayer:

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Shocking that this is newsworthy, really.

Christianists were, of course, quick to respond.

First a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic announced that the study says nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members.

“Working in a large center like Mayo,” he said, “You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don’t doubt them.”

How novel.

And let me guess, you tell those same families that it was the will of your god when their prayers were not answered.

Another Christianist reminds us that we don’t know how MUCH prayer each person received

Or if they inhaled while praying, dude.

Medea. Slaps. Forehead. Soundly. Now.

186. SLURPING WORD SOUP IN THE CULTURESPHERE

From the Archives

(January 2006) Rachel Neumann, in an end-of-the-year AlterNet story, laments the fact that conservatives won the 2005 war on frames—"how we talk about the big news and big ideas in the culturesphere"—by using effective catch phrases such as War on Terrorism and Intelligent Design and the ever-popular War on Christmas, and suggests a few phrases that progressives can adopt tbefore the next elections: Debacle in the Desert, the Great Mistake, the Iraqi Quagmire, and Plamegate.

(They don’t exactly turn my head but I do hope that Christianism catches on.)

Meanwhile I've been thinking about how pathetic it is that US citizens require a clever phrase to recognize what’s going on (a song that Marvin Gaye really needs to update for 2006).

I mean, think about it. Gaye could begin start the chorus with illegal, illegal and see if anyone looks up from the football finals to notice that the CIA played a role in an Abu Ghraib killing and created secret Eastern European prisons.

What’s going on when doctors and psychologists participate in Guantánamo Bay tortures and the Pentagon pays the Iraqi press to publish pro-USA stories?

(And it infuriates me no end to know that the New York Times waited till after the elections to inform its readers that the boy emperor authorized the NSA to spy on ordinary American citizens—Quakers, people!—without warrants.)

We sound like a third-world country with a greedy despot who makes people disappear, and not like the cradle of democracy, and, if I were teaching this semester, I would make Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Forché's Against Forgetting and Ariel Dorfman’s poetry required reading.

I am not teaching right now though (but I am listening intently).

So here’s what I’m thinking: If we must rely on clever little soundbites to get people to stand up and take notice, then let’s pepper our conversations in 2006 with this Jesse Jackson-inspired phrase that I just created: Lost Your Home? Just Live in the Dome.

Or let’s just play the word-association game: Faith-Based Giving. Holy Mission. Christian Taliban. Body Armor. Escalating Gas Prices. Mass Destruction. Cindy Sheehan. Broken Levees. Brownie. Abu Ghraib. Illegal Wire-tapping. Sanctioned Torture. Corruption. Recessed Appointments. Abramoff. Cronyism. Boy Dictator. Brownie. Brownie. Brownie.

Makes you think of Neumann's Destruction of Democracy, huh?

•

I read today that at least four groups comprised of military families are actively opposing our self-proclaimed emperor’s Great Mistake.

Amadee Braxton, a member Veterans Against The War, says

Veterans of the Iraq war and those still serving are the ones most capable of explaining the differences between the war the Bush administration portrays and the reality of the war on the ground. Most ... veterans realize, when they're over there, that they're viewed as an occupying force; not as liberators but as target practice. Americans were lied to, and Iraqi veterans are uniquely qualified to describe the disastrous consequences of that lie.

Her group emphasizes the connections between spending billions on the Debacle in the Desert and domestic cuts at home.

A good message indeed but the working-class voters hurt most by domestic cuts still support Shrub, despite his torture and disregard of poor people and the recent New Orleans apartheid, because he has somehow convinced them that he is a moral man.

(Why isn't helping the poor and seeking peace and justice considered moral?)

I just don't understand but suspect that, if we find a way to get beyond soundbites and speak heart-to-heart with people, most people will recognize the difference.

But how to do that when the headlines are focused on Brad and Angelina adopting a baby or Ted Kennedy having a secret love child or Eminem and Kim tying the knot (again)?

(Well, he did clearly still had strong feelings for her.)

And now I know that those two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders who were making out in that bathroom got fired for embarrassing the team after one planted a kiss on another (which, obviously, ranks right up there with murdering your pregnant wife or drag-racing down Charlotte highways in your Masurati ... or Porsche or Spyder or whatever luxury vehicle it was that those players were driving when one of them ate the gravel biscuit.

•

So yeah. Here it is 2 AM already and I am on yet another political rampage and still wide awake (goddamnit to Hell and Stillwater Texas).

I cannot sleep this week and have resorted to a glass of wine in an attempt to exhaust myself into slumber.

Why? Well I’ll sound like a ho hum broken record if I list the obvious reasons here, but here goes:

First, I read that a musician who plays here a lot was murdered with his wife and two children in a home robbery invasion and I cannot block the visuals.

(Please please tell me that they killed the parents first. And please please tell me that they killled the husband first so he didn’t have to die knowing that he failed to protect his family because I know men well enough to know that, otherwise, his father’s voice was chastising him for failing to protect his family as he died.)

And please please tell me that the stupid-ass teenagers who killed four people for a few lousy bucks at least used silencers so that the last one to die didn’t have to listen to the first three executions.

And please please please help me quit envisioning their teeth chattering in terror as the kids screaming Daddy.....

So yeah. I’m a visual AND aural person and know I’ll have nightmares if I go to sleep and so am resisting it.

Other reasons? Well, I have definitely entered the hot-flash zone and feel as if I'm roasting alive right now even though I dropped the heater down to 62 degrees.

But I am whining again and it’s after 3 AM already and I really ought to go to bed now since I have to get at 7 so I will at least go lie in the bed now and try to tell myself that I can sleep.

(Whimper.)

161. SINGING ... ABOUT THE DARK TIMES

From the Archives

(October 2005) So. Scientists have determined that the 1918 flu pandemic was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. Scientists also speculate that AIDS is a monkey virus that jumped directly to humans.

Now bear with me ‘cause I’ll come back to that. But, in the meantime, anthropologists argue that humans have survived as a species, in part, because our ability to communicate allows us to weed out, through ostracism or physical elimination, the bloodthirsty bullies who would destroy our communities.

Unlike chimpanzees, we homo sapiens manage to silence our bullies in an effort to sustain our species.

Yet homo sapiens engineered the Holocaust. The Crusades. Destroyed priceless cultural artifacts—destroyed thought—during the Dark Ages and beyond. Introduced untold atrocities in the twentieth century. Engineered the disasppeared. And Rwanda. And Darfur.

Now we have reached another juncture when the Christianists have become the arrogant, aggressive iron-fisted bullies who are attempting to silence alternative viewpoints, to silence diversity.

In our time, it is the Donald Trumps of the world—the people who say, with glee, You’re fired! as we sit on our couches eating popcorn and celebrating such meanness—not the Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings Jrs or Bobby Kennedys of the world—who are revered, some photogenic asshole on Survivor who flexes his abs for the camera while stabbing a teammate in the back who is lauded as the new American hero.

Meanwhile, we have elected a president who used his Daddy’s connections to weasel his way out of serving in the armed services but now dons war gear in an effort to pass himself off as a hero. And a mean-spirited, heartless preacher who shows up at gay children’s funerals waving a “God Hates Fags” placards and shouting to the boy’s mourning parents that their child is in Hell where s/he belongs is celebrated as a moral hero by people who consider themselves moral.

We worship the biz school detritis of suburban America—the glamorous, consumer-branded offspring of corporate CEOs and the idle rich who will do anything in the name of bidness and retaining their status among the economic elite.

So I guess it makes sense that the Christianists have followed suit and realized that American citizens want a mean Jerry Falwell-type and not some kind-hearted country bumpkin Will Campbell-type who admonishes us to fulfill Christ’s directive to love one another, damn it!

Evangelists who once proclaimed Jesus’s message of love and inclusiveness now strut their power on stage and their hatred over the radio waves, garner control from their tax-protected pulpits and rake in millions spreading hatred as God’s unerring truth.

Modernity, twentieth-century German Jewish philosophers Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno argue, is marked by a superstitious worship of oppressive force (and by a concomitant reliance on oblivion, poet Carolyn Forché would add).

I fear people who are convinced that they hold the only version of truth, perhaps because I grew up surrounded by too damn many fundamentalists who wanted to control my and everyone else’s mind, body, and soul. I fear people like Eric Rudolph who are so convinced that their god gives them the right to silence all other interpretations of truth that they believe they are justified in walking into a bar and spraying nails into fellow human beings.

And I fear the neighborhood Eric Rudolphs who spread homohate and misogyny across their kitchen tables and backyard fences.

Today, American universities, like universities in Tehran and other theocracies, are teeming with students who “have an unwavering moral compass that is not swayed by public opinion” (as several grad. students informed me before refusing to complete a writing assignment that required them to argue both sides of an issue).

It’s no longer paranoid to imagine American students reporting professors who don’t espouse the presidential administration’s iron-fisted policies to some thought Gestapo that will monitor library books and e-mail and telephone calls, hold us without cause for indeterminate periods of time without ever pressing charges because we spoke out in the name of justice, democracy.

Professors who dare discuss a controversial topic (or who insist that students stick to the topic instead of monopolizing discussion time with their repeated bigotry) are dragged through the mud in newspapers and punished for preaching reason.

Meanwhile, a university degree is something to be purchased, just a piece of paper that suburban parents buy for their children like designer clothes.

But what about knowledge for the sake of knowledge, enlightenment? That’s what kept me working to pay my tuition even when I was exhausted, what keeps my artist friends and me up nights reveling in new ideas and exploring new ways of thinking and seeing and interpreting and moving in the world, our place in it.

My mother used to threaten to send me to Bob Jones University when I mocked Baptist doctrines and I count my blessings every day that religious school vouchers were not available back when I was a kid. I try to remember to recognize how fortunate I am that I was able to attend public schools where—at least in some cases—such narrow doctrines were challenged.

But today Christianists are in a position to hold their children prisoner to these ignorant views, to define the conversation within the parameters of their own narrow world view. And, since Reagan did away with balanced reporting, Christianists can purchase television shows (on, say, the National Geographic channel) that assert their so-called Intelligent Design or whatever philosophy they’re currently espousing as scientific truth without justifying it.

Did you know that there are two different rafting tours down the Grand Canyon: one for scientists and one for people who espouse the theory of intelligent design? Ponder that. And even the once-credible New York Times spends far too much time furthering the president’s agenda instead of presenting objective news (but that’s a topic for another day).

What comes to us via our TV screens and the radio and in our newspapers today may not be factual, may instead be whatever message a sponsor paid for us to hear.

Or shall I just state the obvious: Our reality is determined by the market.

Christianists would argue that science is but an advertisement as well, but some of them have never even taken a legitimate science course from a legitimate scientist. Why then should they be allowed to lecture about this field of expertise?

So many Americans—like Bush’s current Supreme Court nominee—base their world view solely on what they define as the perfect word of God and insist that patterns found in our natural world are immaterial.

Carolyn Forché notes, in her introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, that

the gap between self and other opens up the problem of relativism that has bedeviled modern philosophy, politics, and poetry. Respect for otherness seems always to release the specter of an infinite regress. The language of religion therefore becomes quite important in this supposedly secular century, for religion traditionally makes claims for universality and unimpeachable truth.

And some of the most flagrant forms of institutionalized violence in our era, she notes, have been directed toward specific religions (during the Holocaust) or against religion in general (as in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe).

Religion in our age of atrocity bears substantial responsibility for human suffering.

I try to believe that most of us are reasonable people who are likewise appalled by the fact that we seem to be worshipping Donald Trump.

(Surely that must appall people at some level.)

I try to believe these people are grasping for morals in a world that feels increasingly out of control and meaningless.

The Christian church is an easy answer in such a world. It provides a social outlet for our children, still teaches the Golden Rule, offers up a (patriotic) version of the Ten Commandments, the promise of salvation, clear boundaries.

The problem is, the modern evangelical movement, the fundamentalists, are also attempting to introduce a new dark ages.

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISTS SUCCEED?

A lawyer friend and I have long philosophical conversations as often as we can manage. Her lawyer husband was on Clinton’s shortlist to be the next Supreme Court justice and said, after the Meiers nomination, We’ve gotten it all wrong. We thought it was abortion, but it’s religion. The ultimate goal is not to overturn Roe v. Wade, but to force their religious beliefs onto the rest of us.

That writing’s been on the wall for some time now.

My friend is re-reading Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale now and it’s scaring the living shit out of her. She says she still can’t believe that we’re actually in a place where the possibility of waking up to discover that her bank account has been closed and her money placed in her husband’s account does not seem so far outside the realm of possibility anymore.

I think of the homeschooled Christianist children, the ones who never even get a chance to experience Enlightenment thought, in terms of Plato’s Parable of the Cave. They’re indoctrinated now, afraid, unable to turn their heads and acknowledge the light at the opening of the cave, and thus continue to insist that the world is black and white, without nuance, without subtlety. They’re rigid with fear and ignorant, yet insist that everyone else see the world through their narrow black and white lens.

There’s a reason Hitler went after the artists, the free-thinkers, first. A reason the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti was sent to forced-labor camp where his words were silenced.

Carolyn Forché notes that,

as North Americans, we have been fortunate: wars for us [provided we are not combatants] are fought elsewhere, in other countries. The cities bombed are other people’s cities. The houses destroyed are other people’s houses. We are also fortunate in that we do not live under martial law [yet]. There are nominal restrictions on state censorship; our citizens are not sent into exile. We are legally and juridicially free to choose our associates, and to determine our communal lives. But perhaps we should not consider our social lives as merely products of our choice: the social is a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protests disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.

Still, I stand by Bertolt Brecht’s belief: In the dark times ... there will be singing. About the dark times.

Yet (Medea says, finally getting back to those scientists and the bird flu that jumped to the human species and making a huge specious leap), sometimes I wonder if we should compare this cowboy Christianist mindset that now dominates our land to rogue chimpanzee behavior that threatens whole species.

128. THE DISAPPEARED

From the Archives

(July 2005) Continuing my earlier riff about the disappeared and those shiny happy people who present themselves as so freakin’ wholesome while doing so much harm.

Carolyn Forché identifies herself as a poet of witness. She says “I have been told that a poet should be of his or her own time. It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness. This is not accomplished without certain difficulties. If I did not wish to make poetry of what I had seen, what is it I thought poetry was?”

Gathering The Tribes (1976), her first collection, won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The Country between Us (1982), a volume that focused on the civil war in El Salvador during the 1970s, won the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. This prize, which Minnie Bruce Pratt also won for Crimes against Nature, recognizes the best second book of poetry published in the US. Forché’s other books include the prescient landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which she edited, and The Angel of History (1994).

She read this poem years ago at my writing program and I can still hear her voice as she described the travesty of a grocery bag full of human ears that a general poured onto a table in front of her.

RETURN
by Carolyn Forché

from The Country between Us

—for Josephine Crum

Upon my return to America, Josephine
the iced drinks and paper umbrellas, clean
toilets and Los Angeles palm trees moving
like lean women. I was afraid more than
I had been, even of motels so much so
that for nine months every tire blow-out
was final, every strange car near the house
kept watch and I strained even to remember
things impossible to forget. You took
my stories apart for hours, sitting
on your sofa with your legs under you
and fifty years in your face.
So you know
now, you said, what kind of money
is involved and that campesinos knife
one another and you know you should
not trust anyone and so you find a few
people you will trust. You know the mix
of machetes with whiskey, the slip of the tongue
that costs hundreds of deaths.
You’ve seen the pits where men and women
are kept the few days it takes without
food and water. You’ve heard the cocktail
conversation on which their release depends.
So you’ve come to understand why
men and women of good will read
torture reports with fascination.
Such things as water pumps
and co-op farms are of little importance
and take years.
It is not Ché Guevara, this struggle.
Camillo Torres is dead. Victor Jara
was rounded up with the others, and José
Martí is a landing strip for planes
from Miami to Cuba. Go try on
Americans your long, dull story
of corruption, but better to give
them what they want: Li’l Milagro Ramirez,
who after years of confinement did not
know what year it was, how she walked
with help and was forced to shit in public.
Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
Dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all
Who fucked her, how many times and when.
Tell them about retaliation: José lying
on the flat bed truck, waving his stumps
in your face, his hands cut off by his
captors and thrown to the many acres
of cotton, lost, still, and holding
the last few lumps of leeched earth.
Tell them of José in his last few hours
and later how, many months earlier,
a labor leader was cut to pieced and buried.
Tell them how his friends found
the soldiers and made them dig him up
and ask forgiveness of the corpse, once
it was assembled again on the ground
like a man. As for the cars, of course
they watch you and for this don’t flatter
yourself. We are all watched. We are
all assembled.

Josephine, I tell you
I have not rested, not since I drove
those streets with a gun in my lap,
not since all manner of speaking has
failed and the remnant of my life
continues onward. I go mad, for example,
in the Safeway, at the many heads
of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples
and coffee, especially the coffee.
And when I speak with American men,
there is some absence of recognition:
their constant Scotch and fine white
hands, many hours of business, penises
hardened by motor inns and a faint
resemblance to their wives. I cannot
keep going. I remember the American
attaché in that country: his tanks
of fish, his clicking pen, his rapt
devotion to reports. His wife wrote
his reports. She said as much as she
gathered him each day from the embassy
compound, that she was tired of covering
up, sick of drinking and the loss
of his last promotion. She was a woman
who flew her own plane, stalling out
after four martinis to taxi on an empty
field in the campo and to those men
and women announce she was there to help.
She flew where she pleased in that country
With her drunken kindness, while Marines
In white gloves were assigned to protect
Her husband. It was difficult work, what
With the suspicion on the rise in smaller
countries that gringos die like other men.
I cannot, Josephine, talk to them,

And so, you say, you’ve learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicians, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
Then they cup their own parts
with their bed sheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer heave the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are trying to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.

So take a moment and ask yourself what Audre Lorde admonishes US women to ask: “How am I using my power?”

101. BOURGEOIS BLUES

From the Archives

(May 2005) Found the words and chords to the old Leadbelly song "Bourgeois Blues" a while back and hashed out a tune on the guitar. I've never heard the recorded version, so don’t know if my approach is anything like Leadbelly's, but do like the one I created.

Listen here people, listen to me. Don’t try to find no home down in Washington, DC. Lawd it’s a bourgeois town. oh it's a bourgeois town. I got the bourgeois blues—gonna spread the news around.

White folks in Washington they know how to throw a colored man a nickel just to see him bow. Lawd it's a bourgeois town. Oh it's a bourgeois town. I got the bourgeois blues—gonna spread the news around.

Yeah.

I played it for a pal today and she said my voice is perfectly suited for rot-gut blues. Taught her a few chords too in the coruse of introducing her to Lucinda Williams’s and GIllian Welch's music.

I'm thinking Dm and A7 and B7 and G and C can take her a long ways with them—and everyone needs to learn how to play Lucinda's "Hot Love."

Lucinda’s songs aren’t even complicated really, and some of her rhymes make me laugh out loud. Example: The sun's so hot and my heart is thumping. Let me buy you a beer or somethin’. You’ve been traveling a hard road. Sit down Bill and lighten your load. .

I love her twang and her passion, and find her allusions to American poets wonderful.

Lucinda's father runs the Arkansas writing program and is a really good translator.

One of the poets associated with the program committed suicide years ago and this shows up in her songs from time to time (see "Lake Charles," "Pineola," and "Sweet Old World," especially).

So here’s a Miller Williams translation that I really like. The poem is by Nicanor Parra (1914–), a Chilean academic who refused to leave the country after the coup that brought Pinochet to power. Instead he established himself as a voice of dissent.

Carolyn Forché says that Parra's poetry "imparts a quality of multiple estrangement and exemplifies his deep commitment to what he calls anti-poetry—a rejection of poetic language and conventions” (from her brilliant compilation Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness).

SENTENCES
by Nicanor Parra
(translated by Miller Williams)

Let’s no fool ourselves.
The automobile is a wheelchair
A lion is made of lambs
Poets have no biographies
Death is a collective habit
Children are born to be happy
Reality has a tendency to fade away
Fucking is a diabolical act
God is a good friend of the poor.

I scratched that poem onto a piece of silver paper with a nail and posted it on my bulletin board at work. People never fail to comment on it too.

•

In other news, I came across a sobering statistic about our depreciating currency today. The US's deficit in international transactions reached $666 billion in 2004, which is up 24 percent from 2003. That’s 5.7 percent of the economy (2–3 times what economists generally consider sustainable) ... but Shrub is a compassionate conservative looking after our money, right?

So here’s my obscure joke of the day: Q. What nationality are you? A. Depreciating currency.