"Get Drunk"
One should always be drunk. That's the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.
Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.
And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: "It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please."
- Charles Baudelaire
One should always be drunk. That's the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.
Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.
And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: "It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please."
- Charles Baudelaire
"What moron said that knowledge is power? Knowledge is power only if it doesn't depress you so much that it leaves you in an immobile heap at the end of your bed."
-Paula Poundstone
-Paula Poundstone
"No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful."
- They Might Be Giants, "Don't Let's Start"
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful."
- They Might Be Giants, "Don't Let's Start"
A FAVORITE POEM I FIRST READ IN GRAD SCHOOL:
"The Solution" by Sharon Olds
Finally they got the Singles problem under control, they made it scientific. They opened huge Sex Centers--you could simply go and state what you want and they would find you someone who wanted that too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to Be Touched and Held and when someone came and stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.
At first it went great. A steady stream of people under the sign I Like to Give Pain paired up with a steady stream of people from under I Like to Receive Pain. Foreplay Only-No Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only-No Foreplay matched up its believers. A loyal Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a
Sheet, because that's the only way it was legal in Berkeley-but he stood there a long time in his lonely blue law coat. And the man under I Like to Be Sung to White Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been there weeks without a reply.
Things began to get strange. The Love Only-No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only-No Love was doing well, pair after pair walking out together like wooden animals off a child's ark, but the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly, shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet-No Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.
The din rose in the vast room. The line under I Want to Be Fucked Senseless was so long that portable toilets had to be added and a minister brought for deaths, births, and marriages on the line. Over under I Want to Fuck Senseless--no one, a pile of guns. A hollow roaring filled the enormous gym. More and more people began to move over to Want to Be Fucked Senseless. The line snaked around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into the fields. More and more people joined it, until
Fucked Senseless stretched across the nation in a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they had to name it they named it, they called it the American Way.
"The Solution" by Sharon Olds
Finally they got the Singles problem under control, they made it scientific. They opened huge Sex Centers--you could simply go and state what you want and they would find you someone who wanted that too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to Be Touched and Held and when someone came and stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.
At first it went great. A steady stream of people under the sign I Like to Give Pain paired up with a steady stream of people from under I Like to Receive Pain. Foreplay Only-No Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only-No Foreplay matched up its believers. A loyal Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a
Sheet, because that's the only way it was legal in Berkeley-but he stood there a long time in his lonely blue law coat. And the man under I Like to Be Sung to White Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been there weeks without a reply.
Things began to get strange. The Love Only-No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only-No Love was doing well, pair after pair walking out together like wooden animals off a child's ark, but the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly, shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet-No Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.
The din rose in the vast room. The line under I Want to Be Fucked Senseless was so long that portable toilets had to be added and a minister brought for deaths, births, and marriages on the line. Over under I Want to Fuck Senseless--no one, a pile of guns. A hollow roaring filled the enormous gym. More and more people began to move over to Want to Be Fucked Senseless. The line snaked around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into the fields. More and more people joined it, until
Fucked Senseless stretched across the nation in a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they had to name it they named it, they called it the American Way.
Wisdom from Os Guinness' book, "The Case for Civility":
"...the incessant culture warring trivializes and distorts important issues and reduces America to a Punch-and-Judy democracy in which cartoon stereotypes rail at each other with no serious engagement, let alone deliberation and debate... Many who start with thoughtful positions slip into a partisanship in which team playing trumps truth, decency degenerates into malice, and constant attacks become a hostility that hardens into extremism...
"In the bitter clash of polar views, the truths at stake are lost and each side becomes the other's double, the closest reflection of the other, the main argument for the other, and the chief fund-raiser for the other. The finger-wagging, mudslinging accusations reinforce the perceptions of the other side as the dangerous and aggressive enemy. Every conservative becomes 'the Far Right,' and every liberal 'the far Left.' What some do once is taken to stand for all that the enemy 'is really about.' Each side, hypocritical enough to pretend that it lives up to its own hype, is equally insistent that the other side's worst is truly all that it is."
I wish that everyone could be this reasonable and self-aware. I mean, in between looking at pretty girls naked, wouldn't it be great if we examined our own behavior and treated each other with respect, regardless of our differences?
Be good, everyone!
"...the incessant culture warring trivializes and distorts important issues and reduces America to a Punch-and-Judy democracy in which cartoon stereotypes rail at each other with no serious engagement, let alone deliberation and debate... Many who start with thoughtful positions slip into a partisanship in which team playing trumps truth, decency degenerates into malice, and constant attacks become a hostility that hardens into extremism...
"In the bitter clash of polar views, the truths at stake are lost and each side becomes the other's double, the closest reflection of the other, the main argument for the other, and the chief fund-raiser for the other. The finger-wagging, mudslinging accusations reinforce the perceptions of the other side as the dangerous and aggressive enemy. Every conservative becomes 'the Far Right,' and every liberal 'the far Left.' What some do once is taken to stand for all that the enemy 'is really about.' Each side, hypocritical enough to pretend that it lives up to its own hype, is equally insistent that the other side's worst is truly all that it is."
I wish that everyone could be this reasonable and self-aware. I mean, in between looking at pretty girls naked, wouldn't it be great if we examined our own behavior and treated each other with respect, regardless of our differences?
Be good, everyone!
"The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state...
People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by ALL of the people... Citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism."
- Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals"
Have been reading recently and came across Alinsky's book. Loved this quote and noted that it didn't say to be free people had to sacrifice their RIGHTS, as Mr. Bush seems to believe. It just says we have to sacrifice some of our interests (perhaps like an evening of video games or sitcoms) and PARTICIPATE in our own government.
Love that. Makes me feel like running for mayor or something and undermining the malaise and apathy of contemporary politicians.
Woo hoo. Who wants to kick some ass?
People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by ALL of the people... Citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism."
- Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals"
Have been reading recently and came across Alinsky's book. Loved this quote and noted that it didn't say to be free people had to sacrifice their RIGHTS, as Mr. Bush seems to believe. It just says we have to sacrifice some of our interests (perhaps like an evening of video games or sitcoms) and PARTICIPATE in our own government.
Love that. Makes me feel like running for mayor or something and undermining the malaise and apathy of contemporary politicians.
Woo hoo. Who wants to kick some ass?
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They don't mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you."
-Philip Larkin
They don't mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you."
-Philip Larkin
FEBRUARY 2010
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JANUARY 2010
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