Amazingly enough, Gentle Reader, I got monster flu number three! Yes! From my neighbor who flew halfway around the world and brought us all back….bwha hahawb..cough…..cabin fever. This was especially festive stuff which turned both my eyes bright red and caused mucky ooze to stick them shut. Plus…well. Never mind. Viruses are fun, especially the mood swings.
Whilst trying to remember it WAS “just” flu and marshalling herbs and things to combat the infestation (I recommend usnea, elderberry, ginger to drink as teas and oregano, thyme and ravensara oils to breathe in. Works wonders.) I watched a fair amount of television and my eyes had ungummed enough to sit through Lawrence of Arabia over the weekend. Followed by hearing the aptly named Larry Fink, grand mucky muck of Blackrock, interviewed by Charlie Rose. There, when I had just got my head uncongested, I went and let it explode again.
Lawrence of Arabia really floored me. When I first saw it, I was of course struck by the Grand Sweep, The Romance, The Handsomeness. This time? It seemed more like a documentary or something you’d see on the news now. Same places and towns, same fights, same viciousness and perversity, same black flags, same evil multinational manipulation and same half crazed individuals taking center stage. Really? A hundred years later and we are still in the same place? I felt like a foolish and deluded bear for sure.
Then, there was the Interview of Fink. Hannah Arendt was very right when she described the banality of evil. This guy? Aside from the manicure and slash mouth, he looks in fact quite banal. And seems to be thinking that the propaganda the Legacy Group dishes out is true or at least ACTS that way. I wonder if in his own mind he knows what total shits he and his cohorts are? An incredible thing he said, as a good economic indicator, is how great technology is. America is uniquely positioned to gear up for manufacturing jobs again, and the great thing is they won’t require many human employees. So the employers could actually “pay them five or ten more dollars an hour”, there being fewer of them and all. And since the labor costs are lower, YEEHAW. Profits up the kabonga. He also thinks more entrants in the oil and gas production sector will make more product available and more people will buy that product, i.e. gasoline. In one swell foop he just shovels cement over the deep holes of unemployment, poverty and inequality, and of course climate change. I wonder who the hell is going to be able to consume all the crap he visualizes being made? When they don’t have jobs which would provide them with money. Also when the earth has been so destroyed by human activity that you can’t do anything anyway. Maybe I’m missing something here. The one thing he DID at least admit is that we don’t need the Keystone pipeline. Kind of a shocking admission, but even then he extolled the safety of a pipeline and drilling over rail transport. Those dratted rail cars to tend to turn over and despoil vast areas, after all. ( I guess he and Warren Buffett may not be seeing eye to eye. Anyway.) Why not just blow it all to hell to begin with and get it over?
Honestly. Some times I despair. But then I think, well. I’m still here and that must count for something. There must be some balance somewhere and things do change. In the meantime, Spring has made its brief appearance. They joke up here, yes, that if you go away for the weekend you’ll miss Spring and it is true. A couple of years we had a splendid pink radiance from all the buds on the oak trees before they became green, which was totally astounding. This year the poor dry things have just leafed out, overnight, with their translucent green brilliance. It is amazing and all the bluebirds and jays provide just the spark of color needed. The shooting stars have come up and some of the California Valerian and Queen Anne’s Lace.
I kind of thought (” “) in the press of all the recent stuff that a sensible course of action would be to fill my brain with the awe I feel looking at those leaves outside instead of the rage I feel when listening to what passes for Power in our world. You can’t pay attention, and you can’t NOT pay attention, and one element in today’s weirdness is that even though supposedly there’s all this information around so many people are completely unaware of what’s going on three blocks away from them- so therefore it doesn’t exist. It’s an interesting effort, because one thing that happens, if you’re honest, when you listen to those Power Puffs, is that you realize they not only don’t care about you. It’s that they really find you completely expendable once you don’t fit as a cog somewhere in their apparatus. You truly have no value. Since the things the Power Puffs are talking about are often matters of life and death it is hard to know what to think. But I’ve decided at long last, and I think I can stick to this, to go with the magic I know outside the walls instead of the destruction being offered inside them.
It can be hard to live a life based on proper foundations. We confuse our wants and needs and complicate things over and over, expecting something outside us like another person or a job or whatever it might be to provide peace and satisfaction. That isn’t really the way it works long term, however, and things built on faulty foundations wind up falling down and having to be rebuilt. We’re all obviously right smack in the middle of such a coming rebuild, and perhaps the best thing to do is to concentrate, refine, simplify. Once you’ve done that on a material level, the real fun starts because then? You get to do the same thing in your head! Good fun and well worth it, however. And we definitely have to approach our lives with a different set of concepts than we started out with if we want to get somewhere different. Which I think we do. What would we look like if we let ourselves just simply be who we really are? Not the exploded drag queen/superstar/perfect toothed/master of industry/size 00/rich/monetized-so-I-Think-I’m Happy version of it, but just the real day to day unsequinned version- the humor and endurance that makes the full dress version of oneself, when it comes out, so wonderful. A real endeavor, this- to see it is all always there, and somehow that we may pick a path that, if not totally good for all, at least does no harm. My Bulgarian yogurt came out well, and that I suppose is a good start, and finish, for today.
Blessings and thanks.
Boozilla: learning to fly one room at a time 