UNREMITTING FAILURE

From a Great Man

"There is no way of telling people they are all walking around shining like the sun."

Thomas Merton

The Ancient Parakeet

Was mad, he had given up repeating all the words he knew and had started to make up his own, dada words from the Antonin Artaud of birds, and at night he would escape his cage, then sail out the open window, to buzz and torment the people leaving the bars with his squawks of "Ka-ra-rezemption!" and "Make your fat way home, fatty fat person!" Granted, those were real words. He was more likely to cry, "Skquibble skzatt!" Sometimes he would fly into the bars and the patrons would buy him drinks. He was a garrulous drunk, and alcohol seemed to return him temporarily to sanity. He told us once, "If you're really honest about it, life I mean, you will agree the best mashed potatoes are made from barbed wire." We could hardly debate him on the fact.

And if we claim to be a wise man

It surely means that we don't know. A great man said that. His name was Kansas. No first name, middle initial. A man of seventies stadium rock show sorcery. Just Kansas.

Took the Words Right Out of Our Mouth

"I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism... seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind."

Arthur Schopenhauer

 

If You Can't Imagine a World

Any world, in which you are not a stranger, then you are of no good to God, nor the Devil. You have a spiritual vocation, certainly. Homelessness makes you a prophet, in a vacuum. You are an arid saint, and you will wander all the days of your life barefoot in the desert, the survivor of a birth more futile than any war.

Ornery and Foul Fowl

"What the fuck are you looking at?"

Wilfred Owen's "Futility"

Sadness Come Down Like Rain

On the hearts of all of us, on the city streets and country roads, in the darkness in which we wander our whole lives, towards the lighted windows of houses we see but never seem to find, where they sit and wait for us, all of our dear departed ones, and some day we will come to the river, darkly flowing, and we will wander into that river, until the current takes us, and on our backs we shall see the stars glittering above us, Orion guiding us home, Orion guiding us home.

Lost Weekend

We saw, but failed to purchase, Charles Jackson's 1944 novel The Lost Weekend at the used bookstore  yesterday. We don't know why. It's right up there with Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Jack Kerouac's Big Sur, and Hans Fallada's The Drinker in its stark depiction of total alcoholic desperation. Indeed, we found it the most harrowing of the pantheon and we recommend it highly. It lacks the poetic merit of the other books, but makes up for it by its horrifying realism. Read at your own risk!

Ye Shall Judge a Man by His Fruits

Confederate general Stonewall Jackson liked to suck on lemons during battle. We don't know why, but this makes us like Stonewall Jackson more than we would otherwise.