I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Edgar Allen Poe

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
- H. L. Mencken

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
-Bertrand Russell

What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
-James Branch Cabell

August 28, 2013 - 12:00 p.m.

An Unearlthy Child

I started writing ridiculously late yesterday and it's late now but much better. Next week school starts and I'll be writing during my break between classes.

I did not get out of the house till after 6 PM last night. I didn't shower till not long before then. That's not good. Today I'm getting myself to move. After I did shower I didn't leave immediately because I had my very first conversation on my new phone, We shouldn't really call smart phones, phones. That is not what we primarily use them for. I've had the phone a week and this was my first call. I wish I used it more for conversation but I don't. They are pocket computers with a phone function. I'm glad to report that Katherine said she heard me much better than on my old one, That is one of the main reasons I needed a new phone. Nobody could understand me on the old one. The conversation consisted largely of "what did you say?"

I left hear at 6:30 to go shopping at Trader Joe's and had to be back here in time to leave for a 9 PM show in the East Village. I did well. I made it out at 8:06 which should have given me plenty of time. It didn't. There was a local at the platform but it is usually faster to take the express . I couldn't read the sign that gives the time to the next trains from the end of the platform and by the time I moved close enough to see it the had pulled out. To my dismay I saw that the next was not for 8 minutes. There would have been faster. I could take the to Union Square but it is almost always faster to switch at Atlantic for the . Of course yesterday it wasn't. Three trains stop at the platform that I don't want,. Five trains came before mine. Yes two came twice. I've seen Miss Tess three times at the 11th Street Bar and was late each time. I'm never late. I got there at 9:06 and she had already started.

My new pocket computer has a much better camera than my old one. As I use the camera more than I use the phone should I call it a camera? There are only four pics I want to show you so I just will, no slideshow.

I also took a video. The quality is good. Tess's performance was great, unfortunately it was ruined by the people talking. Funny it didn't bother me that much in person as I just shut it out but it is glaring on the recording. That's the problem with playing at a bar. The City needs more listening rooms. Then we could leave the bars to bar bands playing covers and not expecting people to listen.

This is my third week in a row seeing Tess and you can't expect me to come up with new insights that often. I do but you can't. I had one but it needed the video to illustrate it. I might try and find another video of her doing the song and post that. If I do it will come later. I didn't and I'll leave well enough alone. So I'll just leave you with the thought that I felt that Miss Tess was worth seeing three weeks in a row in a venue I don't care for that is difficult to get to.

I posted this on Facebook:

Here's the deal. No more posting about the VMA. I just isn't that important one way or another and more than enough space in everyone's brain has been taken up by it already.
Of course I wouldn't be me if I didn't find something in it worth thinking about. What happened is totally unimportant; what I thought about is why so many intelligent people, my friends, felt the need to comment on it. Part of it of course is that sex makes people stupid, even intelligent people. But I've been there and done that and looked elsewhere. Part of it is that we knew Miley as a kid, that's the image in our heads, so we get hit by cognitive dissonance. But of course that's silly. Everyone that does everything was a kid; every villain, every sage, every saint. Osama bin Laden was a kid, Albert Einstein was a kid, Martin Luther King was a kid. You and I were kids. And that kid never leaves us. I immediately thought of this passage of James Branch Cabell's The Cream of the Jest. If I were to explain the background it would take a book. It's all part of the the most perfect fantasy realm created. But the writing is sharp enough that the passage stands by itself.
I have held much filthy traffic, with treachery and theft and murder, traffic such as my soul loathed: and to no avail! Yes, I have been guilty of many wickednesses, as men estimate these matters; and yet, I swear to you, I seem to myself to be still that boy with whom you used to play, when you too were a child, Ettarre, and did not hate me.
Thus is for all of us. We are pearls, adding layers of nacre to make us smooth and gleaming but in the center is the rough piece of sand, the child we were, that never disappears.


I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.





Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018



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Horvendile August 28, 2013
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