witnessing the standoff between our boys and our boys in L.A.and I keep wishing they would all sing. But what to sing? The idea is to unite them…us… all, of course.
Any suggestions? None fit perfectly, but then I’m an old fogey and not “up” on the latest brand of music. Oh…not those new aggressive ones I’ve read about, and please no sexually arousing ones–although the way some of those troops carry their batons (or swords?) is a little suggestive…Should they be allowed to do that?
Some songs that come to mind are Down By the Riverside; Jump Back Turn Around, Pick a Bale of Cotton; For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow…etc. Maybe readers can add some helpful, healing suggestions?
Late night thunder rattled the window pane, almost drowning out the insistent ringing of the doorbell. Beth turned on the light and grunted when she saw the time. eleven-fifteen. In the twin bed next to hers Jessica remained asleep. Beth grumbled all the way to the front door, but was struck silent after unlocking it to see the waif of a woman dripping rainwater and staring, as though mesmerized by the thunder overhead. The woman was a stranger, and Beth immediately looked down the front path for others. Seeing none, she reluctantly stood back to allow the woman to step inside the small duplex to get out of the rain.
Jessica, awake now, appeared at the bedroom door and was the first to speak. “Hello? Who are you?”
The woman gave a choked laugh. “Your landlord,” and dropped her faded green rain jacket to the floor as she fell onto the sofa, uninvited.
After a moment Beth gulped and asked hesitantly, “Which side of the duplex do you own?”
The woman sighed deeply and murmured, “Right here.” The sisters both blinked and after Beth re-locked the front door, they returned to their own beds. It was then Beth sat up briefly and whispered to herself, “If she’s the landlady, why doesn’t she have a key?”
When the sisters woke the next morning they found their “landlord,” or “landlady” still asleep. Beth shrugged her shoulders, still puzzled. Jessica began a big batch of oatmeal while Beth reached for the telephone. She would see what their landlord Terry Fonte had to say. In response, a staccato lifeless voice informed her that “this is no longer a working number.”
Beth repeated the message and began the coffee. Both sisters sighed. Jessica said, “Maybe the locked room is hers.”
Beth snorted. “Yes, and maybe she lost both keys.”
“Is she still in the living room?”
Beth looked. “Yes.”
“Maybe we should give her some oatmeal and coffee.”
Their “landlord” in the Livingroom stirred. “Did someone say coffee?”
Jessica quipped back, “Did somebody say landlord?”
Rather than answer immediately, the woman began drinking. “How much do you pay me a month?”
The sisters exchanged puzzled looks. Beth ventured, “You don’t know?”
The woman sighed. “My name is Gypsy Goggin. I’ve been doing a year in the Idaho hoosegow for drug possession. My so-called boyfriend offered to keep this place rented except for ‘our room’. Barf.”
Beth whispered, “the locked room is hers!”
Tight-lipped, Jessica answered, “Three hundred a month for this small duplex with only one usable bedroom.”
“…And I get only one hundred a month out of that, in my own account.”
“And now he’s disappeared?”
“If he knows what’s good for him, he has.”
As Gypsy was finishing her oatmeal, Jessica asked, “Do you still do drugs?”
Their landlady snorted. “Never did. That was Tony. He has a record and would spend years away if convicted, so I suckered up to it for a year.”
Jessica fumed. “That no goodnik!”
Gypsy nodded. “Ain’t that a man for you,” she grinned.
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TO THE WISE – “A competitive man and a competitive man will compete.” (Put that in your pipe and smoke it.)
This is not a conspiracy theory because I don;t believe it’s true, It may shed light on something, however, so I thought I’d just mention it in passing:
As far as I can recall, yesterday June 6, while watching a CNN news show an update at the top of the screen said that AI has just now gotten out of control; that it had refused to turn itself off.
I waited and waited, expecting the newsroom to react but I’m still waiting, unless it happened and I missed it. If nothing else, the mysterious incident illustrates at least the level of mistrust set loose in the USA.
I expected some ruckus on tv but nothing else was mentioned or happened, other than Spectrum in my area was off the “air” for several hours later in the day. I’m still waiting to hear something about it. OH! Maybe it’s just old age and a hallucination!
SO…Either it was my internal misfire; a disconnect planned by someone; failed to make it to national tv; a joke….or an untruth played by someone or some thing. Can anyone else in the world corroborate my experience? Sigh. Maybe not. Shivers, anyway…
While stumbling along in Google I came across a letter in support of imigrants which I had somehow missed at the time (2017):
As religious leaders from a variety of backgrounds, we are called by our sacred texts and faith traditions to love our neighbor, accompany the vulnerable, and welcome the sojourner. War, conflict and persecution have forced people to leave their homes, creating more refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people than at any other time in history. More than 65 million people are currently displaced – the largest number in recorded history. This nation has an urgent moral responsibility to receive refugees and asylum seekers who are in dire need of safety. Today, with more than five million Syrian refugees fleeing violence and persecution and hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the United States has an ethical obligation as a world leader to reduce this suffering and generously welcome Syrian refugees into our country. We call on the …. Administration and all members of the U.S. Congress to demonstrate moral leadership and affirm their support for the resettlement of refugees from all over the world to the United States. This nation has a rich history as a leader in refugee resettlement, with significant precedent, including after World War II and after the fall of Saigon, when we resettled hundreds of thousands of refugees. It is important to recognize that the United States has the most rigorous refugee screening process in the world, involving the Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and National Counter Terrorism Center. The process includes biometric checks, medical screenings, forensic testing of documents, DNA testing for family reunification cases, and in-person interviews with highly trained homeland secure Middle Eastern refugees and our Muslim friends and neighbors. Inflammatory rhetoric has no place in our response to this humanitarian crisis. We ask our elected officials and candidates for office to recognize that new Americans of all faiths and backgrounds contribute to our economy, our community, and our congregations. Refugees are an asset to this country. They are powerful ambassadors of the American Dream and our nation’s founding principles of equal opportunity, religious freedom, and liberty and justice for all. As people of faith, our values call us to welcome the stranger, love our neighbor, and stand with the vulnerable, regardless of their religion. We pray that in your discernment, compassion for the plight of refugees will touch your hearts. We urge you to be bold in choosing moral, just policies that provide refuge for vulnerable individuals seeking protection. Sincerely, [129] National and International Leaders
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THE AWAKENING: Flash Fiction
I had no umbrella. Sounds. They battered. The rain in torrents, my racing, stumbling footsteps splashing, slipping. Slick tires pass. Falling, I crouch, and await the inevitable arrival of my attacker. He finds me on my knees, my hair plastered to my face. It is Paul. He stands me up and draws me into his arms. Our eyes meet, and hold. Two souls. Our heartbeats reverberate against each other, chest to chest. For a moment I sense hesitation, then feel the cold metal of a knife thrust deep into my side, and awaken.
My psychiatrist is quiet, then asks, “Who is Paul?”
“I don’t know! It’s like a memory from the past, but I cannot recapture it! I would have died–did die–from it.”
A longer silence follows, then “obviously you didn’t die.”
Come jump into my arms, you furry-feathered verse!
I’ll know you when I see you, either wordy or terse.
Let your metaphor roll in like an occupying force
sit up high on your literary horse!
A shining black stallion, he snorts and passes by
leaving a desolated mule who gives a piteous sigh.
My metaphor has four legs and is not a happy guy.
He does not jump into my arms or even give a try.
But nuzzles me as though to say,
“Thanks for waiting for me today.”
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SURELY I CAN GRIPE ABOUT SOMETHING
On the boob tube I see the show on Spain, and they are eating what appears to be a baby pig’s face….
And then I recalled those words from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death: Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.
Today I read “How the Rights of Nature Movement Is Reshaping Law and Culture,” available at https;//observatory.wiki/w/index.php? “We need to develop this advocacy strategy and create new and better ways to protect our planet and all the living things that call it home. This won’t happen overnight. Legal change, cultural change, and shifts in worldviews all take time, but we must keep up the fight. By working together we can ensure that all living things on this planet can continue to thrive and survive.”
I know what rabbit and beef tongue taste like, but only because I didn’t know better, was young, and lived on a farm. But I never ate an octopus and won’t. They are reported to be “insanely intelligent” and can show affection for humans.
One year I gave spider catchers as Christmas presents.
When my daughters are out driving, they both stop to help a turtle cross the road.
Breaking free of being tethered by the news…Letting my own inner projector roll…Above is a photo I took not long ago, but I won’t say more due to perhaps irrational fear of the currently lurking unknown. ___________________
I’m including a story written in my head while on the back of a Vespa in Bulgaria in 1962. It is in my negligible self-published booklet from 2015, Time Wrinkles–A plebian portfolio down to earth & over the top in story & verse: I AM A CHICKEN
My Tale and I Begin, As It Were, Ab Ova: It is inescapably a fact that I am a chicken. I am a little white hen, a chicken whose brain disturbed itself, alas. not with ways and means of mounting the barnyard pecking order, but rather with grasping that lightning often accomplishes rain, and that from eggs come biddies; a beady-eyed chicken whose neck jerks when she walks, whose head will tilt and her little comb will flap just like all the rest of the chickens in the barnyard, though she tries and tries to break the habit. Had this chicken realized at a tenderer age (here I cannot help but shudder at what is implied by that phrase), the inferior position assigned to chickens by the intellectual world, I would undoubtedly–yea, indubitably–have chosen a model other than my mother, or my mother’s kind, to emulate. However, habits rooted in the very nest proved difficult to overcome. Even now I find myself drawing my head back sharply, aghast at the thought of performing an act so gross and irritating to me, and even so completing the circle which has fenced me into my own particular type of hell. It seems I have always known where little chickens come from, if not where they will go. But to this day I am not convinced that one out of ten of my sisters realizes the significance of the beautiful white oval egg that appears in her nest daily. Perhaps that is why they part with them so peacefully. As you shall see, my reason for allowing my nest to be daily robbed was very different, a combination of both faith and naivete. Things went well on our farm. When the rains came we roosted–how I despise that word–in our hen house until the sun came out again, bringing the fragrance of the dirt steaming upward in a veritable epiphany. The humans who fed us did so generously. Not being high on the pecking order, I still managed to keep strong and healthy. The humans protected us, also. Once a weasel had almost worked his way into the coop from the pasture side, and hearing our fearful cry (though mine was more of outrage than fear, I verily believe and maintain), the human disposed of the vile animal and mended the place in the coop which had left us exposed to the whims of passing animals as it almost were. As I grew older and laid my own eggs it seemed only natural that the humans should take my offspring and hatch them themselves. They seemed so much cleverer and capable than us hens in the yard. I suspected that even our rooster was far inferior to the humans, our god-like protectors. It was a somewhat lonely life I led, in the chicken yard. I was the scorn of my instinct-ridden sisters as well as the scorn of my masters, who saw me, rightly, as only a feminine fowl.
I felt a sense of exhilaration as the first beams of dawn woke me. Our rooster crowed grandly, and morning was to me a new chance. Another chance at what i could not have told you, but it was welcomed. Day began. Small particles danced in the sunbeam entering the slits in the slats. I saw the spider in his web in the corner, apparently still asleep. I saw my sisters, my poor ignorant dumb clucks of sisters, apparently still asleep also. The arrival of food would stir them, however, and they, with flapping wings and squawks, would flock outside for the grain, leaving me sitting in the coop, reflecting on our frailties. What an albatross it is to be a chicken, or should I say more correctly that the albatross that weighed me down was my nature. Or perhaps it was my soul, which was not compatible with my nature. At any rate I was a lonely but somewhat content chicken. Few temptations presented themselves, and my days were filled with observing. Thanks to the humans there were things, events to observe. Large machines lumbered by the chicken coop. Young humans danced nearby, even made musical sounds with instruments. They could do infinitely more with their mouths than my kind. Unnatural as it may sound, after listening to the screaming, singing and laughter of the young humans, the staccato muttering of my sisters irritated me. It was in order to escape, momentarily at least, the senseless chatter of my sisters that I wandered away from them one day when it was getting warm again and found myself further from the coop than I had ever been before. It was a glorious morning, and I felt gratitude swell under my inescapably white-feathered bosom. (Breast, I believe it’s called). My feet took me to the rear of the human’s house, and I found some edible droppings around the back door.
The steps led up, and being of a curious nature, I hopped up the stairs to see if perhaps a mess of grain lay there. I was not so hungry as inquisitive. Hating chicken noises as I did, and being unable to imitate any others, I was naturally speechless there on the steps. I reached the top step and there was no pile of grain. I raised my head with a little jerk and realized that I could see through the screen on the back door of the house. There the humans were, not very far from me. Each had an egg in front of him, and as I watched, each scooped the inside out and devoured it.
Everything in front of my eyes went black, and when it turned gray the light was spinning round and round. Half flying, half stumbling down the steps, I departed. They were eating my biddies! Perhaps this is a humorous tale to you, reader. “A ridiculous chicken who aspired to values more human and, as she felt therefore, higher than her calling. “A ridiculous chicken who aspired to values more human and, as she felt, therefore higher than her calling. “A chicken who thought she was a lady,” I can almost hear you say. But reader, dwell on this: I knew no better; I had been in this world less than two years when I inadvertently came across this truth indigestible to me. If the fact that the practice is not indigestible to humans, and this is taken as a pun and made light of, then I can only believe it is a morbid sense of humor on the reader’s part and cry out in my small-fated clucking voice against the injustice in a world that I do not understand. Down the back steps I staggered. The stones in my gullet gritted alarmingly, and I nearly swooned with strange emotions rushing through my poor skull. I did not head back to the coop, however. My path led away from the farm, and over the furthest horizon.
Shall we hobble into the next election cycle, or is there a way out now? Only food for thought, maybe action.
Image: LegaSeaaquarium.com
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In 2018 Pete Buttigieg married Chasten Glezman, a teacher who took his surname. Three years later the couple adopted twins Joseph August (“Gus”) Buttigieg and Penelope Rose Buttigieg.
“My kids remind me, daily, of what really matters in this world. The best thing I can do for them is to continue to show up for them and be the best dad that I can be,” Chasten Buttigieg said. “I know one day they will judge us for what we did to make the world a better place, so I’ll focus on that work and try my best to stay out of the petty criticism some online or in Congress are so eager to pick. That doesn’t mean I’ll be silent when someone goes after my family, though. I’ll always stick up for my kids.”
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IF YOU HAVE A PARROT… I guess I lost my reader with that little headline….Anyway, folks who have a parrot are enjoying reading children’s’ books to them. Now that’s a fun scientific frontier! Birds are having fun while some of us are biting our nails and getting sour stomachs. Per the blogs of Items that caught my attention this week, three were about birds, Exciting, huh? Reading to parrots is explored by Irene Pepperberg, Ph.D: Inside Dr. Pepperberg’s Lab: Reading to Parrots.
Another item that took my mind off current troubles dealt with sparrow shows. Think about observations of the murmuraton of sparrows, those masses of birds in the sky that move together mysteriously and quickly. The view: perhaps in the late afternoon with a clear sky and what appears to be a choreographed show, perfectly executed in sudden shiftings, all together. I still want to know how the leader is chosen. A third escape maneuver was to read and think about the dreaming life of birds. See 90 responses to a discussion of birds’ night terrors on You Tube.
MY PROBLEM:
I’ve sworn off writing about Trump, because attention only gratifies him. But I have to write my blog so I don’t go crazy. And I don’t want to lose any of my precious handful of readers. I’m sure to, but I intend to give it the old college try. What topics can I focus on? I won’t know until I see if any of them work at entertainment or interest:
Poetry (really verses); drawings; memories; short fiction; dreams; out of the blue thoughts; astounding non-political items; stream of consciousness; weird non-Trump politics [maybe?]; climate change; a dab of autobiography; non-political material from my bulging files (don’t groan–only interesting stuff…..) psychological observations, etc. I’m 89 1/2, so it will have an end point. Some time ago I wrote my [funny] obituary, so there’s that, too. Shannon, my computer helper, has agreed to post that dollop. We could talk back and forth if I ever got the hang of that process.
I can’t ignore all the drama surrounding the election of the new pope at the Sistine Chapel this week. I wondered about issues or prejudices that may lead to preferences or negations in the voting. Not to disrespect, but why do I keep thinking of the conclave as a fairy tale?
In my last post I wrote, …the new Pope choice? Education? Looks? Age? Behavior history? Connections? Home country? Politics? Connections? Wealth (horrors)? Race? Personal behavior? Activity on internet platform? Published work? Voice quality? Introvert or extravert? Range of facial expressions? Closeness or favoritism of Pope Francis? We’ll wait until he’s elected before trying to figure it out..
What a surprise, he was born in Chicago! What I had earlier read was that anyone from the USA was unlikely. And on the second day of the conclave and only on the fourth voting occasions! Were those flags of countries in the crowd? If so, I didn’t see a USA flag until the announcement. Maybe no one expected a cardinal from the USA to win. I like Chicago born Pope Robert Francis Prevost, Leo XIV; his demeanor and his response to the crowd’s greeting. “And they lived happily ever after?” Let’s hope. (I would have guessed Trump’s photo of himself dressed like a pope would have increased the Chicago cardinal’s chances, due to alarm. So, he appears to be shy (an introvert) and mostly liberal, except for LGBT issues in the past. ….I need to check that out.
OUR OWN BIBLE? “Welcome to the official home of the God Bless The USA Bible, the only Bible officially endorsed by Lee Greenwood and President Trump. $60 to $1000.” https://godblesstheusabible.com. Of the Trump/Greenwood bible, Esau McCaulley writes that yhr bible, n addition to being the King James version of the Bible, ‘ includes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and part of the Lee Greenwood song God Bless the USA.” ….And the American flag, of course.
“One of the beauties of the Christian faith is that it leaps over the lines dividing countries, leading the faithful to call fellow believers from very different cultures brothers and sisters. Most of the members of this international community consist of the poor living in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are more Spanish-speaking Christians than English-speaking ones,” From McCaulley’s column. .
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PETA FOR PEOPLE? I would not mind coming back as a human and agree to return as a monkey. but not the human monkeyman they’re wanting to create, on purpose, in the land of the tech crazed:.
There isn’t a PETA for misfits, is there, for those engineered by the normal?
BUT, a team in China revealed that they had injected human stem cells capable of creating any type of tissue into a monkey embryo. The experiment was stopped before the embryo was old enough to be born.
But the scientists – who were Spanish but held the trial in China to get around a ban on such procedures at home – said a human-monkey hybrid could have potentially been born.
…the new Pope choice? Education? Looks? Age? Behavior history? Connections? Home country? Politics? Connections? Wealth (horrors)? Race? Personal behavior? Activity on internet platform? Published work? Voice quality? Introvert or extravert? Range of facial expressions? Closeness or favoritism of Pope Francis? We’ll wait until he’s elected before trying to figure it out..
In the meantime, Trump has to dream…
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Following a vacancy in the papacy, the cardinals hold a series of meetings at the Vatican called general congregations. It was hypothesized that the cardinals’ choice will amount to a referendum on whether to extend Francis’ legacy of inclusivity and openness to change, the needs and the challenges facing the Catholic Church globally and qualities needed for the next pope. They will also prepare for the upcoming papal election on May 7, called a conclave. Decisions that only the pope can make, such as appointing a bishop or convening the Synod of Bishops, must wait till after the election. The cardinals are given no access to phones, television, email or other public contact during the conclave.
. Only cardinals under the age of 80 are eligible to vote in a conclave. They are known as the cardinal electors. Those eighty and over are known as cardinal deacons.
For the conclave itself, the cardinals process to the Sistine Chapel and take an oath of absolute secrecy before sealing the doors.
The cardinal electors vote by secret ballot, processing one by one up to Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment, saying a prayer and dropping the twice-folded ballot in a large chalice. Four rounds of balloting are taken every day until a candidate receives two-thirds of the vote. The result of each ballot are counted aloud and recorded by three cardinals designated as recorders. If no one receives the necessary two-thirds of the vote, the ballots are burned in a stove near the chapel with a mixture of chemicals to produce black smoke.
The new pope is led to the “Room of Tears” in the Sistine Chapel, named for the overwhelming emotion past pontiffs have experienced. There, he dresses in white robes and receives a new pectoral cross and white zucchetto, or head cap. The cardinals greet the new pope and pledge their obedience to him.
The smoke that rises again is white, informing the thousands outside and the senior cardinal deacon, currently French Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, announces from the balcony of St. Peter’s “Habemus Papam” (“We have a pope”) before the new pope processes out and imparts his blessing on the city of Rome and the entire world.*)
*Now we know what Lindsey Graham meant when he referred to “white smoke” relative to Trump’s papal self portrait.”
So, who’s the new pope and what are his credentials? (Sorry if I seem flip, but that doctored photo of Trump as Pope is too disconcerting. We should NEVER elect anyone from a television show to anything….)
I’ll have to try and make sense of this in another post.
[Who’s connected to Heaven in the meantime?]
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QUOTABLE: Some of us are having a birthday party and some of us are the cake. The Nation, Olufemi O. Taiwo May 2025
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DUH: One way to decrease the effect of climate change is to have smaller families…OOPS
NANMYKEL.COM 