Saturday, February 18, 2006

Pwnz



Yeesh, another cold and rainy weekend in NEAL.
I would rather be passing the balmy e'ens away in SWLA.
It seems that perhaps when summer wains, that is where I
am to be, to pick up the traces where I left them at the end of '04.
Either way, when I skip this town, I vow to be in better shape
financially, physically, eomtionally, spiritually, and psychically
for what lies ahead...and oh so happy to leave this place behind for once
and for all.

Friday, February 17, 2006

Don't Try



Charles "Hank/Buk" Bukowski was the toughest motherfucker to ever live. I am the second. Like him, I have survived:

Dysfunctional parents, horrid boils, playground bullies, ulcers, insanity, insane women, squalid houses, fights in allies and barroom brawls, cat fights with girlfriends, a nagging case of hemorrhoids, cheap rooms, alley rats, jail, the draft, politically correct poetry and fiction editors, Chicago freeways, mad friends, poets musicians and writers befriended, ghetto mobsters, humanity, cops, jail, groupies, scars, rejection slips, Canada, silverfish, cheap booze, more jail, barflys, Washington DC freeways, park benches, bad running cars, decades of mind-numbing jobs, stupid ass and dull-headed co-workers, at least five grad schools, New Orleans whores, and all that other shit that kills ordinary, run-of-the-mill humans.

Yeah, so today is my international Bukowski day for one, writing and drinking and laying out from work and just generally not giving a solitary damn.

RIP, Buk.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

High Noon


Alas; the pivotal moment, long awaited, at last has arrived. Gary Cooper's Roman au clef performance has personal signifigance for me. The time is migh when I will leave this green prison once again, and grapple with the forces that stand between me and my dreams. The struggle is always there; we must just find the strength to rejoin the fight.
--Rev.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

The Prophecy is upon U.S.

Was Frank Herbert a seer, a prophet of things to come? No; what he was, though, was a great, far-sighted science fiction writer of the first rank, a latter-day Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, who, like him, were astute political and social observers, as well as creative geniuses.

Something that I pointed out in a paper I wrote while working on my Masters in Political Science, was that, like Edward Bellamy, the Author of "Looking Backward," Herbert was able to look at the world around him, its trends and its dangers, and set down a warning for the generations to come. Mr. Herbert in Dune has made a startling accurate, and alarming roman a clef
prediction for the U.S.A.

Consider these ideas as symbols:
Spice=Oil
Arrakis(Dune)=Iraq
Terms that crop up with similarity are Shaddam (Saddam) Fedayken (Fedaye'en)
...but what is most apparent is that Herbert foresaw that if anything troubling ever happened in Arrak (heh) that the Emperor (President) would be forced to commit his highly advanced, heavily armed troops (Sardukar/US Armed Forces) to fight the more spiritual, rag-tag zealots that peopled the desert, and controlled that most vital of commodities, without which (space) travel is impossible.

This piece of literature is a vital insight into what is transpiring in the Middle East today, and it is chilling if one reads the entire series, and takes Herbert's vision into account, and places in that context...for he saw Western involvement in the Mideast as meddling, internicine, and ultimately, fatal for the powers that intervene there.

It is indeed ironic that fate has placed us in the hands of a president who has probably never read a book. The one lesson that history has taught us, and that Mr. Bush's late address made abundantly clear that he had missed; while he pledges repeatedly that "America will not leave until the job is finished," America's foes learned thirty years ago, that you do not have to beat America to win. You just have to keep her from winning, any dirty way you need to, and you might just win when they tire of your crummy little country and at last go home.
Was Herbert right? Had he seen the coming Mideastern struggle, even as the ashes of Viet Nam still smoldered? Time will tell.

The oil must flow.