Peer't through to the be side

Rounding a corner with The Professor is like sharing cheese with a ghost. The guilt trip's your own pleasure.

He'd barely glanced at the sign, if at all, when he muttered disbelief at the modern day marking of the streets of the city after a person who'd inspired so much death and destruction, to which I said dude's no more responsible for the gulags than that edgy objectivistesse for the brutality of United Fruit. Not everyone named Chiquita is a brand-marked terrorist enabler. He thought on this long enough to see my point about the perversion of good intentions, which for Pratt was the duration of the tick before the tock, and said the analogy bordered on no true Scotsman, something he liked to drop in wherever he thought it fit, his analog kidded quarter-proof Scotch himself.

 

I complained the fallacy camouflages a scary creature of dry stalks of cereal plants, and he said at least the chaff's removed, which I think might've been a comment on the potential misreckoning inherent to the citing of a fallacy and the confusion that abounds whenever someone makes inexplicit a construction or the recognition of one, an observation or an accusation.

 

It's perfectly fine, even exemplary, to be a master of filling a composition with nuance of raw power yet not be able to swing from a rope even were it hung from the heavens by the coach of creation. No amount of the big money can afford that wily watchmaker’s wares, let alone grasp what one’s reward whispers not to. Still, the beat was always solid and the words were moving pictures.

 

Knowing of his aversion to in-his-face sentimentality, I apologized when I told him I’d probably feel a heart-crossing shadow upon the news of his passing. Without thinking, he reassured me that was perfectly fine as long as I was aware it wasn't him I was missing.

 

Fin.

Bleglgauze

Not so much a bandage as a pun-adjacent comment on the previous entry whose final paragraph is in permanent revision and whose final paragraph is not necessarily the current one and this fact justifies the relative clause being a defining one so as to forgo the comma despite what follows having no such excuse concurrent with an entry whose speech simulacrum is like "La Villa Strangiato" in that it both bespeaks an exercise in self-indulgence along with an attempt at recursion to a point between which I will reference a refrain that provides this excuse to express the same again from that prior entry that eventually entails being the penultimate point before the point that says none of our values are the same let alone immune to inflationary implosion in the aggregate or not as our superficial style of survival rests on a rock as our extinction hearkens hindward hard and so it finally arrives that davidly dot eu is dead because davidly dot eu is not broccoli but brokered by bait and switch rent seekers whose likes led a long long time ago to my removing the feeding tubes to +49301785853304.

 

Novem be nine

No ember benign,

November bemoan:

the West that is known

will never be mine.

 

Gabriel-Max-Str. - 1989 (hover/click: 2023)

Uh, nuh!

There was rain.

 

A steady drip down Leipziger to P'damer Str: a stretch done dirty down to a degradation of an already desperately needed haven from the bog potential ((that) I can say I'm glad is no longer my weekly cycle). I even did what I normally wouldn't, which is ride on the covered walk of the shopping strip and subsequent hotel, which kept me out of the drizzle a while.

I'd read in the paper long enough ago that this segment was to be a cyclist's dream. As it is, the previous marks, heat-sealed into the pavement, have another stripe across them, which doesn't mean "no bikes allowed" so much as "ride at your own risk".

 

P'damer Plz is the least laudable yet most appropriate symbol of die Wende, being, as it is, literally, a transition from the dick-swinging sectors parcelled out to would-be protectors of freedom, with their freshly defeated fascists in the fold, armed muzzle-to-muzzle opposite would-be arbiters of collective emancipation from the same. Authorities reign over all parades. As it connects to those armed to protect and those armed to resist and those armed to overcome and those armed to come over, only they justify themselves, nourishing each other and no one else, which seems fitting to the news of the day.

 

Anyway, as a metaphor for ever-swelling pots of piss, P'damer takes the cup. And there was rain.

 

Tho' none on this parade: Gock's (generous gift) giving a ship in the midst of the mist: two ticks to Eno at the house of the philharmonic, worthy of its color & in contrast to too much surrounding it (and built at the same time as the Wall).

 

Gock couldn't make the trip and I couldn't blame him. On behalf of his forgone half came K8 none too late. To her level of concern that her unfamiliarity 'd amount to an unworthiness of attendance, my assurance was it's nearly exclusively the stuff from the century past I'd made intimate acquaintance with: We were in the same boat if not the same harbor.

After Viet rice and noodles and a vape too deep (ye don't get off, unless ye cough), we ventured over and into the venue, about which I can say the following: outer doors at 8 and inner admittance at 8:30 is not entirely unlike the feeling of being schlepped from lock to lock at the airport (tracking moments too minutely (in this case, w/ thc (s)talking); maybe Ambien I woulda worked).

Once relaxed into the space, I observed what could be called Music for Concert Halls, as the pre-performance music accommodated this: a ship's bottle being slowly but surely filled with conversing characters who, each in their own fashion fit the part cast by their composer (who for his part rewarded recognition of all of this without demanding it;-). While the piece (or pieces) were full of familiar vocabulary, collectively none of it was identifiable as a previously known title. I think the point I want to make is they were not, as I would otherwise worry, substandard versions of what preceded them, but rather exemplary of an oeuvre and the essentials of one guy's self-defined genre. Derived without being derivative in the pejorative sense. And for all I know it was created for this purpose.

 

Houselights down, the woodwinds and strings entered first, literally, as they sort of wandered on while establishing the waves upon which the Ship would be set. And so it began, auspiciously (with the title track of the concert's namesake, followed by its three roman numbered companions): during this section, apprehension abated, disquiet dissolved, and this combo's potential shined, culminating in its swoon (or maybe the bombast).

 

It's a challenge of wordsmithing to convey how the players reproduced the aforementioned genre: they gave a shape to a one-time fantasy of mine that an orchestra could just warm up for several hours: the gradual formation of harmonic narrative left that idea in its wake, but with the wake remaining contiguous to the periphery of the performance of the wake itself, it never strayed entirely out of the scope of the audient.

 

The point I failed to make in the previous paragraph is that the character of the sound was true to that which was to be recreated, down to its subtlest. That is, it came off as original, orchestrated but un-orchestral.

 

(I am reminded here of the service done by the Metropole Orkest to Fripp's The Wine of Silence, but with a greater degree of difficulty in consideration of the variance of texture involved.)

 

I have to mention one of the best aspects being the fade to silences being uninterrupted by the slightest peep from the house. Then, an eruption of enthusiasm. Each time except one, where, appropriately, the transition between pieces flowed unbroken except by the silence.

 

Of course the Baltic Sea Philharmonic has a conductor. One can be forgiven for feeling too much shine from such a presence. What is a maestro but a knob, after all. Yet despite my traditional dilettante's doubting their necessity, I cannot believe (in this instance) that the swelling & shrinking and fading in & out of each other could have been accomplished as effectively devoid of direction from somewhere. The best bands break up without it keeping the egos in check; individual instrumentalists move on to escape the hubris of the same (I think I glimpsed a smirk or three among the blowers and strokers, but there were smiles, too). All in all, I found it easy enough to focus my attention away from the demonstrative dirigent dirigenting (which K8n't be said of everyone;-)

 

The Ship was followed by something the players created that sounded familiar. Was it from On Land, or was it another exemplary combination of chirping & croaking to remind us of it? (Later in response to one of Mr Conductor Man's between-song chatterings, this time about the coming piece's featuring birdsong, Eno humorously self-deprecated that everything he's ever done does.)

 

Anyway, the previous fed into "By this River", with the harpist introducing Roedelius' part, and, as far as I could tell, a keyboard taking Moebius', and mallets filling out the former (percussion was in partial view at the back). This would be the sole representation of the twentieth century. Dating back to 1977, it puts twenty-eight years between itself and the nearest chronologically sourced part of the rest of the set, which ranged between 2005 to today.

 

If you're a fan of the vocal melodies from ForeverAndEverNoMore, you won't find your way off of your cloud for a bit. The artist's voice was as could have been desired (tho' he remarked of a cold, which was only recognizable when he spoke or sang too softly to be heard anyway). His rendition of "I'm Set Free" really shone its own, and  along with "By this River" brought the other soloists out, and clustered waves of chamber-like activity in (like Music for Bridges), which made the returns really pay off.

 

Few as his live performances have been, this will serve as a landmark to its having been ventured and a testament to a career headed this way, as if it had embarked to get here.

 

Like, for me, the thing I said before about exemplary vocabulary as part of his genre, last night's experience has reestablished in my mind that this territory does in fact belong to him. That is, he didn't just take from others who've influenced a certain approach, and he didn't just result in those who continue to ape his influence, for good or ill, but he's established a lexicon with his name on it. It's easy to lose sight of that, and the stage was a perfect reminder.

 

Had the acoustics of this house been present at the Hammersmith, or had I been sitting in the best seat in the house, as here, I'd still be throwing away my pants.

Thanks to Gock for a birthday well spent.

Present Progressive

Everlasting as is the invaluable need's sacrifice at the shrine of instant indulgence,

increasingly, immediacy, too's, forsaken for its own sake.

Wanna from Heaven

This begins with the time I recognized CNN as an outlet not unlike the overnight radio call-in program, whereby the sleepless consumer class is invited to fabulate live on air from a dubiously sourced starting point established by host and guest, which in this case was focussed on what I'm calling The Origin Story.

 

It goes that a press release was launched in July of 1947 from the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field, U.S.A.™ in which was stated a flying disc had been recovered from a ranch in New Mexico and eventually brought by Group Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, to the base. The story continues that later the same day the information in the press release was retracted, as it turned out the debris in question had been from a weather balloon.

What's been added to the story since that time is of UFO lore, much of which was recounted that night on CNN, and despite the official fill-in-the blanks brand of information that's occasionally come from the successors to the chair of the source story, it does not act to dispel the conspiracy theories; it rather triggers the wanna believers, on this evening in the form of eager cable news consumers regaling fellow wanna believers with that which nobody can tell them is not true because the coverup is so blatantly obvious.

 

Not to thumb my own bike bell at you, but if a lightbulb didn't go on at the conclusion of the previous sentence... never mind. It shouldn't have taken that long for me. I'll continue. I mean, we all know there's more, right?

The rush to spin to "aliens" makes those early model flying saucers and all their top speed wobbliness look like the creeky creeping rotation of the Earth, relatively speaking. Time was, I bought into it, returning to the newsstand for those UFO magazines, which were published bi-nothingly. Same single issues of the same two magazines for the longest. Starving for new information.

 

And that night when the blatant obviousness was raised as the proof in the pudding, it occurred to me how I'd been eating it up. And as suddenly, the chocolate went vanilla.

 

As is the case with time, new theories crop up, inevitably with contributions from people in the know, i.e. whoever claims to have lived a life with a "need to know", i.e. worked on a covert project or a secret base or on a parallel planet.

 

Like some quantum proverb, it spins in a pair of directions. The contributors could be assets, or assets nonetheless. The witting, the unwitting, the half-witting. That is, even when sentences passed down are not at the behest of the original sorcerers, and as nonesuch contradict the intended framing of the narrative, it doesn't matter. Even if it revealed something someone had not wanted.

 

Any narrative made to be muddy is served over the long term by adding more mud, which makes truth not so much harder to identify as it is demotivating if you'd wanted to bother.

 

A populace consisting of citizen-folk who want to believe (who think they know the "real truth", which shifts, regardless of the nature of the added bits of information, to accord with their preferred version of the narrative) and the same who don't know what to believe is a perfect mix. 

 

The story goes, for those who cannot be told otherwise, that Major Marcel took a piece of that wreckage home to his son Jesse Jr., who was then able to witness how this smooth metallic looking substance could be wadded into a tiny ball in the hand and would immediately return to its previous state when released.
 
The story, according to those from whom the entire tale began, is that what that rancher had gathered up and taken to the sheriff, and what Major Marcel went to retrieve when the sheriff called, was bits of rubber and tinfoil. Funny that. They would later identify the stuff as a weather balloon. But not until after the group commander'd initiated that press release, which, whether one likes it or not, is the origin of The Origin Story.
 
It's claimed today by (for want of an appropriate term) official sources who don't claim otherwise, that the Roswell Incident should be scene as part of a flying disc craze that had begun weeks earlier. I assume the intended logic is that the press release was a result of the same. Like, maybe sticks and rubber and tinfoil were not improbable ingredients for a navigational device of an interplanetary aviator, the assumed flightpath of a flying disc fancied as of 1947. That is, even those responsible for the maintenance of the most advanced flying machines identifiable at the time would not find it improbable you could get to the moon and back with the stuff from a kite.
 
Their story goes that Major Marcel and his commander were convinced enough to feed the story to the press, sans ingredients, until leaving Marcel holding the balloon. The same story from those who will never not know better is that "the government" snagged a UFO and, in some versions, its otherworldly occupants and only realized after the press release they'd want to keep that secret. I recall a claim from somewhere or another that you can read the expression on the Major's face in the balloon photo op as being attributable to something so specifically identifiable as the Major's being outraged that a coverup was in the works.

It should be noted that one update occurred when Major Marcel did an interview with a self-styled ufologist. It was around this time in the seventies when US intelligence sources revealed Project Mogul, which involved high altitude balloons to detect the sound of the Soviets testing nukes. This could explain away why they'd want to obscure the balloon story, so the official narrative, which ostensibly cannot preclude the notion that in a rush to cover up the existence of Project Mogul, the flying disc thing was the best they could come up with until the weather balloon story was agreed upon.

 

It would seem, as well, that the flying disc craze could justify the premature press release, as if the public had been demanding an answer to a question then only known to a podunk rancher and sheriff and a military intelligence officer and his big boss.

 

My CNN epiphany had been that the Americans decided to make "the Commies" believe they had captured an extraterrestrial ship by saying so, and then pretending to cover it up. Like all the other conspiracy theorists, I revise that belief when more details emerge, but nevertheless maintain the overarching theme of my version of the narrative, which is that what all those people who want to believe believe is more or less the same as what the antagonists in their stories want.

 

I'd like to say I'm different, but the more all the new information on the topic and its framing continues to comport well with the view of the other respective narratives, the more they'll likely do the same with mine.

 

At least as far back as the heyday of those UFO rags and their letters to the editor, it's been theorized that "the government" has been using its influence in the cultural sector to gradually acclimate the public to the existence of aliens among us. Hence the universal image of the Alien Grey. Depending on the perspective, The X-Files creators are either in on it, being fed by it and/or the likely result of it. One might be apt to claim there's a remarkable amount of mud leaked via the MIB franchise.

There's a remarkable half-season of American Horror Story dedicated to the mythology that emerged from Roswell that becomes an absurdist unified field of US conspiracy legend, which is evidence at least of its breadth of influence and the widespread knowledge of certain details of the myth, although those who always know better could tell you where they got it all wrong. What I can tell you is the myth is malleable, its characters and details irrelevant. It is however interesting that the acclimation theory and the spy practice of using more absurd bits to discredit others dovetail nicely in such productions as American Horror Story and Men In Black. If you believe such things, you got to pick and choose.

It's not the first time The Origin Story made for television entertainment. There's a show from the nineties whose first episode I recall recounted a similar event to that of American Horror Story: It goes that Eisenhower was ushered to a place near the cite of a captured craft and eventually made to go along with the alien-human hybrid program. In the show from the nineties this terrifying realisation comes into the consciousness of the human envoy by way of the alien's telepathic communication. "He just demanded our unconditional surrender!" exclaims the terrified Army man.

The pre televised myth says that Truman or Ike, or whoever, was led to a tent, or wherever, where the aliens communicated the abduction and breeding program, or whatever. This eventually led to the formation of a top secret commission, or whatever, called the Majestic 12, whose purpose eludes me but whose name implies no more than a dozen people with a need to know.

 

Versions of the myth feature terraforming the Earth to make it inhabitable to the reptilians, or whoever. See the movie Arrival (the one with Charlie Sheen) for a synopsis of how the oil industry can help with this plan.

The myth can extend to entail the hybrid program's being an attempt to achieve the real life afforded to humans for the reptilians, i.e. life that includes the free will of the human soul, or whatever.

 

This may have come via those who have claimed to've been abducted and those who believe them and thus co-written the mass abduction part of the story. I don't know if this was retrofitted to create the coerced covenant crossroads in Roswell  (read: deal with the devil) that those who know is true know is true, and they may point out nobody's leaking those documents.

 

When dealing in the myth of extraterrestrial life forms, you'd have to get biblical eventually and I'm sure the soulless alien nugget's been depicted in one or other of our aping human entertainments. Casting for the part of the lizard who wants a soul include the serpent, Cain, Enki, the guy who played the Tin Man, or Michael Shannon.

 

Back in the real world, each new leak might appear to follow the strategy of acclimating humans to our alien overlords, but like so much in mediated space, I find little by way of real world converts to the world of believers. Not that I'm conducting polls. I mean, sure, if you got your head deep in the ass of the modern day, catered-to-you news cycle, everybody's talking about your thing. I just don't sense the newly branded UAP phenomenon taking on greater importance out there.

 

What I do sense is that within the lair of the lore, I have merely out-theorized the theorizers because I can't get around the fact that the story, supposedly covered up for over seventy-five years, came from the source of the alleged coverup and has continued until today to be shaped by the same.

 

As far as motives go, I think they're fluid. So please don't @ me with the fake alien invasion theory. However marginal it may seem in comparison, it's fallen not far from the tree.

What are turds for?

Herewith a suggestion that another word be added to the puns of irony lexicon along with foster siblings "transparency" and "oversight".

 

In similar fashion to how the former can stand for the unintentional presence of obvious malfeasance right along side the notion of official openness to scrutiny, and the latter functions as a matter of trust that those responsible for it will not be held to account when it turns out to mean they hadn't seen something coming, I propose that "sustainability" connote acting in whatever way necessary to make sure that when another transparent swan arrives to join the one that inspired the sustainability project, it'll be too late even for scapegoats.

  

About the title:
 

What just happened to be featured news:
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/mensch-metropole/u2-alexanderplatz-bvg-abgesackter-u-bahn-tunnel-am-alex-arbeiten-im-plan-aber-es-gibt-neue-zweifel-li.357398

It's not always the shoe.

Stress is self made, sure. But it's also firmly part of inner and outer space. Blaming oneself for worries is a stretch fraught with more stress.

 

Seen from outer space to view each labor cum love's a life lesson, yeah. Why fret? Yet every concern turned turn-on lies not far from more promising dread informed by the experience of stress, but far enough that navigating between such experience's another art of stress upon the unforgiving entirety of it all.

 

I've gone enough aloud with the cliché of being spiritual not religious only to realize the reverse is so. Might I have that backward, too? Well, it's the shoe, a superstition, and what is that but a glue on a view to religion?

 

If there's a mantra it's always be grateful and don't take for granted, couched in the would-be, something more akin to be ever aware of the got, so as to be not unawares of the not. Should that then suddenly drop.

 

A walk recently concealed the result of what one might say was the walk itself. Or a shoe or something in it. It was the latter was true, but it wasn't the shoe. No dried disc of blood in a sock should serve as exhibit to jump to false convictions.

 

Two toes have served long together more closely than the rest. One could really nearly regard them as one, were it not for their having individual concerns, and the fact of an infraction committed by the ring against the middle.

 

It might be the offender was tired of having the victim draped over & upon it so familiar & snug, so it took a nail and stabbed it just as ad nauseam as the offense that'd caused the crime, not too many times to count but innumerably nonetheless, for there'd be one tiny wound repeatedly offended.

Seeing that dot at the end of it all, one'd think at most there'd been but one drop.

dint like whither

didn't live with us a bike was stowed in a boot rip you tay shun leaves

Memoriam

[Originally "I remember" from Monday, 21 November 2005.] 

As soon as the Twin Peaks theme began to play, the various video recorders came out, began to float in and around my line of vision. I felt a conflict. I had something in my pocket, having also brought it for such a purpose. Not to video Julee Cruise singing Falling—clearly the most popular, most people’s favorite song of the evening, hence the sudden mass of tiny, glowing monitors—but something anyway. The initial nuisance had me thinking that I could in no way justify doing this myself. Yet I knew I wanted to get something in the machine. Am I a vampire? I’ve tried to fabricate a line which could be crossed, to delineate between them and me, which dictates that what I’ve done didn’t impede anyone’s experience. I can’t know this for sure. I did suffer the fate that I imagine for the others, however. That is, that I can’t imagine anyone truly enjoying the experience that was before us, to be experienced, now, when they were so pre-occupied with artificial encapsulation. And what an experience it was; except for the twelve seconds that I spent framing her singing my favorite song. I can watch the crappy quality of that imagery over and over, and I just might, to remind myself that I’ll never get a chance to enjoy that twelve seconds again. I took this picture of the book at the foot of her mic stand when the lights came up after the show. 

 

That's a spider on Horton's head. Hmmm.

 

[Subsequent to this I began an email correspondence with Julee long enough to find out what a spirited personality she had. I also got to know some of her non-Badalamenti/Lynch work, like on The Art of  Being a Girl and My Secret Life, as well as her Pluramon and Khan collaborations. Like me, she liked "more mashed potatoes" for dessert. She began musically on the French horn. May she know eternal peace.]

The Shed Rues

Took a stretch with the new season, un-pedalled for three such since the beginning of the mad panic. Not for nothing, rode a rounder radius than had been usual, in anxious regard for the backup bike's being dodgier than is already classic for a backup bike – that is, less reliable maaaybe, what would amount to a per se potential of being less so serviceable (in the able to be serviced sense).

The idea, you see, is whenever the backup is mobilised, bicycle A must be serviced apace. Unless it's to stay an unusable alternate, having thus just become a backup itself. One might think, as one am apt, the immediate toil of repair would drub the purposeful luxury of making good on a backup. But an apter awareness prevails who thinks about the purpose of the words backup and good. Make good on the backup without delay. Whether remaining true to this theosophy has termed itself successful is anyone's guess. For one cannot know what might have been in terms of the delay not prolonged. So hypothetically, if not today, will the defaulted backup be righted from its unserviceable state? No broken backup needed. No matter how short.

 

Neither here nor there. One does not grab primary secondary in the middle of nowhere. One grabs it, for instance, fortunately less deflated than the tyre found flat on primary primary while unlocking it in the courtyard. Also neither here nor there. Bike B is in theory still in go mode. Discounting this digression, which should only serve to beset the scenery with the digressor's stream of apprehension, for what was actually afoot, the length of road had to be fit for the risk. Though lengthier, the length taken was aligned with underground stops to be attainable more directly via un-agitated foot than the normal way would.

A familiar strain accompanied the rolling along, whereby the roll's inefficiency introduced itself directly to the strrretch, as would be the case in both directions – in the a.m. and the subsequent p.m.  A rubberband guy, me.

While the way out managed to meet its deadline, the symbolic release of tension availed the direction home a calmer breath by time. No need for the subway's safety net, the old route would do the trick. It happens just so this concludes near the beneficent bike-keep's complementary air. A pump affixed in permanence outside the shoppe window against those who abuse consideration for selfishness is uncommon nonetheless in its round-the-clock accessibility.

 

Whereas the greater distance of the day had been as if suddenly my wheels were wheels in mud, from this stop along the normal path near home emerged an irony with which the former risk assessment terminated looking back on the ride that might have been. No well. The lesson is reduce the literal surface tension. No. The lesson is not to forget that lesson.

 

Thence availed of higher psi force, the mere meters to home were likewise lent a release reminiscent of the adolescent 'Aha!' at first roll each spring. It goes, Hweee...

Here y' go!

 

 

Or if you like, here's her stoned version from eleven. I'm easy.

 

I dunno, wrong?

He made this tiny little remark I immediately read as an inside joke I was not on the inside of, with the performative tone and manner of a character so embarrassing I had to try and hide having witnessed it, too late. He noticed I'd noticed, just a blink after I noticed that he'd caught himself having forgot I was sitting right next to him, froze mid-pose, and tried to disappear this, to me, new character in hopes of erasing what he'd just done while deliberating whether to look over to see if I'd noticed, and then looking over.

 

These shifting sequences of cognition, corresponding actions and reactions, can play out in such little time, as anyone's experienced. There's a method within film language developed to depict the intricacy, with quick cuts and close-ups. Unless locked in to interpersonal moments of heightened awareness, it usually goes unnoticed. Triggered by that which is unexpected, self-consciousness can be devastatingly punitive emotionally.

 

It'd be tempting to think that our conversations, being improvised, can be nothing if not full of surprises but, no, we are forever riffing on a script whose continual development had nevertheless been written long ago. If you can think it, it's been thought, said, and even searched for, virtually, so as to see if anyone's already come up with it. The few surprises that crop up can trigger involuntary laughter, or mortification.

 

Naturally, it would seem, there are some of us with less self-confidence, the result of which, or, indeed, which is the result of an apparent malady of hyperawareness. I'm not the first to note the fitness of mastering that potential trap through a discipline of focussed anti-focus. The cancer is the key to its own cure. The curious should be careful not to observe what's evident in others as evidence to the contrary. An avatar in all its lotus posing grace hides an inherently hostile human. See for yourself, but within yourself. Beyond this is another puzzle.

 

In the virtual world, we're only now beginning to understand after a generation of developing the very understanding that the person you got the email from might not be the person you'd come to identify with the address. Well, most everybody's known this for quite some time, but largely dependent on the age of one's generation, has one been programmed with the necessary tools of understanding. This too is losing relevance. Access to educational facilities that encourage digital and computer literacy is a generation older than that of the internet. Nevertheless, the kind of literacy that goes into the battle for your digital soul is anything but a required course of study. Far be it from me to say it should be.

 

If you're like me, you're aware that if you get an email from one of your friend's yahoo addresses, it's always the same quality spam, but you have no idea what goes into its creation and how often people really click on the link to make it all worthwhile. Likewise, the occasional message that contains certain earmarks, or the lack thereof, are not foreign to your digital correspondence. The relationships we maintain with other people develop in-group shibboleths, and often each within each have their own passwords. As such, the absence of as little as a morpheme in electronic communication might give the game away.

 

Up until very recently I had never considered how a person I'd come to know in the real world might evolve a distinct digital personality just indistinguishable  enough to pass, but quirky enough to make me wonder if I'd walked into an existence-sized inside joke without any setups or punchlines.

 

The difference between the scenario all those years ago, several years into our friendship but after that brief time away at boarding school where his character of the inside joke had been fostered, and the situation that began to describe itself via my inbox just the other day is a difference I know must be there, but one I'm not sure has any identifiable traits. You might say that I'm attempting a false ascription to a relationship simply grown apart with time, as was the case back then, which is fair. That's likely to happen anyway. But the quality is something that suddenly struck me. I can't un-recognize it.

 

It's a more general dulling of the angles that shape one's personality that are normally developed with the inclusion of the acuteness of the senses all at once. You know, in the narrowing world we call meatspace. It's the same thing I bitch about regarding online instruction: the subtle delay of the person behind the eyes, the removal of the body language, the disconnect of certain sensory perception and the same's fragmentation in the perception of those of others.

 

And then I remembered the inside joke. He was home for spring break with a friend from school. Everything in his room was the same as before he'd left, stuff I'd become familiar with alongside how each supplemented his identity, most of which I identified with more directly than others. A poster. A set of books. A puzzle. The bicycle had been brought inside, affecting a summary of our adventures going back to kindergarten.

 

All that's not quite what I was thinking then, but that feeling must have been in the room, naturally more familiar to me than to his boarding school chum there for the first time. Maybe he'd felt a similar awkwardness regarding our mutual friend's mode of interior decoration, which'd catalogued so much of my experience, that I had hearing his choice of voice out of nowhere.

 

It's a strange dynamic, getting acquainted with an old friend's new friend. The hard-earned smoothed over social hierarchy largely unconscious to human relationships is again askew. The energy is raw. A good joke breaks the ice. An embarrassing gesture ratchets up the tension. A combo of the two?

I got the joke. It was funny. But the way it was delivered presented to me for the first time an opportunity to judge what went some way toward defining his new friendship, with all the complex details of the aforementioned dynamic arriving in one choking instant.

We began mercifully enough, as it turned out we had all loved The Illuminatus! Trilogy. At some point this guy began to expound on the idea that, as absurd as the belief in literal eon-spanning Illumiati overlords may be, it could be that the actions of the world's most powerful, maybe even unwittingly to them, are motivated by the same future, into which we are all evolving one way or the other. I think he punctuated this as a sort of cart before the horse trajectory of history.

 

Regarding what followed, I can't tell you why it was embarrassing. You not only had to be there, you probably had to be me. Anyway, it was at that point my old pal took on this super definite posture and delivered in the most awkward way imaginable, "Isn't it somehow all too convenient that you lack proof for your theory?"

S-Bahn Warschauer Str, Berlin - 1987/2021

Beltin Jawn for KikiDo

An optimist's hot take on erections, American or otherwise

Of course more radical ideas are not feasible and correspondingly neither are the best candidates. If they were, they and their policies would be just as easy to revoke by future legislators. In this respect, it represents a de facto cross-congressional counterpart to the de jure middle way represented by the stubborn extremists we know as moderates.

Dates Ember

burn in thou-sandpits

sick shriveled seed of poppy

he plum up and went

Stalinallee Block C Süd, Berlin-Friedrichshain - 1957  /

Karl-Marx-Allee 72-90, Berlin-Friedrichshain - 2018

October's Objects of Possession

I’d like, for once, to argue with people who’d gotten their preposterous opinions on their own, reflecting the genuine shapes of their own minds as buffeted by private experience… rather than arguing indirectly with The State’s proxies in the form of brainwashed consumers who inadvertently ingest opinions and pre-fab personality traits with the media products they absorb like addicts.

—StAug

__

'T's that shit you let fly that lays the ground on which you sound bitter or crazy for your all of a sudden one day saying something that implies your not thinking that shit should fly. Like, by the time of the meddlesome mother's objection to her kid's having to recite "under God" in school, you missed the boat on calling out in front of God & her PTA just how retarded the goddamn Pledge is in the first place.

How many y'all ever really thought 'Ye' was a musical genius? Name one track he's ever done that even ever accidentally rocked your brain stem. I mean, what's his actual legacy defining moment?

Can't one at least take pleasure in Maga cum Dickface's abrading his anus all over the oval rug, branding the presidential seal, or is it that his followers' certain justification of their hero's soiling of the inviolable accessory just grate on each last nerve that conveniently responds to trumped up triggers? As in, the only reason that shit's sacred is because of them. Fuckin' hypocrites. Imagine the gall it takes to profess to hold something dear that you don't hold dear.

The following image is from 1885, one century before the rhetoric of the Ray Gun Revolution's being cemented in history. For the Millennial, an adequate comparison for context would be when Bo Rama was re-elected, his nation's approving his legacy in all of its vainglorious disposition matrix, which is just another stone along the path of what will continue to pass for one of those many feel good American moments one's questioning is questionable.

Stralauer Plz, Berlin-Friedrichshain 1885 (Am Ostbahnhof 2018)

For Whom the Daisy Bell Trolls

I'm half crazy all for the love of you.

__

This article in the Berliner Zeitung takes a feelgood event and — maybe in striving to be fair & balanced or, even more maybe, in an effort to avoid appearing to ignore the devil in our midst, lest they confirm the treachery the anti-Islam crowd crow about whatever the media do or don't do — highlights a controversy that turns it into a referendum on the radical associations of religious Muslims at home. If indeed it were only as fair & balanced in background detail as it is through its otherwise laudable microscope.

On its face — assuming one read the face from start to finish — it appears pretty fair & balanced. I would even give it high marks for the editor's inclusion of pertinent details one doesn't find in other articles, yet I cannot help but stroke it with a thick red marker for something I find missing, albeit on the obscured ground of the light kind of propaganda-by-default that results from the critical mass of a nation assuming one's own occupy higher ground. The extent to which one's own are not above reproach is considered, if taken into consideration at all, hardly relevant to the topic at hand.

The topic at hand is a band of imams & rabbis taking to the streets on tandem bicycles, pedaling together against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, so to spoke. But all is not well, for one-or-another of the participants "has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood", which is not okay if you're an imam not under the aegis of one-or-another of the host nation's spy agencies, if you'll excuse the digression.

It is the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution who says so in a report. For those unfamiliar with this office, it is not a grassroots-minded, independent watchdog, but rather a opaquely-funded, government spy agency. But who better to gather intelligence than an intelligence agency with absolutely no history of- or proclivity for bending the rules on behalf of their conflicts of interest, if you'll excuse the sarcasm.

The article is fair & balanced insofar as it gives the do-gooders the final word, those who remark that the imam in question is not who the spooks say, and others who are, anyway, more concerned about the downside of shutting people out of the conversation, which would drive them into the limbs of the rads, if you'll excuse the trans-lingual pun.

The mosque man's alleged connections aside, one should order one's own house. If the concerns are real and legit, then they're just doing their job in reporting on them. I have to wonder still what the official constitutional protectorate has to say about their host state's support of Saudi Arabia, not just because of the latter's alleged support for the same Muslim Brotherhood, but as it relates to the former couple's brutally collegial project that has created the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Just as the strife between the Union side of the current government coalition threatens (at least as one reads in the media) to destroy European unity with its collateral damage, does no one find it strange that the same government should supply weapons to regimes that violate the same human rights as the party named in that particular intelligence report, said to model themselves after the historical regime, unreformed, while that current regime are with the support of their Western allies killing thousands and driving many more away from home, exacerbating the refugee crisis, which crisis is what this internecine political strife is all about? This connection is not even alluded to by any of the parties mentioned in the article or its editors, regardless of which of the ostensible two sides they come down on: for the iman ridin' the bike vs. against the imam ridin' the bike.

While we have learned from the media about the horrors in Yemen, it has not been as comprehensive and obsessively set to REPEAT as has been their reporting on the War between the CDU and CSU. Lemme ask you this: If the imam in question had procured for this so-called brotherhood just such weapons as Berlin has the Kings of Oil, would NATO missiles have destroyed his entire neighbourhood by now, or would they find a better solution?

Update: es geht weiter so. ..  . ..mit Gänseblümchen:

Seehofers typische Gänseblümchen-Taktik

Yes, a Gänseblümchen is a daisy. You can't make up a coincidence.

Oily Bell, Daisy Chain: Links to Fahrradikalen - Berlin, 2018

Re. +49301785853304

Short answer (text-like version) in the 1st of the following sentences: No, I don't. As a matter of fact, to begin the comprehensive explanation, I let it lapse only relatively recently after the pre-paid SIM card I had been using since my arrival in 2002 had its Terms of Use amended to limit using the minimum loadable amount of €15 within six months instead of what had been for over fifteen years a year-&-a-half. Ironically enough, the only chargeable offense I used the phone for was to write texts, which were 30 cents a piece, so the fifteen euros had over all those fifteen years lasted at least through a couple of terms just inside the entirety of their eighteen months.

Now one might ask (and, trust me, more than one has) why I never just purchased a contract, thereby enabling a more frequent use at a reasonable price, much more convenience, etc., etc. This question crucifies itself upon the assumption that I would have used my phone more if I could have. But it was precisely the way I was using it that led to the realisation that I not only didn't need it but simply didn't want it.

Nevertheless on 29 September 2017 at 1:49pm, I was loathe to load an additional €15 to prolong the first new expiry and to avoid losing the 15+ that was already on it. 'Use it or lose it' was the agitated cogitation until on 29 March of this year when I lost that entire thirty-something because I didn't want to prolong the anti-ecological cliché any longer. Obviously I wasn't using it to make many calls or write a significant number of texts. That last time it served an emergency is in a cloud of forgotten memories.

I have a landline. I won't go so far as to make the hereditary affirmation that if it were up to me I wouldn't even have that. It is at least partly up to me, it comes with the Net, and I wouldn't have it otherwise. My ability to tele-connect makes the expenditure of both the fiat transfer and cognitive tax justifiable. The sometimes inconvenient convenience remains worthwhile. I am all-too aware that the industry I therewith support is manufacturing a world into which I will no longer be able to venture if I don't change my immobile ways. So be it.

The sole subsequent mobile telephone that I purchased as a replacement of the first one (solely because the former's display no longer displayed legible lettering) and into which I stuck the SIM card — which was what I'd really purchased on that summer day at a flea market — has become anyway little more than a camera, albeit digital and of quality quite limited, the bulk of primary evidence of which can be found in the hover images here.

The longer background (should this be (or remain) of any interest) is that basically I bought my first mobile telephone used at Boxhagener Platz Flohmarkt, not because I wanted it, but because the first guy I wanted to book T & me grimaced when I said, "No, but I got an email address." I got the phone. We got the gig.

The most interesting tidbit of this tale only occurred to me as recently as a couple of days ago when I turned on my one-time to me embarrassingly chic flip-phone for its other primary purpose — to be able to track the time for the three hours that followed. A new message appeared. "SIM nicht registriert". This displayed so prominently for so long that I actually almost wondered if I'd ever be able to see the clock again.

So from 29 March of this year, when my moola minima vaporised into an un-spendable pun, to apparently exactly two months later, I was nevertheless able to receive calls and texts. Now, the final expiry of expiration must have been last Tuesday, I'd wager, 1:49pm. I hadn't turned it on from the previous Friday until Wednesday so I make this assumption based on the always accurate carrying out of the Terms which this time, seemingly arbitrarily, granted me an additional two months' passive use. I'm sure in that time I would not have received those few texts in tact... but for some goddess' grace period.

What occurred to me between Wednesday and now is that the SIM card was never really registered, at least not to me. Having bought it used, I even had to have its digital lock picked by the kind of pro who can do such things. Not that I hadn't been trackable all this time, but at least in the court of law, I'd've had a better chance than someone who'd signed their name along a bottom line. Or I might've had the least of lesser chances and been locked up for purchasing a stolen phone and going so far as to assist in the achievement of its unlawful unlocking and, not least of worst, evading the law that says you're not allowed to use your devices without allowing your being traced & tracked by name & number. At any rate, as far as I can tell, +49301785853304 is over & out.

The machine that houses it, however, remains reusable. Indeed. The following corresponding hover image comes by way of an inadvisable shimmy to the depth of this one-time riverside swimmery (I wudn't walkin' that plank, palms & knees for me) and the use of that former courtesy phone of persisting paltry pixelation. Quite conversely, it is only the row of postal addresses of the rooftops in the background that remain from this photograph:

"111" - Osthafen, Berlin-Friedrichshain - 1907/2018

Just the Facts

Observe the following sentence & subsequent translation: Der Rollstuhlfahrer soll beim Überqueren der Straße nicht den Fußgängerüberweg genutzt haben, eine Ampel befand sich nur 25 Meter weiter. It means: The wheelchair user is believed not to have used the pedestrian crossing. A traffic light was only 25 meters away.

nur {adv}: only; just | If he'd only wheeled his lazy ass to the next corner. He's just looking for sympathy.

The descriptive measurement becomes a value judgment by way of the insertion of no more than an additional word, a simple syllable, a mere morpheme, which is then nothing less than a transgression of journalistic responsibility that triggers a number of possible conclusions about what actually happened. However, the application of "nur" in this context is not only bad reporting pregnant with the plausibly prejudicial ableist attitude beclouded in traffic law & order. It's also inaccurate, which mere minutes of research might have made clear. As you can glean from the item's accompanying photograph, there is in fact a light at the reported intersection. Either the Unfortunate wasn't crossing at this corner and the driver dragged him the distance, or the nearest light was *twice as far away.