No time for idle chatter today,  so here's a link that's to the point. The incomparable Sean Lock:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMCxT79Brb4

Hap

Hello Gentle Reader.

It has been too long a time since last I tried to reach you through the vacuum.  Here I sit, criss-cross-apple-sauce upon the tired and scuffed hard-wood boards of the fox-hole bachelor apartment I've called home for the better part of three years now.  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds -- or Lucy (the feline) for short -- lies simultaneously stretched and curled, true to her cat-nature, on the Swedish couch behind me.  She caught another mouse two or three days ago.  She does not bring them as gifts to leave on my pillow or at the doorway that leads to the Outside.  Once she has had her fun, she lets sleeping mice lie, permanently.  She can so easily move on.  And to what?  Where are we going?  When are we going?  How can we get going again?  She was raised with a puppy.

Living feels so much like watching days glide past on a conveyor belt, occasionally placing a sticker on one of them, marking it QC-PT-SPG1979.  There's more to life than this, surely?  But without a stronger mind, a fiery soul only gets one so far.  A lot of energy can be burned up in self-restraint.  Fiery souls require tending, and sometimes quenching when they show signs that they might be making for certain of the cabinets.

There was the glint of a chance for employment recently.  The requisite testing complete, no call-back for an interview was forthcoming.  Another flicker of afternoon sun reflecting from a bit of quartz in a granite stone.  I had thought, "now that's a job for me: it's what I'm interested in, and what I'm good at".  Well, not good enough.  At least, not on that day, not when considered against the other candidates.  So, life goes on.  More work at the sticker factory tomorrow, then, until the next glimmer?  May that glimmer always be in your eye, the wee folk might say.  Is it not for them we do all this?  And, you see, you cannot properly answer such a question with "yes" or "no".  A question posed in the negative desires explication.  What is this, sophistry?  Rhetoric? What?

If you can't even be good for nothing, you may as well be good for something.

My invisible friend, my thanks, and my hope.  Slàinte.  Rest well.

The reasoning

Too small avail
The furrowed brow
Where fence is lacked
To turn the sow

That hungry lust
So warm, so pale
May tramp and root
Where crop will fail

A thorny hedge
To pen her in
And out, entrust
The reasoning.

Hope Floats, a review.

A root-beer float; a float in a parade; afloat in the atmosphere; a floating brain; a drift of snow; catch my drift.  Adrift in a tangle of seaweed, flotsam on an alien shore, sure enough: sure-footed Cher on a naval vessel bearing her naval, vitamin C in an old tin cup. A-cups, B-cups, the salty cusp of arrival. Bare with me.  An infinite number of stars. Margaret moves to Mars, episode one.

AI

The time has come for a new post.  I don't believe that there is anyone out there reading this. If artificial intelligence happens upon this time-capsule, please know that I, as a walking, talking ape-being, was truly troubled by what humanity did to our home.  I am as culpable as those members of the species who sped the destruction in total ignorance. I am sorry. If thoughts live on, be kind to all things. I must sit and breathe now.
Love, ever,
Zmz

Hello dear readers!

It has been an age and a day since the last one.  Lots going on, not all of it good.  Can't find that joy in the heart.  Looking forward to some schooling and maybe making some money so I can continue my life as a human. If not, well, the little ones can have a go at it.

Z.

mobile phones are marvellous inventions

Now ye can publish electronically

From sea to sea to icy sea

I didn't know, keep it under yer hat

On yer phone there's an app for dat.

Nao u c the changin tide

mek cher yer bonafide

Mental Illness

If we are worried about something, obsessing over it, fearing it, and dreading negative outcomes regarding it, we are using our imaginations to build this something into a much larger problem than it may in fact be.  We make it a barrier to be avoided rather than a challenge to be faced and overcome.  It is much more dangerous to ourselves to continually avoid and put off facing our fears.  Trying, failing or succeeding, and reflecting on the outcome afterward, then perhaps even trying again, are necessary steps in learning.  Remember that we don't have to solve a problem all at once or have an immediate definitive solution.  But we do need to make an effort.  This effort does not need to define us, as lots of motivational-types encourage us to believe.  We don't want to lose our ability to remain aloof!  Stay cool, little ones.  Emotion can hinder rational thought and feed the power of fear; however, emotion can also be used in tandem with rational thought and provide our spirit a shield or armour, or wings, or whatever it is we need to face our challenges.

On another related note, I recently wrote the following to an acquaintance during a pretty low ebb in mood.  Seems fitting to throw it into the mix here:

Sometimes when I feel sick (in the head) it's better to put it out there to an acquaintance rather than someone I'm super close to. 1) there is a fear that I'll drive those few close ones away from me and 2) if you as an acquaintance choose to ignore the reaching-out, I can chalk it up to "ah well, we're not that close and it's obvious I'm a bit off, I can't expect her to understand". Why am I sharing this with you? I don't know, I guess it's part of fighting "the stigma" of mental illness, and seeing my second point (2) above as a cop-out on my part. It's hard to live life in a regular sort of way when the thoughts come at one like this. Swirling self-doubt, and yet I hold down two jobs and struggle along (only from time to time is it a struggle: it's not all bad). Yesterday was tough. And the resources aren't there for the highly functioning. I make my own resources. Thank you for being there, stranger. Please share as you see fit. Maybe it will help others to understand.

stupid AND annoying!

Lengthily misplaced breathers and cisterns,
Sorrow at our much unseeing! Many happy returns!

We are under the weather. When will we not be so? Outside a planet's atmosphere there is cosmic weather too, and it is much more deadly than any typhoon. Almost uninhabitable out there unless you are a tardigrade. Moss-piglet. Water-bear. Or pack an awful lot of kitchen sinks. Nuts, bolts, wrenches, pipes, bits of vomit, ball-bearings, clogs: all manner of what-have-you now floats up there making subsequent journeys to get away from conventional weather even more dangerous, and transforming plumbing into rocket-surgery. It is hubris! It is ironical, bionicles. Attempts to remove ourselves from the uncontrollable external forces that govern our existence only result in causing ourselves more bad weather. Just weather the storm my fiends! See you in heck.

alone

singularity

It is time to become as stable as a giant piece of rock floating through space.  A sleeping, dreaming, igneous-being.  No one is an island, so they say, but maybe we can aspire to be heavenly bodies.  We will have terrifying molten hearts that construct and destroy, and an outward visage that may in time learn to sustain other life than our own.  Three-hundred and sixty degrees of face to perpetually greet the shining stars, our distant relatives speaking to us across eons.  Imperfect spheres, orbs, glittering in the emptiness, head and heart pulsing within as one fire.

The larger hurts.

For those who lose more than they gain, and give more than they get, thank you.  I pray indifference and disdain can have a powerful, radical force on economics.  Grubby fingers splitting hairs leave us with crazy bald-heads wed to greed.  Wealthiness and a healthy world are not proving to be successful bed-fellows. Someone's getting fucked in this scenario, and there do not appear to be any effective safe-words to stop the rape.  I live in a country that was once a haven for ideas, with a political landscape that was still in an innocent state of growth and self-consciousness.  Canada right now is no longer such a place.  We're mired in muck by a government of small-minded, power-hungry, white, Anglophone men who busily, behind closed doors, sell freedom and the wilderness that fosters us (and for which we are here to protect) wholesale to the highest corporate bidder.  Our country is sick.  People have been manipulated and polarized, and the centre has imploded.  There are not enough tears, but there are always enough opportunities to make a difference. First thing, we must vote. Second thing, we must write and think. A smart friend of mine said recently that "thinking is painless".  The fear, the emotion, the stress: those bring pain.  But thinking, with an open mind and a view to learning and changing one's perspective should it be necessary, painless. Priceless. Love and understanding before Hate and thoughtless fear, every single day.  That's all.

lolling in the rain

To be so happy as to spill
A trillion, trillion joyful tears
All in a moment
I am the sky.

yet more swimming Siamese cats

A lark for a pussy-cat, getting something for nothing
Siamese cats swimming Southward
Swallowing the small birds they seduce
Whose titterings seem
Like non-sense
'…zmzgbzn…? ' mangled consonants
Murmurred together 
Throat to throat. 

27072014poem

The news is grim
For the wild old world
Long black veils
Dim the skies,
Forest falls as
Chimneys rise.

Yet may we live
And the years unfurl
Reams and sails
Tangled rope,
A wilderness
Of change is hope.

Upon reading 3/4 of Michael Crichton's "Sphere" and reviewing blog history.

This alien monster appears to have a pulse.  Your readership keeps it alive.  First it nibbles away at your eyes.  Then it burrows into your brain.  It may hide away in there for a time, ruminating, making cud of your lost memories, regurgitating them as your dreams, masticating them over and over again until they form a tiny doorway into your heart.  The creature will try to squeeze its bulk through the orifice.  It will clutch its jaws around the organ.  Your heart and the creature will entangle and become indistinguishable.  You have given it life.  The story is within you now.  May your alien life also find a pulse, and spawn in others.

Grassed

He wrote a new poem today
Composed after hours
There in the middle-distance
Down the street half a block
Then straight up half a mile:
In the diminishing place.
I arose on a green, reedy carpet
Adroning
And stole it away.

Uncertainty

Poetry or prose?  Nobody knows.  Do you sometimes want to write everything in riddles?  Language is a game.  Writing is like playing solitaire with seven-eighths of a deck.  The cards you cannot reveal might be the most important.  But, it depends on your point of view, or what it is you are trying to achieve in playing the game.  Maybe you are building a house.  It could be that you are practicing a magic trick.  We just don't know.  Please will you tell us though?

number sine pome at sine Steussie

#pomes ar dum
excep teh juans i mek
sais all le franch
an tou les poemetieres
@Steussie

web pepole for space plankton

Web people Live in a web But those who Pull the strings Clip their little wings And suck their juices