“I guess failure *was* an option.” - Cel don’t shake your head and say it’s horrible; what are you gonna DO? Your move! beatific prose can obfuscate as well as elucidate > In China there was a man named Seko, who loved dragons. All his scrolls were dragons, he designed his house like a dragon-house, and he had many pictures of dragons. So the real dragon thought, “If I appear in his house, he will be very pleased.” So one day the real dragon appeared in his room and Seko was very scared of it. He almost drew his sword and killed the real dragon. The dragon cried, “Oh my!” and hurriedly escaped from Seko’s room. Dogen Zenji says, “Don’t be like that.” > [R]ather than taking the path that is prescribed in the formal practice of Zen Buddhism itself, namely, sitting cross-legged and breathing and such things, I decided that my proper discipline was the one to which I was already committed, namely, the making of music. And that I would do it with a means that was as strict as sitting cross-legged, namely, the use of chance operations, and the shifting of my responsibility from the making of choices to that of asking questions. - p glass - #pdp 021321 In the sail meeting I heard myself saying being a mail carrier was "not that complicated." and that “There’s a certain appeal to it. " but even as I was saying it I knew it wasn't quite that simple. There's way more to delivering the mail than "this piece of paper goes in this box by this time” --im just not sure how to put it into words. [edit: 2022—it has something to do with the people, and the cats, and turkeys, and the pheasants? and the gun runner, and the dog people, and the beer people, and the listening to the radio in the driveway in a very old truck people, and the cul de sac people, and the people up top of the hill in slightly nicer houses than the people down in the muddy bottom, and the people across the next field who live like kings compared to them] 021321 #thekeytowriting you want to come up with good things to say to make the conversation better, to earn your way into the golden carnival of the conversation. it’s not to make yourself look better, it’s not to sell yourself. It’s to pay your way, to pay your respects, to carry your weight. It’s to show your eagerness to be part of the conversation. It’s to show your love. Find everyone’s secret ray of impossible sunshine. Honor them. Sing their praises. Be quiet and listen. If you can’t find a loving way to say something, is it something you really need to be saying? Scott contacted me out of the fucking blue-blue-green. We talked on Zoom. That’s as weird as it sounds, and I am so grateful. So grateful to have a friend who would come back for me. #pdp if you give a class some love, you’ll get results. You think you know what results you want now, but you don’t. Trust me. You have to wait and see, and then rejoice in whatever it turns out to be. 021521 It’s either school or else be some kind of genius, so unless you’re really fucking lucky it’s school or nothing. That’s what we’ve told ourselves. Why? And what did JS mean by “consider the differential of privilege when you think about standards”? (that’s a major paraphrase, but.) 021821 > While the first measures Democrats introduced in this session of Congress were bills to expand and protect voting, Republicans in state legislatures across the nation are considering measures to limit voting. It’s just ... how is this ... how can they ... how the fuck is this even a question??? How can they sit there with a straight face and present this shit and have people support them? It’s fucking mind blowing. 022121 TIME TO STOP LYING AROUND ALL DAY. TURN WIFI OFF IF NEED school isn’t necessarily evil but what are we doing with our time? energy? why are we letting inertia and others’ lethargic expectations dictate the confines of our days? torpor is our biggest enemy now; passivity; consumption; what happened to ‘move on, we guess you don’t need his permission’ ...drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid... tired of ‘my’ ‘computers’ scolding and clucking and pretending no one says fuck or ain’t; always slipping out of tge way when i’m trying to be honest, never there when i need them, always fashionable and treacherous tired of being timid, a mousy follower like all the other lamos... but what happens when the average get sucked into the whirlwind of vengeance against the recognition of their blindness, weakness, failures? what happens is the ones they want to emulate prey on them, all the while egging them onto into the righteous light that is just as spurious as ‘socialism’. so what’s left for us masses of non-geniuses? mental slavery? being wards for the rest of our days? withering from the dull heat of the constant awareness that we contribute nothing, experience not the slightest fraction of real, quick, vital life? dying of the thirst for both belonging and individuality, choked by the thick tongue of knowing neither is attainable? once you begin to glean that ‘writing’ doesn’t equal ‘moaning and maundering and piling on the self-loathing until some savior incarnate detects the keen of ultimate pathos and manifests to tell you how wrong you are, to show you your beauty and your sacred self,’ what is left? says Tara Westover: “Some years Grandpa would look out over the small, frightened herd bound for the meat grinder, at the young stallions pacing, coming to terms with their first captivity, and a hunger would appear in his eyes. Then he’d point to one and say, “Don’t load that ’un. That ’un we’ll break.” we just wanted to be that ‘un. but not to breaked—just to be a stallion. to be released from the certainty of becoming dog food “He had never been feral, so he could not hear the maddening call of that other world, on the mountain, in which he could not be owned, could not be ridden.”. but we can all feel it, at least a tiny bit. i don’t know if i could ever explain to ‘book club’ that that’s what i’m getting from this if parenting and teaching is all about smoothing everything down, then god help me i hope i fail miserably —— says Howard Oakley: _There was an old lady who swallowed a cow;
I don’t know how she swallowed a cow!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her!
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly – Perhaps she’ll die!_ [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Lady_Who_Swallowed_a_Fly). > The trick, I believe, is to stop short of the horse. says cory doctorow: > You can't be an American Lysenkoist unless you deny that we have a shared destiny. That's why climate, pandemic, energy, education and health are so confounding to conservatives. These are systems that require collective responses.... > Lysenkoism demands a hard heart. To survive watching your neighbors die for your ideology, you must somehow shift the blame to them. Small wonder that Ted Cruz feels empowered to take his germ-ridden family to a Cancun resort, abandoning his constituents.... > You can't embrace an ideology that kills your neighbors and still look yourself in the mirror unless you can find a way to make it all your neighbors' fault.