The Light of Peace

On Christmas Day
we celebrated at our house
I picked up my in-laws at their house
and drove them to our house.
They are old and wobbly
and there are lots of stairs
so it took a while to get them into my car
also my mother-in-law had a flame
the Light of Peace
that had come all the way from Jerusalem
that she wanted to share with us
and we had to be careful with that
so as not to light anything on fire
and especially not let it go out.
it was in the form of a candle, protected in a little
wood and glass lantern type thing.
she put that into a pot and carried the pot
for extra protection of all involved.
the light, as i understand it, someone goes to jerusalem
and sets something on fire from the Light of Peace there
and hurries back with it before it goes out
then they light more things on fire
and take them to churches
where people come and light other things, usually candles
and take them home
where the Light of Peace
shines on Christmas.
their neighbor had gone to church to get a flame
and come over and lit their candle for them
doubling the Light of Peace.
all the way to my house it smelled like something was burning
in my car but it was only the Light of Peace.
at my house everyone stood around
and watched
while I took out our candle
or rather put their candle-lantern thing into a larger lantern
of ours
a big glass affair
and took our candle and a long wooden match
with which to transfer the Light of Peace to our new candle
while leaving their candle burning
thus doubling yet again the Light of Peace
but instead, with the large match, I pressed the first candle’s wick
into the melted wax
extinguishing the Light of Peace
undeniably, before five witnesses
fuck, I said.
it’s like that Jack London story with the trapper starting a fire in winter,
i said
but none of them were Jack London fans.

Improving the urban experience

I was just wondering
if commuting would be improved
by more vocal Jehovah’s Witnesses
like, if they cat-called
passersby, like
hey, sinner, hey, hey!
and instead of just holding their
Watchtowers, they waved them
or fanned themselves with them
when they got hot in their overcoats
hey, enjoy your apocalypse, sinner!
sinner, hey!

Fuller Disclosure (Full Disclosure Part II)

Beta: (Returns from exotic mission to exotic country XYZ)
Beta: Boy, am I tired.
Beta: (Reads blog post)
Beta: Hrm.
Beta: Dad, if kidnappers kidnap you they want ransom. So your family would already know.
Mig: Uh…
Beta: Especially if they cut off your fingertip. It would be used to emphasize their ransom demand. So your family would already know about that too. Your train of thought makes no sense.
Mig: It was a fresh train of thought, I was still in the midst of thinking it, I hadn’t examined it for logical consistency yet.
Beta: (Raises one devastating eyebrow devastatingly)
Mig: Fresh, I tell you.

Full disclosure

Mig: Hi. Watcha doin’?
Gamma: Well I was going to do yoga but I got stuck taking tests online.
Gamma: I wondered if I could name 20 elements, so I took a quiz, then I fell down a quiz hole for an hour.
Mig: Ah.
Mig: Your mother asked me what I was thinking. I said, well, I was thinking if someone kidnapped me and cut off the tip of one of my fingers, and then released me but threatened my family if I told anyone, if I would tell anyone. And how long it would take her to notice one of my fingertips was missing.
Gamma: Ah.
Gamma: Well, actually, full disclosure, I was thinking, if we were on a quiz show where they killed you if you didn’t know the answer, would I be able to name 20 elements.
Mig: Ah.

On the musical liberation of the pineal gland

Ok.
So.
Apparently.
Apparently there is a genre of music on youtube, new-agey yogish, acupuncture-therapist-waiting-room-sounding meditative drony recordings, hours long, centering on one of a number of frequencies promising to help you release negative energy, liberate your pineal gland, or third eye, chakra healing, Kundalini something, increase brain power, attain divinity, and so on, depending on the frequency.
I’ve been listening to them at work because they are relaxing and don’t irritate my office-mate.
Today was pineal liberation day.
Pineal gland liberated, I went for my lunchtime stroll.
Report:
Three cars nearly hit me
and the crows shunned me (most of them).
A liberated pineal gland seems to create a force field that distracts drivers.
Or renders them homicidal.
And corvids are like,
Watch out! Kundalini energy! Forget this guy!
Hypothesis: the pineal gland was subjugated for a reason.
In the early days of human evolution
the forces of evolution gathered in the darkness
one said, we have to do something. About the pineus.
But they look so happy and relaxed and ten years younger, said another.
Yeah but they’re eventually going to invent cars and they’ll exterminate themselves, said the first.
(the forces of evolution looked like crows)
So, boom, subjugation of the pineal gland.

Family history

The quick, brown fox could no longer remember whether it had already written a post on a certain topic, or not, but figured if that was the case (that it had forgotten) then anyone else potentially out there in the aether reading this couldn’t either, so why worry?

Alpha, as you know, is looking into family history. We are slowly, as in a couple years down the road, lining up trips to Ireland and Scotland (near the single-malt whisky trail, apparently) to look at where some of my people are from, but for now she is concentrating on her side of the family.

Her father’s people were miners. They worked in an iron mine that dates back to Celts and Romans. She has spent time in archives and churches going through centuries’ worth of birth and death records.

I have already written about this, haven’t I? It feels so familiar.

Miners were the first workers to unionize in Austria (I think). And there were times when the unions were strong, and wages were okay, and living conditions were relatively healthy. And there were times when the unions got busted, and new workers imported from somewhere else, and pages and pages of death records were full of whole families all dying of the same disease at the same time because people were malnourished and crammed into crowded housing.

There was no endless progress from darkness and misery to light and prosperity. Prosperity and health of these ancestors depended on how strong their union was, because the natural tendency of the mine owners, whether church or state or someone else, was to squeeze as much as possible out of them; they had no interest in the welfare of the miners, and revoked what prosperity the miners had once achieved whenever possible.

Pages and pages of people dying at the same time as some sanitation-based epidemic or another burned through the village.

PS break up Facebook, google, Apple, Twitter, all those guys.

figurehead

does anyone else get the feeling
lately that the current president
of the usa is less a leader and more
one of those living figureheads strapped
to the front of one of those spikey,
flamey trucks in road warrior
hollering and spittle/snot-dripping through
his hammered mask? his typos and
brain-damage english distracting
us from the stabby, shooty,
burney nazi caravan behind him, seeking valhalla
but just bootlicker dogs of
the wheezer gods back at the cave
doling out water by the drop
or is it just me?
and of those, how many have the sneaking
feeling it has always been thus
and something just can’t be
arsed to apply its mask in the morning
anymore?