Grassroots

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Wow. The Democrats still piss me off but what a wonderful day! You couldn't of whiped the smile off my face with 12 hours of surgery. Headline: Rumsfeld Resigns; Bush Vows to Work with Democratic Majority. Already articles on how the focus of the new house & senate is going to be the end of the war, environmental reform focusing on alternative energy & land-use reform, the return of property rights, & finding better jobs for the 'little' people. Damn. This means no more talk of eliminating the estate tax & less abuse of eminent domain. This means a bridge to end the unnecessarily debilitating situations & results of war. The Dems are still woosies who are roped in towards the 'political center'. The bi-party system is partly to blame. But middle & lower America don't seem as duped. The vast minority who swing the hammer with a pen & burgeoning bank accounts aren't winning the majority of elections on the issues of abortion & lower taxes this time around. Who knew? Maybe people won't let that little percentage of the populace create modern feudalism where the big players control the workers/slaves to do their profit-making. This country is still messed in the head. The web is fragile. We still have a grip of people who believe in 'our' authority over other nations & dismiss the rights of people with other sexual orientations. There are plenty who don't know their own minds. The Supreme Court is still precariously on the edge of being staunchly conservative passing precedents with long-reaching implications. Who remembers the greatness of Hugo Black, Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O'Connor, Earl Warren & William Rehnquist? The checks & balances are close to being broken. The executive branch was able to solicit pre-approval for a preemptive attack on a country halfway across the globe based on falsely analyzed information that was organized to mislead but still should've been seen through. Didn't Vietnam & Korea blatantly spell out the foolishness of occupation? The media which is in a way the fourth branch of government has been allowed to fall into the hands of large interest. Who's demanding reform of FCC regulations? Civil War, if it ever comes to that, would be tearfully ugly in a modern age.

Well, I had food-poisoning & threw up three times before 6 in the morning on my way to work two days ago. Due to illness no coffee in the caf, & (much less disappointing) no pinball in smoky bars. My appetite has been precarious due to nausea. At least I haven't just sat around low energy watching movies.

Matt & I have been on the conversation tip. Today I get a check that will finally catch me up to the financial help I've given Aaron & Matt. While decidedly patient & mellow I can't say I've been ecstatic to be so tight with money for the end of summer. Plenty of flashbacks to worse days when Rachael made me feel like shit or Tacoma where I slept in a basement for awhile in despair. Oh well. My infrastructure seems like its made of adamantium compared to olden days.

I did watch Pootie Tang again. Why don't I own that move when I love it so much? With rental & late fees from a couple of occasions I already have shelled out enough to own it two times over. Don't even get me started on Miyazaki... My propensity for late fees has me seriously considering joining Netflix. Big studio movies, great music from major labels, & books from large publishers are my last bastions of monetary support for ruefully capitalist culture. Great art sells. Take the subculture & make it mainstream. If MTV wants to sell Saul Williams & Pootie Tang then okay, I guess. Dissemination of enlightening ideas is okay. My major bank tenure is pretty much over. Hello small community bank. Enough caffeinated leaping.

Nothing much to report in the love department. Everything I express is about love anyway. The last girl I had a semi-crush on ended up being a little too girlish fake, too young at heart, & scared the crap out of me by announcing she's joining the Air Force. Took me two hours of paleness erasure to broach the subject after her announcement. Sure she needs a change & self-discipline but killing from a distance wouldn't be my choice of solution. That early retirement she touted would do me no good I'd spend the rest of my life living out the nightmare of my imagination trying to sort out what I did & might have done. Speaking of, I'm gonna read Truman's memoirs super soon. What did the man (bastard) think of dropping the bombs before & after? The question haunts me.

There is a Socialist in the Senate!!!!

Since my poetry's been shit I'm going back to work on my essay collection. Prose & research are a relief to a mind weary of looking for a new combination of artistic subtleties to meet my own standards of poetic expression. I find relief in the idea that whenever I've felt totally unhappy with my poetry I've risen up to reclaim my place as a conduit & let creation flow through me. Never been too satisfied but I can tell when something has come closer to what's wanting to come out in the moment. We create all the time but I like song best. BTW, poems I put here aren't my best stuff, it's the middle-grade on the borderline of inclusion in collections. The best I save for send-offs. Nothing against the teensy smattering of people who read this.

Alright, I've been at the screen long enough. Had a nightmare recently where Rachael (part Amy) wanted to talk to me to smooth things over but, like my dad, I was engrossed at a slot machine. To be sure I've been caught up in reading at a computer with both Amy & Rachael. Both complained. Attentiveness is muy importante. Goddess knows I acknowledge the homeless & the crazy for that very reason: how very kind it is to recognize someone's existence & their importance in the grand story-scheme. In the nightmare I was all cocooned, oblivious & mindlessly hurtful, ignoring, while a blip of awareness alarmed how I was letting it all happen again. Balance. "What passes for luxury others can keep" starts one of my poems in Subnotes for the Golden Age. My computer sessions are Dionysian bouts since I refuse to have home usage. The public display makes the time seem to stretch. While my vices are few (some sports, some internet, some very occasional recreational but minimal lack of sobriety, a little bit of porn) the after-effects still make me question the validity of indulging in behavior that is retrograde enough I see what seems like little blotches of emptiness. We all deal with the void. The continuing quest to question.

Off to clothes-washing. A nice five block walk in the rain toting three loads. In the possible futures a Golden Age exists. Can people learn to pay attention to their actions, to the implications? Yes. Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." What is knowledge if you do not apply it with proper care? Ironic that an adamant pacifist's explorations into the nature of reality paved the way for others to create atomic & nuclear bombs. A Golden Age awaits. Whether we bring it into being is so in question that each day a fire builds in the thrashing hope of my weathered soul nurturing the roots that seek blossom. The roots are far from perfect or perfect in their own way, I am trying to cleanse my body & my mind so that I can subsume the right details & ingredients for me to function best in the symbiosis. Sometimes I forget. Goddess, kick my ass as often as you deem helpful.