Blue Moon Blogging

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Thursday December 31, 2009 · 5:07 PM PST

2009/12/31 · 17:07

1. I used to have thoughts.
2. Tonight’s full moon will be a blue moon. This afternoon, a heavy wet snow fell for a few hours like a spell.

ommzms

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Sunday December 27, 2009 · 11:14 AM PST

2009/12/27 · 11:14

"My Friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right." - from W.W.T.A.W.W.T.A.L., Raymond Carver (the Gordon Lish edited version)

It begins with an overheard phone conversation -

ommzms

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Friday November 13, 2009 · 2:48 PM PST

2009/11/13 · 14:48

Repetition. I have been trying to begin this for several days. Something about the quality of morning light and reassuring quotidian rituals was what I had been contemplating. Nothing written, nothing typed. Just thinking and walking and repeating the words, rearranging the words, changing the phrase, changing the oblique quality of the morning light coming through the east-facing windows; never getting past a sentence or two of editing sentences that don’t actually exist.

ommzms

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Thursday October 09, 2008 · 10:16 AM PDT

2008/10/09 · 10:16

I look at the other members of my focus group – well, actually there are no others. Focus Sub-Group Z5 consists of one urban professional white male in the 37-58 age grouping wearing gray plaid pajamas at 9:00 PM EDT, 20-year-old Tawny in hand, port that is, pacing, rather than sitting in the available worn, striped corduroy recliner circa All in The Family, while the televised presidential debate begins. Lacking an actual Perception Analyzer®, he will be limited to objective, subjective, deductive, and critical thinking, with all the concomitant butterfly effects of chaos theory infused with the wood-aged uncertainty of the port’s sweet nectar, whereupon he will use his free hand to grasp the closest thing he has to a perception analyzer with the hope of being able to discern a rising and falling graphical worm-line that corresponds to an instantaneous visceral and "pure" response. Although absolutely devoid of any residual tumescence, as soon as Tom Brokaw begins speaking, the PA tool indicates a slight but definitely perceptible downward momentum.

ommzms

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Monday September 29, 2008 · 7:16 AM PDT

2008/09/29 · 07:16

You can only predict things after they have happened. - Eugene Ionesco, from Rhinoceros

"Well, Senator, I can't predict the future, and I've been wrong quite a few times now." - Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke at the Senate Banking Committee hearing.

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. – David Foster Wallace, 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address

ommzms

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Wednesday September 24, 2008 · 7:35 AM PDT

2008/09/24 · 07:35

This is better than a strong cup of coffee. After days of reading and trying to follow the threads of how-we-got-here theory, as excellent as many of them have been, instinctually, I had what I referred to as "that sinking feeling"; this flim-flam has been purpetrated over and over again since 2001 (and earlier, when no one was paying attention).

ommzms

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Tuesday September 23, 2008 · 5:40 PM PDT

2008/09/23 · 17:40

Now that the presidential campaigns are in full cry, following the painful pageantry of the conventions, the formerly scattered (resigned, fired, or banished) neocon braintrust of the Bush administration has reanimated into McCain’s advisory cabal, those, that is, who were not formerly (or are currently) corporate lobbyists – they form the foundation of his campaign. The Bushites forté is meme building. They write speeches that offer a potpourri of prevarication – Palin’s convention speech was written by Matthew Scully, an experienced speechwriter who served two stints in the White House, most recently for President George W. Bush – and barbarous memes that leech on to the listeners’ sub-conscience like spiked retroviruses, the modus operandi of the right-wing talk-radio hate peddlers. They spew out lies and hatred and see what sticks, what demented spirit will take up the hate meme and act upon it. Like Bill Moyers said on a recent edition of his PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal, "You cannot un-ring a bell."

ommzms

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Monday September 22, 2008 · 8:20 AM PDT

2008/09/22 · 08:20

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. - from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges

Among other things, Borges’ short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, first published in 1940, is about the gradual and deliberate transmogrification of history, facts, memory, and reality itself by "chess masters", by "a scattered dynasty of solitary men".

ommzms

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Thursday May 29, 2008 · 8:32 PM PDT

2008/05/29 · 20:32

If I had it to do over, I would begin this sentence again. I just don’t like how it’s turning out; it’s so seven seconds ago. In truth, however, the distance between two sentences is an infinity. Each word is a candle placed between facing mirrors – receding endlessly into a long-forgotten past, extending eternally into an unknowable future.

(Aside) There is an ancient Russian traditional method of cleansing, i.e. energy, as in negative in a room or house, that uses such a combination of candles and mirrors. "Traditional Russian healers believed that all forms of negative energy would be pulled inside the corridor created by two mirrors and so disappear forever" and that this method would clear the negative energy from a single room.

But it is the present that confounds me.

ommzms

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Wednesday April 30, 2008 · 6:15 PM PDT

2008/04/30 · 18:15

MSNBC’s Race for the White House, April 29, 2008

Rachel Maddow: "I find it incredible that we‘re all sitting her going, why won‘t the Jeremiah Wright controversy go away. You know what, today, John McCain unveiled his health care plan. We got three different statements, three different policies on gas prices. We got the president of the United States making a huge economic speech and speaking to reporters for 40 minutes. We have got four U.S. soldiers who are announced to have been killed in Iraq yesterday.
What else has to happen in the news to push Jeremiah Wright out of the headlines before we do it for six straight headlines on every politics show in the country? This is all we‘re capable of talking about."

ommzms

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Thursday April 24, 2008 · 5:26 PM PDT

2008/04/24 · 17:26

"I feel like I’m in a parallel universe here, where the facts just don’t sink in."
-Rachel Maddow on MSNBC’s Race for the White House with David Gregory, 4/24/2008

It was early on in elementary school that I learned friends often disappoint. The incipient dynamics at play – literally and figuratively – could radically swing from the thick chains attached to hip-hugging straps, to heights never before achieved, or, from the pinnacle of the jungle gym, precipitously fall from grace. Most of these disappointments were based upon associations – she likes him?/but he doesn’t like me, so I don’t like him./do I still like her?/why can’t she just choose, and if she does, let it be me? – though some were just breaches of trust that strained a young credulity, like someone I knew well enough, kind of liked ok, would talk to occasionally, who now suddenly was caught stealing my Hostess Twinkies from my lunch bag.

ommzms

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Saturday April 19, 2008 · 5:17 PM PDT

2008/04/19 · 17:17

April is the cruelest month...

I am listening to the rain outside my window. At first its steady torrent is one sound, sizzling, like applause. Closing my eyes I begin to hear a difference between where the water falls on wood and stone or upon other water. Eventually I begin to hear individual drops of rain in syncopation and synchronicity with the other droplets, the voices within other voices. Down the street the doleful tones of a neighbor’s wind chimes pass over and through the flowing water like vapor. The music of all this rises and falls; it is a spontaneous composition that is ever changing, eternal, always new, and, yet, has always been. I am the listener as I am the sound as I am the water as I am the stone upon which it falls as I am the reverberating and dissipating sound of the chime as it moves through space. Wet wheels on pavement move past like a sigh as I read

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Rachel Profiling

April is the Cruelest Month