Saturday, September 29, 2007

Class Act

William Shakespeare: "Exit, pursued by a bear."


Friday, September 28, 2007

Peace Of What?

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: "Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all."


Thursday, September 27, 2007

Recycling Personal Trash

Sometimes I just like to recycle, though I don't recall I've done it with many posts. So try The Jason Principle


Another Pitiful 9/11 Story

Some of our lives are just too boring, I guess. See THIS.


Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The Usual Slouch


I don't suppose my dizziness has gotten any worse, but it also hasn't gotten any less. Sometimes going to doctors isn't worth much. He said I "looked good"! Now what in the world does that mean when your doctor says it? It's not useful...


What's Wrong With That?

H. L. Mencken: "A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."


Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Masquerade

Ambrose Bierce: "Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."


Monday, September 24, 2007

Disney's Dead

I've been skinned and drained
By an awkward auto-gyro, and I've been
Cross-examined and double-crossed
By the ends of time in shreds.
I've been late for sick call, duty call, recall,
I've been worn in a notch and stuck in the mud
And there's just not much you can do about it all--
There's no honor or noble stance that's left,
Just the infamous hooks for hands
That scratch your ass and paw your crotch.

You can't do nothing about me
And who the hell are you?
Oh, look, ain't life grand,
Ain't it sweet now?
Doesn't it shine, after all?
What a travesty it is
That your darling looks like some old transvestite now
And that the baby's sick in the hospital again,
Not to mention in a whole other town--
And the rest of us aren't exactly well.

I'm in the cheese-dip peering out,
I'm porno-fed, and pork distressed,
I'm wet behind and cross-dressed in the front
Completely harmed and then
Tricked out in hazardous orange and yellow,
Anxious 'cause my hair is all on fire,
But I'm engulfed in a cryptic rot
From my waist to my knees
And can't even think about my brain
Because I'm afraid of the answers
To the most preposterous questions.

I've been lost in the dust and spit on by a native girl,
And I carried her away on a dream once or twice,
And held on tight with all my might,
But it didn't matter.
Nowadays there's a cowboy on a flying red horse,
He's got a yellow bandanna on his neck
And he's flapping his yap in the dead of night
While the blessed wind blows hot
And snuffs all those breezes out
While all the buttresses give way,

Where every well-turned word turns round
And hits the fan like that famous turd
And we both got a laugh out of it.
Were you okay? I doubt it.
As for me, I think I've turned both ankles
And grown appendages that grew flabby
And anemic and then terrified.
I'm so terrible, I'm so troubled,
Oh honey, I'm so fast, I'm so So,
I'm so brash, I'm so tangled in the past,
I pull the sheets up over my nude white ass
To cover my death
And invite Nothing Again as far as any can tell!


Saturday, September 22, 2007

Mislaid, Misfired, and Missaid Sayings

1. I'm at my wife's end!
2. He'd been laid by the roadside, he said!
3. His myopic brain oversees everything he does and that's not much!
4. Cornchips at large
5. Unfit leader of the followers
6. My dread at drift
7. Cowpokes In Puddles
8. Cheney In Chains (S&M erotica)
9. Just gyrating with gerbils
10. Pessodomistic politics (negative republican gay guys)


No Effort

Samuel Johnson: "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."


Friday, September 21, 2007

Freedom

Eric Hoffer: "When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."


Thursday, September 20, 2007

Why Is Part Of My Toe Unmoved?

Any day
Comes along
And sets me up or takes me down,
While I take note
And horrify the watchful audience
Or just amuse them and abuse them--
They hang around like that.


That Would Be Just

Artificial Jones: I am as upset by injustice as anyone, though I do not usually expect America to police every occurrence in every country where injustices may occur. If we begin to do so, however, we should start at home.

We could start Here. Or we could start There. I don't mind. How do you vote?


Wednesday, September 19, 2007

With Or For

Of all the things in the world that there are to bellyache about, are you sure that that's the one you want to start with or be known for?

[Ending with a preposition is a crock of shit So don't bug me.]

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Voice

Edward R. Murrow: "Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar."


Monday, September 17, 2007

Counters

Sometime today or yesterday, my help blog "Most Frequent Blogger Questions" surpassed this blog's visitors. TRS had a three year head start, but MFBQ caught up in only two years! I guess it will stay that way. I don't know that it's good or bad; it's just interesting. Once upon a time, "The Rat Squeaks" was an afterthought to my webpage, "Southern Exposure". This blog's counter then surpassed the count of "Southern Exposure" and the latter is now extinct.

Hope I don't go extinct here!


Not A Book Report

I just finished reading the 800 page book, "Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln", by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and it was good. Goodwin writes well, I'm sure, but I think the hugeness of her subject was what really rocked me. Like anyone, I had long felt I knew so much about Lincoln that I knew it all. Maybe that was true, yet reviewing what I knew in general this time in detail was an amazing thing. It was surprising how he made friends and allies of his rivals and his enemies, how he kept his temper amid so much chaos and hatred, how he remained so focused on the road ahead, which included peace and fairness with the South as well as victory for the North. John Wilkes Booth fucked up big time if he really wished well for the defeated Confederacy, for no one alive in the Union was as disposed to mercy and humanitarianism with them as Lincoln was.

People love to argue about history and politics, so some people may hate Lincoln yet, but fuck 'em, if so.


I neglected to mention that my family and forebears are from Texas and other southern states that were Confederate during the Civil War, and I have no idea in the world how I've grown up without any kneejerk love of Dixie or the Confederate flag. I think it's just that I'm NOT LOYAL to anything that doesn't make any sense to me and can't benefit me.

Onward Thru The Fog!

George Eliot: "The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men."


Sunday, September 16, 2007

Bankruptcy

The Soviet Union went bankrupt in part due to its hubris in trying to quell Afghanistan, I always thought. I wonder if it's impossible that we could do the same thing with Iraq? By the time we know the answer, it will be too late--George Bush will be gone and so will all the lives and money.


Saturday, September 15, 2007

What Day?

What was today, anyway?

I think it was a total loss. Too late to start over. Let's just hum a tune and piss in the wind and kiss it all goodbye in the rain. Y'all come back the next time you feel like getting pissed on... Or something.


Any Man

Booth Tarkington: "There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink."


Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Trimming Sail

Speaking of a spigot spank
And all that goes between,
Trimming sail for a proper fit,
And turning tail and going back,
There's no one here to position on
Or even to sidle past.
So you'll just go on,
Depressed as some, or lachrymose,
Detected, determined, and dysfunctional
Down to the very last bone,
Down to the very last Jones.

Is this my last nerve or not, she asked?
I was eager to attend her
And tried to rub against her,
But though she was very friendly
Both distance and her darlings prevented it.

I shuffled through the darkness,
Expending every sense,
Expanding every ounce,
A surfeit of spent desire,
A crucible of savage saved regrets...


Dapper Zappa Rappa

Frank Zappa: "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."


Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Toy Death

Why is it that American kids are valued so much less than the American toy industry's right to butt-fuck everybody left and right? I imagine any senator or representative could explain this easily, as long as you didn't videotape him saying it. We never really seem to have the ratbastards' attention.

I think if the next time Mattel has a defective toy recalled the American government would just execute the top executive of Mattel AND their closest political crony, we'd get their attention.

Maybe we could nuke a Chinese toy factory or two.

As long as the toy industry and China are in favor of death for innocent children, I'd like for my government to be in favor of death for the guilty.


Monday, September 10, 2007

Spinning Out Of Control

This is me, this is how handsome I am. This is a blog where I just push a button or two and then I come through. It goes in here and it comes out there. Some of you may wish it had video and sound, but we already have TV, so I am not tempted. If I were broadcasting myself live, I would cuss more, not less, a thing that in many cases gets in the way of communication. Some of my audience would drop their jaws and drop me like a snake, I'm pretty sure. Why not, after all--no one can see them do it!

Sometimes I recall a few of the many bloggers who I dropped--who have gone away or fallen by the side of the road. I couldn't remember them all, though I may have had a great deal of conversation with them. I've backed out of blogs hundreds of times that had initially been very appealing. Sometimes I backpedal after six minutes, sometimes six months. When I first started blogging, I dropped one woman because she was inanely patriotic about George Bush, who had only just began to skunk the country then. Bush is worse now; I'm not sure about the woman, having already forgotten her url! I doubt she's a peacenik yet, but all things are possible.

The number of others (men and women) I've also dropped like hot potatoes can barely be reckoned. I think I did a post a couple of years ago about bloggers who had dropped off the map (and off my blogroll). I now realize such sites have become too numerous to list. I am probably too demanding. But there's always lots more blogs to fall in love with (however briefly!).


Show Us Your Titties!

Marilyn Monroe:
"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."


The Gettysburg Address

Don't worry about this. It's a test so that I can check the "abridged" aspect of the Subscription from Google Groups. Meanwhile, we can all review our sense of History and of the dignity which Abraham Lincoln gave to all humanity.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.


Sunday, September 09, 2007

How Come

How come
I can make you come,
she said,
but I can never make you go?

Oh what filth it was, she said,
Talking to him about love,
And oh what a downer it was
Waking up with an autoerotic
Skullduggish clown like him.


Friday, September 07, 2007

Chigger?

I can never get over how many visitors to MFBQ are amused and/or befuddled by my reference to Chigger, Texas... Guess I won't.


Handful

There's only a handful of you who have subscribed so far via the new Google Group box in my sidebar. I wonder if any of you few are getting the damn notifications? If you are, let me know. Some of you know how uninformative it can be on the Internet... I am whistling lame tunes and twiddling thumbs even as I inveigle for more feedback!


Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Breath And Tears

Doctor, doctor, tear it out,
Please don't leave without, but I know
Those cleansing tears of yours will fail,
Will bear me down
And obstruct my breath,
No, don't pretend it's all okay
And don't assume you cannot say
Anything of any value just because
You're on the way downtown
Or to the country club.

All your humanities have been killing me
And I wonder could it be because my insides or my feet
May be as bloated as a pillow
Or as numb as a train wreck
Or as feeble as my dead intent...


Women’s Charms

Jo Anne said, “It's the same thing when a pretty woman charms a man as it is when she bulldozes him... “

“What?” I yawned, not sure I’d heard her right.

“It is manipulation, possibly even a form of coercion, particularly if the woman is at all conscious of her beauty, which most pretty women are,” she said. “Why don’t you move over here and spread your legs?” she added.

She was always playing and flirting with me like that, except that at times she played sort of rough. It felt rough, at any rate, before the end.


Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Who's That?

Francois de La Rochefoucauld: "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves."


Sunday, September 02, 2007

Dancing With The Etcharat

A new used balletic rodent for the post coda! I stole it from somewhere...

In plain language: take a look, dammit!

co·da
n.
1. Music The concluding passage of a movement or composition.
2. A conclusion or closing part of a statement.

[Italian, from Latin cauda, tail.]


Come Back, Pogo!

Walt Kelly: "Now is the time for all good men to come to."


Saturday, September 01, 2007

The End?


Wheresa damn subscribers already?! Biding their time, I guess. Hurry, before it's too late! Too late for what? End of the world, maybe?