Off The Wall, Or Up Against It

  There are those of us who view everything for its artistic value, whether 'it' is meant to be art or not.   There are those of us who view everything in terms of the profit that can be made from it. In the eyes of these people, if you cannot make a profit from it, it is worthless.   This is where the first view has them beat, because the first group recognizes that EVERYTHING can be viewed in terms of art, including making a profit.   Both of these are simply viewpoints on the same reality.   Here is reality             It is, as you can see, simple. Straightforward. It is what it is.   But people, us, we see this reality through our own lenses.   Our own filters. And those filters have a huge effect on how we perceive reality. Some see a circle, a never-ending rotation. Some see a zero, a nothing. Some see an empty vessel to be filled. Some see a coin. Some see the sun, or moon, or ...

  Follow the money.   Why is there so much disinformation out there?   Why do we have such a monster for a president? Why do we have Republicans like Mitch McConnell? Why is there so much division? Why can't the Senate get anything done? Why is health care such an expensive nightmare? Why are white supremacists unmolested and even encouraged by authorities? Why is the NRA so powerful? Why don't public schools get the funding they need while corporations pay no taxes?   Follow the fucking money. Someone's getting rich. They don't want to fix any of the problems, because those problems are making them rich.   Wake up America!

I'm hearing voices. On TikTok, on FB, on the news. In my head.   Voices that sound an awful lot like the voices I heard from my fellow young folks back in the late 60's, early 70's.     Back then we said "We know the answer!"   We were so sure. Love would conquer hate.   And now the voices I'm hearing are saying this:   "You knew the answer," they say, and it hurts my heart when I hear this, "You knew the answer, why the fuck didn't you make it happen?"   And they are kind enough not to say it in so many words, but that's what they are saying.   We had the chance but we let it slip through our fingers. It got to be too hard. Too many other things got in the way.   It's no excuse that there was an active campaign by the establishment to undermine us. They undermined us with drugs by making drugs easy to access and illegal. They undermined us by linking the Civil Rights movement with rises in crime.  ...

On September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked.  Two were crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, killing thousands of people and ultimately causing their collapse. One was flown in the Pentagon, with hundreds of casualties there. One plane, Flight 93, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard, but no one on the ground.  The passengers, having learned what happened to the other three planes, made a decision that it would be better to die taking Flight 93 down in an unpopulated area than to allow it to be crashed into whatever target had been chosen on the ground.  They gave their lives to keep others alive. They are heroes. Nineteen years later. We are being held hostage on an aging and defective airplane. An airplane remotely piloted by a sociopathic homicidal maniac. The cockpit is protected by his sociopathic suicidal followers, who are all at least as insane and delusional as their leader.  We are on a collision course with t...

I'm serious. Think about it.   We say "Oh, I'm in Heaven!" whenever we experience and/or appreciate something delightful.   We say "They put me through Hell" when we've had a hard time with something or someone.   And we think it's just an expression, but it's really not. It's literally true.   What is Heaven but something joyous?   What is Hell but something horrible?   The feeling you get the first time you really look deeply into your child's eyes and see that they recognize you. That's Heaven.   That time you and your best friend made each other laugh so hard you couldn't stand up, so hard the tears rolled down your cheeks and you couldn't stop and it hurt so good.   That's Heaven.   I'm sure you have more. I do. Plenty. The more I think about it, the more I find.   Everyone has these moments. These are the times you slip into Heaven.   I'm not going to bother with ...

I have to say that as Pandemics go, Part I was quite a roller-coaster ride.   Started off a bit slow, all the action a little distant, but then it got up close and personal pretty fast. The panic buying scenes were a bit over the top, I mean, would anyone REALLY buy all that TP? And this was only one of the instances I can think of where they stretched reality into the absurd. Parts of it were so cliched! Totally predictable and such an anti-climax when what you already knew would happen finally happened.   I think that was a problem in editing. Also the camera work left something to be desired. A lot of scenes were, to be frank, amatuerishly shot.   And the cast members' acting abilities were widely varied. Far too many bad actors. I mean, what idiot would cast that foppish loser as a President of the US?   This I again found to be just beyond the acceptably believable.    We also saw some really outstanding, performances, however, most notably in ...

I am so disheartened today.   I just watched a video made by a Pennsylvania state legislator, a Democrat, who'd just found out that the Republican leadership had been calling committee meetings for weeks, forcing the legislators and their support staff to come in close contact with a person who had tested positive for Covid-19. And the Republican leadership had KNOWN the man was positive and THEY HADN'T TOLD THE DEMOCRATIC MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE!   This is criminal.   Plain and simple.   It's also a bullying tactic. Force the other person into a dangerous situation.   Bullies run this country. Bullies run the congress and the courts. There's a bully in the White House and the people he has surrounded himself with are also bullies.   Bullies own the Corporations. This is somehow an admirable trait when making a success in business. Fine. Until they decide to do something that is dangerous to the general population, or even dangerous to a sm...