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Saturday, Dec 09th

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Editorial

Behold, a Season of Be's

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Getting warmer out there, near 100 by week's end, so that means it's getting warmer in here, too [tilts head, taps temple, nods knowingly].

The hotter it gets outdoors, the more bees I seem to have in my head, if not in my actual bonnet, or my pants, or elsewise stuck in other uncomfortable, compromising places that are on, in, or around my own highly-personal person.

Behold:  The coming and going of the longest day of the year!  Behold, the season of easy living!  (Well, once the inexorable, excremental, weekly yard work -- and the semi-satisfying begriping about it -- is all done.)

It is an unbenighted time that is now upon us -- not to get too tangled up in double reverses and triple negatives.  It the time of year in which one can be easily lulled into a false sense of bright promise, by day-dreamy heat-wave brain-fogs, further precipitated by such beclement hammock weather and by the planted seed of an ice cold beer, calmly betaken and beswigged, once necessary labors have been temporarily clubbed into submission.  Again.

I am becalmed, bemused, and besprinkled with summer's besmiting pixie dust.  I am also as behumbled as I can be, and beguiled and bemarveled -- and even bespoke, in point of fact -- plus, as a bewelcomed bonus, I am utterly and deeply beholden for such fine days.

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The Vanishing Art of Disappearing

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We are all time travelers.

I have come to this conclusion in a roundabout route, my usual method of making way from A to B, via a few scenic-tour handfuls of multi-cultural alphabets wrought from pen, paper press, and cuneiform tablet.

Art is the key. It is in art where most of us spend our free time, from soaking up opera to hand-tying flies for fishing, or whatever our fancy.  We are consumers of all things, now that we make almost nothing in this country, and art -- popular culture, if you'd prefer to call it -- is part of our voracious appetite.

(Even today's old-fashioned broadcast radio and television counts -- although, I am often unsure what it counts as -- buh-dum-dah.)

Art is where we go for relief from the routine world in which we find ourselves.  And, if we have any energy left over from just trying to survive, and have any interests to do so, we choose art as a platform on which we hope to stand, better understanding our world, ourselves, and trying to make some sense of this journey and this place -- maybe even other people, although we shouldn't get our hopes up too high.

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Bring your own Unicorn

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House Democrats lead by Nancy Pelosi have nixed a key provision of Obama's free trade Bill effectively killing it for the time being. In reality it was the failure of Republicans to pass it as they control the House, so it's probably just their way of embarrassing Obama before doing their Corporate Masters' bidding next week. Republicans seem to keep forgetting that Obama isn't running for a third term, and this will give Democrats a stick to beat job exporting Republicans with before next year's election.

 

Job creation was a robust 280,000 for May and the March number was revised upward by 32,000 to 116,000. Hourly wages rose by 8 cents to $24.96, and over the past year wages rose 2.3 percent. Considering that the minimum wage should be $22/hour,these positive numbers are rather lackluster and simply reflect the 'success' of Reagan's war on the Middle Class.

 

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All Freedom, All the Time

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Report from The Front:  We haven't been killed yet.

Frankly, I have no idea how to estimate the number of times the exact same phrase has been used throughout human history, or even American history by combatants -- and noncombatants -- during times of war.

America's wars have been fought almost exclusively overseas, except when Americans got excited for a while by the ability of Americans to actually own other human beings, and to further become agitated by the assorted economic truths surrounding that other embarrassing truth.  (Funny how that same one reared its head in the Constitution -- once steely-eyed and proudly, and nowadays stunned that it must be half-muttered, with eyes buried underground, requiring some winks and knowing glances to the knowing few.)

Well, the economic truths are all still in place, and still completely legal.  Only the crimes of banks and various corporations are allowed to become larger every year. These crimes now incorporate new entertainments; such as featherweight taps on the wrist and assorted penny-ante fines, to, you know, help us keep the lights burning in prosecutorial offices up and down the chain of our hamstrung governmental command and dissolving protections.  It's good PR, having those lights on, as it gives the impression someone's watching, and maybe even doing something.

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I'll bet you a Yuan to a Baklava

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First Quarter US GDP came in at 0.2%, which is down from 2.2% in the Fourth Quarter. This isn't really a huge drop in US economic growth as you might think at first blush. When GDP is calculated, exports are added and imports are subtracted. The strong USD is making imports 'cheaper' and throttling exports to euro using countries that must pay much higher prices for US goods.

 

China of course is right there to sell the exact same things as the US at a more favorable exchange rate, as more countries are simply trading in the yuan instead of converting them to USD first. Not that the US is a big exporter anyway, but Europe does use the US as a 'cheap labor' factory floor. Overall the top US exports are gasoline, fuel oil and petrochemicals. Our chief 'manufactured' export to China remains recycled cardboard.

 

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Running on Empty, Zapped & Unplugged

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Pardon me while I smolder and sputter from somewhere within, in the penthouse of this body, up behind the eyeballs, where my subdued executive function strains and squints, scrambled sidelong a smidge.

It feels like The Really Big Bottle of Liquid Smote has been glunked out and loosed into the reluctant Jacuzzi of my brainpan, bubbled and fluffed up a tad with some stray napalm.  Sorry about the greasy haze.  With any luck, that soot'll come right out of your clothes, as well as these curtains.

The lingering blast-zone of ozone playing tag with bacon in the air ducts will probably vent out eventually.  We all tend to air out eventually.  The trick is to give it time, and be in no rush.  That seems to be the Big Message here so far, if in fact there is one at all hanging about waiting to be discovered, recognized for what it is, then hugged, and given a lemonade and a homecoming parade.

So, today, I am cooling my fizzy, sizzled nerve endings with the oasis of my imagination:  a home-made, inner-mind batch of an old family recipe, the Turquoise, Gelatin Blur and Silky Malaise of On-Purpose, Memory-Shunting Cool-Ice Bars, following a thumping, thunder-tackle of the trumpeting tsunami terror some have come to experience, and then personally call, a brain seizure.

My trip to Abby-Normal Land, or Brain Oz, or Mind-a-Palooza, was on April 9th, when a few stray lung cancer cells had a flash reunion in the Motor Function Jazz Lounge of my Control Room's brain, completely hosing normal function for a few moments of confused, mutinous body wonder while everything else on board was forced to participate in a sort of genetic kabuki theater thought possible only by Kafkaesque writers laboring to improve upon TSA scripts with rich Jungian pride, using thick, rich concepts from Samuel Beckett, The B-52s, Hamurabi, Heckle and Jeckle.

Yes:  It has been a rich and heady time, me spreading my atomic structure in one-mote densities across this end of the solar system, and waiting for it all to spring, sproing, splung, and splap back into recognizable shape once again during assorted re-entry procedures at the hospital, where gravity and I were reunited in the same room, and allowed to playfully slap one another on the backs in a pantomime show of trust, friendship, harmlessness.

All the right signs are there, all the right noises are being made -- my body coos along again at my beck and call.  The meds and staff and insurance guardians and gatekeepers, and my body and I, and a phalanx of auxiliary staff, are all on the same pages and parapets of Gregorian Medieval Prescription Chanting and Calendar Watching.

So far, so good.

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Fate Makes a Health & Welfare House Call

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Fate -- or The Universe, or The Hairy Thunderer, or Kosmic Muffin, or The Flying Spaghetti Monster, or The Formless Mystery, or Your-What-Have-You -- waited ten whole days before it dropped by to give me a little something extra to stew in my cracked, shoulder-high, neck-mounted crockpot with the rattling glass-top lid.

Frankly, I had come to lose track of Its notions of style, Its sensibilities on timing, Its fondness for the unexpected slip of a stiletto between the ribs, Its pleased sneer for the gleeful anticipation of the set-up, followed by the crack of the ambush, the deft yank on the rug, the flailing, slow-motion fall, the broken things scattering on the floor...

And the snickering, the idiotic sniggering of Its visits:  You can just hear the virtual chitterings of tittering, trickster demon vapor once safely idled off course somewhere harmless and stone-bound, and now allowed -- invited! -- to play Trick-And-Treat out in the small front yard, sparsely grassy and fresh-mowed, ringed by an ancient, ramshackle white picket fence more splinters and streaks than substance, and on the other side of this closed front door, where the buzzer just sounded, are snatches of voices on the dangle and swing.

Sometimes, the ability to simply keep up with the presentation, and take it up, real time, as you go, is the whole show -- the whole point, it seems, like a convoluted test, launched and sprung the exact moment your tester has prepped you to lean the other way, to commit your balance in the opposite direction, having aimed you not toward but away.

Which is where, of course, you either laugh until you cry, or else you cry until you can slowly manage to recover a dented chuckle here, from under the phone table, or else snag a fuzz-coated chortle that fell to the floor over there...

Not being able to penetrate all the potential patterns in this dimension of existence can be a royal pain in the ass.  Today pointed out that one again.  It's another looping, repeated lesson that's in very high rotation this week.

Personally, I'd prefer having the ability to slide along the secret slipknot rings of synchronicity -- content to just know the issues and events in play, the reasons for them, how they all connect up, whether they are fair or sensible, lame or sane...

But...

Watch anything long enough and the patterns start to slip and squeak out.

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