tra la Lorn'

Wouldn't it be demmed embarrassing? — to die angry; to die downhearted; to die stingy; to die whiny; to die arrogant; to die ungrateful; to die worried; to die squabbling; to die despairing; to die superstitious; to die cross;

And then you could have wrathful ḍakinīs, or goblins or whatever you like, dancing in the air around you and singing merrily

Rotten deathday to you
You've built you a zoo
You look like a monkey
You act like one, too

(No offense intended to monkeys. I don't see that they do these things more than we do.)

Be my friend: Kick me in the pants if you see me in any of these states. "Yo, Loren — ready to die?"

Good evening.

I hope you won't mind if I begin again with a moment from the first teaching the Buddha gave. It keeps thudding home for me. It didn't used to.

The Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering is this: It is this thirst (craving) which produces re-existence and re-becoming, bound up with passionate greed. It finds fresh delight now here and now there, namely, craving for sense-pleasures; craving for existence and becoming; and craving for self-annihilation.

The word that keeps coming up in this passage means first of all thirst and, figuratively, craving.

Even though I live in the desert and it's high summer and right now I've been too long at the computer, still I'm embarrassed that ending this post I'm dashing off to get a drink of water.

I actually said this, 'round midnight last night, after a long, long day of making music, morning to night.

Slightly nervous but happy, that I can say that, in the quiet.

Oh, pain is pain
I will say it again
"Into each life some rain"
But pain is pain

Oh it hurts when it hurts
Just ask the experts
Don't it come in spurts
All the introverts
Even extroverts
Know it hurts when it hurts


Oh grief is grief
And there is no relief
Whistle froo your teef
How krief iv krief

Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom
This is what they call gloom
So let's all leave the room
As you file out, sing
"Death, where is thy sting?"
Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing

With Veterans' Day (Armistice Day) recently past, a lot of the little United States flags waving close by graves at the dear cemetery in my neighborhood are brandy-new. Close to the gravelled path is one headstone I'd never much noticed until someone planted a new flag next to it - right next to it - so close that it obscures part of the name carved on the stone.

Which part of the name? Depends. When the breeze is from the west or southwest, the direction of the prevailing winds here, the name you see on the headstone is ( this. )

Just the kind of help I need, and just the kind of shock I go there to get. I hope you may find it to be a useful cue for you, too.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself this long while.

— Thoreau

I want to learn to love everybody — and who says I can't?

Belly laughs rang across the cove when I realized:

Loren has appointed Loren ombudsman to hear all parties' complaints arising with respect to the care and loving discipline of Loren by Loren.




It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

The term "special interest group(s)" is applied to groups of other people for the purpose of portraying oneself as representing something more important, more universal than they.

In American civic life, other uses for the phrase are rare.

When someone uses it, they're being in essence very frank with us about what they aim to do to those people: cut them out; take their clout; get listened to instead of them.

Here I am at the library, and one minute ago I saw out of the corner of my eye on a neighbor's screen some ad blaring, "Does someone you know have Alzheimer's?"

And of course for a moment I read it as "Does someone know you have Alzheimer's?"

Thanks to my sisters, I still have a ratty T-shirt honoring a long-ago Bastille Day party I didn't attend. Since I don't have much urge to celebrate what really happened on Bastille Day, in honor of the day I wish instead:

— that in our country we can stop using our prisons as a Memory Hole or oubliette for people we want to lose;

— and that when or if they come back out we can stop acting as if we just wish they hadn't.

One baby step we may actually take soon: We could remove the insane bureaucratic obstacles that people face who've served their term for a felony conviction and then consider asking to get back the right to vote. In honor of this day, if you are American I ask you to find out what that process is in your home state, whether it is anywhere near meeting current demand, and what purpose you in your heart feel that it really serves. I must warn you that most of you who undertake this are in for an unpleasant surprise.

Inside are more than two million human beings. That's 2,000,000. That's many, many times more than, for instance, all the people you've ever met in your entire life. It's one person out of every 140 or so in our country.

It's another thing we appear to think is disposable, that isn't.

How long does it take you to really succeed in imagining them one at a time as people? And then how about the next one? And then the third one? And then the fourth one? ... [and so on] ... And then the two millionth one? Will you live long enough to do it, do you think?

Another way of thinking of it: The average American spends 1/140th of their life behind bars. So, 62+ hours every year. Or, 72 minutes every week. Or, six or seven months out of an average American lifespan. Know anybody who's spent half a year, total so far, in prison?

The people I know well spend far less than 1/140th of their time in prison— no surprise— but that tells little about how good a job I've done of cultivating in my life only people worth knowing and worth emulating. It tells more about what my parents are, where they raised me, and how poor are the poorer people found there.

How is that in your life?

My new goal is to work to get to know some people who spend more than 1/140th of their time in prison... spending it serving people there. Wish me luck. Also please put me in touch with anybody like that that you're fortunate enough to know.

Thursday I felt lucky to hear on the radio the voices of many Londoners in their resolve to take care of each other, whatever way they each can. I realized then that, simply because I can't much understand recordings of Spanish spoken in real time, the bombings in Madrid had never become as real to me as they would have if I could have really heard— one voice at a time.

If one wanted Britain as a whole to say to one, "So sorry we displeased you! What can we do for you?", attacking civilians is about the most counterproductive thing one could possibly do. Maybe some countries would try to conciliate one afterwards — but Britain? How ignorant of Britain would someone have to be to imagine that would sway them?

Déjà ouï: Tony Blair's voice, recorded several different times over the course of the day of the attacks, kept on putting me in mind of a Kipling poem I found soon on my shelf: "Et Dona Ferentes".

From my own rubble heap: Over the weekend, out of the swarm of random papers in my home, there swam up an unused postcard, whose graphic is a (1990!) system map of the London Underground.

A wish: that the people who helped with doing the bombings and are still alive may swiftly find their heart changed, rather than go on thinking it was a good thing to do.

The keyboards I encounter never have it. Enjoy! I know one of you will.

—

Klavaroj, kiujn mi renkontas, malhavas ĝin, kaj ĝi tre mankis al mi. Jen ĝi por nia tondglua ĝuado.

It's 10:30 p.m. and, due to the favorable weather and the holiday this weekend honors here, my neighborhood sounds like the scene of an artillery attack, or, listened to more closely, like a wedding in western Iraq. No sense trying to go to bed, so I'll ruminate on this holiday with you, if you will.

I'm glad my country and Great Britain came to no longer share the same King or "share" a Parliament in which colonists could be represented only by residents of the home country. It seems for the best. I'm not overjoyed with the way it came about. Should I be?

The engineers of the Revolution had a great deal to do, as in most revolutions, to convince the populace that there was no other way. It was a hard sell, and took years; most in the thirteen Colonies were either uninterested, or scared, or just more patient than our Founding Fathers, even years into the war. Insurrection was no more the one viable path to social justice or good governance than it is today in Iraq.

It was a long, dirty slog, as a look through the history of the era shows -- maybe especially in my state, which was so resentful against outside interference that it was the first Colony to declare independence from the Crown and last to join the United States. Yet where's the evidence that armed rebellion was necessary? George III may have been an unresponsive lump, in the face of urgent, valid concerns -- may have been in fact a King Log -- and only later a stork, well after he was no longer our king/problem -- but why do we insist to each other that our forefathers and foremothers followed the One True Way and acted purely for the best? Tremendous good was done in the founding of the United States, but of course not nearly only good, and the path taken to reach that founding was... not as intensely admirable. Choices made in that generation throw a powerful light on our character as a nation even today. Much of that light is red. Where can I go tomorrow to celebrate mainly what deserves celebrating -- besides to the corner where I go to get on my knees?

A happy Interdependence Day to you.

Des pli ĉar la plimulto el tiuj, kiuj ĝis nun nomas min Amiko rilate al LiveJournal, estas kanadanoj; des pli ĉar mi ankoraŭ neniam ĉeestis Esperanto-renkontiĝon de pli ol deko da homoj kie ne troviĝas almenaŭ unu kanadano kiu grave instruas al mi ĉu intence ĉu ne; ĉar Kanado (sudorienta, neapudmara) estas la unusola fremda lando kiun mi iam ajn vizitis; kaj ĉar mi ankoraŭ havas kelkopon de tiuj verdaj libroj de la gesinjoroj Eichholz disdonacotan al bibliotekoj ktp —

... hodiaŭ mi ne maltrafu la okazon ĉi tie saluti vin kaj deziri kunecon kaj ĝojon en kunlaboro al ĉiuj viaj samnacianoj.

"Lastatempe mi ĝuadas neparanecon," diris ŝi, ĉe unu pinto de konduka ŝnuro.

Originally in English; it lays itself out on the page in one way I couldn't say no to:

I've been enjoying
being single she said from
one end of a leash

YES! Twenty-three hours now. For the first time this century, all the things I own are in one place. Namely, home.

What a hilarious passel of... stuff.

And now I get to lose a lot of it. This is outrageous fun. Lodging it all at home makes the work very much easier, for me.

Come on down, or phone me up, and make me your tour guide and retail assistant and shipping clerk, or your Santa; I'm sure there's something with your name on it, if we can just figure out what. You don't have to have been a good little boy or girl.

Dimanĉe mi vidis ĉe learn_esperanto afiŝon malaktualan je monato, kie studanto de lingvoscienco petas al LJ-uzantaj Esperantistoj angle respondi tri bazajn demandojn pri sia sperto de Esperanto, por helpi al prezento al liaj samkursanoj. Mi supozas ke jam pasis la prezento, sed eble mi tamen respondos.

Estis bonege, legi tie la 12 respondojn. Tio kontribuis al io dolĉa por mi, la kresko de mia dankemo, ke Esperanto ekzistas tia, kia ĝi estas, kaj ke mi trafis ĝin kaj povas uzi ĝin -- dankemo kiu atingas ĉi-monate nivelon kiun mi ne antaŭe vidis en mi. Eble kiam mi ĵus ekkonis Esperanton... sed tiu estis febra, tio estas, ŝancelaĵo. Tiu ĉi estas kvieta.