Foto by tgw, New York City, 2008---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: The Daily Growler has been warned by Blogspot that the old interface we are now using WILL BE WITHDRAWN in the coming month [The Blogspot message: The old Blogger interface will be removed in the coming month.]--which means, if we don't get a new computer in the meantime, the Growler will be unable to publish and will go dark, as they used to say in the newspaper business. We have been publishing for 6 years this month--but now it looks like we're gonna have to SAY GOODBYE to ourselves. Our Toshiba laptop that had the latest Firefox browser on it and could handle Blogspot's new interface bit the dust a couple of days ago--c'est la vie--so be prepared all you faithful Growlers for there one day to be no more The Daily Growler--at least until more prosperous times come along.
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Say Goodbye to: Charles Colson: Ye were punked in prison; may ye now roast in Holy Hell, you sorry bastard. Charles Colson, 80, American White House Counsel and evangelist, involved in the Watergate scandal, founder of Prison Fellowship, brain hemorrhage.
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Death
Death is always a part of life. It is always with us. Some of us make our livings challenging it. Some of us make our livings rebuking it. Some of us deny it until it strikes a blow against us and then we wake up to its presence.
Some of us are not afraid of death. Or at least that's the pose we take. We show this bravery by continuing to smoke or drink heavy after death has struck us a blow. Some of us show this bravery by working out in gyms at ferocious paces. Vigorous exercise keeps some of us alive seemingly forever, i.e., Jack LaLanne. Some of us never exercise and live seemingly forever, i.e., George Burns. While Jack was juicing, Burns was smoking cigars and drinking martinis; yet Burns outlived Jack by several years. As Fats Waller famously said, "One never knows, do one?"
Since I had a heart attack two months ago, I now see death in every thing I look at, like my apartment. My apartment is decadently falling apart daily, though it is over one hundred and fifty years old. The paintings on my walls are deteriorating, fading, one coming unglued from its mat and hanging odd-ball in its frame, the part of it hidden from sunlight turning darker to distort that part that has dropped into that hidden position. Even my treasured keyboard is dying, already three keys going dead on it. Even a pile of old manuscripts I wrote back in the days when all I had was a typewriter to write on are yellowing, deteriorating, crumbling. And this is certainly true of the older books in my library.
Since I had a heart attack two months ago, every time I have a chest pain I immediately think "Oh shit, is this another heart attack coming on? Is this the Reaper still hovering around me? What do I do, run to the Bellevue Emergency Room and check it out?" Before my heart attack if I had chest pains I simply belched them off and went skipping on down the line.
Death is one of our lifelong companions.
"A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist."
Stewart Alsop
"A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure."
Errol Flynn
"Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it."
W. Somerset Maugham
"Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death."
Annie Lennox
"From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity."
Edvard Munch
Whew, I finally got death off my chest. Like Munch, I've instructed the beneficiary of my ashes to dig a hole and plant a hearty tree in it and then feed those roots my ashes. I'll betcha soon that tree will be singing.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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Sunday, November 19, 2006
Striking Oil With Ezra Pound
“Criminals have no intellectual interest”
Ezra Pound said that. That, I would assume, means there is no art in crime. Can a criminal then be an artist (I would submit Francois Villon as a true criminal artist)? Not much great art has come out of prison! That’s probably a pretty honest statement. Poetry and prose, now that’s another matter; plenty of books have been written in prison. Ironic, isn't it, that Ezra was considered a criminal by the United States military and wrote a lot of poetry in prison. Ezra's prison in Italy after WWII was an outdoor pen made out of chicken wire with only a piece of wood for a roof.
Adolph Hitler wrote his masterpiece in prison, but then Hitler would prove Ez’s statement true; therefore, writing a book in prison does not mean you have an intellectual interest in it. Ez would then predict that O.J.’s coming literary masterpiece is probably not going to be intellectual at all.
Our politicians are mostly all criminals, even the good ones, so there ya go; Ez’s statement still
holds water.
Aren’t we all criminals? “Something reprehensible, foolish, or disgraceful” is one of the definitions of a crime. I’ve certainly been reprehensible before; foolish; and, yes, disgraceful, but I don’t think of myself as a criminal. I have intellectual interests, dammit. See, I’m with Ez on this one. You gotta be pretty dumb to be a criminal. Who’s the very dumbest Amurican at the moment? You know my favorite: the “president” [G.W. Bush]—and by God, we damn sure know he’s a criminal.
Something About Freud I Found Striking
According to Hilda Doolittle, Freud used the phrase “striking oil” when his analysis unearthed something in a patient. “Eureka!” comes from striking oil. “Thar she blows!” comes from striking oil in a whale.
Speaking Spock Again: A Fantastic Thought
I heard a biologist say that killer bees were simply regular bees evolving an attitude regarding being attacked:
--by being burnt out of their natural environment
--driven by their ferocious instinct to build a queendom so their life cycles can be fulfilled.
You know why we have killer bees (African bees) in this hemisphere? They were brought in by beekeepers in Brazil to increase honey production. For profits! Capitalism is responsible for the spreading migrations of killer bees, that are as I type this already invading the outskirts of San Francisco.
thegrowlingwolffor The Daily Growler
3 comments:
I know a little of how you feel about chest pains. I had an enormous kidney stone at the end of last August that caused my kidney to back up and all sorts of associated horrors that were resolved after the stone was blasted to bits and pissed out over the course of a week. Every time I feel a little twinge in my back I panic. Post-traumatic stress syndrome. My kidney thing threw me into the medical system for the first time in decades and I had no insurance, etc. It was an ordeal and I am much more aware of my mortality post-kidney episode. My ordeal would have been lethal in an earlier century.
wtp,
I had a friend who had a kidney stone and he said it was so monstrous a pain he felt like killing himself over it--remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer passed the kidney stone?
Yes, we know we are mortals when we suffer brutal pain...and then we do live in fear afterwards...fear of suffering such a pain a second time...another friend had a similar painful experience with gall stones.
the empathizing Wolf Man
Thank you, empathizing Wolf Man. Please don't go dark. I've grown too accustomed to you to lose you now.
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