Retrograde Curmudgeon

It's funny, isn't it, how when we look back on the past we only remember the highlights and the lowlights? I don't remember what I did on June 3rd, 2005 for example, that's for sure. OH WAIT, I DO!!! I was in Bolivia protesting against president Carlos Mesa. We forced a constitutional assembly that would ultimately reform the constitution in favor of the native majority, paving the way for Bolivia's first native president, and country's namesake, Manute Bol! It happened, you can look it up. And if you don't believe I was there, then prove it! Where was I on June 3, 2005? HMMMMMMM???? For that matter, where were YOU? You were probably the one that sent that suspicious package to Australian Foreign Minster Alexander Downer that day, weren't you? I'm sure you have a great alibi.

Anyway, this made me stop and think for a moment. We are quickly reaching a point in time when it WON'T be true that our lives are primarily undocumented and our self-histories will NOT be based primarily/only on the memories of ourselves and those around us. We WON'T disappear into the aether of the collective human past within 100 years (well, we still might) because our entire lives, cradle to eldarc will be digitized and documented! We're not at the end of history, we're barely at the beginning. We're in the transition from the dark ages to the age of historical enlightenment! Events will be parsed, causes tracked back through reams of data into the past! We will know everything about everyone! What will this look like? I don't know, but I want to find out!

So, I started reading back through the archives of this here blog and I realized that it's good that we don't remember many details about the past (in our current era at least) because most of the past is trite, cruel, blowhardesque, tweeishly self-conscious and maudlin with a large dollop of self-righteousness to bring out the flavor of the self-referential self-absorbedness. At least it's good to know and have a record of how self-serious and self-serving I was only a few short years ago. I'm super self-glad that I'm not self-like that any more! Just look at this post, for instance...

*reads back over the post*

OH SHIT!!!

Blahd Blahetry Blahday

When Walking by The Lumber Store on A Snowy Evening

I think that I shall never see
A box full of free wood
that is useful to me.

A warp-ed piece of creaking pallet
And two panels of fiberboard
To nail together with a mallet
Would not make a very good stage.

If only two-by-fours were in there
I could build a tennis racket
If I also had strings and tape and
Other wood-shaping equipment.

All the wood in the world
Would not stop your innocence lost
from being found again and lost again.

Not even if all the wood in the world
Was free.

Two Hundred Words of Bad Poetry

Hmm. I'm liking this idea of writing bad poems of nonsense with an arbitrarily decided number of words. I think it could work. Next, I'll arbitrarily decide the structure that the poem must fit. Wow, I love writing bad poetry. It doesn't even have to make sense. Actually, I think it's better when it doesn't.



The Absence of Fire
by SJSTL


When a synapse fires in the morning
Does it make a sound
Like a pop or like a thud
Or is it something that we as robots
Aren’t supposed to worry about
Okay then, just let me find my socks
Amidst the tangled thoughts of the masses

At a time when everyone else
Would never speak a line out of turn
Some idiot wandered
Over to the smoothie machine
And threw up
All over it

Man, I really wanted a smoothie today
I guess that an
Italian Soda With Whipped Cream
Will suffice
Hold the fire, and don’t forget the ice

This is the way the world ends
Not getting what you want
And settling for something
Similar but not quite the same

And now this lovesong is stuck in my head
I think all things to all people
Is nothing at all to anyone

What a weird day to notice for the first time
That one leg is shorter than the other

A large bird just landed on my window sill, dead.

Or maybe it was a vision
A prophetic vision of death and life
All wrapped up in a total wash
Of the windows
Of an office building