Tag Archives: A Man Without a Country

Books , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Half Ass Post About Walden

by

I’m thinking truly nothing today, so I’m going to have to defer to some more Walden up in here. I was reading that some people think Thoreau was a buffoon with stupid ideas. Well I guess people think that about everyone. At least Robert Frost liked him. I don’t know anything about him except this book and what I wrote in my first post. But the book seems worthwhile to me.

There has been a lot of talk about sitting on pumpkins and well, nothing bad can come of that.

I guess I left off on “It is never to late to give up our prejudices.” Well, that’s a comforting thought. Most of the time I think I don’t have a choice in life. He writes “…it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.” That’s worth thinking about.

“What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.” Thoreau apparently has this thing about old people not being necessarily wise. If he stopped there I would agree that being old is not a sufficient condition for wisdom. But he also thinks that people know more about life when they are younger, and forget and become set in their ways as they get older. I don’t know how I feel about that. I can see it, especially in the Picasso sense of every child being an artist. But old people usually know what’s up. I guess they just collect a lot of prejudices and that can be a problem.

It’s funny that he wrote this like two hundred years ago and he talks about fuel in the same way that Kurt Vonnegut does in Man Without a Country. He writes “…people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled around the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people…”

Which is like Vonnegut’s quote that I’ve quoted probably twice here before, about gasoline, “Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”

So that’s a funny parallel.

Well. Shit I’m not feeling very enthusiastic right now, even with this coffee. It’s almost time to go to work. I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee the last few days and it just hasn’t been doing me any good. It’s like the first time I drink a lot of it after not drinking any for a few days, that’s awesome. But then I’m like, man I’ve got to keep doing this, this is great! And then it just gets worse and worse and I just get all nervous and shit. Anxious and not even very awake. And my eyes start tearing up. I don’t know, shit’s weird.

But anyway, I’m trying to post every day just to keep in practice. Tomorrow I’m going to a Cinco de Mayo brunch and I’m bringing a lot of tequila and limes so I don’t know if I will post.

Morning Warm-Ups , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Thoughts Upon Waking Up (Not Deep)

by

Just got out of bed it’s about ten AM over here on the East Coast and I straight took off work today out of nowhere. It was probably imprudent of me to tell GF this since all she wants is a day off, having just graduated culinary school, but instead she has been scheduled for every day this week at her job that she worked part time while in school. I just realized this as I woke up from a luxurious sleep. She was good not to say anything about it this morning, she left nicely aside from the usual turning on and off of the lights, and that wasn’t so bad because she used the little light. So that was nice of her. But anyway the point is that I have the whole day off. And the more startling thing is that I have tomorrow off, too, except that I have to go in and “deep clean” at 2:00, which was abruptly decided yesterday around 2 PM.

Ah shit I’ll never have the blog of my dreams, the mad views, if I just write like this all the time, just write whatever comes into my head and call that the end of the day. Last night I dreamt that I had a surge of viewers all the sudden, and they were all swelling on this one post and then they were moving onto other posts and it just came out of nowhere after I wrote about an old person in my family dying of Alzheimer’s. And somehow the stat tracking was so crazy I just threw it over trees and draped it around and stuff. I don’t know, that was crazy. Then I dreamed that my chess playing cousin (who doesn’t play chess and no one in the family does but in the dream we all did) was hit by a car and died. He was arguing with his siblings about the way he should drive when he pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car and was immediately run over. Bad way to watch someone go, right after an argument. Cars are deadly. Kurt Vonnegut in Man Without a Country says:

Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.

The Dead Weather in Cut Like a Buffalo says:

You can hit me if you have to

Whatever makes you happy

You should try to take it easy on me

Cuz I don’t know how to take it

Hoo shit my computer froze up right there thought I was going to lose what I wrote so far. That wouldn’t be such a tragedy I guess it only took me about ten minutes to write all that.

I’m trying to think of what I should do today. I think I should do something like an adult. I should go to the motherfucking bank like an adult! I can’t be funny today so I’m just using other people. Maybe I’ll get some coffee and try again. The coffee at work just tastes like shit and gives me a bad feeling. It’s weird because I don’t really believe that’s true, because I know it’s all just coffee, but every time I drink it I don’t feel good.