living The Dream

Back at what used to be my haunt. When Starbucks’ prices rose right after Covid, I stopped using their facilities as my office away from home. Too expensive. My recent birthday brought in a couple of gift cards and I am back for a time. Yum, an $8 latte! Thing is, I really enjoy sitting here with my typewriter and watching the folks, thinking about folks and doing no real harm. Hell, the thing is electronic! I am not even using paper! There are rare-earth minerals and inhumane/environmentally damaging mining techniques to consider, on the way to using my electronics, but by and all, no real harm? When the money is once again gone, maybe the powers that run things would let me bring a thermos. Then, I could always sit here, just breathing and living the dream. Gasp! ‘Living the dream’.

Oh, sons and daughters… the dream. I am coming to believe that there is no dream – this current life is always The Dream. It has to be. You, I, the little beasts are living our dream every day. I do, sometimes, imagine being elsewhere, inhabiting some other body, existing in ways that do not contain the present moment, but there is no other moment. Imagined possibility is dream, yes. We can aim ourselves there but we will never get to another place. The other is always ‘down the road’ (says our inner self, Mr. or Ms. Imagination). The other can exist in ways that are not and may never be. Experience tells me that the thing, the dream, turns out not to be as imagined when we get there. No pot o’ gold. The found pot will be just as brown and probably just as shit as the pot we are in, here, now. So, driving the road to ‘other’ might as well be called ‘living the dream’. I digress. I was daydreaming.

Sigh.

Dreaming of a somewhere else and desiring to be there is our biggest difference with the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the other creatures and living things. The little pussycats I used to babysit, accepted what was. They got up, got themselves something to eat or sat quietly, played rambunctiously, slept often and worried not a whit. If tragedy struck, if the mouse got away, the pussycat just kept on about his pussycat business. No big deal. What is, what happens, is and happens. A pussycat can dream, I am certain. It is within their being to do so. I have witnessed the twitching legs and the chattering teeth of a dreaming pussycat. Theirs is a different attitude. While dreaming, they are in the moment. Those little beasts don’t distract themselves from the moment they are in with a dream. There is no longing for somewhere else, no wishing they could fly, no dissatisfaction with the pot o’ brown, that gets found

Ha.

Today, I pronounce myself King of my day! I am not thin, I am not young, I am not rich. I am dreaming of those things. I am on the road toward (away from) those things. I am living the dream. I am in the moment and there is none better. I sure do hope that the $8 doesn’t run out?

Caution

Proceed with caution, dear audience. The possibilities follow imagination. Take good care to remain positive, to find humour where there is none, to enjoy that the dentist’s face is often upside down…. There is more to come, I have awakened once again.

I did not mean it

this time or that other time. I stand humbled by algorithm and the need to express myself. I am as weak as any other one of us. The designers of social media programs have done their homework and we are vulnerable. Being the human being that we are often challenged to be is not an easy thing. Fighting back against the time-wasting act of endlessly scrolling proves difficult. The scrolling is consuming our productivity, draining our energy, sapping human resources. That is not good. Yeah, there is very likely consensus on that one point. Do we enlist the aid of government in the fight? Hm. You and I can see where government intervention generally makes a problem a worse problem.

so….

How to (in my case, at least) get my words out to the broader public, while escaping the clutches of Facebook and Google and Amazon proves next to impossible. There is my little website and I should be promoting it.

maybe, I will…

I Mean It This Time

I just deactivated Facebook. I mean it this time, I mean it this time…I mean it. The powers that are, keep pushing AI upon us. Now, that unworkable technology is going to upend our world in rapid ways that we will not be able to defend against. Quit these people, everyone. Take the money away from them or they will take our lives away from us. Don’t stream video, don’t make Tik Tok or Instagram videos, don’t stream music. Be careful what you send in email. Use the post, where tech can’t easily go. Get a land line telephone. Buy records. Get a print newspaper from a trusted source. I mean it this time, I really do.

Flawless

Flawless

The best of it was:
two cats,
each a semi-Nautilus,
one the yin,
the other yang on my lap,
snoozing
or
soaring on the sound
made by my own voice,
lungs open,
everything part of the one thing,
music, bird, man
or
mischievous breeze,
teasing at hide and seek,
one
summer afternoon,
while work wilted
or
that young lad,
when I was a young lad,
who,
lay near and next and kinda
liked it,
too.

That was the best of it.

Now?
full nights of easy
sleep are rare,
few and less
remain.
I prepare,
at God’s behest?
and won’t return again.

The Butterfly Migrations

The Butterfly Migrations

Imagine a place where sun shines,

exactly as is best for

you.

That is home.

There are more places

you must be, at times

and,

often, without perfect

weather to feel,

there can be what is

merely tolerable,

enough to fill a hungry day.

Sun arrives,

sun goes away.

I see you, today, at roadside,

overdressed for this

season, one better suited to others,

which

you have found yourself

standing in.

Out of your

one place,

the home, perhaps, that

turned inhospitable,

metamorphosis made you

a figure draped by shadow.

The chrysalis you crawled in

lies elsewhere, empty, hollow.

In a

real but magic-seeming place,

sturdy leaves and warm pods

swell,

promises for

for those who need

a drop of

what is wasted as surfeit

by someone

other.

There is a make-do balance made

when God seems not to bother.

You have fluttered,

other places, other times,

can describe

a different spot

with depth enough

as might be

done

by those who lived

but there,

alone.

Ten thousand years of from and back

we travellers have known.

What I See

On a cold day,

I sit comfortable,

surrounded and kept from what is real

by the steel

and glass of human pretension,

our magnificent folly.

Through a slanted window I watch

while squirrels busy themselves

at mundane procedures.

The mundane is necessary of us all,

ordered by God, if you will,

or by the inertia of life and spirit if you won’t.

A solitary black squirrel seems uncomfortable,

now the temperature has fallen some and

brought grey squirrels into HIS territory,

who chitter about with their own work.

Grumbling, he twitches,

keeps at his rapid chewing on a

found object…

someone’s dried, cast-off crust of sandwich…

while side-eyeing the nearest grey blur

of fur,

who wears

what appears

as a tiny, brown, winter-inspired

hat.

I think Mr. Black is entertaining such

greedy and isolationist thoughts as:

‘That fat, grey bastard had better

keep his damned distance’. Or,

‘Who the hell let lesser beasts

in?’

With one, split-second pounce

he dashes toward the closest grey,

who,

drawing from the well of trained-in reflex,

runs far enough away.

A Bad Dog, Barking

We are, I am

so full of

electronic living.

A Violet glow of

flimsy shadow

slides me down deeper

into button-tufted marshmallow –

the faux-leather quicksand

where thousands have

already died.

Oh!

the high fidelity screams!

Oh!

the colour-balanced terrors,

all fifty-five inches of them interlaced!

The worst of everything

smears our face.

Like Little Alex,

with his nose shoved in it,

we are a

Bad

Dog…

to be picked up

and dropped on fouled newspaper,

where such belong.

Over time,

we will get the hint.