Mountebank Blues [reformed Tull]

          Monte,,,,, shit shit shit.

Mountebank Blues

Noisy bookshelves push patronage game.
Recycled numbers changing their name.
Pad in hand, the Blackbeard stands.
With great pretense.
Scaled metaphor, nonslip rungs to the promised land.

Bookshop proprietor, cool compendium
Labyrinth softener, sometime pond scum.
Blue sky this, value added gist that.
With quite small prints.
Bookish exterior grating over 'gnostic Rand.

Wouldn't show it.
Like a mountebank can.
Shouldn't crow it
With that mountebank span.
Couldn't know it.
Just a mountebank man.

Reduce stock, click, emptied bookshelves.
Adherents mocked into blaming themselves.
Takeout fantasia sing, on budget shoestring,
With measured waste,
Punched up vitae bag man in extended round.

Titled arrangements that jumble my wit
More topspin than I'd care to admit.
Hairbrained scheme, slim particle beam,
That distinctive taste,
Résumé grifter, three card Monte at Hare and Hound.... what the hell.

I wouldn't fake it,
Let the mountebank choose.
I shouldn't take it,
On the mountebank crews,
I couldn't shake it,
With the mountebank blues.



With the mountebank blues ♬ ♪








I can't get out!!

Sun-tanned Stranded Starfish in a Daze

While my employed life settled down to a daily grinding of  misallocated imponderables, I clung fast, I say. By totting and stacking long hoarded evacuation resources I decided to abandon ministerial sophistry and fling it astray if only in short term. Up the 'pool (!) it was to be as I pondered mizzen stays'ils set to the easterlies.

It was simply an indicator of the tightness of the bastille when I then must need endure the specter of pompous Learian rationale to arrange my earned furlough. Oh Mr. Lear, it is ever so. You haunt me, Edward. However, in a twist of the rational  in nigh a week's time I found myself performing a temporary elegy of sorts for the miscommunicatively [it is, I say, or should be...why are you smacking so loudly?] masked madness that descendeth back into its dark crevasse, nay 'pool in all consistency, awaiting some other traveler in some other sane struggle. And...

I'm going up the `pool from down the smoke below
to taste my mum's jam sarnies and see our Aunty Flo.
The candyfloss salesman watches ladies in the sand
down for a freaky weekend in the hope that they'll be meeting
Mister Universe.

Why had I never realized I was caught on a train sans handle charging towards an ending of despair? But...

There'll be bucket, spades and bingo, cockles, mussels, rainy days,
seaweed and sand castles, icy waves.
Deck chairs, rubber dinghies, old vests, braces dangling down,
sun-tanned stranded starfish in a daze.

Edward Bear, it is you that I see. A mere mistaken consonant between me and a rudimentary pilgrimage to the land of my awakening that are the isles.

I was but a starfish in the shallows swishing back to the open endless sea.

Time will pass.

Bell - in progress

Nothing could have presaged the inevitable, or at least the specific details thereof. While it was all easy to plot on the graph of hindsight and in a general sense it was close to obvious over time.

While all was quiet, my colleagues resisted the thoughts which accompany the tragic and appeared to be a little naked without them. These were the same rotting of the clothes of humanity they were missing and these I have seen so clearly before. Not implicating oneself becomes such an acute goal that the general nature of lessons to be learned only simmer in the subconscious like an acidic pool waiting to be disturbed.

New to me were only the actors appearing in the lack of passion play. My own ambitions had changed so drastically early on in life and I knew the stages of grief by rote. I simply remained in anger diffused by time, anger as a perpetual backdrop to all bureaucratic nonsense designed to make one's upward trajectory swift while plundering the human costs for effect. Like John Lennon sleeping at Yoko's hospital bedside, I now knew the liberating character of briskly challenging authority.  I feel around carefully for the unbreakable bars that imprison us in the dark. It is no good fighting every battle, or even unwinnable battles that appear important.

Sometimes the causes were unavoidable but often one could be knowledgeable through past personal experience to see the nastiness that either precipitated the event or lived alongside it lashing at an ever varying pace at those who did not fit standards of approbation.

Entry

I have found it wise to say little about myself in this blog. Rather I have hoped that the things I have seen and done would be fit compensation for my readers' attention. The scar on my left leg just below the knee is not all that important to anyone save me, and even for me was much ado in its creation with diminishing returns in the form of entertainment or importance thereafter.


Many times I have likened my life to a complication in the perfect order of things and so regard my conception to most likely have been more the curious. Of this moment when motility met with oospore, I hardly know a thing. However, in the manner of what I have read, I believe a certain faction of citizenry attach weight to this commencement, with heavy feelings lasting for a length of time before the predictable diminishing loftiness of concern for said creation result thereafter, this despite a considerable affection for the hereafter.


I no longer consider myself puzzled by the nature of the things I see and do. Through blogging I have come to terms with the infinite. I stand before variety clothed only in pity for those who feel consternation over heterogeneity. I have acknowledged my own lowliness when confronting the unknown.


Four years of time after my supreme moment, I have my first memories. One is of my milk bottle which I traded for a model truck, an exchange that was forever thereafter lamented. Another is of an elderly German lady on an upper floor in our apartment building who could pass string through her neck with a quick snap. This was a fearful memory as I could never be comfortable again around this woman and her oddly wrinkled neck which I could only assume hid the incision that passed entirely through. I associated her with Grimm fairy tales which are also a major part of my early life.


I would gladly trade these memories for more comfortable ones that occur later like laying in the back of my parent's Volkswagen as we traveled in the night, or of eating buttered popcorn in the back of that selfsame car while watching Sound of Music between the heads of my parents upon a wide screen. The wisdom of Aesop could easily replace those fairy tales.


But of approximately four years and some months before I am oblivious. The moment is lost to me and the reason for its importance is equally lost. I report here only upon what I see and do while only speculating on the rest. Most importantly, you, dearest reader, do not have to live up to my hypothetical musings.

Reflections on a Good Beginning Gone Awry

My humble bow.

I write this with the intention of doing exactly what I set about doing however I know that this will change and chaos will ensue. A match cannot be held too long before it burns. I have somewhat of an understanding that there are often times in everyone's life, in every government's life, and, hey ho, in every corporation's life when fingertips begin to feel the pain signaling that change will eventually occur. It is nature. It is barbecue.

Such change is inexorable in the long run whether it is the change we set out to create or the change that we are compelled to endure. This sounds reasonable enough. So, we'll let that be.

If we are smart we guide our canoe down the changing current not expending too much energy as to create a running battle. We will place our paddle carefully and hold it strongly. By this manner, we can create a short path which we might intuitively know is best. Yet we cannot keep our placement overly long or we will become rudderless against the natural forces that overpower what was our previous best guess at the way things were and now aren't. That sounds less reasonable, but I tire of rewording.

Sometimes I find myself predicting what might befall others even though it is far more important to know what I might myself come across-- but that is dangerous territory for concern. It is certainly easier to see the much more likely course of failure from the unpredictable than from that which has been taken into account. It is not too difficult to predict disaster with generalities and be correct. Empires like Rome will fall, a space shuttle will explode, and a dust speck will fly into our eye.

And this does not even account for other possible alternate universes where at some point a scientist will land a tiny probe upon a comet and then wear an awkward shirt with multiple Tabasco sauce bottles upon it and still be loved.

Fascination with failure creates an environment much more likely to result in failure, yet fascination with success, also, is likely to result in failure. To become overly worrisome is to lose sight of the current in the stream-- to become overly proud, the same. Our news networks are both.

Everywhere around me are empires that will one day fall. There are rocks in the stream that go unheeded. I have found that it is easy enough to point out the possible problems but more difficult to know whether the current might somehow whisk us around that outcropping of rocks without issue. I blame this on a course that must have been cast early on.

The inevitable happens and life is no longer what I once knew it to be, or simply no longer.
When I look around at you, I see a novel by Joseph Heller. When I look at myself, I see some stoic masterpiece which lies disguised inside a paperback edition of the boy scout manual.

Really, we are one and the same... in the end.

Digressive Second Thoughts

For in this long digression which I was accidentally led into, as in all my digressions (one only excepted) there is a master-stroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been overlooked by my reader,-not for want of penetration in him-but because 'tis an excellence seldom looked for, or expected indeed, in a digression;-and it is this: That though my digressions are all fair, as you observe, -and that I fly off from what I am about, as far and as often too as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs so, that my main business does not stand still in my absence.

Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

While it was at the top of my head, where there is a reddened bump caused by my neighbor's misplaced rake, I must remember to cling to my "main business" of blogging when blogging. Yet, I am afraid I find that there is no main business to blogging. The structure of blogs is asleep on the job and one is constantly paying no mind to audience because of it's miserable scantiness.  If ever there were a barren form of writing in regards to organization and readership, blogging is it. Were it a diary, which would at least configure the mess into chronology, then my life would be presented in simulcast here. Not only would I merely be reliving moments for exiguous purpose but... take thought. Even though I disguise my time zone as that of the Canary Islands, and even save entries written for days and then post at odd moments of time, even then a schedule might be deciphered and my comings and goings-- by the detail of my writing, such detail being the "main business" -- would be manifestly recorded as if train watching while the entries be shuffled into an inviting puzzle. Any good logician could piece together general happenings given the bare outline of an itinerary, well, adjusted to Canary Island time with mere mathematics.

And were one to inattentively leave one's security system lying about in diligent pursuit of one's main business... well, the danger is well apparent. The Internet is a place of sharing.. and so of unlimited information, and too much detail about how to sling Roundup laced ice cubes onto that jerky neighbor's manicured lawn may just be unproductive though well deserved, yes, well deserved individually. The rake!

Perhaps I need a biographical structure like Sterne. This is not my first mention of this, I am sure... and thus... the need. I will contemplate the idea. A full fledged book with beginning and end ... yet blog backwards. Oh my head.

Worn at the Heels

[I really don't mind if you sit this one out.]

 Hasten, because you cannot know who pursues closely behind or what might lie in wait ahead through your malingering. Exactly when the world seems a manageable tiresome muddle, something new will pass you and pass as something tried and true. I know that my words seem to veer and likely will not pass muster of being anything other than some cataclysmal rant of the day. But heed, because it is likely that in every age there is disorder which one might unwisely dismiss or adopt as being unto the same disorder that has all but been dealt with hitherto. “My father thought that the loom would cause a lot of trouble and here we are on the precipice of the next golden age of fabrics,” one might tell oneself. “Darwin was correct about the survival of the fittest and all is well,” one might say. But Darwin, alas, seems but the weaver of an inferior seam in the moral fabric of society, giving the bully a greater status over the thinking fawn that is torn asunder by brutish strength, By logical extension he further points ominously to an ever more likely catastrophic deselection on a grand scale which I fear is looming but just a short distance ahead. For the fawn in some scenario will not get wind of the charging lion until it is too late.

I assure you that my tragic drivel of the impending “Great Muddle,” trademark applicable, is of a concept wholly unused and neoteric. Even that word “neoteric” is so pristine that my spell check declines it. When no entity but the lexicon argues, things are far from being aright. I hold aloft a sign proclaiming the end is near and all scoff and take another bite of their energy bar, but what if a version of the end is actually nigh? Does it not seem that way? Might we be grazing on the green spring grass as the beast approaches? 

Ends of eras constantly pile up on the History Channel, sometimes multiple ends in an evening's viewing. When that moment of closure arrives someone inevitably is metaphorically stuck on an assembly line without a coffee break. Someone and perhaps many may find themselves without the ability to exist, simply deselected. Evolutionary nature favors the ones that were selected, but the deemphasizes the ones that, say, bravely cover a hand grenade to save comrades. We may be at the end of an era for the likes of them. Procreation, that is what improves the species. Survival regardless of the morals involved is prized absolutely.

And, yes, I can admit that at each step of perceived future chaos things appear to be drastic before they yet again appear to calm down. I must beseech you to hear the tolling of the bell and see the toll that is taken. Mercantilism is on the upswing, technology is beyond the comprehension of those selling it, and darkness pervades the country’s spirit as ever I have seen it. Our society may be that which is doomed through the weeding process though we assume it always, though contrary to our lying eyes, to be the winning nag.

Forgive this lack of digression. My new shoes are worn at the heels while my suntan does rapidly peel. My undissembled fear of the tail leader of the movie reel is stark and I fear it is unworthy of my envisioned diverting blog. I  have been too progressively focused and obsessive. This is really unlike me. So, at this opportunity fortuitously provided by my accidentally though consistently shabby efforts, I will offer an excerpt of a supremely better work than mine -- penned by my hero, the distinguished and eminent Laurence Sterne -- on the subject of digression, offered as a hasty digression, and in proof that though Stephen King is a survivor with more seamy success, those who met their frayed end long before with little reward are vastly more clever and worthy:

" By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time.

This, Sir, is a very different story from that of the earth's moving round her axis, in her diurnal rotation, with her progress in her elliptick orbit which brings about the year, and constitutes that variety and vicissitude of seasons we enjoy;—though I own it suggested the thought,—as I believe the greatest of our boasted improvements and discoveries have come from such trifling hints.
 
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
 
All the dexterity is in the good cookery and management of them, so as to be not only for the advantage of the reader, but also of the author, whose distress, in this matter, is truly pitiable: For, if he begins a digression,—from that moment, I observe, his whole work stands stock still;—and if he goes on with his main work,—then there is an end of his digression.

—This is vile work.—For which reason, from the beginning of this, you see, I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going;—and, what's more, it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits. "

This is not the chaff that has been separated and caste to the winds, but like most classics, it is the wheat that an ignorant neglectful Darwinian mold of social unawareness has all but overcome, endemic madness accepted. And penicillin.. it will come... and only the hardy boys will adapt and survive.