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.

Extenuation

I rarely have excuses of any merit when I need them in any manner. That seems to be the harmony of communal thought upon the quality of my excuses. Explanations for failures being a sign of a flawed character one might wonder why I have not amassed a treasure of them but let's just let that go because, in this matter, I have no excuse.

All will be made whole, a wormy apple but still intact, after this entry. Decidedly, it has been a protracted length of time since I last wrote in this preposterously fatuous blog. I make no bones. I attach no flesh upon those bones. I am... inert.

First, I have a... femoral to pick. Why in the name of the goddess Ananke do I desire to write a book just as my faculties begin to fail me? What is the justice in having such a large allotment of one's childhood spent in learning the fundaments of grammar only to have them escape one's grasp at the very cusp of the moment when their best opportunity of wise usage arises? That unseen villain of fate drives a remarkably agile and heavy bus in my direction, regardless of my attempts to follow the street signals of safety. My crosswalk is unclear, my time more important but less abundant. It is all there in plain view.

My eyes are not what they used to be. No matter the ocular lens I am given, all is a foggy battle for focus. I look down and half of the scene is of clear hairs standing upon my arm and the other half but an amusing cacophony of impressionist subject that not even the vacuous nature of modern day artists would touch. Though Monet was fairly blind when he did some of my favorites, those large panels, the ones that go beyond canvas and creep into one's vital being, I have some doubt my own impairments will lead to more than unspectacular result.

My, but it is a bitter wormy apple. I must attempt to lighten the veil of extenuation if I am to make it all whole to you, my dearest reader. You, I have perceived, are quite the dogged pursuer of sense in nonsense. I think it so admirable that I must think of some way to repay you. I have noticed your efforts. I will attempt to allot long distance dedications as my short time of span permits. Though keep in mind, that I cannot touch the soul of everyone who follows foolishly into the abyss of rambling discourse. Perhaps I should hold a lottery for dedication...

You deserve more. Yes, you are here.. towards the end... with bells on. I humbly bow to your pluck. Oh, dizziness, I must finish...

Dignatious Doggerel (in progress)

Doggerel

The bookbinder, the barrister, the cheat.
Commutation, compensation, low deceit.
Journeymen full worth their price,
For they had looked it over once or twice.

Then they brewed a blog of love and hatred,
Sussing the overfed and the overrated.
Contemplating council fixers,
And criticizing Dorothy Dixers.

Then they looked down upon the blogs they'd made
Scorned with crisp words and smug charade.
And packing it all up to the breech
The spewed it forth each one to each.
And resultant carnage was never mentioned.

But the cheat was tired of the cards he played,
And laid his drowsy words to rest in the shade.
The bookbinder, the barrister, without a clue, 
One could never spot when they were through.
To the eye they were well intentioned.

by Michael DeVore

Three Sheets to the Wind

Her dissembled tresses cascaded down over her silken shoulders like a latticework of lunacy, textile madness, a bolt to the senses. The structural complexity of her loose garments could not be sussed in that folly of descending locks. Like a waterfall 'twas, with repeating patterns only there to confuse. My concentration had never been so deranged. Close the door.

Am I forever to be a victim of what is going on about, while in truth never knowing here what merits going on about?

Time moves more and more swiftly towards it's conclusion. "The end of all things is near; therefore, be of sound judgment and sober spirit..." - that Book. My spirit has never been as sober as my ability to ignore it...to slosh around and make a muck of what lifeblood I have left. 

All my born days, and many of my unborn days in all likelihood, were spent a worrier. I have tried a diet of trying to be more positive, attempting the realization that I have nothing to worry about, and believing that everything will be ok. But I ask you, who would believe such a worrisome twit that would drivel thus? 

I have not touched a rusted thimble of alcohol in such a protracted period, an ellipses, as such.  The only locale in which I feel comfort while drinking in this old age is upon a seagoing cruise liner. Though I may sound a fool, there are plenty of folks around to tend to one, inebriated or otherwise. It is further unlikely one would be in charge of the helm. Even in the cheapest of accommodations of a ship, one is sovereign. A state room... and worry seems far away. Though the ship could sink; one could fall overboard; those decks -- oh so slippery in the mist -- all but nonexistent in my mind. The worry disappears as daily life (the commonplace routine apprehensions) dissolve into the spinning newsprint of the past. Potted, unbalanced...

Rosebud...

by Michael DeVore

Errant Pondering

Errant pandering is all that 'tis. A blogger, one who is a close friend of mine, who writes blogs very similar to mine, seems nothing but a currier of obsequious favor from his rabble of readers, blogsters, his oppressors if you will, for I can see a relationship of mutual dependence. One or the other or both the two seem not in full mastery of their leisure time, putting it to such immature usage.

When I was a child I felt out of sorts during my summer vacation from the soulless academia of the time. A day or two would pass in boundless oblivion, the stone finally off of my back. At those times, without the benefit of a halfway house, a safe harbor from the jarring transition, I plunged headlong into my newly unbounded yet even more newly bounded freedom.

And, at this point, time has passed since I put to type those paragraphs and I have completely forgotten what I was on about. Nevertheless, since I am limited by the time I have been granted upon this plane of existence (but had I the world of time, I doubt I could figure the meaning) I publish. Even if the significance eludes ... quickly, quickly, I must publish... before the flicker expires and all goes black.

by Michael DeVore

Nonchalant Renaissance

As the new year of our Lord, Two Thousand and Fourteen, begins, the hour has come to present to you a reborn blog, full of eagerness for getting at the material concrete substance of random thought. Having put an end to the levity of the past in my last entry, declaring things over and done, flipped and spattered, it is with solemn respect that I continue upon a new course, as if such weren't ever consistently so.

Edit: nigh well I must have written  this entry in a drunken stupor... Tis now two months hence.

by Michael DeVore

The End

As this blog was just a bunch of pish posh anyway. I have decided to end it.

The slop that I served up here is suited only for a book.

I say goodbye and once again, owe my entire life (literally) and major parts of my literary life to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne.

This book can be obtained here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1079  and not a penny is paid and not a penny goes to the original author, who has only such to cover his eyes anyway.

I want to keep up a good relationship with you dearest reader, as I may call upon you again to read some of the same and very seamiest pishposh if it shows up in book form.

May you have a profoundly moving moment.

The End

Her majesty's grand baby was a pretty nice boy, but he didn't have a thing to say.
Her majesty's grand baby was a pretty nice boy, but he spit up every day.
I want to say coochy coo, and here comes the walrus,
but I would be locked away.


by Michael DeVore

An Apology

Indeed, as far as the blog goes, I find it well received by its intended audience of not any at all. While I perceive nothing inadequate or profuse, I still ruminate over the need for change. Seemingly, all things must either end or dwell, but nay, I wish a transformation. I do not aspire to move beyond the trifling-- vanquish that thought-- but merely desire to drift with a differing wind.

The complexity of the scheme has me in a stew. I began as a blog. I started not at the beginning, not at the end, nor even in the middle, but on a tangent that had nothing to do with any goal, nor of course, audience in mind. If I have not recounted this previously, I admit the truth of it now. The fact that I know not of what I have written is a telling story indeed. Were I to plot out a proper book, I would hardly misplace the thread of device I had begun with.

There is nothing to be said for it but to trash the whole design. Sir, or madam, I apologize for the time you have spent in simple ignorance of my circumstances up till now. Nay, I grovel at your feet to have you continue the text, be you here only upon an assumption. I have designs upon the architecture of this product of modern communication and I devise to persist.

My beginnings as a purveyor of the written word were as humble as the pencil given me was not. It was a grand hulk of an object, rounded with thick lead and no eraser. Forbidden, as I was, to change my mind, devoid of editing and rewrites, I spent long hours merely copying the words that were penned by another, form over substance. The writing pads were of tremendous size. Reproduction was the game. I have yet the feeling that my instructor was of the habit of not using her own words even upon her own blackboard, but of using, pro forma, the words of another. Could anyone ask a treasure of me now in full knowledge of my outset with the deuce of a pencil while my own voice was stifled? Training for a medieval monk could not have been more effectively fashioned. Damn you Miss Warren for your simplistic drivel of bike, tike, and dike.

Now I may anger a bit quickly when I think of my beginnings though at the time I believed the days not mournful. My whole life had been a series of corrections, yes—and if I forged a unique method, it was most often not the way blueprinted for me. Still, ignorance of the possible was hardly the worst thing humanity had for its endurance tests. Remaining properly unweeded was a much better existence than the alternative. I was, after all, happy and good humored, with a huge pencil in my hands. [1]

I must endure this moment as I have endured any other and must redouble my effort to please you dear reader. I lay before thee my bare neck. Do with it as you will.

---

[1] Fairly copied from Anna Karenina with but the absence of a pear.

by Michael DeVore

There's Aught You Need to Derive

In a bewildering moment of archaic clarity, nocturnal beads of seawatery droplets precipitately appeared upon my forehead, as some dream of a dramatically echoing moment in memory, I realized so clearly--an adverb my initial clarity brought to mind-- that perhaps the pishposh here that was designed exclusively for my own enjoyment might just not need prettying up, or even presented in public -!- like a hung sausage in the market square. I say that moment was bewildering not because I was confounded but merely muddled.

I lead the dogged hindquarters of my thoughts onward though they be sterile or of hybrid nature. "Derivative," how I hate the word --there appear to be countless words I feel thusly about. I can remember the first time I came into contact with the damnable word in reference to a certain kind of forged music for followers of heavenly pursuits. Oh, but I am overly wordy...

Historically, the times I have had such an all-consuming pursuit, as is currently my social media period, the rest of my life became a complete jumble. Formal education was one of those stretches of time. Divorce, another, and was foreordained from the moment of making my first marital decision as if aboard a speeding train and noticing my beloved in a field picking cotton in the far distance-- in the fog. Had there even been a modicum of sense in my head, I would have held off until time had a better chance to do it's slow strip tease of revelation. Thusly so, the scars revealed early rather than later in my life.

So -damned the wordiness- I feel my blog must be derivative as actually I started it with every intention of it being so. But my whole education having been secondhand has led to this derivation problem elsewhere. Only that to break the mold is nigh on impossible -- Tristram!--  I am just as muddled as ever.

by Michael DeVore

Ouch

Self evident truths are just not as routine as I remember. I am disinclined to think that this is some cardinal numerical divergence from the grand scheme of all things in extant, but am more inclined to feel it to be the malworkings of an internal mechanism of that muchly muddled area of ....perception. How I hated that word in psychology-- shall we exchange "perspicacity?" Surely it is no worse the word in spirit because of its conspicuous lack of popularity in my own experience--albeit it most assuredly does not say bang on what I mean-- and so I shall use it with reservation.

Any societal entity is built upon certain assumptions. Those assumptions being solid grounding from which we may vary or stray when we decide the creative urge is worth the effort. For exemplification, I will abuse Picasso, whom I hate almost as much as the word I have substituted "perspicacity" for. There is a bedrock history of art and struggling artists, going long between meals, suffering through fits of depression, climbing metaphorical cliffs towards a culmination of shared experience, typified by a great age of painting that has come to be known as Impressionism. While I am universally a curmudgeon about words I dislike and painters I loathe, I am impassioned when it comes to Impressionism. Here surely is the essence of art in that artificial perspicacious boundry lines were mostly gone, yet still quite awake in the artists' bedrock of experience to help give the work a proper grounding.

Impressionists relied on the self evident truth that lines, with coloring inside them, were fairly uncommon in the natural world outside of coloring books and say, man-made objects that relied upon men who grew up with coloring books as their antecedent perspicacity concerning art. It is not like I don't enjoy a comic book now and then... but not Picasso. Give me Monet and I shall not waste my allowance on Picasso.

Picasso stands upon the shoulders of genius to draw funny shapes and color them in or not, a second grade exercise of either boredom or incompletion. When I look at my elbow,  I see no Fred Flintstone heavy black line separating it from the color of the wall behind it. I see color on top of color. It is self evident.

Ye who hold the reins of evident truths, who labor to present them, who spend countless dollars on the byways of bustle, advertising to create new truths, be forewarned--your truths are on the wane. You like Picasso, stand on the shoulders of genius and paint comics on a canvas, but yours is a canvas of murky rising steam.  The fictional eloquence with which you paint your perceptual  --dammit-- notions is becoming less important as you dumb down your subjects, but your chimerical truths are having less and less effect as their numbers rise and their failures accumulate. And yes, I enjoy the word "chimerical" despite it's overuse.

All this being said, I hesitate to bring up the pain in my left big toe. It is a hell of thing. It is not likely to disappear soon. No amount of fiddling will help, and I must resort to a cure all for my entire body just to perchance effect the far flung.

Perception be damned!

by Michael DeVore

I Don't Care What You Think

[My dedication of this blog in its specific placement here and not where she would probably want it--as the first entry, before I even have a chance to impress any reader-- though non-referential in title, well, maybe only slightly, by chance or devine wisdom, is to my best English teacher, Mrs. Alice Doran, though she would wince to read it, and may yet wince. I present this dedication in the form of an essay, that shall, hopefully, remain ungraded. I dearly loved the commas that were never well received by her so I had and still have an abundence of them unused. So that is that.]

This essay is about...

my quest for an apology for the actions of a customer service representative at Tallapoosa River Electric Cooperative (which is a phrase I just cannot say enough, literally, Mrs. Doran, I cannot type it in my blog entries enough). This Tallapoosa River [etc-] rep hung up on me after saying to me: "I don't care what you think." And...yes, okay, I do actually feel guilty, because I said what first came to mind at that moment. The representative tripped herself up in her own logic and made a statement that completely contradicted an earlier statement. Following the moment where I pointed this out, and just after she reverted back to her original statement, mere seconds after her previous contradictory statement, I unfortunately said, "Then you are a liar" and, on top of the whole sundae, forgot to say "madam" afterwards. Oh, I do get so involved for seemingly no reason at all, well, besides the awful, awful electrical service to my small community of homes and the inherent danger caused by this irresponsibly bad service (my own opinion, but do not quote me, I pray you.) Someday I will outline my issues with (say it with me for the Google searchbot) Tallapoosa River Electric Cooperative, but for now, just understand that I later apologized for my "liar" remark and was refused an apology by a top level manager for the company's apparent opinion that they did not generally care what I thought, and I forcibly being a member of this cooperative, not by choice but by sheer luck of the draw and possibly I overlooked researching at least this one thing about my property to be. What a conundrum it was!

My only answer was to pelt them with my opinions, my added opinions, and yet more of my opinions in computer generated graphics that work their way up the ladder when one searches for "images" of "Tallapoosa River Electric Cooperative." I have attempted to serve these graphics like tennis balls for an invisible opponent. These metaphorical balls bounce off the back wall of the court, and exist for no apparent reason, other than freedom to have my opinions, and freedom to voice my opinions without being disconnected by a monopoly representative dressed up in "cooperative" costume. (Oh, and incidentally, I was eventually having fun writing utter nonsense and embedding my graphics.) Okay, okay, here is the serious part (ignore all that is within parentheses, I pray you) as I near conclusion. Seriously, TREC --yes I'm speaking with you again, despite our previous argument, Tallapoosa River Electric Cooperative --if you cooperated with the other electric company one block away which is providing my  neighbors with lighting when my own family's lights are rendered useless though purchased through capitalistic sourcing to function when darkness occurs, then the seemingly better company's power source would kick in when your apparently miserably ancient equipment fails.

So having thought all this through, for no apparent reason to them (or "aimlessly," by all standards TREC could possibly be capable of mindfully rendering,) I have decided that if electric power were really as important for them to provide as I feel it is for me to receive, then there would be in the state of existence an easily accomplished redundancy. "Well, then how would they bill if more than one power 'company' were able to provide you with power?" [paraphrased but probably only missed by a word or two] an Alabama Public Service Commission representative sincerely asked as I suggested the possibilty of redundancy where the wires met or crossed. She actually asked me this. She did not comprehend nor did I inform her of her unintended but complete irony. My answer was "I don't care what you think." :)   I actually did say that, and it does not deserve an emoticon, except for that I said it only in jest. She laughed loudly at the repitition of this line, so I wash myself of this matter. Subsequently, after my joke, I said that this was no doubt why God gave us computers and the Internet, with all those packets of data flying around, following multiple routes and testing lines ahead and shortest paths, ad-naseum. The reason God, or the Defense Department as is a more commonly known term to legislators, must have made the Internet was to teach us about redundancy. NASA learned to take the lesson to heart, why couldn't the great "electric company" also when it was my safety on the line? Crossed wires. I mean, stop reading Ayn Rand, for the love of God, literally, and cooperate.

[My second favorite English teacher, Mrs. Alice Doran, would probably almost definately not approve of my writing style, as would be her perogative. But it will remain this way from it's birth on and up until this blog will eventually cease as my life must cease. Dear reader, caught in the shuffle, happlessly and possibly aimlessly blundering into a blog entry influenced by the great master Lawrence Sterne, and not uncoincidentally, author of "Tristram Shandy," and incidentally my favorite English teacher, I feel for you, if you have reached this point, as you have. But for Mrs. Doran, if we only include those teachers from the century previous to the current, you were and probably still are the bomb, albeit not literally.]

One question though, Mrs. Doran. Please, in this parenthetical expression:

 (or "aimlessly," by all standards TREC could possibly be capable of mindfully rendering,)

would the comma not more mindfully be placed outside the parenthesis just for the purposes of readability?


For an honest recent essay, which is gradeable, if you are not biased by its religious and political subject matter: http://michaeltdevore.blogspot.com/2012/08/ridgecrest-baptist-church-of-montgomery.html

by Michael DeVore

Train of Fiddlestick

As I found myself banging through my first entry, the thought came to my attention, here, in my second, before I had actually begun it, that I should not sling mud at intellectuals. At the close of the skirmish in my mind, I ended with a soft spot for the likes of Gregor Mendel and many others who could probably be labled as intellectuals or the precursors of such. Starting in my childhood, Gregor Mendel was a momentous role model. Biographies written for children, especially in my day, were often far from accurate depictions with their steadfast goal being the wrapping up of things into a well tied package. Add a bow and a song about banana boats and life was a bowl.

Almost anything communicated whether in written form or otherwise is still far from the truth of the matter, in reality. As an instance for comparison, almost anything written about me personally, someone someone I knew enough about, or something I personally knew anything much of anything about, is mostwise fairly or entirely inaccurate or misguided. I cannot think of a single occurrence of which I knew peasquadlings about of media unsullied. If you have ever watched a local purveyor of video journalism shape up the scene to be depicted  (if you could just pretend to be reading a newspaper over there and watch carefully) you would quickly get my gist (my account of which you cannot logically depend upon any more than his, truth be the master.) I leave you in this paragraph and sequence of thoughts with the term "fog of war," a phrase developed for when the mundane is in the extreme no longer mundane. [the door please... thank you. Oh, I SAID THANK YOU. Wasn't it ever thus?]

Mendel, as portrayed was mindfully determined in separating his peas, and was so fastidious, unlike me, and was posthumously rewarded for his work with words of great praise and respect, not uncoincidentaly proven by my own awareness of  Mendel as one of the good ones, in all likelyhood unlike me after I depart but I have the inclination to hope despite the cards that have already been dealt. Deity Above, perhaps you will smile upon your humble aging servant to allow him to become or remain considerable enough in the grand selection process for me to recollect me after my annihilation.

Mendel’s story acutely appeals to me in a similar manner in which the concept of hope appeals to a constituency of the optimistically determined. (In that light, I must reveal, at least to Deity Above, that I suddenly have a good feeling about my blog  becoming more meaningful, or easier to understand after trying to get control of the connective tissue. [Well, that throws the whole damnable thing off -- connective tissues and tissues in general are bits for later. SHUT THE BLINDS, will you? I am distracted by that damnable bluebird.] )

Ofttimes, my favorite de-animated artists are those not fully appreciated in their lifetimes-- my favorite bygone parents, the same, as final proof of the tarty pudding. Once an artist is truly appreciated, I feel, a struggle begins in that precious life to remain worthy of the new found praise. Modern artists, who are actually rewarded within their lifetimes, tend to be limited to the same carving that defined the contours of their initial success. If such an artist found success in painting spacious portraitures of comic book personalities. then the magnification of more comic book frames will quickly delineate future successful creative efforts, and almost naught else. If and when venturing out from what must needs become worn and stale ground--a type of adventurous journey that was their natural inclination, as artists, previous to hobbling down easy street -- artists will only find that their fame has scattered, leaving an inelegant tightrope to stride between what might be creative and what has been antecedently of prosperous result. 

If the initial strike made as genius made its outing is of large enough scale, perhaps there is no need to expend much effort to remain in the tots. This analogy applies to the common working man as well. If one is good at sewing buttons, one may be sewing buttons throughout life. If one makes a rich strike in an endeavor, through moral or immoral means, perhaps the amount of loot can purchase any lifestyle, any type work, ambassadorships, and fame. Otherwise, sew your buttons. You will find it hard to do otherwise.

I believe I do have a soft spot in my heart for thousands of other intellectuals who have provided a thoughtful framework, with misgivings, for my life. There are the misunderstood Adam Smiths and Charles Darwins, of whom I am not so sure was misunderstood but just well used and commercialized. He was put up wet, so to speak.  In point of fact a little hardening, or perhaps a mild form of chronic scleroderma, may be forming in my cardiovascular center for Darwinian logic in whatever it’s form. He is like a bad Christmas carolAll of these great practical intellectual thinkers were so bright, tis a shame, tis a shame, for all of them that success should narrow the world's boundaries and not just their own.

As I have long imagined, noted, and decided to blog about, the world would be so much better if the appreciation of Darwin as it advanced posthumously over time had remained more within the lines in which he was originally coloring. Scribbling messily outside his discipline has been decidedly detrimental to so many [but here I have slung mud around -- reader, please an entry or two more before you are set against me, I beg. The blog is in it's infancy. All may not be as it appears. Please, your pardon for the inconvenience and that dust upon your coat, let me wipe that off, sir.] If ever a time machine could be created, Charles Darwin would be in my top ten list of those to be brought into our time to view our society with disgust and chastise the wide range of application his simple well stated ideas have drunkenly meandered into, sickening alleyways that should never have been taken Only now, if only because now we are stuck now within the boundaries of his success in areas where a man of his time would not consciounably have taken us. I think I would be fairly certain he would indeed give us a bit of a what for.

[And if sometimes I sing to a cynical degree --- it's just the nonsense that it seems.]

For though one might respect intellectuals like Mendel, the great father of genetics, one cannot help but have distaste for the ultimate application of genetics to humans in World War II or even in today’s advances in modifying plants and, oh there is no end to the evil which knowledge can wander into. Despite the fear of the unknown, I will persist myself. Go ahead and taste the forbidden fruit I blog on about. Go on then, at least for a dozen more blog entries, because as you hopefully can see, I improve with age, and despite my advancing years and the limit of time left, the fact that the years appear to advance ever and ever faster should be of some advantage in advancing my improvements as well.

--Stop the train!— I see now at this particular point I have painted myself into a corner of analogies that may well be my undoing. I must ask the brakeman to stop our train in this place where we can hear ourselves think. Imagine that we are in an Alaskan mountain range and the drifts are high about us on either side. The path forward is clear, the path behind us is clear but to either side are banks of snow higher than our train by a multiple of 3. Now safely without distractions let us consider what Darwin did in his time, and what loads of excrement later sprouted out of his natural pea of knowledge. Darwin is probably one of the most influential men in world history. Eh, I could live without him. His subject was naturalism. His ideas did not really become completely and universally (narrowing the universe to the scientific method) accepted until long after his death. He was certainly not appreciated in his time for the many roads his theories would go down. Darwin's theory, as with most scientific theories, battled with Christianity. The battle rages on today about how old the earth is, whether it was created in 7 days, or whether all species have common ancestors instead of being created in all their variety in a heartbeat. While Christians may well consider this the evil of Darwinism, they themselves are sort of stuck on a train track, unable to see around them at the further influences of Darwinism upon, in my mind, mainly capitalism. Natural selection as a scientific theory? Why, oh my, that is a breeze. The moral implications are almost nonexistent. Yet, here the churches act like trained monkeys on fire.  A train, "A train of fiddlestick." Oh gees, brakeman, move on from this drift... 

Dear reader, my father saw things simply but he did not believe everything he was told. In fact a fair some of knowledge betrayed him. I became similarly distrustful of knowledge at age 20. Living life like this was hard. When I kept to the path I was safe but I explored when I could. Exploring is dangerous business. One can get lost. I no longer dare fate, I merely dabble in the unthoughtful. Despite being pilloried by those with less knowledge and pilloried by those with more, I remain unconvinced of the whole matter.

 Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man's head, there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train just like—A train of artillery? said my uncle Toby—A train of a fiddle-stick!—quoth my father—which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle.—"   - Laurence Stern, Tristram Shandy

by Michael DeVore

The Stressful Beginning

It would distress me immensely to commence a blog somewhere near the beginning of  the story which I want to tell, slave to some chronological stabilizing mechanism, meanwhile putting to spite the full breadth of my life, and the full collection of my varied opinions, acquired as they have been often by chance, and sometimes by industry -- though the latter never being as fully robust an acquistion method as might be practical if I were in desire of placing my personage into a 10 percentile range of those who were successful at remaining calm during life's abusive menace and who became accomplished at maintaining the equilibrium necessary to prosperously obsess upon singularities. Starting near the beginning is quite the cat's bottom as well because it puts me at a period for which my memory fails me utterly. Even if I could dwell upon all the residual flashy lights, fleeting dangling mobile nicknacks, long expirated coochy coos, and the fading echos of my gurgles and cries, I don't think they would sufficiently hold my blog reader's attention to a sufficient extent in this commencement, where first appearances are probably of some import, as they always have been discussed as being.

In my intellectual apprenticeship, I have gathered the apparent knowledge that the definitive origin of my history kicks off with some kind of big explosive boom whereupon everything is scattered willy-nilly into a void, or quite possibly into no void at all, crashing headlong into some other incidental debris resulting from some other equally peculiar boom, ad absurdum.  As I view the matter, no discernible pattern transpires from this "knowledge" and certainly nothing so intellectual appears to be vastly demanding of my preoccupation. Do not perceive me wrongly. I am truly taking aim at a good initial impression but if the arrow does not reach the center spot, please bear with me through another entry or two, as first impressions are clear by reason of their sharpness, but, by the bye, they may also lack meaning by reason of their intrinsic subject matter. (Curses remain upon the first wife!)

By all this, I mean to say that this blog, while biographical, while containing the sum total of whatever opinion I can coax off the ledge of my top story, will not be the standard blog. [Indeed, you may say. Yes indeed, I may respond.] I will not bore you with coochy coos nor will I start at some extraneous point of insignificance as to when and where I was born or created, or from whence the parts of me came to be. These are but points on a continuum of an entire history of events and nonevents that affected me and determined the ample array of wisdom I wish to impart. I am your loyal servant in this quest for enlightenment. And by all manner, Sir or Madame, you are not my captive victim. As may befit your desire, there are plenty of extraneous blogs out there with pearls of wisdom possibly worth the diving. Yet I fear it necessary to inform you that none of these substitutions may be as full of dissembled truth as mine will attempt to impart to thee. My blog will be brassy, cheeky, and fearless-- save for that previously confessed fear-- and will do it's best to be as rare and unique in blogging history as any blog that has or ever will hit the tubes.

You have my word 'pon it.

by Michael DeVore