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