The Dream Quest of Unknown America

Twitter Sonnet #240

Cherry eels arch over an SUV.
A bonfire froze into a porch lamp.
Luckless clovers plunder every lost bee.
Ice bulbs make the bedrooms of Hoth too damp.
Zs reside in the hold of a toy ship.
Plastic lashes the tea kettle with flame.
Sleeping cats proffer bellies of friendship.
Grey brows on kitten pets suggest no name.
Dead leaves disguise quacking cat as a duck.
Spirals of one turbine snails squeeze the dot.
Disregard all noise from the lifeless truck.
Earth is Satan's blue dress paid storage spot.
On Krypton diamonds look like lumps of slag.
Super Charlie gets crystals in his bag.

Yes, even I'm talking about Charlie Sheen. Though that's also a Charlie Brown reference, of course.

I rather liked this speech by Michael Moore on Saturday;



I'm not sure throwing around the word "terrorism" is wise, though perhaps that's just part of rabble rousing, and the rabble could do with some rousing, at least, it could do with some rousing in the right direction. I don't think the comparisons Moore drew between Mubarak and U.S. wealthy is hyperbole, either.

I wish I shared Moore's optimism, but I see this going something like the UK miners' strike. The gears of the capitalist machine seem intractable at this point. Even if the unions maintain their rights in Wisconsin, as Moore observed, the right's goal in this battle would be achieving something that amounts to icing on the cake. We're steadily being squashed by the myth of the American dream, that "rugged individualism". Meanwhile, I don't know anyone in my age group who isn't at least partially depending on someone else or is extremely poor. Often both. Life's like that for millions of people, but we live with the delusion.

I really can't knock the Kindle. Feeling like reading H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key" again, I instantly downloaded everything Lovecraft's ever written for three dollars. From "The Silver Key";

He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realise that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

Speaking of H.P. Lovecraft, I forgot several months ago discovering Remember My Mr. Lovecraft or Haiyoru! Nyaruani. I'm not really sure what it has to do with Lovecraft, other than a picture of him on an apron. I'm not sure if it's another lousy slice of life series or a parody of one. Judge for yourself;