WALKING ON THIN ICE

i, quotidian

George W. Bush, 2005
“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Joe Strummer of The Clash
(You have) “the right to free speech — unless you’re dumb enough to actually try it.”

Camus
“Everything begins with lucid indifference.”

Barney Frank
“For Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

Milan Kundera
“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

John F Kennedy
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Benjamin Franklin
“People shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

John Dewey
“Politics is the shadow that big business casts over society.”

Noam Chomsky
“Historians – part of their task is to shape our picture of the past in a way which is supportive of power interests in the present.”

IF Stone
“All governments are run by liars and nothing they say (about anything) should be believed.”

Ben Franklin
“There was never a good war or a bad peace.”

Thomas Jefferson
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.

Nietzsche
“We have art in order not to die from the truth.”

Camus
“Creating is living doubly.”

Noam Chomsky
“There has not in history ever been any answer other than, Get to work on it.”

Go thee and suffer less
the Church of Not Quite So Much Pain & Suffering

wall of bird

woke up to a wall of birds chirping this morning at sunrise. tonight at sunset we heard them again. this place has an inner courtyard open to the sky and our window wall is 90% covered by ivy from the ground floor to the roof. we saw maybe 300 small finch-like birds fly from the sky and nestle in our ivy wall for the night. vociferous critters. they’re magic, right out of a fairy tale. that’s one of our open courtyards above.

lady k finished 4 art pieces in essaouira. they were too delicate to mail, so she left them on the ramparts by the sea to be taken home by whomever. this is her second free art offering – the other was pula, croatia. she’ll have her first solo gallery show this october or november in cleveland at the brandt gallery.

watched scorsese’s “aviator” film with leonardo dicaprio – great movie but sad. makes one wonder why anyone would ever want to be famous. the first dicaprio film to show me what a great actor he is. unlike any other film i’ve seen by scorsese.

used my usb memory stick at a marrakech cyber cafe and picked up 5 viruses. that’s 9 marrakech internet cafe viruses so far. good metaphor for morocco.

marrakech operates on a higher, faster, denser pitch than essaouira. of course marrakech is 22 times larger and more than 3 times older than essaouira. and this is a desert city while essaouira’s seacoast. more dirt, more poverty, more desperation, and hungrier more aggressive sales sharks here as well. marrakech is uglier, hotter, more demanding – depressing too. yet marrakech is much more interesting, packs more in each minute. shows you the dark side of the human soul.

i’m hashless in marrakech. was told one couldn’t walk anywhere without being offered hash, but i must look too old and lady too healthy for us to be approached here – although in essaouira we were offered drugs 3 times. maybe reality wants me straight. i could go to our ex-guide’s house and get some, but i don’t want to see him again after his show of greed our last day here 2 months ago. i’d rather be straight than enter that manipulative pit again. looks like my principles outweigh my need.

can’t wait to land in england tomorrow. of course that’s going to be a hassle too because england is on high terror alert, which means it’ll take an hour or more to get through passport control. our bags will be going around and around the baggage conveyor belt unattended while we wait to pass muster.

i’m off-flow today. the heat, the bad sleep, the greed, the need, plus moving to 3 hotels in 2 cities in 4 days have depleted me, have me thinking dark thoughts. my natural buoyancy is bounceless, my brain slow, my mind numb, my body sore, my will tired, my spirit less. the two bright points in my life right now are the lovely Lady K, and not being in Amerikkka – land of fascist KKKorporations, KKKristian fumblementalists, and KKKleptomatic war KKKriminal election stealing “vice” president and president pretend..

in the belly of the salmon

i am not inclined to eat in restaurants. i find the tables small and too close together, and the atmosphere false. but last night i found a way to enjoy it: get stoned before hand, then get to the restaurant early. our food and conversation were good, and we were 3/4s done before a second couple came in. two more followed. i’m an empath – i’m like a tesla coil for people, i pick up their discordancies. the more people around, the more turbulent the mental and emotional airwaves, the more i shrink into myself.

so tonight for our last night in essaouira, we got stoned and went to dinner even earlier. figured earlier in, earlier out.

sat down at 7:15. during our tasty waldorf-ish salad, a fiddler and 3 percussionists came in, started exotic ululating foot stomping song. waitress danced. band danced. customers danced. drummer ululated. we ate crab bisque soup during second song. whole band sang. bisque good. heavy drums in small concrete room loud. ululating loud. fiddle loud. ears ringing. conversation with my lady drowned out. dancer goes among tables extorting tips for band. at 9 our main course finally comes – tough tasteless fish and passable vegetable pastilla. cheese and crunchy sweet for dessert.

mediocre main course, lack of conversation, being held hostage for 3 hour dinner, and management making the fleeced pay for forced entertainment left a bored distaste in my mouth. did appreciate that between each native folk song by the band, the cook turned the radio on and played arabic techno. the band knew 3 songs. they played 6.

next day.
back in marrakech again. we found the ibis hotel too humdrum after what and where we’ve been, so canceled next 3 nights to stay in the shererazade riad inside the old city walls instead. by the time we start camping in north england next week, we’ll have changed addresses 5 times in the 9 days. bit much don’t you think. all the moving about coupled with the brutal marrakech sun has drained us. it’s at least 20 degrees fahrenheit warmer here than essaouira… saw one sign that said 113 degrees.

tried to buy straw hats because the sun here is so brutal. street vendor handed me 2 and said 140 dirhams ($16.47 US). i said too much, handed them back. he asked how much i’d be willing to pay. told him last time we bought 2 hats, we paid 40 dirham total ($4.70 US). he said ok, handed the hats back. because we’re gringos, he’d upped his price 350%. that one transaction pretty much sums up morocco.

must have had 30 friend requests on myspace today from false women asking me to pay money to look at naked pictures of them. told lady i had a load of slut requests… she replied “you have a slut glut.” say that real fast 5 times – it’s harder than “toy boat” or “rubber baby buggy bumper.”

next next day (july 2, 2007).
wrote down 3 lines to use later in poems – they’re almost a poem by themselves…

in the belly of the salmon
full moon in Marrakech
slapstick reality

olkiklk;kil;kjukl;lkjn lok,.koijm

lady cried today. walking around our last day on the west coast of africa, we came across 4 starving black kittens. could see their ribs and spine through their fur. they ran up to us pleading for food and affection. lady asked if we could bring them some food and water. i said no, they’re almost dead anyway, won’t do any good and might even prolong their suffering. lady sat on the sea wall, tears running down her face. i held her. the kittens came over and lay down at our feet. too much need and sadness for me, so i relented. we went and bought them some bottled water, 4 small yogurts, and 6 tiny silvery fish. came back, only 2 kittens there. their little teeth couldn’t get through the fish skin, so i placed the fish on rocks and stomped them with my heel to break the flesh. the kittens feasted away.

on the way back out, saw the 3rd kitten, so i found a plastic bag, picked it up and carried it to the fish. can’t touch the cats here because they’re all diseased. on our way back out again, found the 4th kitten. i left it where it was. figured i’d played cat god enough. the kittens took an hour of our day… it was a good hour. my rationale for helping the kittens is we made them happy and kept them alive for 1 more day… maybe tomorrow another soul will take heart and feed them again.

what a sad, unforgiving world this all too often is.

afterwards, we had coffee and pizza at an outdoor cafe. a pregnant black cat asked me for a bite. gave her a couple, and she lay down in the sun at my feet and slept. that’s 5 black cats laying at my feet today. sounds like good luck to me.

i constantly think i hear willie nelson singing here – the reedy slightly off-the-beat male arab singers sound very much like him. willie’s one of my 3 main want-to-dos – i want to get stoned with willie nelson, have bob dylan record one of my poems as a song, and do a word/foundsound collaboration with jack dangers of meat beat manifesto. it’s important to have goals – though my main goal is to make lady happy, and my second goal is to get our memoir of me published.

we have one small toke of hash left for today – i gave half of what we had to guests for their journey. looks like we’ll be hashless in marrakech tomorrow. or not – if we’re supposed to have some, it will appear.

the baby seagulls below are up on our hotel roof.

olkiklk;kil;kjukl;lkjn lok,.koijm

cleaning my keyboard created the line above. i figure it’s as germane as anything i write, so may as well leave it.

leftovers

decided to move to a hotel for our last 2 days in essaouira instead of fighting fates and time… no use staying anyway once a place turns on you – never know when it’ll attack again. so we’re paying 5 times here what we already paid for 2 nights there. go figure. life is strange, reality stranger.

* * *
there are many paths, and they all lead to Pathsville.

* * *
MySpace advertising programs read the blog you click to read, evaluate it, and present 4 ads across the top which might inter-relate with the blog’s contents. at one site, the 4 ads offered were:
1 – Jesus Christ Loves You
2 – conversion to judaism
3 – Born Gay? pro/con
4 – Kick Boxing Manchester

* * *
my baby’s cummerbund and cherry pie – so come on cum bun, be my very why.

* * *
a note in lady’s handwriting in my notebook: “When I draw my breath it’s for a thousand inhabitants, each parsing their own slice.”

* * *
endaltated, i’ve a lazy bones jones. that’s why i’m blogging using leftover notes from my back pocket pad. purgatory panache. or would that be purge-atory? they purged a tory when they got rid of Margaret Thatcher and stopped Thatcher’s Tory rape.

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Lite Verse

We come from light
We go to light
But what a heavy in between