calling planet nibiru...

the dense yellow # 2 is still ripening in the quasi rural fields here in the nexus...

and my nascent winter rye is still standing as tall as it can...

the parking lot at the local supermarket is full...at least half way...

the macdonald's out on route six seems to be doing a robust business...nothing extraordinary on a saturday moring...

admittedly it is a bit on the warm side for the second day of autumn...

and there is an azure sky redolent of deepest summer..and there is part of the problem...the anti-life nihilist fundamentalist evangelical in me is crying out at the failure of planet nibiru to materialize and obliterate the fucking godawful terrible sinful hedonistic human race ( that this would have obliterated every trump supporter is the only real shortcoming i can see in its non-materialization )

oddly the only empty parking lots i saw were at churches...have the faithful already been raptured up and i missed it? or have the faithful seen through the lame numerological con game that is an evangelical side line? remember harold camping and his confused babbling from 2011? david meade can join him in the pantheon of failed prognosticators who fade into oblivion muttering to themselves about what could have gone wrong and god's treachery...personally i am going to have some lunch.

"well...that passed the time"

made a call at the "behavioral health" segment of a local hospital today to make a visit...i found it all to be rather formal and constrained even though the staff was "glad" i was there...as long as i succumbed tot he list of rules...one of the first of which was "no cell phone use " which i promptly violated by taking the attached photographs ( grainy though they may be )...each inmate..er, patient...was allowed only one visitor at a time so i was left to cool my heels in the hallway for about half an hour and wait...so i began to live through waiting for godot line at a time as i paced around...until i noticed the surveillance camera...so surveyed it and its 180 degree field of vision and saw that it overlapped another that was about fifty feet down the hall...behavior was being watched...i was suspecting a shrill whistle followed by a stern voice calling me to task for rule violations...i looked around for refuge and saw a nook where the wall extended by some disused elevator doors ( nothing in good repair...oceania...airstrip one ) unfortunately it was not nearly a deep enough recess to avoid the camera...winston smith had it made compared to this...so i spent an hour on camera ( there was one in the "visitor's lounge" as well...as we left i noticed the cameras vanished...or were better hidden...wondering how much more of my life is surveiled.

mired in an ego viewpoint

"western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. everyone demands something of the rest. we say "thou shalt" in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to that order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable...in the ethics of the west everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. here luther is completely at one with nietzsche, popes with darwininas, socialists with jesuits..." oswald spengler. decline of the west___________every now and then you can open a book....journey to the end of the night, cosmos, confessions of an english opium eater...and find a passage that rings so true at that particular moment that it laves you gasping...old ozzie damn near knocked me out of my chair this morning...we are all stuck behind our own eyes...it is difficult, if no impossible, to view others without making their existence relative to ours...we have difficulty empathizing...it can be done...it takes some effort...and there are those times when you come across an individual so utterly self-absorbed and buried so deeply behind their own eyes that they don't seem capable of any sort of understanding....who can only positively sanction the existence of others in terms of what those others can do for them...it is about them...period...we call that sociopathy...or indifference...or cruelty...or megalomania...and find it abhorrent and react with revulsion and avoidance...just wondering how much of ourselves we see there before we react.

the blanching hour

i spent an hour working on the first step in making what my carpatho-rusyn granny would call holubci...you can call it stuffed cabbage or whatever non-authentic name you want to apply...i will stick with what i grew up with..one head of cabbage in the pot blanching...another on the counter waiting...peeled off with tongs and into a bath of cold water to stop the cooking...then into a colander to drain..forty leaves in the first head...forty-seven in the second...the last two photos are the largest and the smallest leaf from the second head...my work is done here...the rest of the project is in other hands...i am free to ponder whether this qualifies as a post-modern "death of the real" since the generation that brought this to my family is long gone...or if my inclusion of this post in the blog carries on my tradition of satirizing the whole bogus theme of post-modern claptrap...i lean towards the latter...we need g.e. moore now like never before.

just another grifter whore

my garbage can isn't real anymore...it has become a simulacrum...a mere shadow of a real garbage can...you can tell because it says old keith soderquist is mayor and he isn't anymore...statutes enacted in, i believe, 2008, stripped him of his office as soon as his conviction on all counts ( including taking money from the food bank account to spend gambling..up in michigan so he wouldn't be recognized as easily i suppose ) and rendered my garbage can fallacious...the times of northwest indiana says his conviction "casts a pall" over the city...how? a whore is a whore...some political grifters are bigger than others...too big to fail...others not so big...still...cut from the same cloth...let the light in...recognize where we find ourselves for what it is...a free-for-all at the public trough...fuck these people.

bureaucratic blowback

have we ever discussed the nearly criminal mayor's ( trial starts next month...the maw of justice grinds slowly...but it surely grinds ) decision to move trash and recycling collection curbside because scrappers were cutting into the city's revenue stream ( much like the mayor has allegedly done )and, in the process put his name on every damn garbage can in town? well...when he did that he decommissioned the alleys and made individual homeowners responsible for their maintenance where they abutted their property...it is widely ignored and i was cited for having "weeds and rank vegetation over 12" in height.." behind my house ( photos two and three )can't really argue that but so do my neighbors ( photo four ...and i have more )...to cut to the chase...i took the lawnmower back there and scalped it ( photo five ) and lopped off a bunch of overhanging branches as well as cutting down a couple of small trees...i bagged a bunch of "waste" per the citation's instructions ( sixth photo ) but the citation also said , " any cut branches or limbs that cannot be paper bagged can also be placed on the easement for pickup."...never one to deny city workers work i did so ( last photo )...i had until sunday to do this..i expect credit for doing it early...i expect my neighbors to clean theirs up too...one wonders if those expectations will be met in this half-assed town...one wonders if the next mayor will be less of a political whore...hoping so since he was pretty much elected in the primary and i voted for him.

carboniferous detrivores*

at the moment much of my yard is taken up either by plants i aim to eventually eat ( top photo ) or green manures i am letting go to seed ( second photo ) so i can continue the process of adding nitrogen to the soil naturally a bit more cheaply ( i have some alfalfa and a few more goodies like illinois bundleflower to add to the mix )...the bulk of the rest of it is made of a bit of grass and a lot of weird ground cover and moss..but the stuff grows...and for all my pretensions to organic gardening, natural fertilizers, compost ( there is a bin out back too ), and a healthy disrespect for the social conventions of my neighbors, there are still expectations that seemingly have to be met..like mowing the stuff...if i don't someone will call code enforcement and they will tell me to mow it on pain of a fine and anything else the powers that be can throw my way...it is expected...so i load up my lawn mower with 89 octane gasoline and cut away...i am using the remains of the carboniferous epoch of geological history to cut my alleged lawn...and to go to work...and to post this blog...and to heat and cool my home...and buy food to eat that is produced with an abundance of petrochemical...the culture ( ha! ) i live in is universally ( almost ) dependent on these remains...a scavenger society that searches high and low for new sources and is prepared to go to war over them...even trying to live on the fringes sucks me back in...even going "off the grid" entails using technology that is manufactured with carboniferous waste...no fucking way out seemingly until it all crashes from entropy and sky high oil prices....like bugs headed towards a zapper we just keep going...how long can i fool myself? how long can we fool ourselves as a species? "denial runs strong in these...how can we use it?" *from william cattons' book "overshoot"