(Oh Not to Join the Happy Ones, Until Some Tasks Are Done)

It's Declaration Week in Blegsylvania! (It's always Declaration Week in Blegsylvania, just some more than others.) Tiny Revolution's The Just and the Good by Bernard is the latest I've seen. (I've linked this week to multiple others.) (Oopsy - just saw this one.)

MANIFESTOITUS! A pandemic! I've got it!

Old Dirty Bastard zings me good about this:

Nice "duh" moment you had there! You should have been here when I found the Old Fool lecturing the 20-something Game Stop manager about the dangers of Liberalism/Communism/Homoism, etc. I called him an idiot. It felt good. Huzzah!

I do see these fuckwits all the time as a nature of where I work and where I stop to and from work, but I never thought (until ODB's comment) that that might be a subconscious motive in my not calling the fuckwit a fuckwit (I stood there, it occurs to me, in an institution-identifying sweatshirt), and I do know some fuckwits who know they've seen me in some vague serf role and could figure out who I was if I pissed them off enough to want to, and who'd win that fight?

Manifesto: I'm ridiculously complicit. Me and mine's self-interest? American hegemony, baby. I think it's more maintainable by policies of less assholity, but I've no illusions about assholity and assholity's trajectory.

I fighting for the privileges I already have and agitating for more, which, because of my relative comfort, necessitates I indulge in tenth-hearted but fully self-congratulatory advocacy for those who have less than me.

Many should be so lucky. Tell me I'm different than all but the holy fools.

*

• The Iron Cheer of Empire.
• Your country.
• Your country.
• Desperately seeking peacenik pot-smoking hippies.
• Excellent summation.
• Look! A Shiny Balloon!
• Fair or not, if there are mass deaths, this will be Obama's Katrina.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Has the rightwing shitfit over this started yet?
• How about about this?
• UPDATE! Ding!
• Not that this will change policy for the better.
• Just routine business.
• The politics of health care explained.
• Fucking economists.
• Bobo smacked once, twice.
• Flying Pig is funny, but taints the KITH skit forever.
• Domestic extremists.
• UPDATE! A solicitation. I suggest Bleggleb.
• ICC!
• MOCO's skateboader wars (includes photo of Kensington!).
• My current and future hell.
• CCT!
• Wearing white at home is lame.
• Wearing black when your color is red is lame.
• BLEG ADVICE SOUGHT! Last night I saw BLCKDGRD in IE and WTF? why does it look so compressed and shrunken? Why don't the youtubes escape the middle column like it does in firefox? Any suggestions on how to make it look in IE like it does in Firefox? Cause it looks crappy in IE. (I have no idea how it looks on a Mac.) (Lordy, if it's a typepad thing, o fuck and well.)
• Hilary Mantel on nine kinds of hypochondria: I once knew a man, a Jamaican, who when he first came to England always answered truthfully when asked ‘How are you?’ A bit sniffly, he might reply; or he would describe his indigestion, or the twinge in his left knee. One day a woman lost patience: ‘Look,’ she snapped, ‘there’s something you must understand; in England, the answer to “How are you?” is “I’m fine, how are you?”’ So he’d been told, and he didn’t need telling twice: for all the English care, you can die and stiffen on the street.
• New Ashbery.
• Two new Heather McHugh poems.
• Updike not a Pynchon fan (does like Barth). No word on what Pynchon thinks of Updike.
• On writing about bad writing.
• Don Carpenter? Lucky I have access to library stacks:

• Say, who's tacked to the wall behind the books? KABONG! goes my pitchfork.
• Halloween in Japan, plus Halloween mix.
• Halloween?
• Jeebus, radio is playing Fleet Foxes, and I just don't get the fuss, cause they suck unto suck's suck.
• DIY.
• Yes.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Jeebusfuck, now new Vampire Weekend, who suck just less than Fleet Foxes.
• Inside you the time moves and she don't fade.
• Guilty pleasure.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

*

THE HAPPY MAJORITY

Thomas Lux

    ..... before I join the great and, I believe, the happy majority
                                                                    - P.T. Barnum

Before I join the happy majority (though I doubt one member
    happy
or unhappy) I have some plans: to discover several new species
of beetle; to jump from a 100-foot platform
into a pile - big enough
to break my fall - of multicolored lingerie;
to build a little heater
(oh not to join the happy ones,
until some tasks are done)
beside each tulip bulb to speed its bloom;
to read 42,007 books (list available
on request); to learn Sanskrit, petroglyphs,
and English; to catch a bigot
(oh not to join the happy ones,
until some tasks are done)
by the toe; to kiss
the clavicle of (name available
on request); to pay my respects, again,
at the grave of John Keats; to abrogate
my position in God's nihilistic
(oh not to join the happy ones,
until some tasks are done)
dream; to hold my mother's hand as she leaves this world;
to lay my hand upon my father's heart as he does likewise;
and for my daughter to be glad I was her father as I exit, also
(in a hundred years or so), from the conscious to the un-.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: