Soon Your Dear Ones Will Hide in a Closet When They Hear Your Heavy Step on the Porch and Then Your House Will Slide into Disrepair

Dear Cowardly Emailer clever enough to send an email without return address (not that I'd have emailed you; I remark only on your cowardice),

Why yes, this blog does suck, thank you. I've always said so. I don't know what I want this crappy blog to be, funny or serious, happy or angry, light or heavy, conciliatory or accusatory, open-minded or parochial, honest or disingenuous, coherent or incoherent, rude or ruder, loud or louder, self-aggrandizing or self-scourging, informative or white noise, etc.... but I do know that I don't want this blog to be either funny or serious, happy or angry, light or heavy, coherent or incoherent, conciliatory or accusatory, open-minded or parochial, honest or disingenuous, rude or ruder, loud or louder, self-aggrandizing or self-scourging, informative or white noise, etc... 

These are the funniest, most serious, happiest, angriest, lightest, heaviest, most in need of conciliation, most necessarily accusatory, most open-minded, most parochial, most honest, most disingenuous, most coherent, most incoherent, the rudest, loudest, most self-aggrandizing, most self-scourging, most informative, the most static-filled white-noised days of my life. I'm canary, I'm weathervane, I'm Cassandra, I'm Fool. That you took the trouble to tell me this crappy blog sucks is a sign this crappy blog is suc(K)ceeding at some level. My thanks are not either/or either.

• Mehgahfeh. That felt good. That felt shitty.
• UPDATE! Fuck, I'm bypassed again.
• Poll!
• Hated.
• Liars, every one of them.
• It's not Left v Right, it's You v Corporations.
• Welfare.
• More thoughts on the thought police.
• Education as indoctrination.
• Obama's hit squad.
• God's left hand.
• It's official!
• UPDATE! Bye, Rahm, and fuck you too.
• Stone walls and steel bars.
• Holyfuck.
• UPDATE! Holyfuck, part two.
• See you in hell.
• UPDATE! Marketing and capitalism. 
• White America has lost its mind?
• Company men.
• It's this simple.
• My job's best perk:

• What do we tip waiters for?
• Ambulance-fee back on ballot. If anyone blegs a passionate post detailing the reasons to vote against the fee, I'll link. Alternatively, if that person wants to find his passionate comment detailing the reasons to vote against the fee downblog, I'll link to that.
• Good luck w/that, Gaithersburg.
• Marylanders want gambling.
• Weirdest weather year of my life.
• Asshole endorses asshole.
• Size-driven rivalry.
• Allsopp 2011?

• Gahfehmeh.
• What are books good for? "My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others. In 1959, C.P. Snow threw down the challenge of "two cultures," the scientific and the humanistic, pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies. In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective. It isn't infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality, and it ends, just as our lives do. Books tell stories. Scholarly books tell scholarly stories."
• Against the Day. I've found myself thinking about it more than I thought I would when I finished my second read a couple of months ago, mostly about Cyprian Latewood, his entire story but especially his epiphany in Bulgaria. The more I think about it, for all the Vibes, Traverses, Rideouts, Chums, and Highcourts, Cyprian may be the key character.
• UPDATE! Heh! Damn, now Jim's pissed at the realities of the world. Those of you guitar players who read this shitty blog, can The Situation's CD release be far away?
• Lit links.
• New Carl Dennis!
• Buggles.
  
• That'll do for lunch.
• Beyond Fitz and the Tantrums, the youngsters are listening to Frankie Rose and the Outs. Again, it's perfectly fine listening, but new rock going retro, not forward.
• Guilty pleasure.
• I would have bet Feist would be famous by now.
• UPDATE! Ear-candy!
• Guilty pleasure.
• Woke up with this in my head, my favorite REM song.
• Which has since been replaced by this guilty pleasure.
• UPDATE! Yay! Now this is in my head.

A MAXIM

Carl Dennis

To live each day as if it might be the last
Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius
Inscribes in his journal to remind himself
That he, too, however privileged, is mortal,
That whatever bounty is destined to reach him
Has reached him already, many times.
But if you take his maxim too literally
And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will,
Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell
To friends and family, you’ll come to regret it.
Soon your lawyer won’t fit you into his schedule.
Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet
When they hear your heavy step on the porch.
And then your house will slide into disrepair.
If this is my last day, you’ll say to yourself,
Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames
Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway?
If you don’t want your heirs to curse the day
You first opened Marcus’s journals,
Take him simply to mean you should find an hour
Each day to pay a debt or forgive one,
Or write a letter of thanks or apology.
No shame in leaving behind some evidence
You were hoping to live beyond the moment.
No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off,
Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping
To meet by then someone who’d love to join you,
Two seats near the front so you catch each note.