reflection

There's none of my genius PhotoShop magic here;

Just a straight-up reflection of a boat at the bight in the night.

the dragonfly

Today I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

He dried his wings: like gauze they grew;
Thro' crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

You are made of almost nothing
but of enough to be great eyes
and diaphanous double vans;

To be ceaseless movement,
unending hunger, grappling love.

Link between water and air, earth repels you.
Light touches you only to shift into iridescence
upon your body and wings.

Twice-born, predator, you split into the heat.
Swift beyond calculation or capture,
you dart into the shadow which consumes you.

You rocket into the day.
But at last, when the wind flattens the grasses,
for you, the design and purpose stop.

And you fall with the other husks of summer.

Louise Bogan

deep fried butter on a stick!

Just a quick one here and no, these are not my photographs.

I looked in on the suedo-political hijinks in Iowa this past weekend and of all the "important" impressions I might have come away with, I came away with this. . .

Deep Fried Butter on a Stick!

Let me say it again . . .
Deep Fried Frikkin' Butter on a Stick!!!

A 4 ounce (a.k.a. 1/2 cup) stick of of butter dipped in some kind of corn-meal batter that's plunged in a pool of boiling chicken fat grease!!

Sweet Jesus Christ on Friday!!!

This is good, but universal health care is not. . .
What the hell are we becoming?

circling the drain

I'm about to bend one of my own rules here
and wax a bit political.

graphic by Art Winstanley © 2011

I read somewhere that the average shelf-life of "global" empires has been roughly 300 years and that their demise has been, more often than not, caused by economic collapse rather than invasion and conquest.

Take Rome for example. . .
By the time Alaric and the Visigoths (the infamous barbarian hordes) came riding over the hill and stormed through the gates of Rome looking for food, there wasn't any food
to be found.
After a century and a half of inept emperors, a Senate corrupted to the point of being dysfunctional and an overextended military, the Roman Empire was bankrupt.

By then, the political and monied classes had long since seen the writing on the wall and moved their interests, any sense of governance and chariot races to hide behind Christianity in Constantinople; leaving the plebeian/proletariat class
(the working stiffs like you and me) to fend for themselves.

Sounding vaguely familiar yet?

In the present American "global" empire, we have a President who ran like a visionary but governs like a functionary.
(face it, Barak is a disappointment)
We have a Congress and Senate that can't, or won't, legislate themselves past their own self-interests and, after ten years of worthless war, a military stretched so thin you can see through it. (oh but we've made great strides in robotic prosthetic limbs)

All our bullsh*t bureaucrats need to do next is move their "seat of power" to the Turks & Caicos to be near their corporate cronies who don't pay taxes and restart the chariot (a.k.a. NASCAR) races there, with Christ on their side.

It might be helpful, at this point, to remember that the American "global" empire is 235 years old.

Only 65 years to go. . .

night lights

Being out and about around Key West on my once weekly overnight gig for the Blue Paper offers me an alternative perspective on our fair city.

The first thing that can grab you is the quiet.
Even on Duval after 4am, the island is at peace. It's like the rock's daytime energy buzz stretched itself out in a hammock and took a nap.
But Key West, it turns out, is yet another city that never sleeps; at least not completely.

While most of the store fronts and small business offices are dark, the mini-mart gas stations are open 24 hours and so is Sandy's Cuban Coffee on White. The hotel front desk folks are on the job, the cab drivers and cops are always on the prowl and even after the bars close, there are the guys who hose down the sidewalks in front of the bars, the street sweepers and the working girls at the adult entertainment dives.

It's a different brand of people who work the overnight.
A little friendlier, more easy going. Definitely different from the folks in the hustle of the daytime world where I spent the other 6 days of my week. There's not as much going on and all will make the time to stop and chat. The security guard at the Federal building, the front desk dude at Ocean Key, my buddies Donnie and Michael at either of the Chevron mini-marts, the working girls and even the cops.

I've been pulled over at least a half dozen times for nothing in particular and of course they'll do their "official" garbled transmission thing on their shoulder radios with my license in hand but I always get away clean with the impression that all they were really wanting was a few minutes of contact conversation. (they are, after all, alone in the squad car for 8 - 10 hours every night - and, it turns out, cops are people too.)

So as much as the overnight in Key West is nicely lighted in all it's luminous neon glory from dusk to dawn, to my mind, it's really the overnight people who are the real night lights
on our island.