"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Mar 25, 2010

Typing Aloud Whilst I Slowly Go Blind

"...That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 -he said,  'I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.' Hah! You don't have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, 'I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?'
Fat chance!

He was old enough to remember the sleigh rods under the boxcars, riding the rods. Fry Pan Jack, the true bum...

...the bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind, the other is driven around to his club, is fetted, wined, and dined

and they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all that's bad will greet the other with a winning smile and extend the hand so glad

the bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occasional bite, the bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night

the bum on the rods is a load so light that his weight we scarcely feel, but it takes the labor of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal

as long as we sanction the bum on the plush, the other will always be there, but rid ourselves of the bum on the plush, and the other will disappear

and make an intelligent, organized kick: get rid of the ways that crush; don't worry about the bum on the rods - get rid of the bum on the plush"

~ Utah Phillips

*

Yummy.

No comments: