Give Your Life Another Chance Before it’s Gone - Mad Mar Walker

This rendition of Time Rolls On (Give your life another chance before it's gone) was recorded at the Putnam House Restaurant and Bar on 8/31/25, with my phone - by propping the phone against a coffee cup!!! The Putnam House has great food, nice people too - the open mic is hosted by The Incredible Kelly who has a fabulous voice and plays a mean guitar both acoustic and electric.  She has rotating colored stage lights, which on my low res phone video made me purple and green. It  looked weird to me so I thought I make it even stranger by added a retro effect in Google photos. ( I'm doing what I can!)

The Terrible Mistake

 

On the seventh day, 

when the Almighty should have been napping,

He paced the glassy surface of new poured sea

wringing his sculptor's hands in celestial anxiety.

A nagging tug, a vexing doubt

about creation, something about creation,

something obvious and overlooked,

the one loose thread

to unravel slowly down the eons....

Four acre lots of the mind,

are circumspect and clean, so clean

God forbid the ideas should touch one another

Or leak onto the plot next door

Which might accidentally create some 

new upstart idea, something

Unclassifiable and awkward

Requiring a hazmat team to extract....

For fertility of ideas

multifamily structure is best

 

Stack em up

like floors in a highrise

Skyscrapers of boxes on a dock

rickety, shabbily

 

Zagging every which way

expanding in various directions 

In danger of falling over

Askew. Like community garden patches,

Overgrown, seeding their neighbors

plots with something untoward and interesting.... 

                            --- Mad Mar (Mistryel) Walker

The Essential Trick

If you have perennials, biennials, 

things that seed themselves 

and return to you in odd moments,

sprout anew after a while of dying back

-- then you can't indiscriminately

pull up unknown sprouts in the name of neatness.

Be patient.

Study the situation.

Is it a weed or a daisy in waiting?

or Queen Anne's Lace 

or the wee tip of fern

about to uncurl?

The essential trick?

Never uproot a thing

that will, sometime later,

fill you with the earnest, wild

energy of delight

& make you glad you are alive...

                            --- Mad Mar (Mistryel) Walker

Selecting a worry list for the Zombie Apocalypse

Never. That's when I thought I'd see the unfolding of events as they are tumbling into chaotic existence this year. And look it's only July. And I fear much is unfolding unseen.  I don’t know what to worry about anymore - there are so MANY choices!! 

All the countries that used to be our friends and allies, but have stopped calling. 

And all the people who’ve died because certain international agencies that dispensed food and medical aid have suddenly turned on a dime and disappeared - absorbed by the so-called state department.

Will we ever have vaccine recommendations we can trust again? (Hmmm try the AMA  - they still believe in science.) What happens during the next pandemic when research funding has been axed?

Will NOAA be trustable after all the climate experts have been banished? What will happen to the coast as things melt on - will AMOC stop?  Will we bake in the oven of our folly?  Or will a new ice age suddenly arise and make Popsicles of us all?

So many floods,  epic rain and wind events in recent years! And Think of all those campers and RV-ers  swept away in the night as they slept - heartbreaking. They are still searching, many finding the sudden darkness of grief....

 

What about all the forest fires creating swaths of charcoal out of  the animate and inanimate alike?  Will 47 have everyone sweeping the forest floor, and pull all the national guard fire details to help ICE?  Speaking of ICE what happens to all those folks snatched and deported leaving families and jobs dumped in countries they’ve never been to  or incarcerated incognito?  What of Due Process? Rule of Law?  Will Miller reduce the US population by jailing half of us in various Alligator Alcatraz iterations? 

And if there is a "Big One" along the Cascadia Subduction Zone - how will we recover?  I don't think we will really. California is the engine for a large chunk of our national economy. By then, FEMA may be a memory, missed more and more as the months pass. As stodgy and rule bound as they were - they helped many.

And what of democracy? Of Technocrats, cryptologists and accelerationists trying to  burn down the world.....

Speaking of technocrats - think of  all the various AI iterations preparing to take our jobs, hallucinate new law cases and other nonfacts, run and analyze all those surveillance cams and drone-swarms, acquire human targets for.... ummm, never mind. 

The only thing I can think to do is turn off Siri and never ask ChatGPT. MetaAI, Claude or Gemini etc any questions. Those other iterations, many with industrial or military purpose or having secret code names --- are too frightening to contemplate.  And Grok - why don’t people realize Grok is named for a sci-fi verb “to grok” which means 'communing with your dead friends by eating them'?

             Zombie apocalypse indeed.