Data Centers in Space? ....nope.

 Pipe Dream! Peter Zeihan explains why in detail! So MANY reasons!

 

The Hiding Habit

When the world shouts obscenities

and the winds of change roar in the trees,
move low to the ground to the hiding place.

When fear is strong, pay attention.
Sit in stillness, in silence and listen.
Wait. Think. You don't have to move yet.

Breathe in. Breathe out.
Purr to comfort yourself.

If you must move, be stealthy,

silent in the shadows, then return to safety.

When quiet evening finally comes - emerge. 

Look around. Sniff the air. Stretch. 

Give a wide yawn. Blink. You are still here! 

Pay attention!

- Mad Mar Mistryel Walker

--------------------------------

This was an older post I thought needed another go. There is a story to the photo. The windows were wide open at home and there was a crew of roofers working nearby and they made a lot of noise. After a while I noticed my three cats were missing. I hunted under and behind everything until I found them. They were  lined up in a straight row in the narrows behind a dresser, hiding from all the noise. If I had tried to line them up like that,  well, herding cats right? 

May, May, go away

May has a worrisome cruelty underneath, and I cant seem to let it go.  My father died in May. My mother too.

May arrives, the azaleas bloom, the lilacs too now. But the beauty is not enough.

Today, this year with the pandemic, I didn't visit my parents' grave. I stayed home again. And tomorrow too. I'm not dead as yet and hope to remain in this state for the foreseeable future. Hope to live to vote in November, live to get my shots: flu and someday, for the novel coronavirus. 

I've always been something of a stay at home, but I balanced this tendency with small scale excursions: lunch, coffee, an exercise class, an art workshop, some local live music, a lecture. Little, short, nearby diversions for mental health,.

Now its just scary grocery store trips. And I struggle with everyone else to figure out how to get stuff delivered. It's tricky. 

And though the world is opening tomorrow - I am not fooled. The virus is still here. And I am still securing against it. I don't care what opens. Each time I think of going out from sheer restlessness, I think  - is it worth dying for?  

I proceed with caution only. 

A certain lack of something

This was how I felt before I adopted my three kitties.

Weathered,
patched with odd bits,
a jumbled collection
re-assembled without instructions,
left outside everything to rust away.

I carry on though. Not so sure. Positive but aware of reality. Carrying memories. And a tiny spark of hope.


originally posted 8/16/2016

Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker

Peace for the New Year: Hope over Fear.

Well it's 2018. How did that happen.... And the world needs peace more than ever. And it seems less likely then ever.  We can try to put hope over fear, and move forward, one small step at a time. It's all we can do - one moment at a time....  We can mind our own yard at least. See what near-at-hand  nature might need, what cheer we can bring the people around us. Maybe we cannot change the whole world. But we can change our own world. Make it so.

April 2016 Poem A Day #26 Law of Emotivity

The Great Law of Emotivity

Everyone knows
love and anti-love
cannot coexist
in the same space
as they readily ironically
annihilate each other.

April 2016 Poem A Day #24 Lost // Not Lost

Lost // Not Lost

The scale
like history
repeats itself
damn it.

April 2016 Poem A Day - #18 Restless

the prompt was to write an office poem

Restless.

The day Jim said
"You could retire from here,
head of a department."
"Just give it time." he said
That same day I went into the big boss
and gave my two weeks notice.
I feared it would be true
that Jim was right
and I couldn't let that happen.
"What can we do to keep you," they asked me.
And so from then on
I had Wednesdays off
every Wednesday.
Monday, Tuesday, Day off.
Thursday, Friday, Two days off.
It wasn't enough.
I lasted another year
then moved on.

April 2016 Poem A Day #7 Urban Whatever

Part time Urban

I like the idea of cities,
walkup neighborhoods, museums, coffee shops
the mix of culture and habit
.
I need busy and humming sometimes
bumping up against the world
in a subway or a pub
.
More often though I like quiet
equilibrium, siting in a swing
on a porch listening to rain fall
.
I like the bright lights,
then I like going home
walking in the quiet dark

Pigeon holes and Platitudes

People love platitudes. I'm fond of a few myself. Just check the memes floating around Facebook and other social networks. Platitudes and pigeonholes make us relax. Reality, not so much.

In general people prefer that disturbing realities fold their wings neatly, then duck politely into a sturdy square box with a lid, out of sight - a box that keeps its contents in check - so things can't pop out and flop around in plain sight. Otherwise people might start questioning their faith in a happy world where a good-guy god reigns and where everyone who needs soon has.

We reach for platitudes for comfort.. Nonsense like: "Everything happens for a reason. Everything works out for the best."  Tell that to an antelope being torn apart by hyenas. The messy truth is this: the living world runs on death. Hamburgers, salmon steak and chicken wings have all been ripped untimely from beasts who weren't through with them yet. Don't let the grocery store's neat Styrofoam trays and pristine shrink wrap fool you. Life eats other life in order to continue. Purportedly this is the invention of a gentle loving god.

People too end in unseemly ways. They get blown up, burnt to cinders, have limbs severed, are mangled inside car wrecks,  beaten to death, starve in slow bony collapse, ache with suicidal despair, have their bleeding guts poured out on indifferent ground before laughing witnesses.

It's just easier for the more comfortable branches of the human race not to think about it much. We stuff this information into a little square pigeonhole and we paste a few decorator platitudes on top of it.

This enables us to buy expensive designer sneakers and iPhones for our kids without guilt. It enables us to live as extravagantly as possible believing we deserve it all, or to happily enjoy whatever small pleasures we can find while rationalizing away the world's ubiquitous cruelty and inequity.

This philosophical slight of hand makes it possible to have lunch once in a while. And after all, if you have lunch - you might as well savor every bite....

Bon appetite.

-- Mad Mar (Mistryel) Walker
originally written April 9, 2002 & updated in 2013. 

Ubiquitous entropy

Summer seems an odd backdrop for thinking about fall, but entropy is on my mind today. Ordered systems tend toward disarray. Everything that grows also harbors a limit of time, energy, health, of life itself. Nature ferments a slow cycle of wax and wane. These days, this is is not a popular thought. Yet, everything is cyclic, planets, plants, even people and ways of thinking about the world. All things bloom and wither. Things change in the world and in us. The interior world does not follow a smooth logical trajectory upward anymore than the exterior world does. Oceans rise. Rivers dry up. Things that are whole fall into parts. Things that have grown crumble into compost. That which crumbles doesn't permanently return. Something new might grow. And even in barren dry soil, a desert might offer it's subtle beauties. Selah.

The above picture I made in an online browser program. I was thinking about fall.

Philosophy from my past - a 1982 journal entry

I found an old journal of mine in the basement - a book in pen on paper. Some entries I think I will post. :)

This is the very first, from January 4, 1982 -- long before blogs, before cell phones, before I had email, or even a computer.   I was fighting sadness:

     There are no whys.

     There are only nows,
     spanning eternity end to end,
     like points in a line, infinite,
     yet each in strident isolation.

     I am sick of whys.
     Whys stink of pain.
     Give me distraction: the eternal present.
     The kingdom of contentment is "NOW."

     Life needs no reason.
     Life is reason enough.
                   
                           -- Mad Mar (Mistryel) Walker

Psychological Spaces: Alone, Not Alone

A public place is a place of odd and unexpected possibility.

In a busy world where so many things demand attention and there is always a list of things to be done - sometimes a public place is the only place where obligations can be briefly set aside. It's also a place to be a participant with others in a kind of silent, noncommittal way. Often it's a place of watching, reading or waiting. Sometimes it's a place of writing.

Sitting in a public place, you  have company, yet you are by yourself. You are with the crowd, but not in it. You can feel lonely there, but you don't have to  - with a little imagination, you can also feel your place as a member of our varied human menagerie.

Here, you can quietly observe or discreetly ignore the gaggle of humanity around you. You can chronicle it all  - just in your head, or with a camera or a laptop, a drawing pencil and sketchpad, or with a pen and a pocket notebook.  Or you can sip your java, ignore your cell phone and revel in this small zone of tranquility. 

This, of course, makes a glaring assumption: you have money for coffee, a cell phone and/or any kind of peace.  When 11 million people have lost their homes and half the working age population has given up looking for work - that's not a good assumption. 

If you are homeless, for sanity's sake you have to carve a private space out of a series of public or shared spaces. I think that's why so many choose to live in a car, (assuming you have one of whatever vintage) - because a car offers the privacy of a door and a lock. 

You can't hide out there forever though, and inviting public spaces offer a respite. Of course I have made another assumption: that store owners and citizens aren't complaining and getting non-buyers tossed out for loitering. 

My how the mental furniture around here has changed.....

This phone-photo was taken from the second story of the mall, looking down into a sitting area. It was fiddled with digitally in Picnik. 

Litany of the car - my trail of debris

Cars - the personal space you travel in. We get attached to them. Well I do. I don't imagine I'm alone. We see the passing show from the front seat of our cars, the darkness illumined in halogen glare, the passage of time ticked off in miles.

I haven't had much luck with cars over my 40 plus years of driving. (Yes indeed - I am old as dirt!) I started my car career with a little white Chevy I bought from my Grandmother when she got a new car. Then I got married, and when that car started falling apart, we had an old VW bug and a huge Ford Van. In the breakup, I got the bug, he got the van. When the bug developed some bugs, my father took it.. He used it to fiddle with an experimental carburetor he was trying to build from plans in Popular Science Magazine.

I got something called an Astra, a used three-door hatchback. it was a little car I liked a lot - but my Astra was totaled nearly head-on by the student president of the local high school's Safe Rides club who was driving her daddies brand new caddie. I saw her coming around the corner in the middle of the road, and yanked the wheel to the side. As she hit me I could see her look of horror and HER HANDS IN THE AIR!!!! Idiot. I was lucky I lived through it. Afterwards she indignantly accused me of speeding. The nice policeman had to walk her back along the 100 feet of skid marks the caddie left after it hit my car....

Then came the Blue Renault - a five door hatchback that I bought new (my first) and paid off. I drove that car for several years and moved to Maine with it. In Maine its chief flaw was this - the heater and the defroster were crap. When my mom got rid of my by then late father's Plymouth Duster, (which had a fabulous heater) I took it and gave the Renault to my cousin's boy (who later totaled it during his first year of college)

The Duster had its own set of oddities. There was something mysteriously wrong with the onboard computer. I went through four of these. Though some tragic flaw in the design - when it rained (Snow and ice were okay) the car would not start unless I got out a HAIR DRYER and dried the computer casing. So for a year and half I carried a 50 foot orange extension cord and a hair dryer every where I travelled. Traveling home from Maine, in Massachusets town - on a bleak day when their were multiple accidents in that town because of conditions - the duster and I hydroplaned into a Mass Electric truck - which was completely undamaged.

I was carless for a time after that, and once I took the plunge again, I had a white honda civic hatchback for 11 years. What a great little car that was!!! BUT - in the end (no pun intended) - it got rear-ended in front of the Brookfield Craft Center by a giant red pickup truck, driven by a volunteer fireman. So much much for my great little car.

I bought a used Ford Escort wagon, a 96, that threw a rod six months after I bought it. i paid $1,500 to have a new engine head put in - but the repair left some metal fragments in one cylinder - and after a few weeks it started making a terrible grinding noise. There went another $1,500. It was never right after that. And neither was I after wasting that much money.

After a while I replaced it with a 2003 Toyota Echo a car I really loved driving - I had it for three years, then an idiot in a magenta jeep rear-ended me at a stop light. I was completely stopped - he was going 40 while yaking it up on a cell phone. JERK. I remember how wistful I felt when I learned it was totaled, when I went to the body shop to clean it out and say goodbye.

I liked that Echo so much I got another 2003 Echo. It wasn't quite the same but It worked well until this year. Frankly, I have had my calculator out. I have spent $1,105. on my car since January.

Despite this, Tuesday morning it refused to start. It clicked spastically while sounding anemic. It's already had TWO NEW BATTERIES, new front brakes with rotors and new front tires THIS YEAR and alternator belts replaced and the subsequently readjusted. It went all the way to New Haven Monday night so if its surly little alternator was working at all it should have charged. I asked the mechanics about this twice. I was assured the alternator was working. I have a love hate relationship with this car. There is NO love involved in my relationship with the dealer's service center.

So, I rolled it out of the garage, down onto the street to get the 13-year old car, (which still RUNS) - into the garage. I left the Toyota on the street. because I simply didn't know what to do. Saturday morning I discovered it had been hit by a passing car. The street was littered with headlight glass from the other car. My car sported a giant dent, and a street-side front tire bent all out of whack ( with attendant damage to the tie-rods, steering assembly etc etc.. SIGH.

Lucky though, while the nice lady cop was writing up the accident, a tinkerer from down the street was walking by with his granddaughter and their puppy Bobby.  He is now the proud owner of a new project -with full disclosure of its odd problems. At least doing the work himself he won't have to pay some pricy mechanic. He managed to roll it down the hill.... So at least I didn't have to pay to have it towed...

That's a lot of scrap metal I have left behind - I'd like to know the tonnage and multiply it by the number of drivers in the world.. I think we need more trains. .

NaPoWriMo # 21 - Taking root

Taking Root

Abandoned on Osborne
a once handsome house:
plumbing doesn't work
no electric, no heat
doors boarded up
mold greys
the stucco now
no paint in decades
caved in roof
makes way for sky
welcomes rain.
A helicopter seed
twirls down on the wind
finds a home
grows unnoticed year
after year seeks
the light,  presses
against the still
unbroken glass
reaches through shingles
to open air, sky, sun
and this year  another
helicopter seed is released
to carry on, carried on
the streetside breeze.

Life grapples, insidious.
In imperfection: opportunity

- Mar Walker

The prompt was to write a poem on imperfection.  I took this photo a decade ago on Osborne Street in Danbury. I first noticed the tree's leaves pressing against the glass, a year before it came through the roof. It grew like that for another year or so. Sadly it's gone now, though it did reproduce - the evolutionary hallmark of success. The house still stands, looking much the same - though less interesting without the lovely tree. I used the picture once in an issue of Bent Pin Quarterly, but hadn't ever gotten around to considering a poem of my own to accompany it. So thanks ReadWritePoem for the prompt!

NaPoWriMo #9 - Survivor's Epilogue

Survivor's Epilogue

We persist like sentinel chimneys
teetering  alone when the house has burned.

Hazmat walkers sift pumice and ashes on the fringe,
sort remnants, ask questions, circumnavigate the wounds.

We sip coffee bitters all night, startle easily, but do
the next task, massage our bruises in silence.

A jug of rain,  a pail of tears cannot wash this.
Through coming years, we bloom

like mower-schooled violets in the lawn
heads tucked, eyes open.

-- Mar Walker

NOTE: I  only used nine words from prompt rather than 12. -- down to eight now that I changed the title (I also misspelled Epilogue originally. Coffee bitters was the flavor, silence was the sound. the lawn violets image was was from a previous poem I tried to write that didn't work out...  I took the photo six or seven years ago in New Milford, CT. I have changed the title three times. who knows what it will end up....

The PROMPT:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to: Use at least twelve words from this list: flap, winter, torch, pail, jug, strum, lever, massage, octopus, marionette, stow, pumice, rug, jam, limp, campfire, startle, wattle, bruise, chimney, tome, talon, fringe, walker; Include something that tastes terrible; Include some part (from a few words to several lines) of a previous poem that didn’t quite pan out; and Include a sound that makes you happy."

Offline, life is better

Though I am unemployed, I am not unoccupied. My life has taken on a certain friendly rhythm.. I get up in the morning, get coffee and study my current row of unfinished paintings. I ponder them, and what needs to be done to them in the beautiful morning light. Besides daily tasks and occasional errands and things to take care of,  for the last few weeks, I have basically been painting all day from 7 to 3 pm. as if it were my job.

Only then -- after 3p.m. do I  allow myself to go online. I used to be on all day -- let me repeat ALL DAY!  I would CHURN in that endless internet way -- where by you feel like you are working at something, yet afterwards you realize you have actually done nothing and taken all day to do it..... I am not twittering, nor facebooking, nor chasing down endless email items all day.  Not that those are not interesting - but they need to be balanced with something physical and real. They need to be contained by limiting the time spent on them. I don't know about you, but I need other things in my world. I have stopped joining various membership sites online as well, and unjoined a few.  You can't be everywhere....

Now at the end of the day, I can look and see what progress has been made. That is, what concrete physical changes have been made to the paintings at hand.  It has made life more simple and less stressful, and made me a bit quieter at heart. In this crazy world, that can't be bad.

Bent Pin: The familiar discomfort - Foster Trecost & MarkMcGuire-Schwartz

The familiar unhappiness is often more comfortable for human beings than making a difficult extended change.  This week we have one humorous poem about a couple aware of their own peculiarities, and a bit of flash fiction where the narrator is seemingly unaware of his own slightly sadistic pleasure in the discomfort of those around him. The works are Thoughts At The Table by Foster Trecost and Heartless by Mark McGuire-Schwartz.

The incomplete Bent Pin Archive can now be found at http://benpinquarterly.blogspot.com   Unfortunately this page is not online as yet.

-- MM Walker

POEM: Lady Liberty Gives Her Report

Liberty's report


I am moon to this loud sea.
Chaos or collusion -
the tide’s drawn out
by me.

From colony to nation,
with woodsmen’s maul and wedge
you divided peculiar powers;
with ink-stained sledge
But I am mirror - honest glass ‘n lead
reflecting your collective head:
freedom to speak and hear
to read any book
to believe or discount
with skeptical looks
freedom to sell and buy
to hawk and whine
freedom to sue anyone, anytime.
Free cruises for congress
on corporate boats
- freedom not to know
- not to vote.
Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Jefferson and I watch
jetsam’s apex and ebb
future flotsam in moonbath,
drunk on the web of tide.
Below, deep, the waters move.
The paper leviathan continually entwine,
create unseen vortices
flee the harpoon’s sting
with lurching expedience.
Indifferent yaghtsmen quaff their conyac.
Speedboaters toss back beer.
Innumerable row boats rise and fall,
bail and steer with hapless oar
while hungry shorebirds
sing and soar
dropping oysters
to salt- stained rocks below.

Bystanders watch for pearls.

copyright 1998 Marjorie M. Walker
(from the Metaphoratorium on http://pages.prodigy.net/mmwalker