Off With Their Heads

                                                      WHEN IS A SPADE A SPADE?

 

It is time to call a spade a spade; to be "Brutally Honest".  A few years ago, sometime in 2011, around early September, I began to suspect that except for some lovely design and weird writing there was a lot that was wrong in that thing that got started in the desert a long time ago.  Now, if that will upset some folks so be it.  Honesty always upsets folks who don't want to be that way.  It bothers their sleeping rhythms, their digestion and interferes with their peace of mind.  Some must, because I quietly commented in a public forum about my misgivings.  Penalties were imposed.

I was put in FB prison on two occasions for submitting the following short reaction to two, more or less, recent horrors.

One of them involved the slaughter of a number of people in an African nation by Muslims who took umbrage, I suppose, at the fact that they were Christians.  So...

The other was a horror that took place a year or so before; the murder of two young ladies traveling alone in some Muslim majority North African country. The women were captured, abused in the usual manner and murdered.  Everyone from here to there, and up and down, was horrified at the brutality and savagery and inhumanity, and voiced strong disapproval.  In a word, the "Nations" and the "Peoples" were properly upset.  They will be again, and sometime soon, no doubt.  Some may even be enraged.

Of course they have passed the point of being enraged over such goings on anywhere there are any Armenians still alive.  And, why not?  Nothing bad has happened to an Armenian is over a century.  Armenians being horribly treated is soooo last century.

In any event, this is all about me, not them.  I was horribly abused by FaceBook because I dared call attention to thele two measly episodes, our of hundreds, two horrors perpetrated on innocent and defensless folks by devout, no doubt, muslims, just doing what they are supposed to do

My critical remark about the, erm, excessive behavior of devout Muslims was, in both cases, the following sentence:  "The only thing wrong with Islam is that it exists."

Is that really bad?  I mean is is as bad as filling the countryside with te crucified bodies of Armenian girls, slaughtering African men women and children, raping women passing through town, throwing families into fire pits and drowning others simply because they aren't Muslims, or live in a place you would like to live?

And, can you explain why the bosses at Face Book, founded, owned and operated by a Jewish kid, whose people are high on the list of victims of "missionary" work by centuries of Muslim "missionaries" would silence me for a simple one sentence criticism of a group whose primary method of making friends and influencing people is a combination of slavery, rape and homicide?

P.S.:  I expect this to get me kicked off here

Today: January 10, 2018

I haven't visited this place in quite some time.  But today is a quiet day, and I find myself looking about for something to do beyond yawning, and watching the shadows grow longer, so I wandered over here to this weed covered place...

I know this is late,  I mean Christmas was last YEAR already.  But, I have an excuse, Alzheimers.  It's good enough to keep em out of tha army.  But, it works great for getting elected to the presidency.  Anyway, here is something I wrote.  Save it for next year.  Or wait for me to write another, which ought to be really interesting:

The Light Is Always Here

       (A Christmas Poem)

 

Even as the rain is falling my heart is high.

We were just two this morning, she and I,

In shadows of a hidden Christmas morn,

Who took leave of our little, quiet, home

And along empty streets made way to Mass.

I saw Linus, Cletus, Clement as we passed,

Peter and the others on entering

This cold, and rain soaked, Christmas morning;

The silent old brown brick sanctuary

Full of dreams, prayers, and dozing memories.

 

The old church, I think, is always smiling

Happily, like a grandmother whiling

Hours by in prayer, waiting for company.

And always, there are children, two or three

To stop and look in wonder.

Don’t we still?  Yes!  We wander in quietly

Slow and wondering before we kneel, pray

And wait, always, for the Light of day!

 

While, just beyond our vision, far and deep

In eternal unquenchable active light,

Our Father smiles indulgently at

Peace always in living rest. Yet deep He moves

All sound and silence, with all time and aye

Present, past and many all in One Life.

 

Except we had been there, how could we know?

We sat on the sand one deep dawn long ago,

The Other One and I sitting hours so

Through a quiet star covered night alone;

Before sea’s soft waves far wind blown

Across the sea’s sleeping deeps and then to us.

Just two, just two two light at last to touch!

To rise and touch us at the break of day

After spangled night and all night’s life.

 

So then!  So now!  But this, this was no blazing

Star before which the dark world’s night fading

Brought a birthing brightness as it died away

For returning night’s promised hope of day.

 

We saw the Promised Light best this dark day!

Light once come will never more fade away.

Light of Christ! Infant in the manger dear.

The living, life giving Light always here!

 

PEG 12/29/2020

 

 

 

This Heavy Silence, A Novel of Loneliness and Lost Opportunity

When is strong too strong?  When does being self-sufficient become a cover for, a mask for intense loneliness, and, possibly, fear?   These are good questions to ask about the problem of loneliness.  Who is shy?  Who, instead of being shy suffers from existential loneliness?  Is it only a few people; the odd ones?  Is it we, ourselves?  How does our own loneliness affect others, especially children whose natural inclination to love and to help everyone might break through the walls loneliness builds? How does the lonely one cope with her loneliness?  In work?

“This Heavy Silence” by Nicole Mazzarella is a difficult book to read.  It bleeds like an open wound, and frustrates the reader who might want someone to help the wounded, to SEE the wound in the first place.  It frustrates because of all people in the story, the person who is wounded by loneliness seems the most blind to her loneliness.  Alone, she farms the land.   Strong, resilient, and deeply loyal, Dottie Connell farms her family’s three hundred acres in rural Ohio alone, having sacrificed love and family for land she does not own. A sudden, inexplicable event leaves the daughter of her childhood friend in her care. Pressured by her community to allow her former fiancée to raise the child, Dottie must face the past she has worked fifteen years to forget.  The resulting story explores the intricate and delicate nature of dealing with a foster child, the problems of loneliness and the existential difficulies of relationship that result from failing to provide a nurturing environment for a growing child

Spanning a decade, “This Heavy Silence” explores the power of the vows we make to others, and, more binding, those we make to ourselves. Evoking the hardship, spring-fed beauty, and the complexities of community in the rural Midwest, this beautifully observed novel leads us to question our ideas about motherhood, faith, and the debts we owe.

The Christian Book Corner happily offers this book and others like it at our generous discount. All of our books and products are from reputable suppliers.  Visit us at http://www.t-CBC.com and browse our growing selection of the best in Christian and Catholic literature all of it “Chosen with care; chosen with Prayer.”

Tommy Dorsey's Spiritual Journey vs. Heorge Harrison's

A friend of mine sent me a link to a George Harrison song, something about Sunshine, or having to do with it, and one's spiritual journey.  He wanted to know my reaction.  I simply replied, after listening to Mr. Harrison, "Poor Guy."  I'd rather listen to Tommy Dorsey.  Maybe you would, too.

Riding That Train

I grew up in Kingsbridge, a neighborhood in The Bronx, which is the only place in the world beside The Vatican preceded by the definite article when commonly referred to.  Not even Brooklyn can make a claim like that.

Anyway across the street from the old pre-war walk-up that was home for my first 23 years was a New York Central spur line going all the way up to someplace near Albany.  There was a small freight yard right about dead in front of my house, too.  A perfect place to play, and practice running away from cops.  I was a kid just at the end of the Age of Steam, and got pretty used to the deep huffing and clouds of steam and smoke punctuating the day as rich guys from way up near Albany came down to the City each day so Tom Wolfe could write "Bonfire of the Vanities" when I grew up.  I played in and around those big black bulls, scary and powerful and dreadfully attractive all at once, and remember dancing on the rails with my ragamuffin friends as they bore down on us just to provoke a few roars from the warning whistle. Toreadors before Iron Bulls.

I knew trolleys, too, and their clanging bells, and subways charging above the street near where I lived before plowing under Manhattan's hills a couple of miles south from the Harlem River where I learned to swim in open sewage, water that would make a kid from Calcutta wrinkle his nose in disgust.  I cannot count the number of times I hitched rides on the back of trolleys up to Van Cortlandt Park, a place much larger that Yosemite Park.  Me and Eddie Haviland would spend days hunting squirrels in the woods and snakes and salamanders in the little streams and swampy places and swimming in Charlie's Hole, a wide spot in Tibbets Brook, more mud than water.  I got to be a pretty good marksman with the stones from the railway ballast, and could hit a squirrel and bring it down from high up in almost any tree. 

I sneaked onto Subway platforms all over the city, too,  before they were patrolled by those spoil sport Transit Police and rode the trains to places like Elmhurst, which, with a name like that had no right to be in a city where there were neighborhoods called Hell's Kitchen.  Come to think of it, what was the Bronx doing with Kingsbridge and Riverdale? Well, we do have Rat Island.  Among my favorite destinations on the subway were the Museum of Natural History, Penn Station and Grand Central Station.  I could walk to the New York Public Library Central Branch from Grand Central, climb on the lions, sit in the main reading room, run up and down the stairs, and occasionally look through a book.

The trolleys were the first to go, replaced by buses, a much harder mode of transportation to sneak a ride on.  Steam trains gave way to diesel locomotives, ugly boxy black things that sat and growled, or stank along the tracks trailing oily smoke when they passed.  Commuter service stopped running up the Putnam Line sometime in the fifties after Gov. Dewey's New York Thruway ruined everything for me and my friends, and put a barrier between us and the freight yard about which I still dream, full as it was then with tanks and guns during the Korean War, fruit and produce for the city's kitchens  during the spring and summer, and always inviting whatever the time of year.  I still hate Dewey...and Rockefeller... for that crime against children, especially city rats like myself, in the name of progress.

All of these things ran through my mind this morning after reading two things.  The first was an e-mail from an old school mate, a fellow from Highbridge, another neighborhood in the Bronx.  He and his wife traveled to DC on Amtrak from his home in Connecticut last weekend and paid $258.00 for the privilege of several hours of discomfort, noise, lack of information and bad food in dirty dining cars.  It was an experience he says he will not repeat, though he may have to.  Driving down there, he has also learned, is a purgatory of crowded highways, confiscatory tolls and more bad food and dirty dining areas along the way.  It was a sad end to a long story, a romance, really.  I’d ridden back and forth between New York and DC on the Metroliner in the 80’s and thought it a wonderful way to travel; better than four hours in a car and much better than just the same amount of time at La Guardia and National Airport on either end of the Eastern Shuttle, even if the fare was only $20.00 one way.  It was till an airport, all glass and steel and no style, and still hours of slogging driving home or to your hotel.  The train dropped you near the subway and in an hour you were where you could get a beer and kick off your shoes.

The second is an article which appeared in Human Events Magazine, written by a fellow named Michael Barone who snarked about some multi-billion dollar plan to build high speed rail lines all over the place and put everyone to work.  The way he explained it, I had to agree with him.  The plan is just plain stupid.  I don’t believe trains ought to go as fast as planes darting from here to there like cobras.  Hell, they even look like snakes!  But, Baron argues against high speed trains because they just cost too much.  I’m not against dumping a losing proposition like that, and for that reason.  Up to there, I’m friends with Mr. Barone.  We part company towards the end. 

I think he’s really not interested in trains. Really, I think, not interested too much in public transportation at all.  He betrays himself in just a few words implying things would be much better all around when a guy has his car and isn’t forced to take a pre-planned route from A to B.  As if roads and streets and superhighways are like English (or poison) Ivy, randomly spreading out all over.  As if the 40,000 square miles of paved roads and streets and parking lots we have laid down since Henry invented the assembly line are an "unplanned cow-path-improvement on anything.  Forty K square miles.  That's roughly the size of Ohio; whiich wouldn't be a bad thing if the black top was actually all IN Ohio.

“Passenger rail is an old technology that is particularly attractive to planners, the folks who want to force us out of our cars and into subways that travel only on the routes they design. Let’s make everyone live the way people do in Manhattan!”

The rest of what he says, I buy.  I wonder, aside from the rents, what’s wrong with living the way folks do in Manhattan., where you can sing about riding in a hole in the ground.