Today is 12.19.16.10.13 12 Ben 11 Yaxk’in

1227 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Grendel’s Laundry List

Free floating texts lassoed from the Noose-sphere

Nature has never been taken in by well-meaning advice. The only thing that moves nature is causal necessity, and that includes human nature.

Carl Jung

The function of meter in poetry is to drive the electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener. A similar thing occurs when the voices of schizophrenics speak in scanning rhythms or rhyme.

Julian Jaynes

Optimism makes us perpetual enemies of those future moments that do not meet our expectation, which means all future moments. It’s when we expect nothing from the future that we are free to experience it as it will be rather than as a disappointment.

Joshua Dienstag

Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

Francis Bacon

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

Adrienne Rich

Until relatively recent times man’s span of life was short. Throughout most of history the truly old were a rarity. Thus it seems plausible that the momentous discoveries and inventions of the Neolithic Age were the work of an almost childlike population, and were perhaps made in the course of play. Nor is it likely that the ancient myths and legends, with their fairy-tale pattern and symbolism, were elaborated by burnt-out old men.

Eric Hoffer

Today is 12.19.16.10.7 6 Manik’ 5 Yaxk’in

1233 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Today I am a Kenyan.

Want proof that you too were born in Kenya? Go to the Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator, fill in the blanks and click “Deliver this baby!”  Download the .jpg that shows you were born in Kenya, and post it to your favorite freshly lubed up social tool. Send it to a Birther near you. Send it to Lou Dobbs. Add your mite to the mighty might of Little Sister, and do your bit as a true blue online American to cleanse the innertubes of the blithering blight of Birtherism.

Birtherism is about one thing and one thing only: The Birthers cling to the delusion that Barack Obama is not a native-born American because they cannot accept that a black man is President of the United States of America. It is racism–Racism so pure and desperate it partakes of madness.

These teabagging numbnutziks have enlisted with corporate and political forces of darkness to astroturf the public square. Time to lace up the spikes and dance on their heads.

 

Today is 12.19.16.10.2 1 Ik’ 0 Yaxk’in

1238 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Today is also Lammas.

Lammas aka Loaf Mass aka Lughnasadh is a feast celebrated on the cross-quarter day halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, by convenience of tradition,  August 1st or 2nd. It is called the feast of first fruits–the fruits of the year’s harvest. The first fruits are honored by baking bread made from flour milled from the new crop of wheat.

By tradition, the first reaping from the field is winnowed, milled, mixed, baked, and consumed all on the day or days (sometimes Lammas is two day affair) of the festival. These days I recommend the freshest bag of Bob’s Red Mill or King Arthur bread flour you can find on the shelf at the local grocery store.  In Tulsa, such can be found at Whole Foods or Reeser’s.

I’m a retired journeyman baker, and I bake bread at home on a semi-regular basis, so this is an easy thing for me to do. If you can’t bear the thought of firing up the oven on the first of August, or baking anything at all is too daunting to face–no worries–the spirit of thing is to honor and give attention to the “daily bread,” the food you put in your mouth on this day, preferably a food handmade from basic, unadulterated ingredients.

Food close to its roots, so to speak, that has some savor of the ground it grew in or place it came from, that’s best, though hunger can make a Twinkie, or potato chips, or a baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip, holy. You want to be hungry when you eat the food you’ve consecrated for Loaf Mass. Bringing your hunger to the table is part of what makes the food a holy offering and the table a consecrated altar to whatever god or gods you’ve asked to dinner.

Even if you have no gods (as I don’t), don’t forget to set out an extra plate for an unexpected guest. Place on it a stone. The guest will tell the stone to become bread. When the stone becomes bread, the guest has arrived.