VIVA LAS VEGAS

accidental picture of the ceiling at front porch gallery




The cold this winter has become an issue. I'm tired of it in the extreme. I feel like the earth has shifted and now I'm in Siberia. The heat goes all the time and indoors I dress like for outdoors because the house is not tight and the cold never lets up. I have a long sleeved tshirt on, a sweater over that and an insulated shirt over that, buttoned all the way to the top. One pair of sweat pants when I need 2. With 2 I'm comfortable, but not with one. The floor is where the cold comes from. It is whatever the temperature is outside, 23 at this moment. At head level it is 71. From head to feet, the entire range of temperature runs up my body. Don't need a hat. I'm so tired of dressing indoors like it's outdoors I could go back to bed where I wear a sweater on top of "sweats" now to sleep in. The problem is, this relentless cold has become boring. 3 months of steady cold is old. Looks like 3 more to go. Aint fit fer man ner beast.

The title of a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti stays in my mind, Moscow In The Winter, Segovia In The Snow. I remember nothing about the poem, it being at least 40 years since reading it, but the title has stayed with me as a beautifully memorable title. I doubt I understood the content of the poem back then, so you can say it's the same as unread. Only the title remains. Coney Island Of The Mind, another good title by Ferlinghetti, will perhaps always be a classic of his generation. There again, I remember nothing but the title. Makes me want to go dig it out of a box and look at it again. Ferlinghetti is a poet I never think about much, but when reading him, it's always fresh. That's a good word for him. His poems have a freshness about them every time I see one. Maybe it's like they have air in them that can be breathed, something like Monet's paintings in that way.

Usually, I don't get this fed up with winter until late February, but this winter started a month early. Saw a statistic the other day that the sciences at universities are full of democrats. Republicans en masse don't believe in science any more. Science is too liberal. The science community doesn't deny evolution, no matter how much Rush Limbaugh talks against it. We can foresee that when police state has absolute authority, about the time the boys come home from Iraq and Afghanistan, non-creationist science will be outlawed. All I can say is LOL. The people that work for a living are being bled to death by the people that make millions a year playing golf. The Repubs are polishing Sarah Palin up for the next presidential run, proving the truth in the song by Jane's Addiction, Idiots Rule. No more needs saying. Look at the roll call in congress. Our "representatives." Virginia Foxx represents nobody I know, only money. When Mammon rules, what's false is true and vice versa.

I ask myself often how much longer a world built on lies, based in lies, and characterized only by lies can last. It keeps on going on. It's been this way since Greek and Roman times and way before that. The worship of a false god creates a life of falseness where truth is false. How many people can read the Tao Te Ching after graduating from college and make any sense of it? It goes against everything we've been taught, as does the spiritual life lived in any religion or outside religion. Las Vegas has become America's holy city, the glitzy shrine to money Americans from all over make pilgrimages to for the chance of being blessed by the god of money. That's a very different kind of holy city from Mecca. The muslims don't call us the Great Satan only because it makes a good sound bite.

The answer I get to how much longer can it last is: indefinitely. It's been going on all along, from before we started chucking spears. It's in our grain. It's natural to us as flopping your ears is to a dog. This is why God has to take human form from time to time, each time the first and only, to get us back on track. It's like He is schooling us along collectively as He does individually. It's like a mother dog that teaches her puppies to stay out of the road by turning them away from the road with her nose. From talking with my friends who are lovers of God, I see we are cared for divinely in such ways as getting steered away from a disaster before it happens, looking back and saying the divine hand was with me. I believe it happens to us collectively, too, in times when it couldn't get worse we have our saying about the darkness before the dawn. It seems to me the USA is the darkest it has ever been and keeps on getting darker. Maybe this means the dawn is just over the horizon. It has to be.

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