Some Waterhouse for you. His critics complained all the girls looked the same. Well they are nymphs, after all. I don't know if they are famous for their individuality. But I find this picture very dark and a little frightening. No, it's very frightening - nothing little about it. As an artist he stayed closer to the Ruskinian ideal than any of his contemporaries still working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. This is tough to do, to paint a picture like this.

It's tough to imagine a picture like this, much less make your hands do whatever they need to do to manifest it.

Should I write about how we make things out of thoughts? No - that's boring. You've heard that one.

I've been cleaning. I've been using my friend, Kirby. He's so good, that Kirby. And there's this lavender flavored window cleaner made by Earth Friendly products that I absolutely adore. Well, it don't work worth a darn but it sure do smell good.

It's wonderful to have a clean White Lodge - at least those parts of it humans can inhabit. The one dimensional and two dimensional rooms are maintained by allowing whatever manages to get in there to rot. It's fortunate there's no smell until you get to the fourth dimension. Without there being Time you can't smell anything because you can't breathe, your blood doesn't move. It's nasty.

Squabbler can go into the three dimensional areas of the house. He's a statue anyway. Well, he is an up-standing fellow.

I've been trying to line up work for this week. We're in a bit of a post-summer lull. I think that's my cue to take it easy for a week or two. Of course, what do I do today on my day off? I clean the house. I drink a lot of coffee and clean the house. I burn a lot of incense and drink a lot of coffee and clean the house. And I listen to music and burn a lot of incense and drink a lot of coffee and clean the house. Oh yes, and I cleaned the frige and listened to music and burned a lot of incense and drank a lot of coffee and cleaned the house

that Jack built.

It smells great.

So then I sat down and started looking for pictures to jump start my mind. I wasn't in the mood to look at the world. Or, I should say I was in too good a mood to want to spoil it by looking at the world. So I own a large print of this picture. It hangs in my bedroom. Just hang a right at the Kirby and you're there - well, less than a mile anyway. And so I thought of it. I don't know why. Typed in Hylas and the Nymphs. The result is this afternoon cobweb post about everything and nothing.

It must have been Christmas of '93 when I bought it. It was a Christmas present for "the house," right? That means it was a gift for me. My wife of the moment happened to like Victorian painting too. Since then, I can count on a birthday card with a Rosetti picture on it. I really am easy to please when it comes to gifts. The fact that somebody's actually giving me something - Wow, what possessed them?

Well, I was really drunk when I bought that picture. I'm surprised I made it out of the mall in Valley Stream and back home in one piece. Heck, I'm surprised I lived to see Christmas '93. I had seven more years of that to go, and in March it'll be seven years again since I've have a drink, and I think Biblically that either means I'm perfectly sober or perfectly daffy - I'm not sure which. I suppose it depends on who you talk to. Whom?

I am a man of modest gifts.

There are seven naked nymphs in that picture. They all look the same. I wonder what it all means?

Naw, on second thought, I don't give a darn. The house is clean. What else matters?

I awoke to the most beautiful morning of all time ever.

Some velvet morning when I'm straight I'm going to open up your gate, and maybe tell you about...

It was April of 1992. The place was the Freeport Boatel/Motel. The Nick Cave song on my widget was new - "Brother, My Cup is Empty."

and I haven't got a penny,

but if I buy no more whiskey

I'll have to go home.

Well, I had plenty of money left, plenty of whiskey to drink. I think that's what I did with it. A little later I rented a car with a glove compartment just the right size for a bottle of Black Bush. Now, I'd walk out of the house into the spring morning, and there was a picnic table on a patio out in the yard. Everything looked smaller than I remembered. Through the trees was the bay, and beyond that the Long Island Sound, and beyond that the great state of Connecticut which connects one state with another state, and the state I was seeking was joy from a bottle, sometimes called "spirits," spiritus. I was seeking the Spirit.

Briefly, I found it. But it didn't come from the Black Bush. In those days my friend The Squabbler was absent. He was gone for many years, and I was without my rudder. I was without the truth. I was without morality. I remembered only that I used to have a friend named Sydney Horatio Plumnick, and how silly that was. I changed my name many times. I wrote under the names Horatio Malvase and Jonathan Rees, sometimes Eric Nemo. At a certain point It occurred to me that my father is a great man and so I should happily wear his name - the name I was given. And it was then, and only then, that Sydney returned.

When he returned he was changed. He had been changed by me while he was away, while I was dreaming of spiritus, looking for the God. It's because of the way I used to live that his once beautiful face became disfigured, and now the gas mask is his face. It is fused with his thousands years-old flesh. He became The Squabbler. He witnessed the dawn of Judeo-Christian civilization. He was there at the beginning. He's back to see it end. He is History, our history, the depository of knowledge. You see?

Looking for the God in all the wrong places

Looking for the God in too many faces

I used to think He was in the act of lovemaking, but I found only oblivion. Just like I disvovered in the Black Bush. I remember waking outside the Boatel/Motel, the smell of it still on my hands and still coming from my pores like a very fine perfume. There were seagulls flying over the fishing boat-bobbing bay.

Must have been reading Dylan Thomas. The night was black, starless and Bible black.

Listen: Time is folded in upon itself in every conceivable way. What was yesterday is today, and there is no tomorrow. Every door here opens into another dimension where death has no dominion, but it is only by dying that they will open at all.

Weeping willow tree

Weep in sympathy

The Squabbler tells me my death was essential to my living, and that the two are the same, exactly the same, in Time. The God is there - in that sameness. That's what I learned.

Is anybody home? The lights are on.

At the top of these Blogstream pages, and at the top of thousands of web sites, social networks, is an invitation to "Pimp" your profile. This derives from MTV's reality program Pimp My Ride, I think. But it really comes from Antonio Fargas's character on Starsky and Hutch back in the 70's.

The word pimp is being used here to mean "dress up," or "enhance with a visually appealing design." The advertisers who are using the word are assuming we understand that new definition, but of course the meaning if the word hasn't actually changed. I thought it would be instructive to supply a definition of the word pimp from the feared, hated, and lately oft-derided Wikipedia. Here it is:

"A pimp finds and manages clients for prostitutes and engages them in prostitution (in brothels in most cases and some cases street prostitution) in order to profit from their earnings. Typically, a pimp will not force prostitutes to stay with him, although some have been known to be abusive in order to keep their prostitutes submissive or to maximize profits. A pimp may also offer to protect his prostitutes from rival pimps and prostitutes, or from abusive clients. He can also enable a prostitute to work in a particular area under his control. Pimping is a sex crime."

Here's Antonio Fargas as Huggy Bear, the crime-battling duo's chief informant from Starsky and Hutch, who was a cute and cuddly sort of sex criminal. Wiki's definition is a tad gentle. In reality, pimps are not "sometimes" abusive. In reality, pimps are participating in a form of slavery. They routinely beat, disfigure, torture, and kill the women this definition suggests they protect. Well, I guess that means they beat, disfigure, torture, and kill those women for their own good.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Kill me.

I've written about this before, and in that writing I suggested someone wake up a feminist. Not that it would do any good. Feminism has been subsumed, coopted, made utterly redundant. The outrage of the last clingers-on to that confoundedly at-odds-with-itself "movement," which at the moment is like the Republican Party in that it has no leadership, has always been politically-motivated and therefore strangely selective. Yes, they are great respecters of cultures, you see. The Taliban is OK with the feminist. It's fine if you want to set your wife on fire. That's your culture, and we need to respect that. Just so long as we can go on having as many abortions as possible. Question of priorities, brother.

So - who sees this pimp usage on a daily basis? Everybody does. All of us here on Blogstream live with it daily. I'm a bit of an exception to many rules. I don't watch TV. I've never seen Pimp My Ride. I don't have a social network, no MySpace page, or anything like that. But many of us do. Many of us are into 3-D chat rooms and all that. I see the glorification of slavery, the subjugation and murder of women only here on Blogstream, and it's just a silly banner advertisement that appears on the bounce page when I am responding to a comment. I know that many of you, since you are more fully connected to the crap culture, see this casual depravity all the time. Stop being a sheep. Don't stand for it.

Nobody else is going to grow up and do it for you. It's like hearing men talk about their dicks on the radio while you're driving the kids to school. It's a Viagra commercial - OK. But that's what they're doing - they're talking about their dicks. Now, the weather...

Of course, if I heard my boys using the word pimp to mean anything other than - well, what it means - I would smack 'em down. (I mean that figuratively, by the way, having no control but every authority.) But how could they not eventually start losing their minds when every other source they are given for guidance tells them the opposite of what I am telling them?

Oh, c'mon Squabbler, join in the fun. Relax. Get a manicure. You'll feel better.

This is coming from a libertarian. I believe there should be not one single restriction placed by government on the free market. I believe that government has no business being in any way involved with the media, with "health care," with education - or any of the other aspects of our lives, institutions, and so forth, that they have insinuated their bloated, greedy, disgusting tentacles into. Obviously, I look to that apparatus for solutions to absolutely nothing. "There oughtta be a law?" No. There oughtta be only one Law. 

This is coming from me who believes in freedom, not censorship, not regulations. With that freedom comes immense responsibility that it is obvious the so-called baby boomer generation is incapable of taking on, being somehow not fully human - or, something. Confused perhaps. "Evolved" - that's the word they like to use. It seems to mean cowardly and ambivalent.

Anyhoooooo, I thought it might be a fun thing for you to do today to count the number of times you see the word pimp used in whatever happy, mindless context. See if you can keep your lunch down. 

Luciano Pavarotti is dead. He was 71. Luciano Pavaratti.

If you want to watch him perform Schubert's Ave Maria here, scroll down and pause my song widget.

OK. Something substantial.

Substantive. The correct word is substantive.

Enough messing around with old records. I feel like writing about sex. Why? I don't remember it. What's to write about?

I do know that if you tell people - young and old, of every possible variation of race, ethnicity, social standing, and attitude - that it is good to engage in the sex act every day and in every way with everybody, eventually they're going to take you up on it. Eventually they're going to follow the advice you've been giving. In the case of children, eventually they're going to do exactly what you have been telling them to do. So why is the legal age of consent so preposterously high, and why is our outrage over them doing what they are being told to do so... weird?

Well, Dad and Mom must think it's terribly important to be able to maintain the ability to have an erection until they're in their pine box. On the TV stations they watch every other commercial is for an erectile dysfunction treatment. They alternate in rotation with sleep aids - the fluttering green butterfly of death. You need the latter to recover from the former. I mean, if Dad can't sleep on his stomach...

Oh, I'm obsessed.

Well, if they have to advertise we don't need it. If we really need it we'll find it. Makes sense.

Enough of that.

Back on Holy Thursday I was at mass, and we all found out there that a local kid just died in a car accident. I live in a small town. Everybody really does know everybody. I didn't know him. Well, he was a High School senior - hardly a child. I vaguely know his mother, enough to say, "Hallo, yes weather's nice. They say rain," the way you do. But of course it was awful. His Mom and his little brother were coming out of the church when they got the news. It was - well, you can imagine what it must have looked like. I described it here at the White Lodge that very same night.

Now, the young man was a relatively new driver. He wasn't drunk - nothing like that. And what if he was? So what? People also live when they do stupid things. But it just so happens he wasn't drunk. Maybe he was driving recklessly. Maybe a lot of people who cared about him had already spoken to him about that. And well, they did.

No one in history has ever died "before his time," by the way. No one.

What happened next you may be able to imagine. There was great sadness. Some of you reading may have lost a child. There was a time, not long ago, when it was very unlikely a person could reach middle age without losing a child. It's a little more rare today. And it's true - one cannot really understand the quality of that grief who hasn't experienced it.

But on other occasions this same young man had driven recklessly, and lived. Millions of young men drive recklessly, and live. Millions of children are not abducted. Millions of women are not raped. Millions of people don't buy Viagra. What am I getting at? Well, it's like this: the story of the young man's death was "News." Obviously, all of us who were at mass that night knew about it. There were several people there who knew him well - teachers, his classmates. It was a shock. Now, the story stayed local - pretty much. Oh, the new publisher of the local weekly sensationalized the hell out of it. He sensationalizes everything, and no one buys his paper anymore. But, apart from that.

Beyond this small community, however, the young man's death was not "News." And thank God for that. Thank God for his family and his friends the pornographers who entertain the bloodthirsty morons of this country didn't get wind of it. We had only one pornographer here - the weekly newspaper guy.

Death happens to younger people. It's the darndest thing. Accidents happen, tragedies. Right now someone's dying, in pain. Right now someone's being shot at, someone's being tortured, (and really tortured - not hazed.) But right now a little kid is crying that he has no friends, or his dad is beating up his mom again. Right now a child is being misused, and interfered with. In this unimaginably gigantic population of humanity everything terrible is always happening right now.

It was always that way. You know what? - It used to be worse. It used to be a lot worse. One young man out of many millions dies in a car accident. It used to be millions died at birth, or in infancy, or in wars, famine, diseases we found cures for. My great-grandparents had thirteen children so four could survive - In Ireland, in time of war, which would be six hundred years, not bloody six. As we are safer, more secure, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before in human history somehow the world still manages to be going to hell in a handbasket. I know people who think the world is a very dangerous place.

I didn't know that young man. It wasn't my business. I had no need to know that someone I never met had died in an accident. I happened to be there. I happen to know his Mom only well enough to say, "Gee I'm sorry for your loss. They say rain." That's appropriate. That's it. End of story.

But I mean it when I say your entertainment is pornography. Your "reality TV" is the shit that shit would shit if it could shit. That's where it all ends up on Planet Voyeur. That's where the mind of the journalist is, and that's what a journalist is worth. Now, you've got 24 hours of "News" on several cable television networks, only about two of which hours are devoted to anything substantive - and that's usually fabricated either in whole or in part. All the commercials - as the kids correctly point out - are geared towards an aging population of useless navel-gazing hippie hitlers.

Give them bread and circuses. Hard dicks and a good night's sleep.

I feel better now.

I really liked "Wish You Were Here." That was the first Pink Floyd album I bought. Well, it was the year it came out. I was only 13 so it was the first album I bought with my own money. I think I've told this story. It doesn't matter, though. I can remember the smell of the inside of the sleeve just as I got the shrink wrap off. That was only yesterday. It really was. I keep saying this, and no one believes me. What's the difference? Time! It's just Time. That's all it is. There's no such foolish thing. There's change. Time is just how we make sense of change.

Well, the dog's gone.