Guess what we talked about at Thursday Night Pints. The whoever brings up POTUS 12 first buys two nights' rounds rule was suspended by agreement early. We vary on where in American politics kabuki turns kayfabe, but a face turn by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, regardless his motives (which we got to next), is an unexpected swerve in whatever narrative about America each of us believes; yes, in full admittance of our respective complicities vis a vis those narratives, it couldn't not be talked about. L held that Roberts was embarrassed by association with Alito, Thomas, especially Scalia, didn't want Harvard Law students reading history books in a hundred years unanimously calling him the worst Chief Justice ever. I said, maybe, but I think Roberts ruled for the corporate interests that stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars on a plan cooked up by the Heritage Foundation. Nobody suggested that Roberts carefully weighed the arguments for and against Obamacare and ran those algorithms through his keenly trained and logically honest mind then rendered a Solomonic judgment. All confessed to childish delight at cracker heads' exploding, you're never too small for schadenfreude. The whole SCOTUS/POTUS discussion took five minutes, then we talked about Balotelli and why the Mannschaft suck against Italy, Mantel's Bringing Up the Bodies, which both L and K read (and loved and really loved) since we last met, D's new grandson, nine and a half pounds, ouch, and a bit of a miracle, yay! and a bunch of stuff I'm not going to talk about here. So something has changed in each of our narratives of where kabuki turns kayfabe: the fuck-it has noticeably taken root. We debated whether that's good or bad, our kabuki and our kayfabe.
- Yes, here is the XTC cascade I threatened earlier this week.
- The argument for Obamacare.
- The manufactured debate over Obamacare.
- Misjudgment.
- Render unto Kaiser Permanente.
- Chief Justice Rube Goldberg.
- Villager court jester blows John Roberts.
- Everyone stop blowing John Roberts.
- Our politicized judiciary.
- The tribalism of elite Democrats.
- Bank mobsters.
- Thomas Friedman's new state of grace.
- Crisis of capitalism and urban struggle.
- I have a good friend who adamantly badgers me not to eat genetically engineered food. OK already, stop, I buy my food at MOMs.
- DCU at mid-season, by the numbers.
- DCU acquires a Long Tan.
- UPDATE! YAY!
- UPDATE! MORE ON YAY!
- I really really like Why Always Me.
- UPDATE! I really really like Why Always Me.
- Robbie Douglas is dead.
- How headphones changed the world.
- Lyn Hejinian's poetics of failure. I've posted a bunch of poems (and will continue to) from her new The Book of a Thousand Eyes. It's magnificent.
- Drums and Wires.
EVENING PRACTICE
D.A. Nurske
I asked my father,
“would you rather die
of cancer or a heart attack?
Would you rather be executed
or put in jail for life?
Which would you rather be—
a spy or a sentinel?”
And he tried to answer
honestly, combing his thinning hair
with his fingers, thinking of something else.
At last he fell silent. I ran out
to savor the dregs of dusk
playing with my friends
in the road that led to the highway.
The ball flew up toward day
and landed in night.
We chanted. Every other minute
a truck, summoned by our warnings,
brushed past in a gust of light,
the driver’s curses muffled
by distance: the oncoming wheels
were the point of the game,
like the scores in chalk
or the blood from scuffed knees
that we smeared across our faces:
so when my mother called,
her voice was quaint and stymied
and I took all the time in the world
trotting home past tarped barbecue pits,
past names of lovers filling with sap,
past tentative wind from sprinklers:
then I was stunned to see my golden window
where all faces, hanging plants, dangling pots
were framed by night and dwarfed
by a ravenous inward-turning light.
