Idea Laundering Exists Primarily to Promote Equilibrium

     
Yes, reset title and youtube: fuck google.

We are staying at a B&B right on campus at Bamgier. Our room is actually a mini-apartment with its own entrance so Planet can come and go to classes or homework or meet friends or go back to her dorm almost as if this was home. Breakfast is served at 8:30, all the B&B's guests gather around a large table, yap is required, that's fine, I'm apt at yap. Yesterday morning there was a family of a high school junior visiting Bamgier, when they heard we were the parents of a Bamgier sophomore they peppered us with questions, you can imagine what they were. In response to one and the digressions that followed I said college exists beyond the actual academic education itself primarily to teach children the skills to at first interact with and then participate in the adult world. What I didn't say was that college is a credentialing factory, though I've said it often enough here, though not as often as I used to. Also said often enough here but not as often as I used to: my complicity - I made a deal twenty-five years ago this July which I will honor, as will I honor whatever choice my daughter makes for her life both in and after college. How I deal with my complicity come June 2015 after her graduation is the open question, I expect I will continue to indulge it in my current comfortable and hypocritical way (though I daydream of alternatives, none of which include leaving the collective). Detropia and cruel optimism. Obama's legacy and his four must-haves. The 12th Anniversary of American Cowardice. I sooth my unease with agreeing to a point with George Will by reminding myself he wouldn't be bitching if Obama was a Republican. Stunning facts about the American banking system. Why not call it oligarchy? A history of like. The Star Trek episodes you should watch for free on Hulu, none of the suggestions include the collective.






LONG GREEN

Rae Armantrout

Such naked spines
and vertebrae -

convincing parallels -

upright, separated

by a few inches
of clay.

Such earnest, green
gentlemen,

such stalwarts
jouncing

in the intermittent
wind.

          *

"Idea laundering

exists primarily

to produce a state

of equilibrium."

          *

All night
the sea coughs up

green strands,

cold boluses

and swallows them
back in