To thine own self be true

for Don Iveson and the last three Edmonton city councils, it would be the recurringly-closed LRT over by the Royal Alex/NAIT and the funicular as well as the polluted accidental ‘beach’, the permanent ripped-up roads, and the calcium chloride decomposing cars, roads, sidewalks, pets, and pedestrians.

Doh! Ain’t no apps for:

-common sense

-intelligence

-sense of humor and wit

-decency

-sensibility

-personal depth

-natural capacity to respond to beauty

-creative consciousness

-empathy and sympathy

-civility and courtesy

-gentleness, kindness and caring

-natural innocence, awe, and wonder

-natural curiosity

-appreciation

-institutions that truly serve the public and not merely politicians, parties, or government

-permanence

-real intimacy, open-heartedness, love, and touch

-live in-person presence

-actual traditional works of art

-nature and pets

-genius and vision

-civilization

-personal freedom

-true individuality

-unconventional consciousness

-moments of being

-unagenda-ed possibilities

-un-e-mediated spirit and soul experience

-un-e-mediated magic moments

And never will be. All those many things that are rapidly vanishing, quickly forgotten, or gone largely missing in our ‘wonderful’ brave new d-world.

“Technology dominates us all, diminishing our freedom.”–Dorothy McCall, quoted, 14 March 1974″

Old eyes and an unending view of cynical frost not recalling the newborn simpler days.
A story of spring before the long, cold suppression and firm denial of flowers.
Listening to distant children play before they sounded like parents or commanded others–their little shows of egoic control.
To have lived long and mostly forgotten how anyone lived in a pretty how town.

Yet sometimes the fact of glory asserts itself and remains despite the screens, machine-souls, and agendas.
‘Preserve, preserve’ sayeth the memory of an echoing green. ‘Slow–slow.
It is laughter and love that still matters beyond the self-induced harness-trap of work and the recurring mad hunt for gold before old eyes go blind forever.’

The tv advertisers of meds with dire side effects often resort to one gimmick now, simple-mindedly using dogs or puppies as props to sell their wares and offset the innumerable small print and voiceover warnings.

update: Subaru has done a commercial which just features dogs.

A non-smoking aid found its own animal–the turkey–to advertise with entirely. That is, a cute animated (goin’ cold) turkey.

I will remember him for his excellent roles in The Gathering Storm, The Dresser, Under the Volcano, Tom Jones, and Murder on the Orient Express (unrecognizable!). very few olde school actors left now: Kirk Douglas, Angela Lansbury, Sidney Poitier, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Joanne Woodward, Michael Caine among the oldest.

“I think women need kindness more than love. When one human being is kind to another, it’s a very deep matter.”
–Alice Childress, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights

“Love between women is seen as a paradigm in love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.”
–Elizabeth Janeway, Between Myth and Meaning

“”Love interferes with the fidelities.”
–Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher

“Love in itself she felt should be like the creation of a succession of works of art.”
–Hayashi Fumiko, “Lady Chrysanthemum”

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
–Dorothy Parker, quoted in While Rome Burns

“Marriage: a souvenir of love.”
–Helen Rowland, Reflections of a Bachelor Girl

“If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.”
–Marie Dressler, My Own Story

“There is nothing ridiculous in love.”
–Olive Schreiner, “The Buddhist Priest’s Wife”

“When my self is not with you, it is nowhere.”
–Heloise, Letter to Peter Abelard

“Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.”
–Jean Anouilh

“For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find within his hand a flower as token that he had really been there–what then, what then?”
–Thomas Wolfe

“Touch is the meaning of being human.”
–Andrea Dworkin

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
–George Orwell, 1984

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
–George Orwell, 1984

“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air round him. She had become a physical necessity.”
–George Orwell, 1984

“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.”
–William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Can one desire too much of a good thing?”
–William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
–William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Love sought is good, but given unsought better.”
–William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.”
–William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116”

“We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and love as we are to die.”
–R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
–Oscar Wilde

“To refuse the call means stagnation.”
–Joseph Campbell

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.”
–Denis Diderot

“Tenderness is greater proof of love than the most passionate of vows.”
–Marlene Dietrich

“Touch is the landscape of what is possible.”
–Kate Green

“Love seeketh not itself to please.”
–William Blake, “The Clod and the Pebble”

again today in Katzville. Needed a hot chocolate when we came in after groceries. Since getting in and out of baths has become a life-and-death situation at 70, the old method from childhood of a hot bath no longer takes off the chill. We use an electric blanket in the family room which warms you up fairly fast. Nothing like that chill that lingers otherwise. Even turning up the heat only works so far and doesn’t heat your inner core when you get a chill. Yeah, an electric blanket is what I’d swear by, especially for a cold lower body.

When you’re young, I think you’ve got more resistance; I can remember playing hockey or skating in sub-minus 20 F temps. But sooner or later you’d just want to get home asap. In our old WW1 house, we originally had a chain ‘thermostat’ furnace. You had to be careful pulling it to start, and there were times when it didn’t start or we were out of coal. I can remember us freezing on arctic days, waiting for a coal delivery just to get heat in the house. The relief of hearing the coal roll down the shute.

I delivered newspapers after school for 5 years (grade 5-9) and these kinds of winter days were common in ’60s Winnipeg. Plus you’d have to collect every week, having to go out evenings to basically get paid. Standing around outside waiting for the Saturday papers to come necessitated waits in the grocery store nearby just to get out of the cold. After that, you’d generate your own heat when your legs started moving to deliver two streets of papers. No wonder there was always a high turnover of carriers!

Well, there you go–poverty and trying to make some spending spare change when you received no allowance like many kids in my working-class neighborhood. And, at the end of the deliveries, rushing home to then sit in front of the big wall vent waiting for the blessed heat to come on again. Something I didn’t miss when we sold our house in grade 9 and moved into a nice warm apartment block. It was far saner and more civilized with less of the old inconveniences in the frozen North.

Some famous quotes from great literature:

“He who does not follow love’s command errs greatly.”
–Chretien de Troyes, Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart

“I found myself within a shadowed forest.”
–Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno

“Laughter’s the property of man. Live joyfully.”
–Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

“He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.”
–Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

“One man in his time plays many parts.”
–William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
–Andrew Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems

“If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others?”
–Voltaire, Candide

“Poetry is the breath and the finer spirit of all knowledge.”
–William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
–Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“All partings foreshadow the great final one.”
–Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“A poet is a kinsman in the clouds.”
–Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
–Feodor Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
–George Eliot, Middlemarch

“”The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
–Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”
–George Orwell, 1984

“He was Beat–the root, the soul of beatific.”
–Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Three Excellent Quotations Books:

(the best source of classic English author/lit quotes)

(

(the best source of thematic quotations on various subjects and topics)

(the best source of quotes by women on various themes)

Like those when guys can make fists while sitting on the floor then use them to raise themselves when getting up. Our chimp ancestry showing through the ages.

There are some human depravities that are too sickening to watch or hear about. These are two of them for me, personally. (Everyone has their limits.)