Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 11

Aligning the ducks

A half-hour after I wrote this

The mess stands before me, challenging me: “Here are the ducks, dare you line them in rows?” I acknowledge the piles of books and records and CDs and loose papers, and I turn back to working and playing amid the chaos.

I bought a record over the weekend but haven’t played it yet. The books I brought back from New Jersey, the crosswords that accumulated while I was gone, and some paid but unfiled bills are on the turntable.

So move them, Warren. And perhaps...

the duel

There are two of us here, we,
The lump of flesh and the
whatjacallit
soul, consciousness, sentience

and we battle it out daily.
Something tells me the lump always wins
but lets the thinker rationalize
whatever it decides.

Which is our better nature?
The thinker thinks it’s him
but then he’s the one
doing the thinking.

Maybe the fallacy is
that we are two of us here.
You see anyone else
in the room?

Movies I give a you-know-what about

I am reading/listening to Mark Manson’s Everything is F*cked, the follow-up to his fascinating tome The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and am intrigued by his description of the thinking brain and the feeling brain — the two brains we each have inside us, at war with and working with each other. To make a long story short, one of his arguments is that the feeling brain makes a lot of the decisions and the thinking brain provides rational cover for them.

So my wandering mind(s) wondered ...

Hold these truths

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

First Amendment to U.S. Constitution

Given the impunity with which these prohibitions have been ignored in the last 20 to 100 years, I think it’s safe to say most every “duly elected” official we know ought to be removed ...

These dreams and whispers

I’m telling ya, man, come on,
There’s nothing to it and even if there was,
what could we do about it?
Let it go, man,
Let it go,
Let it go.

(Someone whispered in the night,
“No. Fly. Be free.”)

Really?
Really?
Don’t do this.

(But they were already miles away.)

Love for the Nine and Ten

A long time ago in a blogosphere far, far away, I attempted a series reviewing the Bill of Rights, one amendment at a time, to show how each had been abused over the years. I abandoned the project after six installments, in part because I began to see how much I still needed to learn about the history, and in part because the exercise was so discouraging.

None of the first 10 constitutional amendments gets anything more than lip service these days, and after years of disuse some of them d...

A modest proposal

I propose that we, the people, begin to enforce these 10 steps to bring our runaway government under control.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and ...

what comes to you in the silence

Some of the work I’m proudest of didn’t get a single “Like” here or on Facebook.

Austin Kleon shared Michaela Coel’s Emmy acceptance speech where she spoke of how “visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success” and added, “don’t be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.”

Kleon then added, “Silence is a space for something to happen.” It often is enlightening to step away from the electronics and all the stimulation and tur...

W.B. Watching: Goliath

Red and I spent Friday and Saturday nights binge-watching Season 4 of the very fine lawyer melodrama Goliath, starring the incomparable Billy Bob Thornton as flawed but brilliant attorney Billy McBride.

We don’t binge-watch that much. We’ll glom onto a show and watch one or two episodes at a time, but to watch eight over two nights is rare for us. Goliath is that compelling.

The villain in this fourth and final story is Big Pharma, personified by the always riveting J.K. Simmons, and t...

Time to stop comparing

Serendipity is a wonderful, awesome thing sometimes.

Friday morning I started through my “Important People” folder, the links to people who blog daily or at least often enough to pique my brain. One of those important people is Dean Wesley Smith, the prolific writer and daily blogger whose streak is somewhere around 4,000 days (this right here is my 421st consecutive daily blog).

Smith mentioned that he had spent HIS Thursday writing 4,000 words and recording a segment of an upcoming o...