Thirty Cents

Why don’t they all just kill (me or) themselves? It’s the most I wish to witness. Yet I must deal with my decision to return (the old country). Sink or swim is the motto. All of those thoughts of sinking. The rifle barrel pressed to the back of my throat and I worry if I can reach the trigger. The Americans, remnents of my past, have actually dared to progress. And in their progression where have they gone? The down-spiral path of disarray. What a joy it must be to just glide along this life. The (manipulated and perverted version of Plato’s) noble lie working so well. That wasn’t his intention though was it? It’s not supposed to be about the lie (as it is these days) but a noble cause. Oh, are we doomed!

Part Other. (As opposed to part 2.)

Christian reconstruction-ism and christian zionism.

Drank a beer last nigh and was appalled. The bartender, after taking my money, returned only the bill part of the return change. The odd (thirty some cents) he kept as a tip. When I questioned where the change was he said/asked, “Oh, I thought you wouldn’t want that.” How Euro of him. He assumed I’d leave it for a tip and that was that. Incredible really. The increase, if you can call it that, in US productivity over the last twenty years is all about keeping the thirty cents. There is no substance anymore.

Tommi

The She

Met the She last night. She was last night. She had a sharp wit honed in the time of laughter and avoidance. She is unlike those around me in that Hers is more a life of avoid which is a utter mystery because Her vision will strike a strong man down. Where She is now no one knows for real. Perhaps the guitar player at the morning cafe.

If I could only remember the things she said. Yes! About gong for a walk. She sits upright. American’t raised albeit not from her mother but instead from her gurlfriend. And the wit. The very short stories of humour and experience would burst out as if rehearsed and (would/could) land just below my left lower eyelid … (Is there a name for that part of the eye (lid)?) … like a minuscule raindrop or the lost spit of a colleague lost in discourse. She was asked, “We’re going in to town, do you want to come?” Someone else said, “yeah, I could use a walk.” “A walk?,” she injected. “How ’bout we drive?” “It’s only a fifteen minute walk–or so”, someone else said. “I don’t walk; that why I have a car,” she said. “But walking is good for you,” yet another someone said. “The only time I walk is when I’m with a dog,” she said and then added, “I have a car.”

All the talk of shitting last night. And Brown … something and AC/DC and Edison and someone else who fiddled with electromagnetic something…

Something of interest that I cannot realize: Apt. furnished studio for rent. <phone number excluded to protect the innocent; and don’t bother looking for the original notebook this is transcribed from>

Rant on.

-Tommi

Modigliani And The Imbecile

Bringing a baby to an art museum. What are the parents thinking? Why are they not better trained to think. And so, I view Modigliani and one of the best exhibits I’ve ever seen. But it is a Saturday afternoon on a cloudy rain threatening day; the people have crowded the beautiful wanna-be-something-other-it-is place (Phillips) and their breadth is a burden between myself and paintings. It is so hard to focus on art in a place where occupants of it lack just that. Difficult to be surrounded by so much art and creative work yet the rooms and halls are filled with imbeciles, those who have no idear what art is. (Yes, this is tommi-worst projecting.) Because none of them strive for it. Yet it grows on me. The wondrous dark colors M used. The way he accentuated women as if to elongate their beauty. The secret M has kept and which will obviously never be revealed is what these women actually look(ed) like. We want to know who Mona Lisa was but I want to know what and how M’s women are/were. There are a few portraits where I wouldn’t ask twice but the likes of the noble Polish Woman or the (in)famous Reclining Female(s), even the surprising painting of Jean Cocteau who revealed M’s genius. I tend to think, after seeing his (M’s) picture, that there is a piece of himself in these pics. Obviously M saw something else. It was about the seeing, sight, vision, eyes. He has taken so much time to either ponder their position or correct an error, but the eyes are always asymmetrical. What was his reason for this? A trade mark? Clarity of origin? And the similarity of the women in Anna (Polish Nobel Woman) and reclining nude (woman unknown) ??? Anna was the wife of a confidant. The(ir) hair and body and shape, facial structure look so similar. All of this questioning and answer seeking, among the imbeciles and hourly waged security forces. “Let’s have a few cc’s of culture shot in our arms, honey.” “Yes, of course, dear,” she responds. Who is gonna save the children from their parents (ignorance that stays before them)? So many of M’s paintings are dated 1917–at least those I enjoyed. I am particularly taken by the portrait of Cocteau! I have looked but cannot find any indication to suspect what I would like to suspect. For we know who JC was, according to certain secondary sources. Yet, the handkerchief in his suit jacket pocket, it means obviously nothing. It certainly doesn’t look like a properly folded handkerchief. And what of the broken (lines in the) nose? The short description of the painting says the chair JC is sitting in a “throne-like” chair. Let me continue. In a drawing “Hermaphrodite Cariatide” the description begins with “Gender ambiguity” and continues with the Leitmotif of the Kabbalah and alchemy and the importance of androgyny. Was alchemy important to M? Seek and you will find or… be patient and it will eventually come around. “SANTO GIOVANNI” a small penciled on notebook paper drawing of St. John. The caption notes: “M. believed in the universality of religion as advocated in the mystical messianic teachings of the Kabbalah…” Symbol of fish, star David and world Jerusalem.

Nuff.

Tommi

In Tact

It has been (a) hour(s) and sorts. The sounds might be at fault. It’s as though I have moved between dimensions. Remember? Certainly the previous one was quiet. DC is so loud and hectic. But I have maintained the organism. Wait. Let me scrap(e) it (her) off the hard wood floor once again. Mold. It. It is in tact. While in American’t.

-Tom

Allow

Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec

  • Red Headed Nude Crouching, 1897
  • In the Salon: The Sofa, 1892-1893
  • Women Resting, 1894-1895
  • In The Bed: The Kiss
  • In The Salon, 1893 (Same room, different angle as previous “On The Sofa”)
  • Medical Inspection (Rue de Moulins), 1894

Explain to Danton the limits of his excess. Beyond the failed cause stands a bleeding woman. “Where does the blood come from,” he asks. “You (of all people) should know (where blood always comes from),” she replies.

Why should a whore have rights? To tell her client what she’ll allow and he refuses because he’s paying.

T

The Apple

The apple. Used by Newton for gravity and Bible for religion. Contradiction? Same thing? Both fell out of nowhere?

Identify space tearing flop transitions.

The anthropic principle. This is a doctrine, not unlike a political or relgious agenda, that stipulates (in the world of theoretical physics) the world is the way it is because we are here to observe it that way.

>makes no sense at all

>>it’s also probably not what it means.

t

Stale

How to?

Cookies cooked stale.

The cooky batter/dough was so old that when I cooked them they were already stale.

-From a friend (Patrick Henry)

Rant on.

T

Inescapable

Justification of existence. How to justify ones existence. (This is the not related to the useless-eater idear.) Is existence based on (human) behaviour? What the behaviour once was? It’s no longer about the justifications of ones actions which has been the case during most of the industrial era (pre industrialisation?) but instead about the result of those actions being inescapable. And now I put down that book giving me these idears to nowhere, chaos, confusion.

Tommi

Theory Of Everything

Is it done? Cramped into the elegant plastic seats of LH416 listening to people (men) snore on the agonizing flight. This is supposed to be the beginning of something new, as my dear sweet sister says. (And I love her for it.) Yes, the observations. Cramped in a seat. So much room in the would, the universe and the best educated mgt. minds can come up with is making economy class (on a plane) only full of more victims.

Idear:

TOE. Theory of Everything. A worker at a factory has written a paper that proposes to explain the theory of everything. This paper has arrived at the desk of a local university professor’s desk who literally cannot believe his eyes. This is comparable to Einsteins’s General Theory of Relativity–or as ground breaking. The problem the professor has though or that which he discovers, is the person who wrote the paper is not a student or even an assistant professor (grad student). He’s an older man working at a local car plant that is the talk of the town as it’s just been purchased by a foreign investor to save its ass. Yes, the (odd) man is a shop floor worker (or something like that) who maintains the tools the other workers use to assemble the cars. This is the BMW plant in SC.

Truth Seeking v1.8

(Incomplete)

The fight that can’t be won.

A critique on the-better-then-never, a-day-late-a-dollar-short, progressive radio voice that is battling the monopoly on stupidity. Or. Why H5N1 Birdflu was predicted by Newton.

It hurts me to say this but truth-seeking will never be the answer to fighting neo-cons. I have recently come to this conclusion because, the other day, in St. Augustine, Florida, while I was doing my stretching exercises, which is part of a regular break from home-office-work, I saw a bird fall out of the sky and smack the pavement in front of my apartment window with a loud jell-o thud. The bird was a swan with a wingspan of at least three meters. It fell out of the sky when I was squeezing my chin to my knees. At first I thought it was a stuffed animal but quickly after it let a last gasp that it wasn’t. Within minutes of my call to nine-one-one, and just as my right calf muscle was cramping, the bird was surrounded by smartly dressed, almost corporate looking men with homeland security pins on their lapels. As my calf muscle was relaxing there were a total of twelve men and as many vehicles around the bird. Some of the men would jump out of their cars while the tires were still screeching to a halt and, like TV used to be, they would leap out yelling something that sounded like: “yee-haw”.

By the end of the day the whole ordeal caused what is called a ruckus-epiphany in my cerebral cortex. This form of epiphany is very dangerous and was discovered by accident by an east-German horse doctor who was also the first physician banned from working with Olympic athletes. It is said to be a very dangerous form of epiphany and if not treated promptly can lead to various forms of neurodegenerative disease. Luckily I was able to get help but while doing so I strained my Achilles tendon, which has prohibited me from adjusting my sitting position with my left leg and, in turn, has caused me to miss at least three days of home-office-work. When will the stress end?

I don’t want to languish on the details of the diagnosis but three doctors in the greater St. Augustine area examined me with a particular thoroughness attributable only to the European insurance coverage I was totting. Using the internet and other modern technologies they also questioned my German doctor. Specifically, the American doctors were curious about the acclimation therapy recommended by my German doctor. In helping me get over my fear of repatriation he had recommended that I make a link back to where I was when I expatriated. Knowing that I was a media junky and that I always complained about not having good radio in Germany, he recommended that I stream radio using the internet. After a couple of weeks of failed attempts of finding something decent to listen too, and seeing the stress build up in me trying to search the maze of what’s available, my German doctor eventually recommended that I listen to a radio guy named Mike Molloy. He knew from past visits that I had listened to Rush Limbaugh when I left America some twenty years ago and he thought Molloy would be a good alternative now. And so, like a prescription, I streamed Molloy every night for six months before flying to Florida.

What the doctors didn’t tell me and I later learned from the very talkative Homeland Security temp agent named Julstice was that the doctors concluded the combination of television imagery locked in my subconscious from the seventies, specifically “Streets of San Francisco” and “Dallas”, and the recent jolt of Mike Molloy, the infamous and dubiously arrogant radio host from Air America who refuses to participate in public discourse and instead dictates it, are all part of the outbreak of ruckus-epiphany, initialized by the falling bird. Julstice jokingly said that, according to their records, the only real change they could see after streaming Molloy was that my consumption of free internet porn was way down.

Excuse me if I drift from subject. You can blame it on my trauma.

(About Julstice – do I need this?) It was a few hours after homeland security hired a company from two states away (the license plates of their converted SUVs were personalized with: we clean it all) to get rid of the dead bird, that I first met Ed Julstice Jonah. As I mentioned, he’s a homeland security temp agent whose office was in a local Motel 6 located just outside of St. Augustine; his second job was guarding Wal Marts at night. Julstice was about five feet, four inches, almost a head shorter them me, he shaved with a bic single blade disposable (you can tell by the scars around the adam’s-apple) and wore a plastic watch that must have been a promotional gimme. He wore a pen in the outer breast pocket and a pair of dark green slacks that was only an attempt to match his jacket. He carried a brand new briefcase made of plastic. His shoes were black and plastic and probably cleaned that morning after he had to request one of those shoe-shine-pads that you often mistake for soap that lie around cheap motel bathrooms.

During the interview with Julstice, he preferred his middle name because there were thirty other Ed’s from the temp agency, thirteen of which were with homeland and the rest with custodial services for highway rest stops, I was asked twenty-two questions about if I had seen kids around the neighbourhood between the age of fifteen and nineteen who, it was recorded, visited a mosque during a junior high school trip to Arizona. Julstice even showed me the yearbook pictures of all the kids. I asked what that had to do with the bird.

“Everything,” Julstice said. “We are particularly interested in how you could witness such a thing. You’re obviously a man who is in right places at right times – you see things. And God bless you for doing so.”
“I called nine-one-one about the bird? I was just in Europe and they’re cordoning off all the bird farms in France and Germany and prohibiting the British from travelling to those farms.”
“Is that so?” he says; he looked intensely through his notebook and eventually pulled a manila folder from his briefcase with my name on the flap. “You were in Europe? Wait a sec…”
“I live in Europe. I’m only here on a six month stint to work for an Indian software company.”
“Visiting who? You don’t live here?”
“No. I’m a project manager. I manage offshore software development.”
“Your name is Thomas…?”
“Tommi.”
“Here is says Thomas.”
“I don’t go by that. Especially since the whole Thomas Gospel and Jesus twin thing became dinner talk.” I giggled but Julstice didn’t respond.
“Fine. Tommi Stone, then.” He makes a mark in his cheap spiral pad.
“You are responding to my call to nine-one-one that a bird fell out of the sky, right?”
“Yeap. And you live in Europe, you say? What country? Wait…”
He reaches a climax in his search through the cluttered dot-matrix printed papers with the perforated edges.
“Here we go. Now I have you. Yes. You’re on our ex-pat list. You haven’t filed your taxes in ten years.”
“Nine.”
“Nope. Says ten.”
“Well, I haven’t had any income for that long either. I only recently got this job. I did send a letter to the Philidelphia saying that I’d file if I ever got a job again.”
“Right. Either way. Make sure you clear that up or there’ll be hell to pay – excuse my French. You know how the IRS can be.” He laughed and shuffled more papers. “And don’t worry about the death of the bird. It’s been taken care of – accordingly.”
“You realize bird-flu has hit US shores?” I asked.
“You have the flue?” he said.
“No, birdflu. H5N1? Whatever. You were asking me about high schools kids and if I’ve noticed anything strange in the community”
“That’s right,” he said.
“I only noticed the bird hitting the ground,” I said while he made marks in his Wal Mart spiral pad.
“We also want to know if you’ve been listening to this man?”
Julstice pulled out a computer printed pic of Mike Molloy.
“That’s that radio host. Yeah. He’s pretty crazy.”
“So you have been listening to him?”
“I podcast him. He’s part of my re-acclimation therapy.”
“We’re aware of that. And you haven’t seen any school kids doing strange things around here?”
“No.”
“Fine, then. Here…”

He gave me a business card with shinny raised letters that included a one eight-hundred number; he also handed me a mint with the red and white spirals, reassuring me that the number was enough.

That night, for the first time in just over six months, I didn’t podcast Mike Molloy. Instead I drank a bottle off overly expensive California red wine, when I should have bought an overly expensive bottle of Italian wine, and ended up having the strangest dream about Isaac Newton and the bird.

It is a myth that Newton witnessed an Apple falling from a tree which caused him to postulate gravity. But like most myths there is an origin that is devoid of mystery. During an inquiry by Royal Society board members regarding a recently published anonymous document about gravity, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a controversial friend of Newton and fellow society member, fell ill after being hit on the head by a very heavy stone. The cause of the blow was due to inexcusable gestures he made to a very young, but also very womanly, niece of Newton. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier had lured her under an apple tree and was subsequently hospitalized with a major concussion. Early diagnosis was a traumatic head injury that to immediate neurological illness, to include delusions.

For the board members of the Royal Society questioning the publication and Newton admitting to not having written it, there was only one other person who could have. When approached regarding the document, it is said that, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, in an almost catatonic state, admitted to writing the document as a prank to get back at Newton for causing him great anguish and emotional hardship.

But the members of the board to the Royal Society were perplexed. What did de Duillier mean by Newton having caused him “anquish”? Or did it have something to do with the research being done within the tight confines of the university? Did this have something to do with the hierarchy of the Royal Society and Newton’s controversial election to lead that society?

Fortunately the published document caused little excitement. Mostly this was due to the fact that it contained mathematical formulations few could understand. Beyond that it also said denied God as a factor in defining gravity.

de Duillier’s misguided advance to Newton’s niece, was, of course, a godsend – and Newton knew it. There were two servants who witnessed, what was now being termed, the assault on the young woman. The servants clearly described the situation as having occurred under the apple tree behind the rose garden, the heavy stone was in actuality a brick taken from a supply that was being used for repairs to the south fence of the grounds. But most importantly this was the perfect opportunity for Newton to finally be rid of the dubious de Duillier.

When the infamous document arrived Newton’s first reaction was that of humour. A large smile appeared on his face. The formula was taken directly from his newly formulated universal concept of gravity.

unconventional manner not seen in a man in those quarters regarding both a “love affair” and a new mathematical formula.
Frustrated and confused and unwilling to leave the Royal Society on anyone else’s terms de Duillier began the crusade of proving his manhood. Hence the lovely niece. Being the great thinker that he was, he went on the offensive and decided that his … The hit on the head of Duillier caused premature neurodegenerative disease
1. Newton’s First Law (also known as the Law of Inertia) states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by a net external force.
2. Newton’s Second Law states that an applied force equals the rate of change of momentum. For constant mass: F=ma, (Force = Mass × Acceleration) or force equals mass times acceleration. In other words, the acceleration produced by a net force on an object is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force and inversely proportional to the mass. In the MKS system of measurement, mass is given in kilograms, acceleration in meters per second squared, and force in newtons (named in his honor).
3. Newton’s Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Suck on thumb now.

I love to imagine what De Vinci went through, how difficult it was for him, the scientist and truth-seeker hiding behind the mundane facade of an artist. What did he say, how did he talk among peers whom he trusted and did not trust? Or Einstein when he would entertain frivolous questions about God? Was De Vinci full of so much wit as Einstein?

What is it that drives us to want to believe so much in things worth a hoot?

“Move thumb slowly but surely from your ass to your mouth,” is the subtext of the preacher.

This is where the so-called conservative and liberal fight will fail. Because there is no need for truth-seeking. The formula is missing today. F=ma.

Think Future

I have not been true to you my dear. Notes and thoughts have made their way to other books. And as you can see, you have not been forgotten. You’ll be happy to know I’ve taken steps to move on. Of course this could be temporary but for how long I do not know.

Remember it’s always about the context.

He: You want me to pay you?

She: Yes.

He: But I’ve never paid for it.

She: Which is probably why you’re here. There’s always a first.

He: I don’t understand. You have a job.

She: Please. You try living in this cit on my salary. Look. I told you to … that we should just be friends.

He: Yeah, but…

She: I need to know if this (can) ruin(s) our friendship.

He: But We haven’t done anything (yet).

She: Oh yes we have. I am dependent on your discretion now.

He: I don’t kiss and tell. So. You have done this with… who?

She: You don’t actually think I’m going to tell you that?

He: You can… I was just curious.

She: Well get that under control.

He: If I pay you you’ll really…

She: Don’t be so surprised. More do it than you know.

He: I’m very attracted to you.

She: I can tell. You need to get that under control.

He: Who else does it?

She: Enough.

He: Ok. Here… (takes out his wallet.)

She: This changes everything.

He: Like what?

She: You’ll be dependent on my.

He: I have nothing to lose, except a bad job, I’m not an elected official.

She: Think about your future.

You know, highschool gave me everything I need for life–but it could not prepare me (or anyone) for what America would become.