Today’s almost random topic comes from a very kickass Fishbone song, to wit :

Watching the video, it occurs to me that you almost never see a black guy playing acoustic guitar.

I mean, they must be out there. There must be black folkies. But other than the guy at the beginning of the video I just linked and Tracy Chapman, I can’t think of any.

Hello there all you fine and fancy folks. Here we are between topics again. I suppose this is the default mode of my blog, really. Perpendicular output, that is to say, linear in a way that is rotated ninety degrees from the common plane. It is a straight line through my twisted mind, and hence seems random and meandering to those outside the framing context.

And seeing as the framing context is the inside of my brain, most of you out there can not see it. (And for all you who can, enjoy the show, no refunds, and the management cannot be held responsible for lost items, innocence, sanity, or lunches. )

Today has been the usual quiet Saturday. I am, as per the norm, alone in the apartment while Joe and Julian are visiting with Joe’s family for board games.

Speaking of Joe, it was his birthday yesterday. He is an early Taurus, the sun having only entered that sign a week ago. I am a late Taurus, born May 19, quite near the transition to Gemini, but not as close as my other roomie (and Joe’s love) Julian, born on the 20th.

So we are an all Taurus household. Makes for a quiet, stable home. Just how we like it! Maybe we could use something to shake the place up now and then, but what the heck, nothing is perfect.

And perfection is not as perfect as it used to be anyhow.

Really liked this bit of dark and morbid comedy I found called (for some reason) If I Could Be Sweet by an author calling herself L. K. Shaw.

I love its tone of self-indulgent morbidity and deliberate silliness. It is not the sort of story to take too literally, otherwise you will get bogged down in logistical and logical questions about how is it nobody can tell the narrator is still alive and how she survive the trip in the coffin and so on, and missed out on the fun little romp about life and death and boredom and angst and life in the modern world, where we can get so stuck in our middle class weightlessness that we throw ourselves in front of a train just to feel something besides numbness for once.

To give it my usual highest compliment, I wish I had written If I Could Be Sweet. I certainly find the style and approach extremely appealing, and immediately began feeding large and meaty chunks of it into the vast and seething cauldron marked “MY INFLUENCES” in the middle of my brain.

A lot of people would be offended, I suppose, by how casually it treats things like suicide and death and rituals of mourning and so on. Certainly, if you want to be offended, there are plenty of grounds.

But me, I have a big morbid streak and a pretty sick and twisted sense of humour, and so a story like that is right up my twisted little alley. And who hasn’t wondered who would show up at their funeral,and what they would have to say about you now that you are gone,

It is a supreme bit of egotism, and I have entertained the notion myself many times.

Also under the category of twisted fun, we have this delightful article filled with everybody’s favorite, historical predictions that turned out to be extremely and hilariously wrong.

Here are a few of my faves from the article :

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty–a fad.” – The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903.

How much you want to bet that said bank president eventually made a sudden disappearance off of the invite list for Horace Rackam’s social calendar once the Model T took off?

But some of these are more understandable. Like take this one :

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” – Marechal Ferdinand Foch, 1904.

And that was perfectly true…. in 1904. Even as late as the early days of World War II, it was not clear that airplanes were good for anything but maybe reconnaissance. It takes a very special kind of person to be able to see past the immediate limitations of a new technology and see the possibilities that open up once those limitations are overcome.

And some of these are so idealistic and naive that is practically breaks your heart.

“By the year 1982 the graduated income tax will have practically abolished major differences in wealth.” – Irwin Edman, professor of philosophy Columbia University, 1932.

Oh, if only, Professor Edman. What you failed to foresee is that that money is power, and the people with the money are the people in power, and they will use that power to protect their money and hence their power. One of the fundamentals of human nature is that power seeks to protect itself, and that the people with the power will forever use that power to maintain itself, and to seek more power. The gathering and consolidation of power in fewer and fewer hands is like a fundamental law of the physics of human nature, and the primary opponent in the fight for social justice.

And the fight against corruption, which is basically the same thing. The definition of justice is “the degree to which power equals responsibility”. Perfect justice would mean that justice and responsibility are in perfect balance with one another.

But power without responsibility is the dark dream that is the soul of all corruption, and lurks within the hearts of all people, awaiting only the opportunity to tempt good people into wrong action.

Damn, I should write for Stan Lee.