He wanted her to kill.

Just as much fun as the monkey chants and banana tosses whenever a black player enters the field!

Most beach poems are sad. Most poems are sad. Most lives are sad. ‘The reason that there are so many depressed people,’ writes UD‘s guru, Adam Phillips, ‘is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.‘

After a morning reading lots of beach poems, UD finds herself charmed by this old-fashioned one – strict end rhyme and pretty strict meter, written in 1913 by a guy you’ve never heard of – Ridgely Torrence – and titled “Santa Barbara Beach.” It could have been any beach – Nungwi, Sarandë – cuz almost no beach poems are specific to the sand where the poet happens to have sunk his/her feet. Poetic beaches are beaches whose vast uncontrollable deathless sublimity catalyzes thoughts of human frailty, brevity, fatality. On a big beach under a bright sun we stand out in dramatic relief in all our littleness against the massive depth and breadth of the ocean, and this evokes thoughts of our sweetness and poignancy, to be sure – we are drawn to the ocean’s shore because we are drawn to beauty, might, heat, majesty, eternality, which is a very nice thing about us qua humans – but it mainly evokes thoughts of our brief befuddled plunge into being.

I’ll interrupt your reading of this poem with commentary. Read it without interruption here.

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Santa Barbara Beach

by Ridgely Torrence

Now while the sunset offers,
Shall we not take our own:
The gems, the blazing coffers,
The seas, the shores, the throne?

[A spectacular sunset lights up a jeweled world of riches, possibilities, and the poet invites us to take our share. This feels like a world we own, and this is the moment to grasp it with joy.]

The sky-ships, radiant-masted,
Move out, bear low our way.
Oh, Life was dark while it lasted,
Now for enduring day.

[The rayed sinking sun is like a brilliantly lit ship, the rays the masts, and its lowness on the horizon feels like a generous bow toward us, the owners of the world, a bow that lights up our path along the strand. In an ironic reversal, the poet describes daylight life as dark, and sunset life as light — in the harsh light of typical day, we see and feel the paucity of our spiritual surroundings. But in the gleaming disseminated light of sunset, we feel our earth and ourselves emblazoned in a low enveloping flame, a flame that feels as though it will last forever.]

Now with the world far under,
To draw up drowning men
And show them lands of wonder
Where they may build again.

[Day is done, its world is subdued, and the spiritual light of sunset can now transport us from our “drowned” lives (We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.) to a higher world of new possibilities.]

There earthly sorrow falters,
There longing has its wage;
There gleam the ivory altars
Of our lost pilgrimage.

[This stanza elaborates upon the rich world of human and spiritual possibilities illuminated by the setting sun, a sun which puts the daylight world “under” and illuminates a new world of new life. Sorrow, longing, lostness – all that we feel in our daylight lives, vanishes in the brilliant promise of this moment.]

Swift flame—then shipwrecks only
Beach in the ruined light;
Above them reach up lonely
The headlands of the night.

[Sudden nasty transition here: Sunset’s mystic flame lasted only moments, and in its ruined light we see “what’s really always there” — the oncoming black of deathly night. Night is even darker, if you will, than day.]

A hurt bird cries and flutters
Her dabbled breast of brown;
The western wall unshutters
To fling one last rose down.

[These are images of beautiful natural things – the bird, the rose – in their last moments. The oncoming black wall at least lets one last petal down for us.]

A rose, a wild light after—
And life calls through the years,
“Who dreams my fountain’s laughter
Shall feed my wells with tears.”

[In life, we have epiphanies – moments of illumination, wild light, when in extreme beauty and meaning, the world calls to us.

But what does it say? We who love life and hear within it the laughter of joy and spirit, are doomed – post-sunset – to weep oceans of tears. The more we expect of existence, the more betrayed we will be.

“Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”]

WAY ratchet, and security is loose. But the good people of Florence SC — and its political establishment — seem to love it.

A working class community (small homes with pickups in front of them) is bullet-riddled after a gunfight at an Airbnb party hits neighboring houses.

Showing a reporter the bullet holes in his house, one guy says this.

“There’s been a couple of times, maybe five times over the last two-and-a-half years, where there’s been some disturbances and these raging parties. Even on Monday nights until 2 a.m…. I don’t have a problem if people want to stay here, but it was less than quiet last night.”

What’s less than quiet in contemporary America? The bullets only pierce your refrigerator and not your kids.

Some 86 percent of police officers are male, a group already at higher risk for suicide, and officers have ready access to firearms, which departments are loath to take away for fear of further discouraging cops from seeking help. In many suicides, officers use their own service weapons. Research has shown that proximity to suicide is in itself a risk factor, causing a potential contagion effect.

Police officers have higher rates of depression than other American workers. Shift work, which disrupts sleep, and alcohol use, long the profession’s culturally accepted method of blowing off steam and managing stress, further compound health issues. 

A lavishly insane 13, 14, 15 year old madly transmitting her mass murder intentions has a degenerate father who feeds her Glocks and Sig Sauers and is too drunk to know where his guns are.

He’s likely excited at the prospect of his daughter shooting people.

In a normal country, this scenario would attract the attention of child protective services, but here, because guns are things of beauty, we let it go until she opens fire at her school.

O look what she did.

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Now they’ve scooped up the father and plastered some felonies on him and he’ll almost certainly be convicted and join the growing Parental Gun Supporting Group in our prisons.

[A school-age hijabi is typically] banned from riding a bike, swimming or participating in other activities that characterize a healthy childhood. She is taught, directly or indirectly, from an early age that she is a sexual object, and it is her responsibility to hide her features from the opposite sex, lest she attract them. A heavy burden for modesty is placed squarely on her shoulders. So many women have been traumatized by such an upbringing, which, I believe, frankly borders on child abuse. 

Various European schools have already banned the child-hijab, and more are doing it all the time.

These [latest gun] arrests contribute to the significant amount of criminal activity that occurred during a 48-hour time span over Spring Break weekend, as confirmed by Virginia Beach police.

On April 28, Virginia Beach police said 53 people were arrested over the course of Spring Break weekend. This resulted in nearly 200 criminal charges being issued.

A non-comprehensive list of the arrests made was released by the department. Of the 38 people on the list, most are adults in their late teens or early twenties. Those on the list range in age from 14 to 53, and everyone except the 14-year-old are adults.

********************

Noncomprehensive because they know there are far more.

Guntards remain in a rage about Washington State’s low gun-murder rate, and its latest state supreme court decision will really have them coughing up blood. Like Hawaii, Washington significantly trails the rest of the country in mass shootings. Both states can expect continued pressure to give child-slaughterers more firepower.

… monolingual Americans thing.

He speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese, and … can read German and Latin.

… Bonnie and Clyde vibes.

 On Saturday evening, deputies got a 911 call about someone shooting [an AR-15] from the window of a black Mustang at a deer …

The same car was reported to be recklessly driving in the area, doing burnouts in the middle of the road and racing through the streets …

Deputies … observed the Mustang pass them doing 117 MPH …

As deputies searched for the car, dispatch got another 911 call about the black Mustang’s involvement in a hit-and-run, where it side swiped a 2018 Mercedes and left the area.

 … William Franklin, 19, from Oklahoma, surrendered to deputies. The second passenger Mason Guidry, 20, of Louisiana and driver Justin Franklin, 36, of Oklahoma, and father of William Franklin, were found in a nearby field where they were trying to hide.

Mason surrendered, while Justin refused to cooperate, according to the sheriff. Justin Franklin was taken into custody after being bit by the K9.

Father/son massacrists were on the FBI’s radar, but they just let it happen. They just watched as the son enrolled in a new killing field and let it rip, with the AR-15 style rifle his father gave this 14-year-old as a gift.

You don’t get these outcomes unless your country wants massacres.

Christopher Edward Jones, 34, may not be able to afford much house, but when it comes to his gun the sky’s the limit.

And what’s he supposed to do, having shot that wad on a gun he turns out to have virtually no opportunity to use? Any one of us would have done what he did: Get plastered and start shooting it off in the community.

I told Mr UD about Mr Jones and he said “I’d like to know what kind of car he has.”

“Easy,” said UD. “A $50,000 Ford F-150. I’d like to know how many other thousand dollar guns he has.”