— PLUS as a special bonus you get to live down the street from Cletus Spuckler and his AR15.
Cletus don’t right know why he sits on his porch shooting off a pistol and the AR but he just do it and neighbors call the cops and Cletus shoots at the cops even though they very clearly and loudly tell him to put the guns down.
Maybe he celebrating the election. Maybe he just all drunk as a skunk.
UD thinks most likely his thinking was something like “Paid 4 thou for these fuckers and gonna use em.” An economic decision.
Monroe Louisiana isn’t Number One every year, but it’s always up there, esp. for violent crime, and this blog has followed its bloody fortunes for years. “If you want nothing more out of life than bass fishing, drugs, deer hunting, corrupt cops, high school football and crime, then Monroe is the place for you,” says a knowledgeable source, and UD doesn’t see “a college education” on that list.
There are four schools in and around Monroe, with Grambling a huge violence standout, but get a load of this wittle Louisiana Tech student’s dorm room! Not just tons of Nazi material; not just drugs all over the place being readied for sale; but “a 9mm handgun with one magazine, a .38 revolver, and the lower portion of an M4. An M4 is similar to an AR-15.” The tyke was manufacturing machine guns in there.
Even by San Diego State standards, this is really something. Good ol’ Monroe.
Kakuzo Okakura’s 1906 Book of Tea, standard reading in aesthetics courses, sets out The Way of Tea Retreat, sets apart the tea-room as the very heart of considered, intentional, beautiful separation of oneself from a world which has suddenly become crushingly vile.
The littleness and fragility of the tea-room expresses its temporary nature: This is no permanent escapist chamber, but rather a place to which we have recourse, perhaps daily, to learn and relearn the discipline of “properly regulating our own existence on this tumultuous sea of foolish troubles which we call life… The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians or the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of woe and worry.” And the art of tea – Teaism – lies in the quiet preparation and enjoyment of the smoky transformative brew which will somehow in its modest way be part of reconciling you to a hateful world, be part of allowing you a kind of flourishing within it. “We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium, and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon. Yet there is joy and beauty in the roll of billows as they sweep outward toward eternity. Why not enter into their spirit, or [even] ride upon the hurricane itself?”
Inside the personal sanctuary of the tea-room, where “even in the daytime the light in the room is subdued, for the low eaves of the slanting roof admit but few of the sun’s rays. Everything is sober in tint from the ceiling to the floor; the guests themselves have carefully chosen garments of unobtrusive colors. The mellowness of age is over all,” you may engage in soul-reanimation. The universe is dimmed for the ignition of your spark, something in the way of Henri Bergson’s élan vital, the creative energy immanent in us and subject always to diminishment by the world of other people. “It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment,” because all effort is toward the emergence of your presence and spiritedness; “fugitiveness is suggested in the thatched roof, frailty in the slender pillars, lightness in the bamboo support, apparent carelessness in the use of commonplace materials,” because the strength at issue here is your own.
Retreat, as of today, is in the air. We dynamic postmoderns will race through the 5 Stages (Incredulity, Anger, Irony, Snark, RETREAT), and conclude on the one that will have us eyeing that extra, kind of do-nothing room in the house and sizing it up as a site of Stoic Elaboration — a place where you bolster yourself with Marcus Aurelius and with bolsters.
This sort of thing. Ideally, you want high windows and a view - urban or rural, but something of interest to contemplate as you sip your Senecan Brew. On stormy days, switch to What does not kill me makes me stronger-esque Nietzschean aphorisms. Or the astringent poetry of Weldon Kees.
... Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick, Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are involved.
You are involved; no point, even in your tranquil new tearoom, in being uninvolved. Daily books and teas and views stimulate and calm you (all good tea stimulates and calms), and ready you and steady you for the bellowing bastards abroad. Your tearoom is indeed a retreat from imperiling stupidity; but, you know, as Henry James put it:
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
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More on emergent tearoom culture after I sit on the beach for awhile.
[In a 2016 presidential run,] Sandu faced open discrimination during the race for being a single woman, and was openly attacked by former Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin who accused her of betraying “family values” and calling her the “laughingstock, the sin and the national disgrace of Moldova” in remarks widely regarded as profoundly misogynistic. She rejected the insults in an interview, replying that “I never thought being a single woman is a shame. Maybe it is a sin even to be a woman?”
UD voted awhile back, by mail, and would now rather ponder the cosmos than catastrophe. Catastrophic it would certainly be if my fellow Americans carry the clown show to victory, but meanwhile there are dolphins riding the waves, and there are meteor showers, and UD wants to see them.
Silly police lieutenant John Rodgers has not been listening in church! His announcement to the Ohioans in his district that he’ll let them die if they’re Democrats overlooks the fact that, as a saved Christian, his job is not to help Satan’s spawn SURVIVE the Rapture: God has decreed that he need only enjoy his own transport to Heaven. Recall the old verse:
We are the pure and chosen few, and all the rest are damned.
There’s room enough in hell for you — we don’t want heaven crammed.
The arrest of prof. Dairon Garcia for drug trafficking is the latest of too many to count instances of high-level sleaze. Feast your eyes on this blog’s coverage of the nation’s dirtiest med school.
Adam Gopnik has in mind people like raving lunatic John Sawchak, who for fifteen years — thanks to the give-a-shit Minneapolis police — terrorized his neighbors and finally shot one of them. The cops’ argument seems to be that they didn’t arrest him because they’re afraid of him, which is one hilarious argument, mes petites, but anyway, incredible as it is, the city authorities just let Sawchak endlessly slash and burn his way around the streets surrounding his house despite everyone begging them for help.
Only when he almost shot to death a guy trimming a tree did the police sit up and take a little notice.
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Sawchak’s just like that crazed old dude who brought Atlanta to a halt the other day while blasting various guns off his balcony. Neighbors confirmed he was a well-known, very heavily armed, berserko, but the apartment/city decided the best thing to do was continue allowing him to arm himself and only act when he did a Charles Whitman. One thinks also of Stephen Paddock, who carried an army’s worth of guns and ammo to his Las Vegas hotel room without anyone stopping him and asking why he was taking so many enormous packages over many days onto the elevator.
See my thing is if you WANT 450 million guns (and growing) and no serious gun laws, something’s gotta give. And that thing is personal liberties. The country can’t afford non-militarized high schools. It can’t afford non-institutionalized aggressive crazy people. Fifteen year olds didn’t back in the day carry loaded guns to school; now they do, on a very routine basis. Crazy people didn’t routinely amass armories and take aim at crowds of people from balconies and other locations.
Charles Whitman used to be something of a novelty.
If Paddock wasn’t as overtly nuts as those other guys, he was a well-known weirdo at the casinos, and he was known to own massive numbers of guns. He should have been under active surveillance before he killed sixty and wounded 413. It’s amazing that gun-mad America ignores its gunny and mad population.
