Three Hailstones

I rushed out and made room to shelter one of the cars in the garage. That was something else! I never knew I could move all that stuff so fast!

Tornado Warning until 6:30 pm EST Wednesday

A tornado has been sighted or indicated by radar in your area – seek shelter immediately!

Oops! Better run!

It’s not the Democrat Party. It’s the Democratic Party.

A member of the Democratic Party is a Democrat.

I don’t know what the right-wing imagines might be gained by referring to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party. The far right seems to think that this terminology works as a pejorative. It doesn’t. It just makes you sound a little bit stupid, and not in a way that makes anyone want to hang out with you.

It’s just silly.

I’m grateful that no-one on the other side seems to have fallen for any mirroring. The “Republic Party” is even more absurd than the “Democrat Party.”

I’ve heard this a lot lately, even on relatively reputable news programs.

What baffles me is why no-one ever seems to correct the person who says it. They just let it slide, and I suppose it’s meant to affect us in some subliminal fashion.

Word to intelligent Republicans, talking-point authors, and assorted blowhards: It doesn’t work.

Inside of insidiously slithering into our minds, it only just makes the speaker seem even more annoying.

Time to retire it.

This has been a public service announcement.

Click to view video

Prayer for You

How do you get God’s attention? Try sweet talking his girlfriend.
by Rob Breznsy

This is a perfect moment. It’s a perfect moment because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I’ve been roused to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of you — even those of you who don’t believe in the power of prayer.

And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods… the God beyond all Gods… the Girlfriend of God… the Teacher of God… the Goddess who invented God.

Dear Goddess, you who never kill but only change:

I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads this benediction.

I pray that you will give them what they don’t even know they need — not just the boons they think they want but everything they’ve always been afraid to even imagine or ask for.

Dear Goddess, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:

Many of the divine chameleons out there don’t even know that their souls will live forever. So please use your brash magic to help them see that they are all wildly creative geniuses too big for their own personalities.

Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what they’ve been led to believe about themselves, and more exciting than they can possibly imagine.

Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for them to be in love with anyone or anything that’s no good for them.

O Goddess, you who give us so much love and pain mixed together that our morality is always on the verge of collapsing:

I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the dumb ideas, bad decisions, and nasty conditioning that have ever cursed the wise and sexy virtuosos out there.

Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung to them, no matter how long they’ve suffered from it, and even if they’ve become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.

Please conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive an early warning if they are ever about to act in such a way as to bring another hex or plague into their lives in the future.

Dear Goddess, sweet Goddess, you sly universal virus with no f*cking opinion:

Please help all the personal growth addicts out there to become disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.

Teach them the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating self-control.

Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing.

Arouse the Wild Woman within them — even if they’re men.

Dear Goddess, you pregnant sl*t who scorns all mediocre longing:

I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate rascals communing with this prayer to kick their own asses and wash their own brains.

Provoke them to throw away or give away all the things they own that encourage them to believe that they are better than anyone else.

Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they cannot do and do not have.

Give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

Most of all, Goddess, brainwash them with your freedom so that they never love their own pain more than anyone else’s pain.

Oh Goddess, you wildly disciplined, radically curious, shockingly friendly, fanatically balanced, mysteriously truthful, teasingly healing, lyrically logical master of rowdy bliss:

I ask you to give your unconventionally unconditional love to all the budding messiahs who read this prayer; love them with all of your ocean and sky and fire and earth.

Cultivate in yourself a fervent yearning for their companionship. Play with them every day. Answer their questions. Listen to their stories.

Inspire them not just to nag you for what they want, but also to thank you for the uncanny gifts you flood them with.

And if there are any pockets of ignorance or hatred these insanely poised creators might be harboring, any inadvertent idiocies that keep them blind to your blessings, please flush them out as soon as possible.

Dear Goddess, You psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our brains:

Bless all the inscrutable creators out there with lucid dreams while they are wide awake, and their very own spin doctors, and solar-powered sex toys that work even in the dark, and vacuum cleaners for their magic carpets, and a knack for avoiding other people’s hells, and a thousand masks that all represent their true feelings, and secret admirers who are not psychotic stalkers.

Arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or an underground river, or a boulevard in an exotic vacationland, or a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn or Jupiter.

Teach them to push their own buttons and unbreak their own hearts and right their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and save their own lives.

Dear Goddess, You fiercely tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm animal bodies:

I pray that you provide all the original sinners out there with a license to bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart from the things they love.

Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from their daring, dramatic, divine desires.

And teach them that they can have anything they want if they’ll only ask for it in an unselfish way.

And now dear God of Gods, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that in these mysterious moments you have begun to change everyone out there in the exact way they’ve needed to change in order to become the gorgeous geniuses they were born to be.

Amen. Awomen.

Wow. That really charges my battery – how about you?

I think I still have some Swiss Kriss – my secret weapon – around here somewhere. This stuff is the only thing I know about that might help, since I’ve started wheezing now. Swiss Kriss is a laxative tea. I’ve never actually tasted it, but the combination of herbs is powerful.

Here’s what to do:

1. Prepare a space on the counter, and grab a big towel.
2. Get a nice wide pot and boil some water in it.
3. Throw in a bunch of the Swiss Kriss tea.
4. Turn the heat down to a simmer.
5. Make it at least double the strength of tea that you’d drink, steeping for at least five minutes.
6. Carefully transfer the pot onto the counter.
7. Drape the towel over the back of your head like a parachute, to catch as much of the steam as you can.
8. Be careful not to burn yourself. Gradually move into the steam.
9. Take regular, deep breaths through your nose and mouth.
10. Almost immediately, your sinuses will drain.
11. Then your face will sweat, and you’ll start coughing.
12. Continue to breathe in the herbal steam for at least 10 minutes.

This clears out all the gunk in your sinuses and in your lungs, and it’s even good for your skin. I usually follow up with a nice long shower to amplify the effect.

I’m really sensitive to decongestants and antihistamines and I try to avoid both. This more mechanical method has always been a lot more effective for me.

Hold On by KT Tunstall

Click to view video

Say you to me
You’re a bird with an eye for anything shiny
Searching the land
For a hero of a man

You say I need
More than my fair share of attention
But I think you know
That just isn’t so

Underneath
I felt the fire of a burning question
Tearing me apart
Right from the very start

And now I see
That it don’t take a trick of the light to excite me
So strong, So long,
You’ll see

Hold on to what you’ve been given lately
Hold on to what you know you’ve got
Hold on to what you’ve been given lately
Hold on cos the world will turn if you’re ready or not

Simplicity
A heart of gold
An old head on young shoulders
Quiet and lovely
Becoming part of me
And now I see
From a handful of names and a thousand faces
One light, burning fiercely

I was tired of January
I was tired of June
I felt a change coming
I was tired of January
Tired of June
I felt a change a coming

I felt a change a coming
I felt a change a coming
I felt a change a coming
I felt a change a coming soon

Hold on to what you’ve been given lately
Hold on to what you know you’ve got
Hold on to what you’ve been given lately
Hold on cos the world will turn if you’re ready or not

Hold on to what you’ve been given lately
Hold on to what you know you’ve got
Hold on to what you’ve been given lately
Hold on cos the world will turn if you’re ready or not

Well the world will turn if you’re ready or not
Yes the world will turn if you’re ready or not

This is a good one: quiddity.

The word “quiddity” (Latin quidditas) is one way to denote the idea of the real nature or essence of a thing, the very thing that makes it what it is. Literally, it translates as “whatness” or “what it is.”

That sounds very individualistic to an American ear, and “what is it” sounds like it might be referring to the truth about something. But it refers to what something has in common with other somethings of its type. It is the opposite of haecceity – the “thisness” of someone or something that makes it an individual being, separate from any other.

But quiddity has another meaning, and it is a strange one. How could a word that means the very essence of something, the very thing that sets it off from other types of beings – while still holding it in commonality with its own group – also be a quibble, a trivial objection, an academic point?

Maybe it’s a comment on itself. A quibble is also a narrative device that uses the precise literal conditions of an agreement in order to avoid the intended meaning.

Maybe all the searches for the essences of things, all the groupings – say, for example, stereotypes – are a kind of quibble. The labels and words that we use when we try to describe a unique thing tends to fall from haecceity to quiddity because individual words for individual beings would have no meaning between people. They cannot communicate anything more than some sort of group identity, even in the case of names (that signal species or nationality or history or paternity, etc.). Even names, unless they are very unique names, don’t communicate what is essential about a person or an animal. They are only signs.

And so they cannot carry the meaning of the “thisness” – only the “whatness.” We try to describe something essential – say, in a eulogy, or in trying to tell someone what makes them so special and unique – but we can only point to traits of commonality with others, and most of those are clichés anyway.

If you want to do statistical analysis – or a very literal biblical interpretation – or a phylogenetic diagram of the tree of life – then quiddity will serve to slice and dice your world. But in some circumstances, that’s a limited form of insight. That’s why I think stories and poetry do more for us, ultimately, than naming and organized sets.

Narrative and imaginative vision (music, painting, and so on) pull us together in a more essential way through our individual selves, whereas listing the commonalities (and assuming stable differences) sets us apart from one another – by group as well as by person.

So, lesson one for Adam was naming the animals, setting the categories based on… what?
I wonder what the upper lessons are (or would have been) in that story.