Thinking aloud

"If you’re just waking up, CNN has by far the best coverage."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:03:46 -0400

“If you’re just waking up, CNN has by far the best coverage.”

- @AnnCoulter
(via kateoplis)
Ha ha ha

19 th April, 2013

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:24:32 -0400

What a day, what a week and it has ended for some of us. Some will continue to heal and hurt. For now, a youngster is in custody. The soul searching begins- the why of it all. Someone on twitter said that all tragedies begin with a single person’s descent into a certain kind of madness. At the back of my mind, I’m thinking this likely happens everyday in Syria. Happened in Bangalore, India. Also,this is the week when gun control in the form of universal back ground check failed. Such a long way to go for all of us.

kateoplis: on par An economy of words with a world of meaning.

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:12:58 -0400

kateoplis:

on par

An economy of words with a world of meaning.

Terrible Lizard #anzaborregostatepark

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:28:47 -0400

Terrible Lizard #anzaborregostatepark

I’m so small-the desert is so big #anzaborregostatepark

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:28:28 -0400

I’m so small-the desert is so big #anzaborregostatepark

A Supermarket in California, by Allen Ginsberg

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:29:57 -0400

A Supermarket in California, by Allen Ginsberg:

chels:

An excerpt from this fantastic poem I read for the first time tonight:

     In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

     What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families
shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

     I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the 
grocery boys.

     I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?

     I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

     We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

     Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in an 
hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

The only way to make grocery shopping entertaining: imagine doing it with Walt Whitman and/or Allen Ginsberg.

Grocery shopping will never be the same again

jayparkinsonmd: I met my girlfriend, Paige, a few weeks after...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:22:47 -0400

jayparkinsonmd:

I met my girlfriend, Paige, a few weeks after her brother, Justin, was shot and killed in Seattle. Justin was married to an ER physician and had two young children. He was an early Microsoft employee and was, at the time, working as a developer at Zillow. Paige’s parents were in Seattle visiting Justin and his family. They went to run some errands and were sitting at a stop light when a fight broke out on the sidewalk. A kid in the fight pulled out a gun and fired off a few shots presumptively trying to shoot the kid he was fighting. When the gunshots stopped, the car inched forward. Justin was shot in the head and died in his father’s arms in front of his mother and two children who were in the backseat.

There are no words to describe how tragic this story is.

Last July, just a few months after Justin’s passing, Paige and I were eating dinner in my backyard and we heard gunshots in the front. We went outside a few moments later, saw nothing, but called the police anyway. Within a few minutes, the police arrived and found someone shot a few doors down on the other side of the street.

Two nights ago, at 3:30 in the morning, I woke to gunshots just outside my window. Fearing for my safety because I live on the ground floor, I waited a bit and looked outside and saw nothing. Yesterday, my neighbor texted me to say there was a drive-by shooting two doors down from my apartment. They inadvertently(?) shot up the house of my elderly neighbor who has lived on my block for over 65 years. She wasn’t hit and is shaken up, but fine. She lives next to a drug dealer who has lived on my block longer than me. They must have either been horrible aim or had the wrong address.

I’ve lived on my block for over 5 years. It is quiet and lovely, except for this one person. I’ve called the police at least 3 times on him, mostly due to noise and one other time was due to gunshots in the backyard. Apparently he was practicing his aim.

The shooting in July was in revenge for his mother being carjacked earlier that day in the new Jag he bought with drug money. The dealer found one of the guys who carjacked his mother and shot him. He didn’t die. But once the cops discovered who the shooter was, they entered my drug dealing neighbor’s house to presumably arrest him. As the cops were entering from the front, he ran to the back, opened up a window and tossed his gun out the window, nearly hitting a cop who was entering from the back of the house.

He’s been away, presumably in prison, for the past few months and the block has been wonderfully quiet. No deals and no gunshots. Rumor is, he’s out on bail, and now is a wanted man by presumably another drug dealer. The cops are currently stationed on my street 24/7 for the foreseeable future. This is very atypical for my neighborhood. I live in probably the nicest part of Williamsburg. But, it only takes one shitty person to bring down a significant portion of the neighborhood.

Guns are horrible. Guns in the hands of people are even worse. The gun advocates, like my father and my brother, will say that we need more citizens armed with guns, because the only way to stop a bad guy with guns is a good guy with guns.

That obviously doesn’t make sense. If Justin had a gun in his car, that wouldn’t have helped him. If I had been shot while I was sleeping because of a mistaken address, a gun near my bed wouldn’t have helped me. Good guys with guns didn’t help Trayvon nor the kids in Newtown nor the theater in Aurora. More people were shot in Chicago the day of the Aurora shooting than the people shot in the theater. It’s easy to support your right to guns when you live a protected life far away from the inner cities. Guns become more of a symbolic protection from “all the bad people in the world” who are different and far away from you. But when you live in the cities because you value diversity in race, socioeconomic status, and culture, guns simply make your existence much less safe.

This is a public health crisis that’s always been and always will be.

About 30,000 people are killed by guns in America every year. Gunshots are only 10% fatal, therefore about 300,000 people are shot every year in America. This is a massive cost to our healthcare system in both human lives and dollars.

But, of course, the real issue here is that our “freedom” to own guns enslaves us. I do not feel safe in my own house. But this in no way compares to Paige and what her family has been through in the past 11 months. Justin is gone because he was an innocent bystander in a country that cherishes their right to form a well-armed militia. I’m glad I live in at least a civilized city where the vast majority of people do not want guns in the hands of every citizen. However, because we unfortunately consider ourselves part of the United States, I still have to feel unsafe because guns are so easy to get both legally and illegally. And Paige and her family still has to struggle on a daily basis with this “freedom.” It’s sick. And until you experience the situation firsthand, most of us will still be yelling about our right to well-armed militias. I don’t wish Paige’s experience on anyone. But I’m sure it would make you feel differently about guns and violence in America. And I do hope, one day, we can all become an enlightened nation.

Yes, there are too many guns and no,they do not make us safer and yet we cannot do anything about this.

walk

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:22:24 -0500

on the wild side

on the beach

to build this carapace of my soul

to heal this shell of my body

just walk

and breathe

and just go..

walk away from pesky things..

like housework

and bills

and children

and relationship that

sour everyday

just walk

Spring is here-although being SoCal winter was never really...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:14:40 -0500

Spring is here-although being SoCal winter was never really here.

"It is already late,enjoy the rest as much as you can."

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:05:28 -0500

“It is already late,enjoy the rest as much as you can.”

- Socrates

"If depression is creeping up and must be faced, learn something about the nature of the beast: You..."

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 14:43:49 -0400

“If depression is creeping up and must be faced, learn something about the nature of the beast: You may escape without a mauling.”

- Dr. R. W. Shepherd (via mindovermatterzine)

the more you know,the more tools you have to deal with the beast.

"The NRA is an organization that is adamant about ‘no controls’ on weapons despite of the fact that..."

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 15:12:27 -0400

“The NRA is an organization that is adamant about ‘no controls’ on weapons despite of the fact that we have Federal laws that say you cannot sell guns to minors, to people with psychiatric problems or drug problems or convicted felons and yet they pressure congress and the White House and they’ve been doing it for decades to not fund enforcement of those laws. We don’t need more laws, we need a couple of fixes. There’s a loophole where you can sell guns w/o a background check at gun shows; 40% of guns are sold that way, same thing on the internet. We need to fix the fact that states are supposed to send records into the central database of who has psychiatric problems and who is convicted because when somebody sells a gun they have to check the database and if there’s no data in it, it wouldn’t do any good. The NRA has opposed anything […]. You know there are guns advertised on the internet “50 caliber rifle able to bring down a commercial jetliner at a mile and a half” or armor-piercing bullets. The last time I saw a deer wearing a bullet-proof vest was a long time ago. The bottom line is that weapons that are sold/advertised as high-capacity and very powerful aren’t weapons to be used in hunting and they certainly aren’t weapons to be used to defend yourself. The Supreme Court said that yes, we have a Second Amendment and you have a right to bear guns but ‘reasonable restrictions ARE constitutional’ and I think that Congress HAS passed ‘reasonable restrictions’ but to not enforce them is just ridiculous.”

- Mayor Bloomberg on Face the Nation (via kateoplis)
Truth

"…The enemy within is often, more challenging especially, in a nation so wedded to..."

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 09:51:38 -0400

“…The enemy within is often, more challenging especially, in a nation so wedded to arms…..
“Perhaps it is fitting that the leading employer in this often ignored place is an industry that only whispers its name. Aurora’s central location, high elevation, and clear prairie air long ago moved the Pentagon to locate classified and high-tech radar arrays on the edge of town. As a boy I would look from my bedroom window at the mysterious giant golf ball shapes and picture the Soviet missiles homing in on them. Aurora was certainly on the Kremlin’s map during the Cold War. Since 9/11, that function has been expanded, and now the Buckley Air Force Base employs more than 12,000 people to monitor spy satellites and Predator drones and who knows what all secret business. Defense contractors like Raytheon and Northrup-Grumman employ thousands more. It’s a shame that those extraordinary devices, which can see a man walking in the Yemeni desert or spy a campsite beside the Khyber Pass can’t discern a deranged individual and his growing arsenal in time to prevent a massacre down the street. There would be more people alive in Aurora today, and fewer grieving families. And the overlooked city would still be largely unknown, which, we now see, is not so bad after all.”

- Time magazine’s David von Drehle on his hometown of Aurora, Colo. (via washingtonpoststyle)

kateoplis: “The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian...

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 01:50:43 -0400

kateoplis: “The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian...:

kateoplis:

“The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed.

Men are far more likely to own guns than women are, but the…

To an outsider, this love of guns seems fairly illogical and mystifying.

Can we all at least agree on the reinstatement of the Assault Weapons Ban?

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 01:41:59 -0400

Can we all at least agree on the reinstatement of the Assault Weapons Ban?

NPR: "your NPR Mom"

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:25:51 -0400

NPR: "your NPR Mom":

npr:

Left on our Facebook page by a listener, Simret Berhane:

“We’re in the van, and I’m listening to NPR. My 7 year old son yells my name and asks: ‘Mom, what does preservative mean?” I turned down the radio and answer him. Then I turn it back up to continue listening to my program, when he…

Similar experiences with our backseat drivers,as well

beingblog: “Give me the work and I’ll do it; give me the stew...

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:23:58 -0400

beingblog:

“Give me the work and I’ll do it; give me the stew and I’ll stew it; give me the bell and I’ll ring it; give me the song and I’ll sing it!

~Woody Guthrie (born July 14, 1912) from the song “Give Me a Nail”

photo by Evan Leeson (Taken with Instagram)

Words for any generation

jtotheizzoe: carlzimmer: Fifth moon of Pluto discovered. Seems...

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 02:58:22 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

carlzimmer:

Fifth moon of Pluto discovered. Seems a bit greedy for something that’s not even a planet. More info here.

I agree, Carl. I mean, here we are, only known sentient beings in the entire universe, and we only have one stinking moon. And we have to stare at the same face of it ALL THE TIME, no less.

Bring Pluto back into the planetary fold

Dinosaur

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:22:29 -0400

Dinosaur

Letters to impossibilities: Morning

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:57:29 -0400

Letters to impossibilities: Morning:

ponderingcomplications:

You were a cup of coffee,
waking me up from the
idea of life without you.

You were full of cream,
soothing the edges and frays
life had wrought on my soul.

You were sweetened with sugar,
lingering on my tongue,
warming my lips that had
long since been cold.

You were held so dearly,
cherished…

Puts into words what I feel with my first cup of coffee.