give a dude a fish and you’ll win favour and patronage / teach him angling and your monopoly will be lost forever

continuing my thoughts on education and inheritance from yesterday… here is another view. perhaps the dominant view in history. by keeping people in the dark, you can better manipulate them. and this is probably why trump wants to shut down the department of education. why the right declare war on universities and academia. accuse anyone who disagree with their brand of fascism as a dangerous leftwing extremist.

demagogues stalk our polity, offering miserable, racist tidbits, with the explicit aim of preventing independent thought. resist! learn to fish!

can you teach me how to fish?

laser quest pivot to armpit sweat and nervous stutters

i was preparing a training session about pivot tables and data analysis generally. feeling a touch of the anxiety butterflies pre performance. and then i got to thinking about the merits of education. how each generation has a duty to pass on knowledge to the next. but does the generation coming having a duty to learn?

i feel like we are wary of talking of duties these days. we have grown up with the ideology of bourgeois individualism, the celebration of wealth and beauty, and tolerance of massive global inequality. we privatize success, and we leave the rest to struggle.

so maybe the generations coming need to learn not from the words and actions of the generations before them; but from the reality of the world they will inherit from them.

but life as it is now only exists as it does now / and the future and the past are a million moral universes

we live in a time of people who do not believe in history. we live in a time of tin-pot tyrants. the vulgar celebration of wealth. ebitda bear markets and deportations without due process.

well the stock market is jittery now as i write. is the ai book more like the dot com crash? or is our current circumstance more like the great depression of 1929? if anything, things seem worse now. we have massive poverty and excess government debt, despite the fact that the stock market still booms.

more than ever, we are polarized between a paltry class of billionaires, and a class of impecunious billions.

just because something is, does not mean it is right. we can and should change the world.

what change do you want to effect in the world?

style glistens on surf with the setting sun / and we act like we what we do is demonstrably normative

first – it was originally ‘a lifestyle glistens’ but i just couldn’t fit it into the song. so i took the britney spears approach and worried about how it sounded rather than what it means. i like the assonance of the repeated ess sounds.

i was trying to evince a sense the temporary nature of the things that feel permanent in our lives, our culture. the way we live feels, and literally is in some ways, governed by rules. but they are not universal. the way one behaves in, say, new york in 2025 ce is very different from the way one behaves in the fertile crescent in 2025 bce. probably.

oh and i love the word ‘demonstrably’ as it conjures a thought of both demons and monsters.

which raises the age old questions, which is better: demons or monsters?

ineluctable loggerheads with events diaristic / i wrestle you onto a future plane

ineluctable is just a good word. fun to say. loggerheads, similarly. and diaristic is a useful word if you are a poet (or a diarist.) and i liked the multiple meanings of plane at work – aeroplane, on a holiday in the future; or is a future plane a dimension in space time that i have created (by wrestling?)

i like booking a holiday. its a little vote of confidence in the future. we all need to believe in the future really.

what is your holiday philosophy?

but the incessant mind plays the hits as usual / and the bin’s full / again i rely on a well meaning soul and forgive myself.

i remember once i was at a temp job. i was in my 20s. i was a runner at this point but just a slow one. it was before we knew about polarised training and how important squats and deadlifts are. anyway, two older women were talking. and i’m not being cheeky or judgemental, but they weren’t in good shape. less good than me, a skinny but not very toned slow runner.

anyway, on says to the other, ‘you know what’s the sexiest bit on a man?’

‘six pack?’ the other woman guesses.

‘no, the v bit sort of below the six pack.’

i’m wasn’t in bad shape when i was 24. slim and pretty active, daily exercise. but it was nice to be made to feel inadequate like that.

what do you find sexy on a man?

then a day indoors with the bug and drive / a lurgy day in bed with that sunk feeling

what goes up must come down? i’d been busy clearly, pushing myself hard in my work outs, socialising, caught a bug. i’m just getting over one as i write now actually. it’s been hanging around for ages. almost two weeks of low energy and blocked up tubes.

for me, when i am sick, i get depressed. i am prone to depression anyway due to my autism, and sometimes i won’t know i’ve got a cold (i also have alexithymia) but will just feel really down and miserable. and then it is a relief the next day when my nose is blocked and i realise life will be fine in a couple of days when it passes.

savour the flavour of copper coins on dry tongue / screw a shelf on, climb the wall, nacho un [] upable

i find that i have the appetite for this less and less lately. those workouts that bring the taste of blood to your mouth. i’m in a bit of a slump today as i write this. so far today i have cancelled a vo2 max workout, an easy run, a gentle climb, and tomorrow’s social ride as well. i’ve had the cold for over a week and i’m just done in.

i used to be obsessed with my training program. i kept spreadsheets. i tracked the numbers. a rise in my resting heartrate to 52 would cause panic. i spent a lot of time learning about training zones. heart rate zones. power zones. i became obsessed with the match between the two zonetypes. any drift would cause alarm.

anyway. i guess i decided to write poetry instead of doing that. and, of course, poetry led to learning piano, music theory, videography, instagram, blogging. i have a habit of finding a way to keep myself urgently busy.

so i push through the pain in warm air for a buzz later

we endure pain now for pleasure later. we feel pleasure now for pain later. it’s funny that. are there things that feel good now and lead to feeling good later too? lovemaking springs to mind. as long as the contraception works. and of course things that feel bad and have bad consequences. but why can’t more things be like lovemaking? fun and good for you. i suppose my poetry is a bit like that too.

i used to dream often about delayed gratification. dreams where i would endlessly shop but never check out. or find money on the ground, an infinite amount, and spend the dream picking it up but never spending it.

how do you know when to stop picking up the pennies and to start spending them?

no and today is so much better than yesterday / infinitely, nice things are nicer than nasty ones

this is a reference to lucky jim by kingsley amis. i had referenced his son a week or so prior. two witty 20th century men. they are dying out, the 20th century men of letters. clive james. christopher hitchens. milan kundera are a few i remember grieving. a lot of them died long before i was born though. george orwell. graham greene.

i think the 20th century novel will forever be tempting to me. modern enough that i understand the social relationships. but historic enough that plots don’t have to be squeezed painfully around mobile phones, gps and dna evidence. a simpler time. more scope for (getting away with) mischief.

and the 21st century novel? we will talk of the 21st century women, not men. we will talk of rooney, smith and mantel, not even bothering with first names, because these are important women of letters.

what are you reading?