The world is held captive to the whims of madmen.

The Fruits of Ignorance

The Allman Bros. are on in the background, filling the bright, summer air with their hot 'Lanta licks. As much as I love the soul of their guitar notes, it does little to change the grim mood that has suddenly descended down upon me. Forget freedom, friends, it is insanity that is on the march, and it is rolling over every corner of this globe where humanity's reach extends. The bodies never cease piling up--where there is a will, there is death.

And what is the cause of all this goddamn death, this stinking mountain of stupidity? Well, the Buddha is right when all is said and done--the root of it all, at least, is ignorance. But what are the fruits of this ignorance (for ye shall know what sort of tree stands before ye by what fruit it bears). I'd have to put greed near the top of the list (Ezra Pound may have been a damn fool throughout a good deal of his life until expressing contrition to Allen Ginsberg in Rapallo, but he was right about the cause and effect of greedheads and war, just ask Halliburton). Avarice is a cancer. It has been with us (humanity) from the start. But is seems that as humanity has developed, its impact upon us and the world in which we inhabit has grown exponentially. Not only has it lead to the war-machine feasting upon our young, but now chokes the planet with its toxic belching. Moloch is alive and well, eh Allen?

And I still stand by my statement that football/soccer is the world's second most dangerous spectator sport, next to religion (even if my information on Pat Sayjak might have been less than accurate--damn that tricky Curveball! Never trust an Iraqi cabdriver with gold fever! He's burnt me for the last time!)

So hold tight, folks. This roller coaster ride has just started rolling, and we aren't even down the first slope yet.

Thoughts of Dublin In Your Eyes

. . .and I have this sinister scrap paper in mind when suddenly I realize I miss the damp streets of Dublin filling with soft lullabies beneath the drunken waking sun.

To see that sunlight that stirs the earth from its star-blue sleep in your eyes--a mirror forever reflecting the living universe revolving, a pool of moonlit dew, the street lights of O'Connell, the quiet outside the post office before the storm blew through, the faint feel of the West, of Connamera brushing the face in the breeze--an epitaph to all my yesterdays & a wide-eyed embrace to all my tomorrows spent outside the steel box of time, inside the Buddha-mind. To see it all with you!