Category: Uncategorized

Damned Evangelists!

In their feverish belief

Casting jagged stones

With their polished rhetoric

Cluttering the path

With traps and pitfalls and snares.

Though I wander, I’M NOT LOST!

What people lose

You can learn a lot about a country by what it leaves behind. So what does Transport for London report having found on the city’s trains and buses? A life-sized Spiderman doll. A prosthetic leg. Endless wallets, phones, and tablets. Umbrellas. A judge’s wig, a room-sized carpet, and an urn with human ashes. “Enough musical instruments to form a band,” including drum kits. No grand pianos, apparently.

I’m not sure who I’m quoting about that band, but unlike some quotes that drift through the culture, this one seems to have actually been said because the newspaper article I’m stealing the information from put it in quotes. It’s probably from a TfL spokesperson.

Oh, and a brown paper envelope with £15,000. Which the finder actually turned in.

Vaguely relevant photo: Public transportation, although not in London. This is the Exeter St. David’s train station. Photo by Ida Swearingen

I don’t…

They were married a good long time. Longer than most of us will be married. My mother would say, “Nobody knows what’s in a marriage but the people in it,” so I hesitate to describe their relationship but, to me, it seemed that there plenty of rough times, long periods of fine. Theirs was a ‘no doubt’ relationship, inconceivable they would ever split up, no matter how badly the ship was listing. You knew that if you ever surprised them in the kitchen. They were always really into each other.

But my father was a tough, bottom-line guy. He was ridiculously self-sufficient, a direct result of coming of age in the Depression and being the son of a carpenter. As a kid, he made his own skis, he built a house, fixed our cars, climbed on the roof to straighten our antennae, rewired and re-plumbed things. Once, as a single…

“do you know how to play in the way?”
an old man shares a secret you now wish to unknow
“don’t redo anything, just accept what was,” he says
“and when you climb those windblown outside ladders
you must try to accept what is”

a foot before the next fool rung
two souls in a twirl like smoke from a kiln
(though one of you is dead)
still afraid of the naked umbilicus
seething over seas of regretfulness
sure, there’s forgetfulness and clinging above
and balking and shaking and more clinging for love
but there’s also the inexorable release
and beholden fall

those sarsen skewered swollen waters are
open to the lives pitched their way
the kerplunken, the sunken, the drunken out gills
and old afore the siren’s end call
no sound, so drowned, no longer found in the way

by TONY SINGLE
© All rights reserved 2016

I get why young Progressives are supporting Bernie Sanders. I’d be disappointed in them if they didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I completely support Hillary Clinton. I list my reasons in an essay published in July. My opinion hasn’t changed; it’s just become firmer: She’s tough, smart and tested. Plus it’s time.

But Bernie Sanders is saying the things that I love. Universal health care, free college, increase taxes on the 1%, these are all things near and dear to my heart.

But here’s the deal. These things are only amazing because no one has said them for a very long time. No one who is young right now knows that political life in America used to be full of big, ambitious, outrageous talk. When the wonderful Beyonce did her Formation yesterday at the Super Bowl with the Black Panther theme, well, guess what, there were once ACTUAL Black…

Recently I took some fog pictures and added a few more from my archives to put up a blog. The reason for this blog was a dream. I woke up after driving through the thick fog, struggling to recognize the familiar road. I knew that the road might be flooded and I could perish. From time to time I came across the cars with the blinking lights – the drivers gave up and pulled over to the side of the road, but I kept striving until I finally knew where I was. It felt like a victory.

This is  Dove Hill Castle,  or De La Poer Castle, a fortified tower house that was built in the 14th century. In my dream, I was driving this road 🙂

Kilsheelan Woods in the foggy morning.  It is just a test picture taken when I was looking for a background for my film sandwich project two…