It isn’t every day one can start off with live Dead before breakfast, or even coffee, and, for many, it might not be exactly their cup of tea, ( I know, mixing my beverages, if not my metaphors….) but, I find it to be a fine way to begin the day, especially when the tune being enjoyed is from a live concert, with a lively, jiving boogie beat, complete with extremely hot licks by one of rock’s greatest improvisational guitarists, one of the earliest virtuosos in that category…. the inimitable, and, sadly, now deceased, Jerry Garcia…. Ah, sublime!….

I guess I just pulled my covers again, as an aging, now aged, hippie, first indoctrinated in the philosophy of free love in 1968 in Berkeley, CA, and a multi-concert attendee at Dead shows….. I never went on the road with the Dead, following after them all over the country, as so many did, but, I’ve made my share of whoopee at their gatherings of the tribes, and don’t regret a single moment of the experience…..

It was a time of great hope in our country….. The passions of the day, and the concepts of liberty and personal freedom that were engendered among the young of our nation back then have been carried forth, and preserved, over time, until, today, the same people who protested the war in Vietnam are now out on the streets, protesting the most recent draconian actions of the government, which, in spite of our efforts, have grown over time to include the latest outrage, wherein they are spying on their own citizens, looking under every rock they can find, in their paranoid search for terrorists….

Of course, the spying began even before the Vietnam conflict; they were putting together files on us at the FBI in 1968, and before that, from 1960 to 1964, during the Free Speech Movement, that preceded the advent of the hippies, and free love…. The government, apparently during WWII sometime, decided that keeping secrets from the public was necessary, whereupon they began to consider themselves as above the law, not subject to the same requirements as the rest of us….. Troops began to go to Southeast Asia, to protect “American interests” there, which, when examined more closely, turned out to be our interests in the heroin trade, a trade that has flourished there for centuries…. About that time, the FBI began to spy on American citizens, looking to root out the “commies” amongst us….

That particular insight, first brought to light in the mid-1960’s, and made very public by the movie, Air America, in the 1970’s, was the beginning of the end of my blind, willing support of the government….. The idea that our elected officials were involved in protecting that industry was completely repugnant to me then, and remains so today, especially since it turned out that such involvement was only the surface of how much corruption, theft, and outright lying our politicians were engaging in, among other revelations, all of which convinced me of their complete lack of virtue, or honor…. They were hiding behind the flag of liberty and justice, using its precepts to engage in destructive, illegal acts that threatened their own people, and didn’t seem to care at all that what they were doing was diametrically opposed to all we have been taught to expect of our leaders….

Hmm…. I seem to have slipped into another early rant, brought on by nostalgia…. Well, that should pass, now that the Dead song is over…. I’ve switched over to the classical station’s stream online, and am now being soothed by J.S. Bach’s “Little Suite”, a familiar piece that never fails to please…. Dum ditty dum, dum ditty doo….. lovely!

Oops, I seem to have pulled another cover here…. Yep, I’m a longhair, and that includes my choices in music; I love classical music, especially that of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach (all of them…. several of the Bach family wrote good stuff, not just Papa…. PDQ Bach wrote some pretty amazing pieces himself, as did J.S., Junior….) Any who, it’s nice to have a variety to listen to….

I started listening to the genre about 15 years ago, when I got tired of what was passing for rock and roll then, and found that I had discovered an entirely new universe of music to explore, most of which I’d never heard…. What a treasure trove that turned out to be….. Like any field of human endeavor, 90% of it is crap, (Sturgeon’s Law covers ALL human activity….), but, over time, the crap has been winnowed out, for the most part; what is left is some excellent music, and offers me uncounted hours of bliss…..

Well, now that I’ve blathered, and ranted, and just plain babbled about next to nothing, I think we should get on with the day’s dive, saving any further chattiness for any public contact I have to make today….. Yeah, that’s the ticket….

Shall we Pearl?…..

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe

— _Jabberwocky_, by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson)
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In this section today, you will find an old-school pearl, fresh as SB and I can make it….. I had intended to discuss a more sober, perhaps even significant subject, with every intention of allowing myself to rant thereon….. but, I’m feeling a bit under the weather, rant-wise, which means, basically that I’m not outraged enough at the moment to carry it off successfully…. So, I’ll go with my default in such instances, and let SB figure out something appropriate to the day, and the moment…. It should all be okay, and, if nothing else, you may congratulate yourselves on having dodged another bullet, metaphorically speaking, of course….

“Tip O’Neill is just like Congress; old, fat and out of control.” — J. LeBoutillier

“You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the presidency.” — Wendell Phillips

“As a general rule, the freedom of any people can be judged by the volume of their laughter.” — Smart Bee

(Even the Google algorithm can’t find attribution for this, other than “Anonymous”…. hence, the attribution is given to SB, per ECR policy….)

“I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever.  All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race.  That’s bad enough for me.” — Mark Twain

“The effectiveness of a politician varies in inverse proportion to his commitment to principle.” — Sam Shaffer

“Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?” — George Carlin

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” — G. K. Chesterton, ILN, 4/19/24

Okay, so it turned into a rantish pearl in spite of all my precautions…. oh, well…. So, sue me…. or, if you’d care to just ignore it, we can go on to other things, and just chalk it up to experience…. Let’s do that, shall we? If nothing else, and like nothing else does, it will piss off the lawyers, which is ALWAYS a good thing….

“Great things can be reduced to small things, and small things can be reduced to nothing.” — Chinese Proverb
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Since I don’t wish for anyone else to catch the blame for any of this, here is one of my older poems to fill up the necessary space, and time….

How did y’all get so lucky? Here I am, already in section three, and still no rantable passions available to get me going…. One might gather the erroneous impression that I’m a wimp today…. I prefer to think of it as a temporary disinclination toward emotional excess, and let it go at that…. I mean, one can’t rant all the damn time, or one takes the chance of becoming entrenched in the same set of attitudes so common to that type of thinking epitomized by the dreaded Limbaugh, that bastion of all that is most ignorant and ugly about America….

I do try to save my outrage for things that have some social significance, hopefully of greater significance than my own prejudices; he doesn’t even bother to try to decide if anything that comes out of his mouth is significant; he only cares that someone listen to his drivel…. Ah well, let’s go in a totally different direction from that fool, and find some thoughts on Life from some of history’s more elegant thinkers….

“The meaning of life is that it stops.” — Franz Kafka

“Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.” — Thomas Browne

No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” — John Donne (c.1571-1631) — Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) “Meditation XVII”

“It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.” — Oscar Wilde

“[…] For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner […] on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. […] That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.” — Carl Sagan

“Don’t try to have the last word. You might get it.” — Lazarus Long

I would like to have it noted that I took great care in the construction of this Pearl, editing the inclusions numerous times before coming up with this seven-star grouping…. which, I believe, is one of the best pearls ever…. Really, it’s damn fine stuff, ffolkes, so, please, pay heed…. Then, when you’ve finished that, remember this ……

“Never underestimate the importance of a cheap laugh.” — Plucky Duck

Okay, so I could have said that more elegantly…. how’s this?…..

“A little nonsense, now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.” — Willie Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
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It’s been a long road to this juncture, and I feel every step it has taken to get here….. Let’s see what we picked up along the way….. I am compelled by honesty to admit that it isn’t bad…. at least, not so’s you’d notice, anyway…. It’s certainly long enough for a Pearl; I guess, given my feelings about out versus in, we’ll leave it as it is, and just pretend that I know what I’m about….. If you bought ANY of that, well, thanks…..

😆