No song today.

Fuck the Taliban.
Fuck ISIS.
Fuck the entrenched and enculturated hatred of you and me and everyone we've ever known.
Fuck willful ignorance and cunning that keeps your porn predilections filtered from your wife or husband yet by some corrupted miracle prevents you from looking into your local news - let alone (heaven forbid!) world events  - once in a while.
Fuck the KKK.
The NRA.
The CPC.
Fuck any set of convictions or beliefs or dogma of any kind, if for a single fucking second they condone this kind of pointless destruction and heartbreak of parents, children, loved ones and friends.
Fuck the psychopaths of Wall Street and elsewhere.
Fuck every drop of greed in me, you and everyone living.
Fuck pride and dignity and remembrance if this is the endgame of pride and dignity and remembrance.
Fuck every politician and civic leader who takes graft and kickbacks from anyone with the muscle or capital to ruthlessly silence the truth. To humiliate the compassion.
Fuck the Sinaloa, the Medellin, the Zeta and any and every other cartel that preys on the misery of the addict.
Fuck EADS Airbus, Raytheon, Arsenal, Vector, Springfield, Northrop Grumman, Century Arms, United Shipbuilding, Almaz-Antey and every other arms manufacturer that makes its money
from the blood of the all too often all too innocent.
Fuck oil and big business and the bottomless pit of disenfranchised ex-mils they hire to protect themselves, their product and the secrecy of their heinous crimes.
Fuck the Ndragheta, the Camorra, the Mafia, every strand of every school of organised crime that has allowed the blood of the innocents to be shed.
Fuck the corrupt unions led by faceless, smirking men with muscle to spare, and savagery where once a heart beat.
Fuck Fox.
Fuck Fairfax.
Fuck the neo-cons
Fuck anyone who puts the dollar and the state above all that is good for everyone everywhere.
Fuck the climate change deniers in their diminishing droves whose tune only changes when they see the fires on the next ridge, the creeks and streams and waterways breaking the levees and the high winds no longer giving a fuck about the poetry of humankind.
Fuck men.
The atrocities they commit and the wars they wage.
Fuck us all.
For not doing enough.
For not caring enough.
For doing too much.
For caring too much.
For impotent and goldfish clickbait shit like this.

And today in Lahore.

The horror of the mirror.

"Willie Stark: This much I swear to you. These things you shall have: I'm going to build a hospital. The biggest that money can buy. And it will belong to you. That any man, woman, and child who is sick or in pain can go through those doors and know that everything will be done for them that man can do to heal sickness, to ease pain. Free. Not as a charity. But as a right. And it is your right. Do you hear me? It is your right. And it is your right that every child should have a complete education. That any man who produce us anything can take it to market without paying toll. And no poor man's land or farm can be taxed or taken away from him. And it is the right of the people that they shall not be deprived of hope.
Anne Stanton: Does he mean it, Jack?
Adam Stanton: That's his bribe."
Like everyone else I've been poli-gawping with the U.S. primaries and like everyone else I've been scratching my head about the rise of Trump. I suspect that unlike many, though, I've been scratching my head since the days of Reagan. There must be something to this whole head-scratching thing though because I still have a full mop of hair. Brain cells, on the other hand...
"All the King's Men" from 1949 charts the slow and brutal rise of a dirt-poor idealist through his brief but brutal administration to his equally brutal demise. It's based loosely on the real life of Huey P. Long and that's as far as I could be arsed reading up on it in Wikipedia. And just like the current primaries, it has some Oscar winning performances and some utterly cringeworthy ones but the timeless narrative and tracts of dialogue remain fascinating.
The upshot being that very little has changed since the days (Four score and seven years ago, anyone?) when Lincoln was out stumping in the state of Illinois or Long canvassing for the state of Louisiana. The people of America so early on became intoxicated, enamoured with the whole panem et circenses routine that it's in the marrow now, together with the lead and blood of the innocents. To a certain extent, just as it is here in Oz with our ongoing whispers of, "It can't happen here." But worry not, that scream you hear is only me plummeting from my high and ever-skittish horse.
Plus ça change. Plus ça change...

Concentration Moon

Tonight's weather is brought to you by -

It's still warm out.
And it is said, "Bloody Melbourne." Or, "Welcome to Australia,"
But we all know the world has turned upside down now.  And March will be hot and April will be hot and June will be hot.
And records will be set and we'll...
So we adopt a soothing tone as we expound with reason worthy of TV lawyers, "We're fucked.  We've wrought it upon ourselves. We are indeed a virus!"
And we will do nothing with that mellifluous, enlightened path of complaint and compliance other than preen and fret,
Or conversely take to revealing all that is ugly and abrasive and useless about ourselves. We will too loudly use time-honoured, hackneyed barbs:
sheeple
lefty
commy
pinko
homo
bleeding
fucking
heart
what
the
hell?
why
do
you
even
LIVE
in
this
country?
bring
back
the
death
penalty!
bludger
naif
You
didn't
fight
in
the
frigging
war
like
I
did!
Or,
more
realistically,
(which
is
what
I
meant
to
say
after
all,
smartarse)
my
old
man
did.
And
so
the
march
of
the
weary
battle
hymn
goes
on
and
on
and
on.
And it's warm out.
Maybe even hot out.
I've eaten too much and I'm all talked out so like hell I'm going outside at this late hour just to appease the whiners or knuckle draggers.
And we will pack our hideous neologisms and best and useless intentions in the worn out handbasket we have carried so valiantly and so long.
And we will find the arch guarded now only by the dusty bones of Cerberus.
And we will witness the ash that remains of what was once hell.
And we will then - and only then - realise we have nowhere else to go.

World Party

The Ibises

I whistle when I hear birdsong.
I whistle and sing a lot by most people's standards, I suppose.
Especially guitar solos.
But I whistle in the warm fug of self-delusion that I'm somehow intimately conveying to the birds that I am one of them.
Larger, flightless, bulkier and for the most part not nearly as beautiful.
I say for the MOST part not nearly as beautiful because I find Ibises unusually ugly.
Wrinkly, unkempt and singularly unattractive. And needy to the point of fawning as anyone who has strolled through the Botanic Gardens can testify.
There's hope though - for both the Ibises and myself.
I used to find Plovers (Masked Lapwings to you pedants) ugly as fuck as well.  But I see them as an unusually pretty little avian now, and admirable in their gormless courage.
One day the imperious and singularly unattractive Ibis may do something to redeem itself.  Invent something useful, perhaps.  Learn a language that humans can understand, thus solving the age old dilemma of just how much birds really do take the piss out of us with their incessant chattering.
And so on.
I'm not holding my breath on miracles, mind you.
But life is,
after all,
about potential.
My feeling is, however, that even in death I'll be better looking than Ibises.

Fly