RIPOST: FOR USE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN:

"I was only trying to be friendly."

"Perhaps you should reexamine your methodology."

#79 THEY TELL US WHAT TO THINK

There are photogenic, sonorous people with cameras and microphones, and they tell us what to think.
They claim to tell us what is happening, but they tell us what to think.
They might be on the Left, and they might be on the Right, but they tell us what to think.
 They tell us what to buy and wear and drink and they tell us what to think.
Right and the Left work together to tell us what to think.
 If we think for ourselves we are told we are wrong and they tell us what to think.
They "inform" us by forming us and they tell us what to think.
 The news is not the news because they tell us what to think.
 By tone of voice and innuendo and background music they hide that they are telling us what to think while they tell us what to think.

In school they tell us what to think. In church they tell us what to think.
At work they tell us what to think.
On the campaign trail and in office they tell us what to think.
Rebellious groups are still groups and they tell us what to think.
In press releases and written statements they tell us what to think.
 In history books and police reports they tell us what to think.
Our families and friends tell us what to think.
 Commercials tell us we shrink and slink and stink and they tell us what to eat and drink and think.
Everywhere you turn people tell us what to think.

# IMPOSSIBLE INDEX OF FORGOTTEN THINGS

I wandered the forgotten corners of foreclosed yards, where rabbit pellets whiten in the sun, and I saw a vision of these things:

The formal names of every individual crack in every for-lease parking lot, named as lovingly and thoughtfully as a mother naming her own precious children.

Book length descriptions of every telephone pole. Poles that tower unnoticed along squalid strip-malls and stand unappreciated along crowded, fume-spewing highways.

The forgotten inhabitants of abandoned Burger King Parking Lots  - each parking lot weed, indexed and numbered and registered in the timeless database of unimportant things.

Alas! The cast off ends of zip ties languishing unclaimed in the dusty gravel of convenience store construction sites. No more! Each zip tie is unique, and each has a name and history, written in marble, illuminated at all times, and revered as heroes by all!

A map of every track of every wheel of every absconded shopping cart. Records of the tracks in the dirt at the crumbled ends of sidewalks in dilapidated, half empty commercial districts. The details of the voyages of every cart that ever buoyed the worldly goods in plastic bags belonging to homeless, mumbling men.  The maps, detailed inventories of those belongings, and biographies of the men who pushed those shopping carts are stamped into plates of gold and launched into space to represent mankind.

A caligraphy scroll of the lost forgotten thoughts of slack-jawed, Kool-Aid stained children with plastic toy guns before the time of the Internet. The thoughts they had when they had thousand-mile stares with visions of half-imagined, unseen, unnamed idealized cities. All dreamt while standing motionless at the end of driveways on summer afternoons.

The indexed surnames of every individual pine needle from every discarded Christmas tree in 1972. Where is that list? Does it exist? It does now.

A ledger of the exact moment of the fifteenth rotation of every tricycle wheel in Bangladesh.

A coffee table book of every piece of school kid's artwork ever created, one picture per page, and the name and weight of every hand silhouette turkey ever made.

Every stick that was ever an imaginary weapon in the mind of a child at play (playing cops-n-robbers or playing WAR), displayed in a museum. A separate, full length motion picture (directed by Ken Burns and narrated by Morgan Freeman) about every pretend battle each stick was involved in, and a three volume hardback compendium about all the pretend wars and battles. A museum dedicated to these sticks, and a separate room in that museum dedicated exclusively to each stick and an artist's rendition (acrylic on canvas) of what the weapon looked like in the child's mind.

The tenth text sent on every Tuesday in Taiwan, each carved into an individual marble monolith planted twenty feet deep beneath the dark side of the surface of the moon.

The first, middle and last name of every blade of fescue grass that has ever existed, their dates of birth/death, their political leanings, a brief biography and a photo, and a serialized commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint for each one.

The secret dream of every hog slaughtered for its meat throughout all of history. An oil painting of each dream on a 72" x 24" canvas. The individual name of each bristle of each brush used to paint those pictures. A play by play description of every brushstroke, given by Joe Buck and Bob Costas, at the renovated Koševo Stadium in Sarajevo, where all of the homeless men from East St. Louise (1963-1992) will paint those pictures before a packed crowd of delirious spectators, and each artist is paid one-million one dollar bills for their troubles.

The serial numbers of each of the dollars mentioned above, in numerical order, each written in Roman Numerals on a single grain of rice.

graph paper stuff

Cervantes.
Verisimilitude; scintillate; Valdes Leal; sardonic; taciturn; obsequious
Book Notes: Basim forbids dancing.  Lamya dances for Sabir to spite her husband.

stuff written on graph paper

1. Saturnine countenance
2. Alexandre Tharoud, Erik Satie: Avent Dernieres

graph paper notes

Dunsanian?
Pearl Buck?
Charles Dexter Ward?

For the book, give characters ticks (nerves) or other maladies, real or imagined.

random things written on graph paper

Ovid's "Art of Love"?
clapboard?
the lurking future may not come at all
plug hunters
tiny triangular sandwiches