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Monthly Archives: March 2026

a hub is a radial fulcrum of sorts

a city or hive or hq

a bub a generical person who snorts

or imbibes or’s on wolverine’s crew.

when this bub sends a package of boxer/brief shorts

via amazon or u p s

it will go through a hub-maze that squirms and contorts

and’s addressed the logistical mess.

it is networking guiding a shipment with quartz

wirelessly informing the bub

and bugs bunny bronx-cheering passage through ports

as the hubbubbed bub rustles up grub.

..

Sidebar: Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helps a bit with the density of Ulysses, and reading Ulysses helps a bit with the incomprehensibility of Finnegans Wake, but since I only got through some of Ulysses, and almost none of Finnegans Wake, the frustration I felt wrestling with Joyce led me to resolve never to task any readers or viewers of my creative works with excessive obscurity. But if you, the reader, didn’t know that in the Marvel Comics canon the adamantium-laced mutant Wolverine dismissively addressed friends and foes alike as “Bub,” and/or if you didn’t know that the shipping entity UPS calls major cities “hubs,” and/or if you didn’t know that Bugs Bunny, whose accent was crafted by Mel Blanc to be an aggressive blend of Bronx and Brooklyn, and who often asked a character “EEEeeehhh…What’s all the hubbub, Bub?!” you would have a tough time making ANY sense of this cobbled-up Cobb Word Salad of a poem, let alone the little sense it has.

Last week I made over a dozen works in progress. This week I endeavor to finish as much of what I started as time allows. It is better to anticipate what I will need before I dive in, so I have surrounded the wheel with my unfinished stuff and added water bucket, needle tool, wire tool, trim tool, metal rib, wood knife and an Arnold Palmer made with herbal prickly pear iced tea. I have also centered about five pounds of clay to make chess-piece heads and other miscellany using Throwing Off the Hump technique. Please wish me luck and skill!

Once upon a time all advertising was sometimes labeled “Madison Avenue.”

Fun fact: MAD Magazine once had its corporate offices on Madison Avenue, and they always called it “MADison Avenue.” Some of MAD’s contributors, Jack Rickard for example, left jobs in advertising to work for MAD.

War-waging and propaganda are joined at the hip.

Once upon a time the United States of America waged a bit of war under the name “Operation Just Cause.” In at least one cynical mind it was posited that a better appellation might have been “Operation Just Because.”

Now an undeclared war conducted by rogue elements of that same United States goes by the name “Operation Epic Fury.” Many more appropriate names occur to the same cynical mind behind “Operation Just Because.”

Operation Pew! Pew! Pew!

Operation Keep Your Enemies and Make New Ones

Operation Bibi Guns

Operation Blow Up Stuff Real Good

Operation Schoolchildren Unaliver

Operation Democracy Deaththroes

Operation Jeffrey Epstein Died for My Sins

…and at least ten thousand more.

..

We desperately need Operation War Is Bad, and Operation Life is Sacred, with no cynicism, no hidden agenda. Please join this just cause!

What do you do for a loved one’s birthday when she says she doesn’t want anything but what you’ve given her already? “How about this. Pick a song you really like, and I will illustrate it, using you and me as part of the illustration. I will spend at least 90 minutes on it.”

She picked John Lennon’s anthemic “Imagine.” So I Imagined from 8:15 to 9:45 PM on 12″ by 18″ all-media paper, using a pen that had almost run out of ink; see above. It is OK as a rough draft of concept but clumsy in execution. But as a fulfillment of a birthday gift commitment it works. She now has (more) indisputable proof that I am crazy about her.

Who saved her?

Who saved her? I saved her. I heard her gasping for breath in the next room and rushed in. Her eyes were panicky and wide, but she did not answer when I talked to her. I took steps.

Who saved her? Steel Magnolias saved her. The way she acted reminded me of the low blood sugar seizure Julia Roberts had in the movie Steel Magnolias. So I got something from the fridge, held it to her lips, told her to eat. She tongued it and pinched her lips on it and slowly got some in her. I called 911. As she got a little more sugar in her she regained consciousness and I told her that EMTs were on the way and she probably should get some pants on. She was grateful.

Who saved her? Firemen saved her. An EMT with a kit bag found that her blood glucose level was a dangerously low 33. They made a PICC line and gave her dextrose. She refused an ambulance and signed an official form of refusal, so they told us to monitor her blood sugar frequently and then packed up and left.

The next day I and 911 and some different (though not indifferent) firemen saved her again.

I had been sleeping soundly when her arm fell hard on my torso, twice. I yelped in protest but soon found that though her eyes were open wide she did not respond when I called her name. I went to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of glucose control fluid, one of a four-pack I had proactively bought the day before, but when I put it to her lips it just ran down her face. 911 again sent firefighting EMTs. Again her glucose level was a plummeted 33, but this time an ambulance got her to the hospital and over the next couple of days they tested her and observed her and searched for the why. As of now no one knows why.

Who will save her now? The hospital did not discover why this is happening, but they noted it was an early-morning phenomenon and it tended to follow self-administered insulin injections. So she is off insulin now and onto a different glucose-level controlling medication; and many early mornings have passed, and she has not seized nor otherwise crashed, and she is still alive.

But–who REALLY saved her? Reread and reflect. She saved herself.

Photo courtesy of WordPress Free Library

this man, without a doubt, has doubts,

doughty though he be.

this bout with doubt has him reroute

a troutful fishing spree.

without the stoutness of his heart

a gout of hesitation charts

and louts of ill intent impart

gross negativity.

..

a satchel full of latchkeys gives

him confidence and verve.

saskatchewanian soul lives

anear his steely nerves.

he smiles and ends his sketchy balking

flexes fingers, ceases talking,

and feet and fervor take to walking

to where the dervish derves.

In the United States of America, many of us do silly things on Saint Patrick’s Day to pretend we are Irish and that we know Irish ways. We drink green beer or “Irish coffee” (it is laced with Jameson and Bailey’s Irish Cream) to a disgusting state of intoxication, and/or sing “Danny Boy” (written by an Englishman) or recite dirty limericks (Edward Lear, the “Father of Limericks,” was also an Englishman, and never used the term “limerick” to describe what he wrote). So often in human history, history itself is falsified and the perception of Reality is warped. Perhaps we Americans ought to rename this holiday “Glorious Excuse to Get Drunk and Silly Day.”

We also wear green. I had a wonderful green Hawaiian shirt that I liked to wear on Saint Patrick’s Day, but about ten years ago I gave it to a homeless man who said “Nice shirt. Can I have it? I’ll trade you for some socks and swim trunks.”

Today, green-clad or not, I intend to be Green in spirit, walking rather than driving, celebrating the remnants of youthful enthusiasm and imminent Springtime. I have signed up for a ceramics studio session and while there I’ll buy a lemonade and raise it in a toast to James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man subtly changed the course of my life about fifty years ago.

Friends, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, and may you celebrate joyfully and non-destructively.

Note: my “Featured Image” is a screenshot of my Olympian hero Joan Benoit, her arms raised in triumph after winning the first Olympic Women’s Marathon on August 5, 1984, exactly two weeks before I did my own first marathon. I post it to get my Green on. 🙂

thanks to our attention spans becoming microscopic

we are castaways awash on tides of random topic

we’re hypnotized and commandeered to watch

freak shows

unchosen

sure, we can flip

and keep our grip

but then some lederhosen

encasing some ungodly animated

bagpiped creature

deliberately blows our mind

evoking arthur treacher

..

they note which reels

have made us stay from one end

to the other

and then we see their cousin father

girlfriend

inlaw

brother

..

creating content is not hard

it’s frequently a snap

in fact we do it

every

single

time

we take a crap

the dead man’s can opener

my brother brian is deceased

but long before he died bequeathed me

shirts and food on which to feast

and baggy shorts that loosely sheathed me.

..

most useful, by far, undeniable

is this. it works. it’s so reliable!

..

the store-bought ones don’t keep the track

and jam and are of shoddy fettle

with too much plastic, too much lack

of elegance that comes from metal.

..

hey, brian. MISS you as no other,

but you still help.

you’re still my brother.

may Heaven be like fine resorts,

and please forgive…

i ditched those shorts.