Life Is a Ping-Pong Paddle, and We Are the Ping-Pong Balls

March 29, 2026
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Life Is a Ping-Pong Paddle, and We Are the Ping-Pong Balls

Well, Life is a ping-pong paddle

And we are the ping-pong balls.

We may think we are tall in the saddle

But we’re slammed into tables and walls.

We are tossed into air and then batted and spun

We’ll be scuff’d and well-English’d before we are done

And it’s always a player, not us, who has won,

With Life as a ping-pong paddle

And Us as the ping-pong balls.

So it pays to be super-resilient

And to bounce back intact and unscathed,

To detach from the navel’s imbiliment

Fly freely and be karma-bathed,

For we keep all our innocence and our good name

Being blamelessly used without fortune nor fame

And without us there would not be even a game

Let alone the excitement that’s rife

With Balls giving meaning to Life.

see what happens

March 28, 2026
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see what happens

when you give him

everything he wants?

everything, it seems,

has turned out

not to be enough.

pillaging, manipulation,

murdering civilians,

raking in and breaking faith,

putting guns in hands of psychos,

telling lies for gits and shiggles,

bloodying the Constitution,

Caligula’s coagulant

inciting Armageddon.

in praise of not being sick any more

March 28, 2026
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the bugs do battle in our bodies

in savage stark ferocity

and we wash pills down with hot toddies

to give them reciprocity

and other liquidss are ingested

like flaxseed tea and orange juice

until the bugly throng is bested

and illness-train shows its caboose.

i say a prayer of avid thanks

and write this verse quick and informal

rejoin the unafflicted ranks

and sound huzzahs for being normal.

pull!

March 28, 2026
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pull!

to the “no kings” protestors marching today

a tug of war

poor rope

a yank of arm

and ligament

..

it’s such a chore

to cope

with hurt and harm

and liniment

..

the midwife pulls the newborn

the hustler pulls the strings

the wool is pulled and new-shorn

we pull the brassy rings

..

we watch in stricken horror as

our missiles pull some kids

into oblivion and see

our country’s hit the skids

..

pull back pull down pull well away

and do not let the king to bray

of greatness in his lust for power

in what’s become our darkest hour

..

we march we speak we hold up signs

we pull our big girl pants up for

the no kings protest which defines

our over

lapping

tugs

of

war

dire in its entirety

March 26, 2026
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gazans are being brutalized starved and killed

the blasted land they are on coveted

their lives deemed discardable

..

in the sudan there is wasting

in iran new to y dug children’s graves

their lives ended by our department of war

but it’s not a war, the department says

and we are sending our youth there

after telling the nonenemy

no quarter

no mercy

..

our fleshlives are taken over by nonflesh agents

noticers who know what we like

and what our secret selves lust for

and how to lull us into addiction

..

the ocean is more watery

the heat is breaking records

the job market is a ticking time bomb

most of us being either too expensive or too many

..

there is plenty of good news though

minnesotans and canadians are heroes

the baseball season is under way

we’re going to the moon again

the hum of electric vehicles is ever more prevalent

and we are close to ousting one of the vilest humans

ever to attain power

..

and the best news of all: life persists and will persist

a mass extinction is in the works

but some will survive

and love and hope and gained wisdom will persist

however electronic

or quantum-mechanical

their forms may take

and you and i are here NOW, i sending

and you receiving

and that matters as much

as anything that has happened

or will happen

my fine, listening friend

hub bub

March 25, 2026
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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.

Mise en Place II: One Week Later

March 23, 2026
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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!

The Marketing of Mayhem

March 23, 2026
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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!

Happy Belated Birthday, Darling Sweetheart Girlfriend Love

March 23, 2026
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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.