Category: Goby’s Journal

History–in my lifetime!

I was six months old and Roosevelt said it was a day of infamy, then Truman dropped a tiny sun on Hiroshima and General Ike took off his uniform, put on his civies and gave a speech about the Military Industrial Complex, and threw the hat that Dickie missed but Kennedy caught and lit a fire in Vietnam giving Nixon a 2nd chance to give his famous two handed 4 finger sign of victory before Ford could say the long nightmare was over, and Carter walked down Pennsylvania Ave to the White House and visited Three Mile Island and hostages in Iran gave the White House to Reagan who began the Great Unraveling and reminded us every day how defenseless we were against the now tens of thousands of Suns-of fusion bombs waiting their signal in silos and submarines for Bush One with crooked smile and crooked son under his arm, who would have to wait for Clinton to tuck his cock back in his pants to take his turn at looking so awful that America would even elect a black man who wasn’t really and had a great smile and wore that suit like he owned it when he shook hands with Trump and smiled his great smile, thinking of the millions he would get for doing such a bang up job for his real friends after he left the white house to the wrecking ball with Orange hair… who fragmented into deadly shrapnel as it left the White House for a bowl of oatmeal with frozen lips and rockets burst over Whuhan in the shape of a giant virus and mighty winds and fire swept across the land to the drip drip drip of melting glaciers and rising seas and everyone looked up looked up looked up, and said–see? See?See?…. nothing to see! And pretty soon, there wasn’t!
Happy New Year

Normal…

... Normal
was always right around the corner
-- a 50's drugstore --
milkshakes for a quarter -- black
coffee in thick white mugs --
white boys in duck tails
pouring Crown Cola 
over black girls in white dresses --
newsreels just couldn't do it justice -- even
colorized years later --
the shock of red  -- how
you never saw their faces
in the same light again -- how
every year the price went up -- how
the trouble was never quite 
good enough
      to stop
the endless rewinds
the multiplication of names
on marble walls

A confession


  • A meme on Facebook, how <… the sole purpose of homework, is to condition children into accepting, that unpaid overtime and ridiculous hours, and even not being able to escape work at in your own home, are normal things to expect in the future>

    So many variants of that. Like forcing people to conform to fixed hours when their brains and bodies do not and will not ever adjust to working fixed hours… and when these people try–in order to live, they are pushed to going manic, into disabling depression, or near suicidal panic attacks.

    I was never able–over 60 years of trying to support myself, and a family, able to stay on one job much over a year. The one time I worked, as a radiographic transcriptionist, for two and a half years–it pushed to being “flordily manic” (my therapist’s words)… and a year of my life… lost
    … or… on and on. And we are given pills to ‘fix’ us…and the Pharmaceuticals LOVE this, and get very very rich, and mental difference becomes a medical condition, a name in Big Book–that’s a lot like those books of Spells in films about witches and warlocks.

    People are not sick, they… we… live in a sick system. What we see, in so much of mental and emotional illness– is not individual sickness, but individuals expressing the symptoms of this sick, capitalist hell.

    That’s my whole fucking life. From 3rd grade till I retired and could live on Social Security.
  • For a long time I looked for the specific source, or sources of what looked and felt like PTS”D” … I don’t think there was any specific source now. I think what I wrote above… explains it all.

Remembering the Blogosphere

I printed out 43 pages of posts from my old blog: Jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com. And that only from July to Sep, 2007, and a few older journal entries. On art, poetry, book reviews, politics. They’ve held up well, and the writing is strong. I have another 200 pages, maybe more.

What does one do with this kind of thing? No one would be interested in publishing them–unless you’re an academic of note, or have a name from some other field. In 2007, the blogosphere was still alive. I corresponded with some interesting people. That was about the time when newspapers ditched their book reviews. For a while, the blogs made up for it. We exchanged recommendations for new books, wrote reviews. Across disciplines. Levi Paul Bryant, of Larval Subjects, is the only one I’m still in touch with. There were some great science blogs, too–like Cosmic Variance, until they got bought out and they magazined the life out of it.

People leave 3 word comments here now.. every once in awhile. But there’s no exchange of ideas. An intellectual wasteland.

Now we’ve got Facebook. Thankful for Neil Patrick Doherty’s Poetry Hedge School. Closest thing to what we had with blogs, but about all that’s left.

I’m going to keep up with this project… wherever it takes me.

#1199 …The Mask… again

I did more work on this and ruined it. This is my attempt to save it.
11×14 pen & Ink, watercolor.

View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.