I CAN'T STAND IT

 

Don’t trust anything you read that was written in the dead of the night by a sleepless person wrestling with problems, pseudo-problems, and whatever lies in the no-man’s land beyond those.  (Context: Earlier on this sleepless night I watched a Blackadder excerpt from the WWI series that has fixed no-man’s land in my mind until morning or whenever it is I wake up or fail to go to sleep.)

That being said, someone wrote something about important facts (I think) being “tears in the rain of news,” I checked out the context of that remark, ran into Blade Runner (which I still haven’t seen in its entirety), and couldn’t stand it.  Any of it.  I would like to calm down.  I thought election night would bring a calming down, but after the briefest of pauses (like when you’ve been struck in the head and stunned or had the wind knocked out of you on the football field), it didn’t.  The election will never ever be over.  People who will lose nothing are suddenly afraid of losing everything.  Except for you, I hate my generation.

Lou Reed: I Can't Stand It (Link) 

RAMIFYING DOWNWARD

There was only one answer; and it filled me with profound discouragement. Seven possible rendezvous!—eight, counting Norden. Which to make for? Out came the time-table and map, and with them hope. The case was not so bad after all; it demanded no immediate change of plan, though it imported grave uncertainties and risks. Norden was still the objective, but mainly as a railway junction, only remotely as a seaport. Though the possible rendezvous were eight, the possible stations were reduced to five—Norden, Hage, Dornum, Esens, Wittmund—all on one single line. Trains from east to west along this line were negligible, because there were none that could be called night trains, the latest being the one I had this morning fixed on to bring me to Norden, where it arrived at 7.15. Of trains from west to east there was only one that need be considered, the same one that I had travelled by last night, leaving Norden at 7.43 and reaching Esens at 8.50, and Wittmund at 9.13. This train, as the reader who was with me in it knows, was in correspondence with another from Emden and the south, and also, I now found, with services from Hanover, Bremen, and Berlin. He will also remember that I had to wait three-quarters of an hour at Norden, from 7 to 7.43.

 

 

Note:  A tragedy has befallen our community, one which makes me ashamed of my own past behavior.

Text:  Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903)

Graham Parker: Pourin' It All Out (Link) (1976)

Art: Vija Celmins