Which Way the Wind Blows

First! Fresh poems; check them out on the comments from days past!

Been down so long I have barely looked up. My media consumption this week was beyond cliche, as you will see, usual suspects.

So I didn’t see until yesterday that a great, insightful astrologer had died, at 11:11 a.m. on Halloween: Rockie Gardiner of Rocky Horoscope fame in LA Weekly and other alternatives. She always had a twist on the usual and a fast way of putting it; she dated Jim Morrison, and rumor is she’s the one LA Woman was written about. She was 70.

In my quest to cultivate gratitude, I’m grateful for this from scientist Stuart Kauffman :

"Forget the "God" word for a second and just try to feel yourself as a co-creating member of the universe. It changes your stance from the secular humanist lack of spirituality to a sense of awed wonder that all of this has come about. For example, I was sitting on my patio and started thinking about the trees around me. I thought I'm one with all of life. If I'm going to cut down a tree, I better have a good reason. It's not just an object. It's alive."

Go, unconsciously-touting-Paganism-man, go!

But why wasn't this on the front page?

William Ayers is busting out all over. First I heard was on Democracy Now, talking about how the 60s were being deomonized as an era or horror, anarchy, chaos…the whole get off my lawn thing that ignores all the civil rights advances made. Got himself a couple book deals, too. And asking questions I was hoping someone would ask, but I guess I’m so naïve, cause it had to wait til after the election:

"I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter, I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.

"Meanwhile, another group of Americans -- also despairing, also off the tracks -- walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.

"And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?"

I don’t know, like, all of the above? That always worked for me on the SATs.

PS: Interview also points out that Bernadine Dohrn, who was the actual leader of the Weather Underground, was completely ignored in the recent attack campaigns. Wimmenfolk can’t never get the credit.