The waves are Chinese, but the Earth is an Indian thing.

Two short and fairly uninteresting things;

I heard Bill Clinton on NPR this morning and was immediately reminded of how thoroughly revolting he is/was; he was promoting a new book about Giving- and of course you know what my first thought was- and his "most astonishing story" was about some Mississippi washerwoman who dropped out of grade school to care for a sick relative and worked until she passed at 87, saving her pennies, and she never had a car but pushed the grocery cart a mile to the grocery store, and she gave $150,000 in savings to some college to endow a scholarship.

I cannot express how absolutely disgusting this is, and how repulsive this looter mentality is.

The point of this story is that it's somehow ennobling to spend your life in miserable service to someone else and deny yourself the things you want so someone who is already ahead of you can get further ahead. Yay for her, right? Or what? Who would choose this? WHY?

You know it's one thing to be entirely selfish, and only concerned with getting ahead and making a buck or whatever it is, but this is much, much worse, because this person is not only selfish, but rather than hoeing their own row, they beg that someone else hoe it for them, and then throw out weak platitudes of gratitude. Ugh.

Communism died- almost- there are apparently even people who are writing books now to rehabilitate (?!) Stalin, mass murderer extraordinaire- but the bad ideas that created it live on, and on, and on, personified in the Clintons. I've been trying to figure out for the longest exactly WHAT it is that terrifies me about Hillary Clinton, and it's this mentality. This we-know-better-than-you-do tobacco taxing puritanical sensibility combined with the attitude that you don't really own what you produce, and that this - slaving away for 80 years and pinching pennies to give it all to us is now- admirable.

O and I always make fun of Alex, because his favourite book is "On The Road" ( I couldn't figure out how to underline) and it's the 50th anniversary of the publication of "On The Road."
Y'all, I was almost about to ask Alex to borrow it so that I could read it? And then I read this article? And I was happy that I did not. Truman Capote was right, it's not writing, it's just typing.

So wait, I just had this brilliant insight.

Why do writers like Kerouac put down this endless stream of non-ideas? Like Hemingway or Conrad? And why do men find it appealing?

Because the vast majority of men admire, and I'm making vast, sweeping generalisations, Homogenity. Ok? Like the preferred communication of men is to sit around and know that the other men around them are thinking more or less the same thoughts. That is why you can have a couple of guys sit together and drink beer and watch a game and not talk a lot. They feel comforted that the other guy is having more or less the same ideas and feelings that they are having. Therefore, they don't want to read about surprising new ideas, or to feel someone else's feelings which might be different from their own.

And, other insight, truly patriarchal societies emphasise homogenity.

Think about it, that's why there are always uniforms for any sort of entirely male group. The Army- Shriners- you name it, they seek homogenity.

Women want to analyse all the differences between themselves and the other people around them. That's why they look each other up and down to figure out where they stand. Guys do this too but much less.

Anyway I'm all out of thought.