snails go gnash traileds

after thinking over the story of el pobre Mouse (R.I.P.), a few words for the New Age.

i routinely do a quick visual sweep of the garden and if i find snails or slugs, i pluck them, give them a quick gatha ( intention being key to what follows) and then make a quick stomp and pull combo, very little is left to the imagination. but only on certain "death days" - other times i just look at them - beautiful if invasive animals, like us, also transplants from Europa on some comic misadventure, not that they see it that way - snails are so lovely, their delicate eyes, how you can see the pupil, the pupil, alive and tender probing, on, on, on. as relentless as scalapino's defoe. (patrick, i think, stole that book)

so that is the flip side for you, noting here my defense of a claim, a claim to tomatoes, nasturiums, mint and thyme. the gatha is my friend, what can i do - we are in the ever belly of murder. better luck next time, and down comes the boot.

dear reader i would do the same to you...


the smile lets me off the hook right? ginger pills and thoughts on the Henry Ford-ness of both emmerson and the pragmatics will take me out. who wants to read about the classical stoics? look them up yourselves! epictetus, esp.:

Epictetus (55–c.135) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was probably born at Hierapolis, Phrygia, lived most of his life in Rome until his exile to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he died. The name given by his parents, if one was given, is not known - the word epiktetos in Greek simply means "acquired."
Epictetus spent his youth as a slave in Rome to Epaphroditos, a very wealthy freedman of Nero. Even as a slave, Epictetus used his time productively, studying Stoic Philosophy under Musonius Rufus. He was eventually freed and lived a relatively hard life in ill health in Rome. It is known that he became crippled, most likely from extreme rheumatism. He was exiled along with other philosophers by the emperor Domitian in 89.
It was Epictetus' exile by Domitian that began what would later come to be the most celebrated part of his life. After his exile, Epictetus traveled to Nicopolis, Greece, where he founded a famed philosophical school. This school was even visited by Hadrian, and its most famous student, Arrian, became a great historian in his own right.
True to Stoic form, Epictetus lived a life of great simplicity, marked by teaching and intellectual pursuits. He is known to have married once, late in life, to help raise a child who would have otherwise been left to die.
Epictetus' main work is the Enchiridion --or "Handbook", while his longer works are known as The Discourses. It is not believed that Epictetus wrote these, himself, but that they were penned by his pupil, Arrian. Like the early Stoics, Epictetus focused on ethics and on being masters of our own lives. The role of the Stoic teacher, according to Epictetus, was to encourage his students to live the philosophic life, whose end was eudaimonia (‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’), to be secured by living the life of reason, which meant living virtuously and living ‘according to the will of nature’.

So master your own life, master of your own life (and nothing else, my chumps, nothing else). Now if only Chain's "Dialogue" issue (hands up if you've been rejected by Chain) had our man Epictetus in conversation w/ Deleuze... even w/ Billy Collins, I am a flexible man. Tried to read that issue in the bathtub today, it was one big distraction. Luckily, I figure the likes of Bruce Andrews encourages me to be distract. Why Chain is brilliantly distracting, consciously invokes it, but then so does a gnere novel, so does Danielle Steel, but Bruce lets you in on it. Partners? So they say. Edwin Torres is a being of pure light, at least if pure light is a little like ecstacy and meth on a 120W spanglish rampage through the NY Public Library.