Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Life is still here. It’s weird and it’s different and it’s stressful. But you still get to have space for normalcy. — Alison Green

Keeping ourselves going matters: in a nontrivial sense, what we're fighting for is space in which we can live our lives, room to work and love and play and learn, because our ordinary lives matter.

(I just left that as a comment on a locked post, and I want it here where I can see it.)

...and then I wandered over to Jo Walton's web page, thinking I should quote a poem, but "This is comfort. Face it bravely" doesn't quite feel apropos. So: here's a stanza from "Doing Laundry on the Last Day of the World":

Yes, we could die on any morning,
slipping between moments,
gone between words in a conversation,
our worlds could end at any time.
Yet here we are, doing laundry,
making dinner,
making poetry,
making the mindful choices,
living in every moment,
because it is this moment,
every action its own action,
every word a benison.

More saved comments: ( poetry and structure, comfort food, warnings for disturbing content, the distinctions languages make, reading and rereading, 'guilty' pleasures )

Children interest me, adults often interest me more, which is to say, people are interesting. This is one reason why I read books, almost all of which are written either by or about what I call 'people'. It's just another smug variation of books vs. real life, which is always a weird and frankly stupid dichotomy.—cija (in oursin's journal)

One from memory, one from the arts section of Wednesday's Montreal Gazette:

"America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." —Allen Ginsberg

"I'm not as pessimistic as I was after Hiroshima. —Pete Seeger

(Pete is doing five concerts in Quebec, all sold out well before the article appeared, of course, or I'd have asked rysmiel whether I should get one ticket or two for the show tonight, which is in this neighborhood. The article talked about his music, artists he has influenced, and his political history, including both Clearwater and the blacklist.)

Your question only makes any sense at all if you completely ignore the point I was making. You are welcome, of course, to continue ignoring me, but it would probably be more efficient use of your time to do so with less typing. —Darkhawk, on alt.poly

Our friendship transcends conventional notions of identity, gender, and sandwiches. —D. C. Simpson, in today's Ozy and Millie.

Forty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., went to Riverside Church (which is here in Manhattan) and gave a speech against the Vietnam War. Here's a bit of it:

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up. —Rex Stout (Death of a Doxy)

Sometimes when a lot of people seem to be using the same obvious and amazing self-contradiction, they're not, they're just failing to follow your model of perfect linguistic behaviour. —Chris Malcolm (on alt.poly)