the limitless divot

Democrats/Republicans = Coke/Pepsi

Brilliant.

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner - and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis - there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.

That this "kidnapping" was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources - most particularly that of water - by the Israeli Defence (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land alloted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

Today outrage follows outrage; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones. The latter usually find their target situated where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called Justice. Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly - who but field commanders can forget this for a moment?

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

This has to be said loud and clear for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognised for what it is and resisted.


Tariq Ali
John Berger
Noam Chomsky
Eduardo Galeano
Naomi Klein
Harold Pinter
Arundhati Roy
Jose Saramago
Giuliana Sgrena
Howard Zinn

"As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song."

I read this, in the sun in the dirty breeze of Lake Calhoun, and was content. Daisy to Gatsby, and the sun upon me.

So it stormed like fuck this afternoon. "Grace under pressure" but solely in light of ready shelter. Wavering visibility reduced to a wet downwardly-cast field of grey, darkness oscillating as a wind-smashed prairie, and the thoroughfares' inclines outside my windows were as canyon rapids. I stepped out on the porch in my bare feet, and it was to the leeward side of the torrents, under the swaddle of my 3 story redstoen. I sauntered down the stair steps, ankle deep in pearl-sized bits of hail and stood out on the concrete to watch the fray. The ground was cold. Cold. I waited for the storm to pass and afterwards the power died for a short time. I walked down the street hoping to make transition to a coffee/tea venue on a separate grid, and I caught the interesting carnival of passersby and lookers-on that you find after something pandemic occurs. In this case it was the absence of electricity but people still try to go about their ways except now in a real sort of Minnesotan nice, something equivocated, and same-boat. For now, lightless semafores become four-way stops, by custom. A stylist has moved her chair and client upon it out on to the sidewalk to fine tune his haircut, using the remaining overcast luminance before it departs. Lightning had also apparently struck/smote a building across from the dry cleaners on the corner, a building with 3 entrances, and hideous canopies, and an even nastier inside. I wished it would burn to the ground, and that by freak random chance all within carried insurance, for the benefit of just me. In response almost, to me and my deranged wishes, it rained again as I watched the firetruck extend its mantis-y pylons with wide feet, and up went 3 likely just-my-types (yeah, in a huge metal boom in a lightning storm, sharp guys, like....honed) in the cherry picker (heh), to inspect whether anything was a-smolder, and so I scurry back to my apartment, with the polka dottage of walked-through water droplets. I exit the back way after a brief checking in, lightswitch on/off, nope still none, and find that a tree branch has fallen upon a car or two. I wonder if so it's my car, but nay, 10 feet south of it. I hop in my car, to the Tea Garden. I am drinking a wintermelon shake now. I ran into an old friend and her (now) husband. We bantered, and it was less awkward small talk than before, both of us acknowledging the lameness of pretending to make plans to hang out, leaving the pleasure in the infrequency and happenstance of our meetings. I return home, and I ess through the neighborhoods. At one unlucky corner a tree had been uprooted, like the Earth and everything else went otherwise from it, a sod and loamy tablecloth ripped imperfectly from beneath stubborn gnarly tendrils and horns. Left so imbalanced this stately oak opted to take ease against two nearby houses, the leverage tossing about an entire sidewalk segment, and a parallel piece of curb, both now retired and perpendicular to their useful place.

A still, brown arch cast into brilliance by solar rays diving inside threaded keyholes of rows of coppery, tinny blinds set at an occlusal slant against the brightness ever-sinking and westward, and overhead a mural of abstraction, and a line of untold-except-graphically verbose caution is what's outstanding beneath the angled crease of the be-flaked ceiling and its once-square tiles. Repeatedly, Mitchell as pacing moon, crosses the rays, and his eclipses run a brief cycle of totality, and from below, in his just-new repose, he seems to Christopher in his perogee/apogee and so on that similarly he's lifted into a gilded, anti-silhouette, traced in motion by the varied coronae of the crepuscular late of day. Around his fevered outline, swim dusty motes, slaves and not necessarily in rebellion to the currents of the rustic gassiness in the cool late day air, the room the temperature and moisture of a still waterfront.

Each (the men) is dressed in the ochres of their surroundings, a wayward camouflage; upon observation just boring still-life, were there lookers-on.

Inside and by stealth, within the boundaries of sound and as quietly, an orange cat coasts upon a low silent loom and just under dusk's grasp, his erect fur catching beams, a feline sundial, in his own grace, returning the sun its brillance in kind. His ears are a-twirl, the vigilance and sleeplessness of his senses and their observation stressed and not-quite-human (though only can they be interpreted that way, to men) and most acutely attuned to other than what's visually make his apparently cool demeanor a guise. His haunches erupt in a serpentine rhythm as he strolls, and he leaves no wake.

Mitchell and as well tight-lipped companion Christopher occupy this room, above and around them mouldings and false overhead butresses a grid of dark sweaty cherry. They are symmetrically arranged in position, but not in posture. The divan squeaks, in weary protest, as Christopher's spine finds its place, and air can be heard in a hiss from the cracks in the arid leather. Facially, each is statuesque, eyes sharp, his an almost black, and Mitchell's blue, and crystalline.

Christopher, is 25, and his composure is a betrayal of the hurricane that blends and roils his insides. He is quick to trust and then distrust, and in either case, in pure apathy his response is so, to himself, about the consequences of his actions or inaction:

"Hey,  I just work here."