Western Wind, when wilt thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

~Unknown

In a shift from the theme of self-righteous preachery, this is one of the first poems I ever loved. Somehow it captures both that early morning feeling when you can't tell your sheets from your skin and love in all of its inexpressibility.

"'Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.' This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function...I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures...And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All US irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I'm saying."...The next real "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction."

~David Foster Wallace

Even odds that this blog devolves into one big sycophantic homage to DFW

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."

~MLK

Good job Congress on granting LGBTQ folks the ability to serve their country with honesty. Now how about letting them live in it fully?

Also, TRIPLE SHAME ON YOU, SENATE, FOR NOT PASSING THE DREAM ACT.

Shame on you one for allowing bigots to paint the act as amnesty. Amnesty implies a crime committed. This Act was written to help children, not criminals.

Shame on you two for preventing educated, patriotic people from contributing to and buying commodities in our economy.

Shame on you three for reducing a person, a child, to a state of legality. How dare you try to legislate the ineffable.

TRIPLE SHAME ON YOU.

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."

~Solomon Short

See also:
Sarah Palin
Michelle Bachmann
Internet message board comments
http://xkcd.com/406/

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Well, shoot. I thought I was just weird. Turns out I'm equipped for salvation. Bring on the night weasels!

"We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery."

~H.G. Wells

"Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant."

~Ani Difranco

The twisted thing is that posting this quote made me concerned I would come across as angry and militant. I can't decide if I should go bake a pie to counteract that or just embrace it and invest in a battle mace.

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"

~David Foster Wallace

This is Water. This is Water.