The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    The Hood Rat

    By Wattree on Wed, 03/07/2012 - 11:27am |


    Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree
     

     

    The Hood Rat
     
    I’m sure you know I love you.
    You’re everything I need.
    You fit the bill of all my desires,
    a perfect match for all my dreams.
    You’re everything I’ve always craved,
    that luscious vision from across the tracks,
    that delicate flower, just beyond my grasp, and here you are at last.
    *
     
    But what you ask is foreign to me.
    You need something that I'm not.
    You said, if I'd tweak my nature, just a bit,
    you’ll give everything you’ve got.
    *
    But that "tweak" you need is who I am.
    It's my essence, can't you see?
    You want to abolish the hood rat from my life,
    the very thing that makes me, me.
    *
    While a hood rat may seem trite to you,
    a hood rat’s what you see.
    So forget about what the other’s say -
    here’s what it means to me:
    *
    I’ve been brutally dragged through the pits of Hell,
    yet, managed to survive,
    well educated and fully functional,
    when I came out the other side.
    *
    I scrounged the lessons taught at Harvard,
    because knowledge, I found, was free.
    But Harvard can't teach the lessons I've learn -
    that knowledge is unique to me.
    *
    While they've heard the sounds of a mournful Trane,
    and Miles moaning in the night,
    not against the backdrop of hunger and pain,
    or injustice, hatred, and blight.
    *
    Yet, these are the things you want me to purge,
    and spurn the life I’ve led.
    Well, I’m sorry sweet thing, as much as I love you,
    the soul of a hood rat is my edge.
    *
     

    Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)

    Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

     

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    Comments

    See now you have got me on seven different roads.

    You’re everything I’ve always craved,
    that luscious vision from across the tracks,

    that delicate flower, just beyond my grasp, and here you are at last

    So I am thinking about wife #2 and then I am lost in the Jazz in all of this and then I think about the lessons.

    I have written so many times about how most of history or the Humanities or Western Civilization or Eastern Civilization could comprise the web. I mean as far as I can tell it is all there free--well free for now.

    You might even run into a site where the table of contents (read schedule) is right there in the offing.

    Someone who really wished to learn something might need a lecture a week which brings me to the other subject of repetition. I mean these lectures have all been made before--decades before.

    So you pay $100,000 for a Humanities degree?

    I am ranting, sorry.

    Love this take by Eric!

     


    by Richard Day on Wed, 03/07/2012 - 5:17pm

    Richard,

    One of the changes that I'm pushing for in the my community is for us to reassess our mores, and replace the pursuit of the "American Dream," with the pursuit of knowledge. I've found that since knowledge is power, one invariably leads to the other, and more.

    I was fortunate enough to obtain the American dream, but not as a result of any kind of pursuit. I only stumbled upon it while on a mission to educate myself.  I wasted my teenage years, when I should have been studying, running the street (between the ages of 12 and 19 years of age). I spent that time dropping out of school, going in and out of various institutions, and using any kind of drug that I could get my hands on. 

    But once I was arrested as an adult (at 19 years-old), an insightful cop and a  benevolent judge joined forces to get me to agree to go into the military (I thought at the time that they meant the army) in return for not being sent to prison, and expunging my record if I came out with an Honorable Discharge. In addition, they somehow managed to get the Marine Corps to ignore all of their regulations against accepting an illiterate delinquent. But once I got in there I found out why - the marines needed a warm body to use as a close combat dummy in order to train the "REAL MARINES."

    But once the marines finished showing me what a gangster REALLY was, they had me take the GED. Although I did a lot of guessing, I scored in the 97 percentile. So they sent me to the Army/Navy Academy to obtain a real high school diploma, and later, gave me an early-out to attend college. 

    In the process I fell in love with knowledge, and I found that what I loved most was free.  I also learned, contrary to our national values, that the only mature and productive form of competition is to compete against the person you were yesterday; and the only true road to perfect fulfillment is to dedicate your life to becoming your own hero. Our failure to understand those two truisms is the source of 99% of the world's problems.        


    by Wattree on Fri, 03/09/2012 - 12:19pm

    I hereby render unto Eric (as if he needs it!) the Dayly Line of the Day at this here Dagblog Site given to all of him from all of me for this gem:

     

    In the process I fell in love with knowledge, and I found that what I loved most was free.  I also learned, contrary to our national values, that the only mature and productive form of competition is to compete against the person you were yesterday; and the only true road to perfect fulfillment is to dedicate your life to becoming your own hero.


    by Richard Day on Fri, 03/09/2012 - 1:45pm

    Very nice. I read it several times to take it all in.

    by trkingmomoe on Fri, 03/09/2012 - 3:24am