On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

"If she moves her eyes and opens her mouth just a little, the world she's trying to refuse will rush into her instantly..." - Yukio Mishima (The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion, 1956) The first historical example of free speech was in 200,000,000 B.C. which was documented on a Sumerian cuniform tablet unearthed during a Huntsville, Alabama Easter Egg hunt in 1978 by a child who unfortunately damaged the document by trying to eat the relic thinking it was a peanut butter chocolate egg. [Citation needed, some critics claim that the petrified fragment was actually a boiled Easter egg that was left in the field from the previous egg hunt in 1977] The ancient excerpt, which an internet expert (who declines to identify himself) says is part of the first volume of the Lost Gospel of Murgatroyd, relates that the great King Nubilecanazzer McDougal the Glorious One, had just sentenced a peasant to several days of torture for unauthorized viewing of the Queen's royal buns (everyon...

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too..." -George Orwell Each generation produces a coterie of rebels and forward thinkers who may or may not edge our culture forward, but will at least add ideas to the mainstream. Very few age groups develop an ability to look inward and see their own flaws in real time. That tends to be the task of the next generation. There were writers such as Voltaire, H. L. Mencken, Paul Krassner, or Tom Wolfe who could see that human nature was really a constant, that is to say, could see the irony in a generation criticizing another, and who turned their sharp eye on their peers' foibles and failings. But most societal critics and lampooners end up becoming, as George Orwell called it, "licensed jesters" who can coast along as honored sages if they stick to approved targets, but the early feminist writers, the ones who stubbornly kept to the core issue of equality, broke that mold, as as a result faced of...

He traverses familiar,  As one should come to town  And tell you all your dreams were true;  He lived where dreams were sown. - Emily Dickinson  "Do you suppose I give a damn about life now? Why, you bone-head, I haven't got a single damned lying hope or pipe dream left!" "By God, there's no hope! I'll never be a success in the grandstand--or anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I'll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die!" - Eugene O'Neill (The Iceman Cometh)  I've first saw O'Neill's play, "The Iceman Cometh" in high school. My English & Literature class watched the movie version that starred Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan on PBS. I won't go into all of the deep meaning, as there's cliff notes and Google for that, but what seems relevant today was the importance of dreams, which are part of a reality, even if delusional. The play'...