Capote reading

Well, blogging I guess.

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome arean that other Kansans call "Out There." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with it's hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than middle west. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

What intrigues me about Capote is his language. His words are dark when needed, and heavy as brick. Yet he can inspire me to feel the whisper of the golden wheat and solemn still of the cemetary.

He was a master, and I've tried to mold myself to his style bit by bit.


We'll see if it works.

I remember the sunlight, heavy, thick with the dust of bygone days, floating and moving slowly away from my field of vision. The room is lit only from the single shaft of brilliance, like a knights lace at tournament, jousting away the dark. Back in the room I look out to see the massive jacaranda trees down the street framed in the gold that fills the room and fills the valley. The back wall of the valley is coated in a living wallpaper of orange glory. Ancient in it's spreading branches and beautiful, shading all who seek refuge, and raining the neon-purple gems that wilt and fade too soon.
It is nearly evening. Soon others will come, will come to force the routine to pick itself up form the floor where I left it, broken and tainted by this moment of release.
But until then I will stay free of it's grasp while I bathe in the gold that is already fading.
As I wait for this joy to dim so that regular life can keep going.

What would I do if it didn't stop? Grow bored? Be happy forever? No, I would soon begin to long for the bone-chilling cold that I once knew, the rushing dark that envelops all sooner or later.

This golden caress, the kiss of the sun, that are valuable because they are scarce.

To bathe in them too long is to relinquish control and abandon oneself to the moment completely. To do such is to live forever.

Alas, it has already faded. The Gold is gone and soon come the night. The rushing and pushing wind that I have come to love.

Lets talk war

Think about war. What do you see?
Do you see the trenches of WW1, or the beaches of Normandy, or the Long standoff with Russia?

Or do you see something more sinister?
Do you see the biltz of media coverage that we have come to understand as "war?"
Or the explotiation of the suffering of those who have sacrificed so much already to make the most money possible? Or the pointless and trivial victories hyped by those who "control" the ground and have a picture they'd like to show you?

I have come to understand war to be the profiteering of those who have over those who have the nationalistic pride and raw intestinal fortitude to serve.

Take those who have no choice but to have their laundry washed by a halliburton subsidiary. But first, a backstory.
Halliburton is a new wave of company, and this new wave crests as our Notions of "America The Great" come crashing around our ankles. This wave puts the profit from the job even above the quality that must minimally be met.

KCO is a Halliburton subsidiary. They wash clothes and feed the troops. Well, in theory.
KCO charges $150 for every load of laundry, and then does something unthinkable.

They just don't wash the clothes.

They take the money, and, essentially, give the clothes back the next day, just as sweat and muck filled as yesterday. This is not healthy over long periods of time. One immediate response may be "Just wash them elsewhere," right? Well, the chain of command has decreed that the average grunt MAY NOT WASH THEIR OWN CLOTHES. They must report to KCO and deliver the garments to be returned the next day.
Worse though is the food production. Halliburton charges the united states government around $100 for every "Home Cooked" meal they serve. However, these meals, for the most part, never arrive. The food that does arrive is moldy and uneatable. Worse than refusing to do laundry, they starve the troops while charging the US government all the while. Worse than not serving the troops is preparing the food at regular intervals while refusing to keep a 24 hour schedule. this allows terrorists to pinpoint the time that our troops eat and attack when there is no other option but to eat.

However, worse than all the rest is "Water Sanitation." Halliburton has the task of cleaning the water that the troops will bathe in, drink, and live on. There is no sanitizing methods. The solution that halliburton uses is to dump a chemical cocktail into the mix, and then return it to the troops because That's Cheaper. The water is not clean, it is turned into poison.

The message is the war has changed. Everyday I consider the possibility that this has been staged for the profit of industries like Halliburton. There is money to be made in this war, your money going to Halliburton on the order of billions every year.

Think now about what war is to you.