Bulletins

Hallefreakinlujah! This morning, after turning my shower off, I shivered. It was that cool in my apartment. There were goosebumps even. Fall is coming. The cicadas are clicking in the trees. Summer is on its way back to hell. Praise Yahweh, Venus, Zeus, Shiva, the temple prostitutes, the weather dwarves, & all their various messengers and avatars.
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In the last couple of days, I’ve noticed women with tattoos between their breasts. No fair! I mean, I want to look, but being a good boy, I can’t stare. I’m with Barthes on this: what’s erotic is half-concealed; the partially hidden form is more exciting than the naked one. But, being both shy and unwilling to treat someone as an object, I don’t take all that much pleasure in looking at strangers. Which is a shame, since lately that’s all I’ve got. What a pickle!
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But by now, aren’t we all pretty bored with tattoos? When it reaches the depravities of the debutant set, it’s quite lost its appeal. I find the only ones I admire now are the minimalist ones, a scattering of stars over the shoulders or some circles running up the back of the calf. (This may be, of course, just admiration for shoulders and calves.) The other day at the Co-op, though, someone had some bees on her arm…
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“And his idealism was tempered with a deep pessimism, or rather, lucidity about the nature of humanity,” wrote J.U. Halperin about Felix Feneon, aesthete and anarchist of fin-de-siecle Paris. This same book introduces me to the term "Morosophes," coined by Erasmus in his immortal In Praise of Folly. The term is translated as “foolosophers.”
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Communard, Dreyfusard, Marxist (Groucho variety), Wobbly, and hippie, that’s me.