American Gothic

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.The simulacrum is true.=Ecclesiastes, from Baudrillard's The Precession of the Simulacra.

It used to be the sky
and vast dominion meant
this side next, fill it up or erase it.
All the water in the far off sea was clean
under and outrageously deep, freshening the edges.
Once upon a time mom and dad
could fill a car for the weekend
with gum and wrappers
as children fell asleep in the corners,
jarred and blinking in the glow
of good intentions.
There was no where to run, no real need to
and plenty of jargon to fill the time.
Nothing needed to be done about
the same old secrets: engine on, engine off.
Easy does it and upsy daisy in the rigamarole,
we kept the getty-up and go
in the thingamajig under the hood.
Time doesn't pass in these juke boxes anymore,
there's more fidget in a pesky market
than on the streets where everyone used to ride
look ma no hands and by the seat of the pants
all torn and socks full of thorns.
The weeds mattered more than the sanctions
when girls got up slow and boys grew up thin.
Way back when a window was mostly pegs and putty
instead of glide and shine, no one minded a crack.
No one bothered to count the missing bits
of paint or the patches on a pair,
it was expected. Life needed to end somewhere.
We could stitch the universe with a thread,
organize the world with a rake and we sure did.




"Google me," he quipped. "If you spin the Leatherman you can travel through time." - Nelson LeBron (while aboard the USS Trenton during the Lebanese evacuation in the war of 2006); sailor and world champion featherweight kickboxer who trains soldiers in close combat.

Experience LeBron's MySpace for yourself

I spend my time on the internet anymore...as a release before actually "going to work" and coming home to face the same old bad news "it's getting pretty bad" my husband and I joke now...each day postulating that if we just start saying to other people 'it's getting pretty good" might really shake them up a bit.

I venture about knowing for a fact that I don't belong to any group or school and in the words of the Lutheran Surrealist "haunt" various blogs and discussions...as if I am not wanted...well...as if I didn't know that we muslims are a hard reminder to so many people right now. But we show up all the same because it is out of curiosity towards the world as it is becoming something different. It absolutely is and we muslims do know this because we come equipped with knowledges that haven't yet become the norm. But they are definitely becoming part of not only the norm but the base/broth of a context that is newer and older than anything that can bewitch a person because of its innate and idiosyncratic adaptability to "the times". That is what Allah must have meant when he labeled the Quran as a book "for all times" and noted that it contained answers to every question that could possibly be asked of it.

I have known about this great change that is about to occur for some time now....I have been utilizing that knowledge for about as long as I can remember even though there was a time when I was very young in which I didn't know what was happening to me. Ah yes...but like Shaupenhauer once reflected..when you look back at life it is as if you are reading a very well written novel...of course..that is only if one is a "good reader" of one's own life.

Ali ibn Abi Taleb....may Allah be mighty pleased with him...said..."if you know yourself then you know your Allah." And it is so true. Allah knows what we cannot begin to imagine...about ourselves, our times, our societies. Allah wrote the rules down and handed them over with some very good intentions towards the human race that has a tendency to get itself in a bit deep. It does that because it doesn't know the speed limits or worse, it ignores them out of selfish materialistic gratifications. It has careless drivers who insist that the speed limit wasn't posted and do so in the face of the cop standing right there by the sign and writing the ticket, making the diagnosis.

Fifty five miles an hour.

Not twenty five as the Creationists and Born Agains like to suggest and not the speed of light as athiests would hope you to believe. It is actually somewhere "in between" the two ideals.

The results are coming in now. America is in big trouble. The world is in big trouble. What next, the plague? And what does it have to do with the LeBron story and Google?

Must be the flarf in my generation and all generations that was indicated by his comment to us aboard the Trent which was chock full of weeping women and tired war weary children. More importantly, it was about a comment made by a rather handsome Air Force cadet who became very interested in my insights as we were deliberating on how to deal with a young mother in our company of exiles who kept mistreating her child because she was more interested in getting drunk with the sailors and enlisted men.

That young cadet said to me that he wanted to buy my book. He was escorting my entourage to the Cargo plane we would be boarding and which was heading to New Jersey of all places. I had to tell him that my book wasn't yet published. What I should have said is that it will never be published in his lifetime let alone mine. He hoped to comfort me by saying that at least I was getting out of a dangerous war zone.

I guess he was surprised when I told him that America is a war zone....a war zone of the mind. I knew I wasn't headed for a place much better off than those succumbing to phosphorous and WOMD distributed by the Israeli/US war machine. Not at all. I knew I was heading to a country full of ignorance and misguidance and that would mean I would be the victim of things much harsher than decapitation and/or dismemberment by materialistic weaponry. And most assuredly...I have suffered a great deal trying to rectify my presence among people who have literally no clue about what is really going on in the world we live in.

This war I'm in here, in America is certainly the worst danger I've ever been in. And I've been in some serious situations, seen some pretty serious things.