From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:03 am
Subject: The Temptations of Blue Peter
The Temptations of Blue Peter (or pseudo saintly singleton upon Tyne).
They try to tempt him, but goodman trueman has none of it.
But is he a real good soul? or just a polite faker?
Scotty had a little nightie and her small cherry tips could be seen through it.
But he seemed not to see them.
Or did he really?
You could never tell with him.
He seemed a nice one, but was he a bit of an evil one really?
Or (worse perhaps) was he just dull and dutiful?
She got the half grapefruits out to test him further.
He seemed impressed and even licked his lips a bit.
But was he doing it to remove a bitter aftertaste or a newly sweet one?
You could never tell with him.
Faker or shaker?
Coffee always gets them up ... but not him it seemed, and the sloppy git just sat there blandly.
Was he a shitster beneath it all?
He often got all mixed up in his own mind, what with all these incredible things he found
himself accused of - why he even ended sentences with dangling participles.
That was the problem with the ones with the dangling bits, they never knew the proper places to put them, or kept it up for long
enough.
The things he was accused of never ended ... why he even slopped on a lavatory seat to make some mark of
disrespect (and he'd always done his best to be a more careful bog pisser than many of his kind).
[And goodness gracious me ... wasn't liberal whitey a terrible racist too?]
Anyway, it was black coffee in bed ... and that was the way he liked it wasn't it? but if that was so, why
did he sometimes have it milky whitey, or all creamy frothy, of with spit and what on Earth was it Baldrick
put on the top of the darling officer's homemade brew?
There always seemed to be little distractions to be reconsidered ... and there always seemed to be fresh
intruders.
And pat she came, like the catastrophe in the old comedy.
[He seemed to know his Shakespeare did the young old boy, but was he just a copyist or a true lover]
Was it a dragon of a mother or a bag of wind or a pair of thundering Welsh thighs with valleys and hills
between them? It seemed one and it seemed all, and from time to time it seemed to change from place to place.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:26 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
So in came the Welsh duchy and she unzipped it ... and out came the words that never seemed to stop
flowing in a juicy sort of joyful way ... and was she another Irish joy-see one, even though she had an obvious
Welsh voice and name?
[At this point, another intruder opens the door looks in and closes it again - and she's
got a Welsh name and an Ulster accent.]
You can never tell with these British thing-gys, they are never quite one thing nor another.
[And as for the thin guys ... they were really fat boys trying to climb out of their
skin - the spots gave it all away ... the real selves would burst out, poisonously or not, sooner or
later.]
Poor Scotty couldn't get a word in, but she knew that pictures were often better than thousands of words. So she
went to the prop cupboard and there she found it, the album with all the proofs of life ... or maybe it was
just a book of snap dragons.
She opened up the flaps and showed him a beautiful one in the lotus position.
It was, or seemed to be, a 78-year-old female Captain Beefheart Fan.
But that proved nothing other than there's nowt so queer as straight folks who camp it up
because they are bored, or for some other unlikely reason ...or maybe just maybe because faking it can sometimes
reveal reality more clearly than doing it for real, as others might believe.
Welsh dutchy had never stopped speaking, even when he seemed more interested in gazing at Scotty's treasured bits. Then it was almost
like magic (but he still didn't believe in that of course) for her wild and whirling words seemed to conjure
into existence an album of her own.
He now had two open flap flip books on his lap and couldn't make up his mind which to try first. Maybe he'd just have
to think about it for a while longer, or maybe he should try out some touchy feely gestures.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:37 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
Poor half dead white male wasn't feeling too well.
Heat seemed to have dried up his brains, and while he'd had a breakfast of sorts he was still hungry
and thirsty.
Coffee and a half-grapefruit isn't much for a real hard leader of men is it?
It was almost as if they were telling him that he was a bit on the flabby side ... while he was laughing at the fat ones in
other times and places and even once slapping one on the belly, not playfully, but with what must have
seemed a bit of malice in it, but then that was a reflex response to some other minor cruelty directed at him over
some trivial seeming, but no doubt important to someone else, fault or flaw or gaping sin line that might
send one and all to hell, but just as likely, when you reflecton it, to rise them all to heaven, somehow,
somewhere, someday ... and when and if we get there it might turn out to be no sort of there that we could ever
understand as a there ... it might just be, well, somehow, for better or worse a bit different.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:52 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
... and when they were all laughing at some crude bit of nonsense that was quite funny actually, the
Welsh puritan, who looked a bit Irish and must have had some Scot and English and all sorts of other bits in
her, and who liked a laugh in other circumstances, said she really didn't find the joke very funny and
was really quite offended by it ... and the likely lad said: 'She's the moral minority' ... and they all
laughed at her ... but the joke wasn't funny any more, because laughter was now separating rather than bringing
together ... and in her discomfort she carried the secret discomfort of them all, which was that they didn't want to
live in a world in which the decent moral people were sometimes apparently in the minority ... and while there is
much to be said for levity, including the coarse seeming kind ... the anti-comical voice is not an
unnecessary one ...
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:57 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
... it's not always a barrel of laughs - and that would be unbearable in its own way, as the anti-comical
voice reminds us from time to time ...
... but it's not always a valley of tears - and the horrible howling yahoo makes a serious point from time to time ...
+++++
Cor High Lights philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 12:58 pm
The fatties decided to solve the slimming problem by going on a sponsored scoff for charity. But the event was a fiasco, and the judge stormed off with custard pie all over his face. Some kindly fans enjoyed his discomfort, and paid the scoffers a few extra pounds. The fatties were rewarded with icecream. The observer believed in being charitable - but not too kind (and it was Lent remember).
[But when was he going to get more than a cheap sweet treat? (He heard it said regularly that all that mattered was the result, and that worried him a bit, because that was not all that mattered.)]
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 1:34 pm
I was conceived around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, so I never had much of a future ... that's what I actually imagined for a long time ... but maybe I was mistaken ... the bombs have missed me for 38 years and still counting now ... and although it has often seemed mostly solitary and frustrating, and not amounting to much, it hasn't been a waste of time (I hope) ...
There was much love making going on in the autumn of 1962. Most of it was done in private, which is probably the best way, but some of the results got out. Many might imagine that it came as a flood of relief when the tension was all over. My guess is that it went on before, during and after. [And as a matter of natural fact, it must have!]. There's a good chance that it was the love makers who in many small ways spread positive feeling to calm the crisis - rather than the crisis being turned off by the powerful-seeming decision makers. Whatever was the case, those of us born in the 60s can stake a claim to being children of love - even if our own parents (and even we ourselves when we grew up) were too square and conventional seeming to be full hippies.
...
The baby born at Woodstock ... what is he or she doing now? And what of Mr Port-O-San Man? He had a shitty job, but he liked to mix with the kids having mostly harmless fun, and gave them just that extra bit of comfort with soft toilet paper. The bit extras, the tillys, can make such a difference.
Of course all children of all decades are love children one way or another. But the love can seem to be diminished so easily.
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:00 pm
The fall reoccurs in some ways every day in the everyday.
I was walking with a young woman down a side street. Walking in the opposite direction were a small boy (I think) and his mother (I assume) hand in hand. The boy fell, and the mother, presumably lost in some personal preoccupation, shouted loudly without any apparent sympathy: 'Get Up' (but in a Geordie accent - which translates to something like 'Gerrup'). The boy got to his feet, silently as a recall, but there might have been forgotten tears, and they walked on together. When my walking companion and I (who were not hand in hand) had walked on a few paces, I let out a loud long laugh. I did not seem to have to explain to her why what we had just witnessed was so terribly funny (i.e. not funny at all).
A few years later, during a telephone conversation I had with her when I was perhaps a bit depressed, and my voice was trailing away to near silence (it might 'just' have been shyness), she said to me abruptly 'Buck up'. (I suspect she might have spend too long in the House of Commons listening to Margaret Thatcher.) I didn't laugh then, and held it as a minor grudge against he for years. But it seems quite funny today (tomorrow it might be a slightly different story). And maybe we all need to be reminded to buck up from time to time. (Maggie had many purposes maybe.) And apparent, or even actual, indifference can sometimes be kindly - giving us rests from intense emotions and helping us to endure difficult times.
When catty and I walked hand-in-hand down the street [Which was my idea, even though I was, according to her, 'not very tactile' and 'reluctant to show affection to her in public' (there was some truth in that one, I'll admit) and ... oh yes, don't forget it, adult handholding was just sloppy/soppy childishness.] she had the habit of dragging her feet and then pulling downwards, as if intent on toppling us both over. She laughed playfully and scowled aloud, at the same time, while she was doing this. She never quite managed to topple us.
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:09 pm
The anti-comic voice adds this ...
The two tears of kitschness (a word I can never spell without having doubts about it) according to Milan Kundera:
the first says, 'I'm moved.'
the second says, 'Isn't it so moving that I am moved?'
[The kitsch world, Kundera goes on to say, is a world without shit in it - the world of propaganda ... and advertising perhaps as well (though the ads sometimes take you close to the bogs).]
A further voice, the persuasion of which is uncertain, adds this:
What does the third tear say?
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:31 pm
Late Political News.
The long time ago that was about 8 years ago, during the Labour Party leadership election, there was a tediously polite debate between the contenders, who included the now British prime minister, the now British deputy prime minister and yet another English rose called Margaret [Who could be abrasive, but was not the same political Margaret as the one seen as a rose by some, a witch by others, and a mixture by many, and who was deposed from power with a mixture of tears and laughter a few years previously.] The only memorable moment came when the now deputy PM made a throwaway wise little joke about the dangers of loving each other to death. Then he gritted his teeth and mouthed a few more bland pleasantries.
And one of the few exciting moments in the 2001 British election came when John the stocky deputy
flung a haymaker punch at a bulky agricultural labourer (with a timelessly unattractive seeming fish-themed haircut) who had just thrown an egg at him.
Punchers and eggers-on rarely kill each other. And when one big bloke makes a move towards another 'it happens' as I heard a heavyweight boxer say the other day. There's no wishing humans into a better nature than is possible at this time. Dust ups will happen from time to time and just have to be minimized - and where possible ritualised.
And while women might like to see men a touch more tender and considerate, they presumably still like to see some aggressive possibilities. (Maybe I'm just guessing - or filling in some space and time.) Weeds aren't always attractive.
Greetings from a nNorthern Skies philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 7:58 am
Greetings
