Gorgs Graphic Souk

Birds of Tindalos. As predicted, the Tindalos Stuff keeps on emerging spontaneously, unbidden and unruly, as it’s the Tindalos wont. Meet the Birdies of that angle-loving, curve-shunning most bizarre of dimensions/lands/habitats/locations/whatnots. Here we can see a mother bird introducing her young chick to the so-called human race, and commenting on its peculiarities in general and a few specific idiosyncrasies. Because she’s in a lazy mood she can’t bothered with any finely tuned ad hominem attacks, although she has more than a few special bíªte noires of her own. You’re quite welcome to name your own objects of contempt and save her the trouble. Have a sponditious life.

Simple Souls. That’s how the cookie crumbles: the more complex the system the more things that can go wrong with it. I ought to know, given the prodigious amount of things that are going kaput in, on, out and about my complex vile body. I think I’d gladly emulate the little chap in the doodle and become a single-cell organism. The only drawback I can see in this otherwise amiable state of being is that I wouldn’t be able to operate a mouse or a tablet and therefore no doodles. Then again, that would make some people very happy so it would sort of even things out, more or less. I love happy endings. And bad poetry.

• When I was a small amoeba
• And I didn’t have a liver
• I could get drunk every day
• Happy, merry, free and gay
• And my pods woul’n’t even quiver.

• When I was a single cell
• Life was easy, life was swell
• Now I am eukaryotic
• Drifting around quite neurotic
• And my life is one pure hell.

• If you know what’s good for you
• You’ll stay put and not be two
• Cleave to your monadic charm
• Never try to grow an arm
• Don’t become organic stew!

Smell the Flowers. By all means take it easy, chill, relax, don’t have kittens over trivial things. Activate the Mehitabel Protocols and extract as much joy as you possibly can out of this wretched social order we’re gripped by. On no account, though, resort to sad little gimmicks like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/21/smile-could-the-pandemic-lead-to-happier-times-laurie-santos-professor-of-happiness-yale

Or this:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/05/ready-for-the-roaring-20s-its-time-to-re-learn-how-to-have-fun-says-happiness-professor

(Frankly, if one needs to resort to this sort of thing one deserves any amount of shite one, invariably, ends up getting.)

Avoid falling into the clutches of the Happyness (sic) Industrial Complex. You might start with a harmless-sounding weekend seminar on Happy Happy Clappy Cognition and you may end up on morality pills (or antidepressants, same difference) for the rest of your lives. Also, and on the other side of this ongoing existential piffle, avoid buying the third rate merchandise spewed by con men of the Jordan Peterson variety. Bliss is possible. Just don’t confuse it with “fun. and the ersatz joviality of selfies. One thing is good, genuine, unpretentious merriment and quite another this current hysterical, dogmatic worship of The Little God Fun, as my good friend professor Hinks used to inveigh against a long time ago. (Cheers, toots!)

Oh, and in for a penny! To add a note of delicious flippancy to the rather serious theme of “happiness., here’s my favourite (possibly semi-misquoted) line from one of my favourite films of all times, Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Michael Crawford (on realizing how crossed his and Annette Andre’s stars truly are):

Then, my love, for us there can be no happiness…

Annette Andre: Then we’ll just have to learn to be happy without it.

Admirable attitude, girl. Way to go.

Have a spiffing weekend.

Sailors. Topic: Personal politics; internal; undefined; exasperating. That’s pretty much how I feel most of the time. Sailing, half blind or fuzzy-eyed and with the faintest of ideas as to destination (other than the grave, which is common to us all), along and around unknown and often unknowable territories, both physical and metaphysical. Still, one has one’s snakes for company and the odd true-hearted pal, so all is not total shite. Terms, conditions and the Mehitabel Paradigm apply.

Have a spiffing weekend and un po’ di silly mu’

(I know I’ve uploaded this link before but, you know, por mucho pan… and all that. Besides, the reggae beat on this Catalan popular children’s song is almost a political statement.)

Elucidating note. The two stowaway conillets (Catalan for wee rabbits) are refugees from the Monumental Catalan Catastrophe, desperately trying to hitch a ride to AnyOldWhere as long as it’s very, very, very far away from Plaça Sant Jaume and the dire dwellers of the Palau de la Generalitat.

Evolution3. There you go. It’s all abut trial & error, and recognizing you’re going about it the wrong way, and being flexible and adaptable and all that jazz. Salud!

Patchwork Entities. Behold the Mishmash Man, also known as the Bits & Pieces Man. He was made with leftovers, discarded stuff from the cast off creations of several smarty-pants bombastic demiurges, by a down&out avant-garde sorcerer with a taste for recycling. He travels the Uncertain Shifts with his spiky owlets and a couple of defrocked warrior princesses he met at a villainous tavern in the alien district of !Ting who, unable to find any kind of job in any respectable army or even any disreputable one, volunteered to tag along as his bodyguards and purveyors of silly jokes. They (the ragbag geezer and the two louche damsels) are willing to undertake some (not many) special ops of the Annoy, Harass and Torment variety for a nominal prize* and for the mere joy of it. The owlets can carry messages to & from their higher-born cousin, the owl of Pallas, if you ask them very, very nicely and your message is not total fiddle-faddle.

*They neither need nor care for money. They don’t eat and they are quite content to be like the lilies of the field; the raggedy bloke wears whatever the eccentric necromancer clad him in back when and the two misses what they were wearing at the time they had to leg it from whatever sphere they decamped. However, if you offer them a discarded teddy bear or black and white picture postcards of the Plateau of Leng, they’ll throw in a bonus ball of sending nightmares to Priti Patel, for free, por la cara.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=plateau+of+leng&iax=images&ia=images

Quarrelling. Of course, one would do best to stick to Master Sun’s tactics and try for subduing the enemy without fighting. Mariano Rajoy, the erstwhile prime minister of Spain, used to be very good at this sort of thing, or a variety of it: he’d beat about the bush at nauseam, doing nothing, deciding nothing and talking a lot of bollocks to go with this inertia, until his opponents, bored to distraction, would loose the will to live let alone fight. Still, sometimes one has to fight and that’s that. So, pick your battles carefully. Make sure that they are YOUR fights and not somebody else’s (your ancestors, your priests, the state, etc.) Then stick to your guns and be flexible. And do have a shufti at both Sun Tzu and Niccolo Machiavelli. Happy campaigning!

https://quotepark.com/authors/mariano-rajoy/

This one is for Afghanistan. For two decades of wanton, unprovoked, unjustifiable and indefensible vicious destruction. And for all the lies that went with this, the Nth sorry-ass venture of the Guardian Angel of the Free World and its servile bootlickers. And for all the mealy-mouthed, hand-wringing, crocodile-teared “analysis. that we have to put up with now, with the indentured “free. media plus most of the world and its wife falling over themselves to lament and pick apart and carp and bitch and admonish and ask “but…what went wrong?. and so on. Yet not one of them dares ask the only legitimate question: What the fuck were they, America and its retainer states, doing there in the first place? (I could tell you exactly why they went in and what they were dong there, but I won’t. Do your own homework.) Actually, I’ll bet you anything that it won’t be long before some of our freedom-loving, democracy-worshiping pundits start blaming the Afghan people for this catastrophe. And the old lies will acquire renewed and enhanced currency value. And the WeThePeople will believe them all over again. And they will use them to demonize the next waves of wretched refugees that will “swarm. and “swamp. and “invade. our beautiful free countries, with their mythical welfare sinecures and phantom NHSs and free speech and whatnot. Oh, well! Have a fab weekend.

NoliMe Tangere. Word to the wise.Do not piss this small damsel off. If you do she will surely slap your face with her luminous (and possibly radioactive) wet kippers. You’re welcome.

A brief note on the use of the word “peasant(s) as used amongst ourselves (us chickens and the Family). See the following extract from:

The Gorgon’s Dictionary. Peasants.

Noun, collective. Also used in the singular, but more often than not the collective form applies, for their number is Legion.Peasanthood, or peasantness, is not a socio-economic class but a mental, intellectual, moral and emotional way of being, a state of mind. It’s also a modus operandi. Some of it can be congenital but mostly is learned behaviour.

Full rant available on request. Have a spiffing weekend.

Good Moves. The “what might have been. game is one of my top ten favourite heartbreakers. To wit. Imagine if you will, Botany Bay (which the autochthonous people called Gamay), 34°00’16. South 151°13’04. East, January 26th 1788. Arthur Philip and his Fleet of the Doomed lands to find the place deserted of both man and beast. Moreover, even the vegetation seems to have vanished entirely and all he surveys is a barren, hostile rocky wilderness.

Three weeks before this arrival, following a tip from a very wise and sensitive Brush bronzewing (Phaps elegans) who could sense trouble way ahead, the whole population of Gamay and environs, human, animal and vegetable had migrated temporarily some 1,000 miles North West.

Philip decides that the place is a bummer. He tails back and heads deeper into the Pacific Ocean, towards Ponape (now Pohnpei). This intrusion pisses Great Cthulhu off immensely; he wakes up in a foul mood and devours the entire fleet without even breaking a sweat. Then he goes back to sleep. The end.

And here’s a picture of a very pretty Brush bronzewing for to gladden your eyeballs:

The Conversation. Being a devout sceptic my life tends to drive back rather than attract The Weird Stuff, aka paranormal phenomenon. With the honourable exception of synchronicity, that is, which happens regularly if not all that often. 80% of the time these coincidences are meaningless but very amusing. The remaining 20% are truly uncanny because of their spot-on relevance to the situation I happen to find myself in at the time.

For some years now I’ve been polishing my General Theory of Interactive Determinants, which pretentious as it sounds, pretty accurately describes the way contemporary fiction (not only literary but also television, cinema, “social. media, MSM news, soi-disant analysis and so on included) bleeds into and shapes what these days passes for reality. I was musing on this subject when I came across the following paragraph in Iain Banks’ The State of the Art (page 110):

(The good ship Arbitrary to Diziet Sma on some of its reasons -and the other Minds’, presumably- for not contacting Earth)

‘…there would be technical difficulties, given the volatility of the situation. They’re on a cusp; a highly heterogeneous but highly connected -and stressedly connected civilization. I’m not sure that one approach could encompass the needs of their different systems. The particular stage of communication they’re at, combining rapidity and selectivity, usually with something added to the signal and almost always with something missed our, means that what passes for truth often has to travel at the speed of failing memories, changing attitudes and new generations. Even when this form of handicap is recognized all they ever try to do, as a rule, is codify it, manipulate it, tidy it up. Their attempts to filter become part of the noise, and they seem unable to bring any more thought to bear on the matter than that which leads them to try and simplify what can only be understood by coming to terms with its complexity.

So I thought I’d use my own condensed version of this as the text for the little creature’s lament in this here doodle, as it expresses neatly and concisely what I’ve been saying all these years.

Stay groovy, clear-headed and fight the Disneyland Construct!

And here’s another bit from the same work, as an also relevant bonus ball:

It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We may thinks ourselves parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales, and long for ‘genuine’ feelings, ‘real’ emotions, but we are missing the point, and indeed making a work of art ourselves in imagining such an uncomplicated existence is even possible. We have the best of it. The alternative is something like Earth, where as much as they suffer, for all that they burn with pain and confused, bewildered angst, they produce more dross than anything else; soap operas and quiz programs, junk papers and pulp romances.

Worse than that, there is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fizzes the telling distinction in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelings by a set of rules largely culled from the most hoary fictional clichés, the most familiar and received nonsense.

Hence the soap operas and those who try to live their lives as soap operas, while believing the stories to be true; hence the quizzes where the ideal is to think as close to the mean as possible, and the one who conforms utterly is the one who stands above the rest; the Winner!

They always had too many stories, I believe; they were too free with their acclaim and their loyalty, too easily impressed by simple strength or a cunning word. They worshipped at too many altars.

(Dizzi ‘s conclusion on the whole sorry-ass affair of contact/not contact Earth and the even more sorry-ass business of Linter’s going native)

(My own verdict: “Peasants, one and all!. -We The Earth People, that is.)