Welcome to... The Saloon

[Project Willow]

I believe he's saying that he used to drink, and he used to drink in bars in my neighborhood, and that as places where humans gather to self medicate, bars can be dark, depressing, and occasionally dangerous.

In my world, bars go with artists, and artists go to bars, because most artists spend time examining the dark, are often depressed, and are occasionally dangerous, at least to some small aspect of the status quo.

Doc Maynard's is no longer here, but the Central Tavern survives.

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=315

[Canadian_watcher]

I love the posts, I just always think I must be missing something..
which isn't a bad thing or a criticism. Mystery is good.

[The Consul]

I feel the same way sometimes but I always catch myself whenever I start sounding like a newspaper. You know they send people to school to learn how to sound like talking heads. Pretty soon we start thinking that way. I know a guy who is a true nonconformist and thinks if we spent more time studying boomerangs we'd be in a lot better shape. Lately I feel like I need to be deprogrammed. But by whom and to what? I had a head injury once and couldn't remember anything for about 5 hours. The most frightening thing in my life was when it all started to come back in geometrical progression from a moment when my brother gave me a purple people eater doll when I was 4. Guess we don't get to pick our jumping off points. Coming out of a surgery the doctor said I sat up, looked around and said "there is only one thing I want to know, is Jesse Jackson still president?" This was before anyone heard of Obama. This convinced me for a while that anastesia allows people to drift into quantum portals to alternate dimensions. Doc said, yeah...it's called hallucinating. Well, of all the things I was going to a hullicinate it would not have been that. I'm sure of it. The mystery is that we think we know anything at all. The whole planet, the entire galaxy; indeed the cosmos itself could at any instant go pop, like a baloon before any of us could even wonder WTF, which is pretty much what happens to all of us anyway, sometimes it's stop motion, other times claymation. History is a horror show. We are so lucky, most of us, as a "people". All suffering is relative and different bars charge different pricess for the same drinks of varying viscosity. Amazingly, after the surgery I had to go to the King County Courthouse to file some legal papers. While there I figured I go see if anything interesting was playing in court. I go in and sit down in what is a fairly full room. Pews like church a different smell, eeeww day prison jump suits and copfarts. It was quiet, the lawyers at one table were whispering. The judge cleared his throat and one of the lawyers said "If it please the court, the defense calls our next witness". Up to the stand goes Jesse Jackson. I thought shit I am on the operating table dying and this is all my brain can come up with? But it was for real, he was speaking in defense of some guy that was ripping whole pages out of reference books in the Seattle Public Libray and when he was confronted by a librarian he pointed the knife at her and ended up at one point having a few people lined up against the wall. Apparently the guy marched with Jackson somewhere sometime and he was there to testify to the guy's character before he more or less lost it. What was weird was when Jesse left and I stood up to get a good look at him, my incision tingled with a painful intensity and I wished I had more dilaudid or a different anaesthesiologist.

[Project Willow]

The mystery is that we think we know anything at all.

It's been a long thread, but I can't remember truer words ever being spoken in this joint. Cheers!

Thank you for the great story as well. It's a rare day that I don't see that courthouse, and the park, and the homeless, and the seagulls.

[Project Willow]

Happy May Day everyone!

http://www.iww.org/en/projects/mayday/origins.shtml

At its national convention in Chicago, held in 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (which later became the American Federation of Labor), proclaimed that "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886." The following year, the FOTLU, backed by many Knights of Labor locals, reiterated their proclamation stating that it would be supported by strikes and demonstrations. At first, most radicals and anarchists regarded this demand as too reformist, failing to strike "at the root of the evil." A year before the Haymarket Massacre, Samuel Fielden pointed out in the anarchist newspaper, The Alarm, that "whether a man works eight hours a day or ten hours a day, he is still a slave."

[Searcher08]

Hi Searcher, I'm glad you wandered in. I hear our weather is very similar to yours, rain, rain, rain, and temperate. I've never been to London either, but I would love to go! I am working on a project with an English friend of mine. I hope to visit her one day in combination with having an art show, but there are no concrete plans yet.

Do you not have a neighborhood pub? I'm not sure I would drink if I didn't have one. It's actually a rarity stateside, to have a neighborhood pub. I've been going to mine for about 6 years now and have met many friends there, but then I live in a community populated by artists (for the time being) and other odd creative types, so it's a great nesting site for malcontents. There's nothing I love more than a lovable malcontent.

Well, I don't want to sound like I'm encouraging drinking, heaven forbid! Anyway, I hope your social encounters increase and your isolation decreases, and if not, well, there's always this nutty RI place. Who knows, many of us might meet in person one day!

Hey Willow, Thanks for this. Gosh, I was sad and when I wrote that - isolation in extremis. I have felt like April was almost on hold, waiting for the sentencing of that dreadful person that I described in the "R.I. Crashing Through the Fifth Wall"thread. That happened late last week and I want to spend some time going through and replying to folks on that thread, but stop off here before doing that.
Wanted to say also I looked at your sites (in your sig) - FWIW I really liked your paintings. They reminded me (in my experience of them, obv not outward form) of some video installation work a friend of mine did, which was very PoMo on the surface, but very emotionally affecting and clear underneath - (Hey, I said that without wearing a beret and blowing French cigarette smoke into the distance, in abstracted fashion! ) Do people have similar reactions or very different ones to your work? I also noticed you were a carer at one time. Me too. Now THAT can be a tough job. "Character building" as one says in London
Hope everyone has as much clear blue skies and lovely sun as the UK at the moment

[Project Willow]

Hey Willow, Thanks for this. Gosh, I was sad and when I wrote that - isolation in extremis. I have felt like April was almost on hold, waiting for the sentencing of that dreadful person that I described in the "R.I. Crashing Through the Fifth Wall"thread. That happened late last week and I want to spend some time going through and replying to folks on that thread, but stop off here before doing that.

Yes, I wasn't sure what to say to that because I just didn't find it surprising at all, though I can understand how upsetting it must have been.

Wanted to say also I looked at your sites (in your sig) - FWIW I really liked your paintings. They reminded me (in my experience of them, obv not outward form) of some video installation work a friend of mine did, which was very PoMo on the surface, but very emotionally affecting and clear underneath - (Hey, I said that without wearing a beret and blowing French cigarette smoke into the distance, in abstracted fashion! ) Do people have similar reactions or very different ones to your work?

Thanks! Reactions have run the entire length of an unimaginably large range, from literally screaming and running away in tears, all the way to: "I don't see anything negative in that, in fact I find it humorous." (or erotic, which sometime creeps me out, depending on the piece). People are strange.

I also noticed you were a carer at one time. Me too. Now THAT can be a tough job. "Character building" as one says in London

It was absolutely transformational, containing examples of human behavior and ability, again, at both ends of an unimaginably large range and several points in between. I miss my friend, and I think the world misses my friend too. She loved the Saloon, BTW.
I wish you strength and peace.

[freemason9]

Finished grad school today. Drinking more than usual, but otherwise I'm in check. How's your weekend going?

[Project Willow]

Grad school? Congratulations! Need we call you Dr. now? What was your thesis?

I am entirely and completely sober, so have another for me, will ya? Enjoy yourself!

[Nordic]

Consul, great story. And just today I saw two circumcision stories in the news.

Would those stories have even BEEN in the news had it not been for the circumcision thread here?

I think not.

The other day my son asked me about a swordfish. If there was such a thing. I told him yes, big fish with a sword-like nose. We go home and turn on the TV and there's some kind of cartoon with a guy impaled on a swordfish.

My son can be a bit clairvoyant, but it's that sort of thing, sometimes that kind of shit happens to me in waves. The last time those things were coming in waves, things were going pretty well for the first time in a long time. I was even making money. The synchronicities were everywhere.

Now they're gone and the money's gone.

[Canadian_watcher]

@freemason: WOOT! Nice job! That must feel really, really good. Cheers!

---------

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY to the moms of RI. Some flowers for you:

[Project Willow]

^^ Yes, happy Mother's Day RI moms!

Also, a day of gentle peace for mothers who lost their children, and for children who lost their mothers, or who never had one (in terms of parenting).

The "Mother's Day Proclamation" by Julia Ward Howe was one of the early calls to celebrate Mother's Day in the United States. Written in 1870, Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation was a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The Proclamation was tied to Howe's feminist belief that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.

Today, the proclamation is included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition. A singing quartet called the Righteous Mothers released a recording of the Proclamation as part of their 25th anniversary CD in 2006.


Mother's Day Proclamation

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

[norton ash]

^ Och, the jaysus fookin madonna there. As though there's none of us without a soddin' mather.

Ireland is a sow who eats her young. I'll buy ye one, willa, 'cause yer guid all told.

[Project Willow]

There's no Madonna here Norton, c'mon now.

Here's to ya, regardless, I'm not far behind you on the path, and then what shall I do with this here Saloon? I'm certain something will call me, ya.

[Project Willow]