does that make sense?

I bought an empty can of paint
The colour wasn’t right
Without a brush to paint things with
One wall took half the night.’ Alex Braun.

it would seem that i’ve now deteriorated to the point of watching day-time television. yes, at two-thirty in the afternoon, wearing my favourite pair of underpants and nibbling crackers, i watched ‘the marvellous mrs. maisel’.

in my own defence, of course, i‘ll do what any privileged, self-aggrandizing old white guy would do. i’ll place the blame elsewhere, anywhere else actually. the reason i’ve now become so degenerated as to be watching day-time television is due to amazon. if that doesn’t entirely do it for you, then i’ll throw in xplornet. in fact, this is the fault of globalization in general. i’m the victim here.

that’s exactly why i love haikus, fanciful verses such as mr. braun’s, or koans like: ‘what’s the sound of one well-washed hand clapping?’ it encourages one to think. it may not make sense, may even make one crazy. however, it may also make one think outside the proverbial box. it may even precipitate one unraveling a greater truth about the world or oneself. hey, it’s gotta be as good as trying to make sense out of what’s goin on in this reality. and i believe that’s the point.

does it make sense that, right in the midst of reading about the horrible scurge plaguing the earth, with hundreds of thousands suffering in various ways, that the article is interrupted with: ‘here’s why so many astronauts have owned chevrolet corvettes’. so, since this oft-repeated so-called ‘unprecedented time’ has forced me to purchase certain necessities on-line, such as refrigerator magnates, decorative duct tape and a murder-mystery novel, it behooved me to join ‘amazon prime’. at least it seemed like a good idea at the time. because then i’d allegedly have free delivery, free audio-books and be able to stream videos for free. it’s all free free free, with my monthly payment. what could possibly go wrong(?) that was a rhetorical question. 

well, almost immediately after spending my father’s hard-earned money i discovered that the items are quite often quite over-priced, the books are quite always not free at all and my internet here in st. cecelia de masham is quite crappy, in spite of my paying top dollar. it cannot quite handle streaming videos from prime, at least not during the evenings. which brings us right back to day-time viewing. 

“Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh how I wishe he’d go away.” Hughes Mearns.

does this world make sense? is there a deeper meaning? amazon will not ship ‘tylenol extra strength’ to quebec because it’s illegal. one needs a prescription in quebec. amazon will send along the regular-strength tablets. so i guess our great leaders and law-makers collectively assumed us folk so simple-minded we wouldn’t figger out that we could simply take one-and-a-half ‘regular strength tylenol’ tablets if we wanted a little extra strength. ok, actually a friend pointed that out to me.

be that as it may, does it make any possible sense to cut funding to the world health organization, whose sole purpose is to ‘direct international health within the united nations' system and to lead partners in global health responses’, right smack dab in the midst of the worst pandemic of our lifetime? of course not. but, blame had to be shifted and i had to watch my program. i highly recommend it, by the way. 

“In a wonderland they lie, 
Dreaming as the days go by, 
Dreaming as the winters die. 
Ever drifting down the stream,
Lingering in the golden gleam,
What is life but a dream?” Lewis Carroll.