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mopinko

mopinko's Journal
mopinko's Journal
June 27, 2020

re-the use of defund.

this is from a thread about barbara lee saying defund the pentagon, but it really saddens me to see folks here recoil from the word- defund.
this tells me that people are afraid. just frightened of the real change we need.
well, buckle up buttercups. this is a war we are in. we need to make that clear.

from the other thread-
they are picking up the people's words. that always wins.
when the people lead, and the leaders follow, those leaders get re-elected.
they cant care how people are going to twist it. they have to just keep speaking it clearly. because the proof of it is all over the streets. you cant reform your way out of shit like this. you have to start slashing.

again, hillary lost more votes by walking back 'deplorables' than she would have by calling them out, saying why, calling them haters to their faces. the deplorables and the rest were never going to vote for her. more on the left would have come out for her if she had showed the courage of her convictions.

i have worked on a lot of campaigns. the only losing candidates i backed were in gerrymandered districts they could not win. both of those were moral victories. 1 made henry hyde retire.
i have knocked many, many doors. mamby pamby does not bring people out. clear truth brings people out. and speaking to problems w a sense of the scale necessary to address the problem bring people out.

June 26, 2020

i have received the most extraordinary gift.

so, i have this little urban farm. it sits in the north east corner of chicago. it is 5 pieces of property, all a city lot and a half.
i am close to loyola university, and the guy that runs their sustainable ag program there has entrusted me w a bit of history that i am just sure i am not worthy of.

he was given some 20 year old seeds of the original american tobacco. he got a flat of plants, and gave 3 to me.
they came to him through a man named john svenson, a man who deserves a nobel prize for his contributions to botany and to agriculture. he is one of the founders of the seed savers, and these seeds were part of his gift of his personal seed vault to them.

most of my main lot, which has no buildings on it, is full sun, but tobacco is an understory plant. (the other 4 have buildings on them. rental housing is what pays the bills here.) so i had to make a special place for them. i had a little hoop house that i was planning to move this year, but i decided to leave it where it is, and plant beans and squashes up the frame, plus some trellis, to shade the plants.
i will take some cuttings from my grape vines and plant them too for later years.
there is an the remains old mulberry next to it, cut down but not dead, that shades it from the late afternoon sun.

that i have been entrusted w this bit of history still boggles my mind a bit. but i have done everything i could to take care of them, and make the right place for them.
when they get a bit bigger is will post some pics.

i guess i am posting here to ask for some blessings for this. it has actually been a part of some neighborhood drama over people setting off explosions, and being assholes, and everyone going nuts.
it is peaceful now, and i think that old grudges have been buried.
but i dont think it would hurt to ask for good wishes of peace and tranquility, and good rains for the rest of the season.

can i get a culturally appropriate amen?

eta a link to my farm fb page, since it isnt in my sigline anymore-
http://facebook.com/moahsark

June 13, 2020

know any good buddhist jokes?

here's the best joke in the english language-

a buddhist nun walks up to a hot dog vendor and says "make me one w everything"

part 2

the nun hands the man a fiver for the $1 dog, but the man turns to the next customer.
"where's my change?" she says
he-"change comes from within."

part one has so many levels-
is there a more humble feeder of people that a person w a hot dog cart?
what are hot dogs made of? lips and assholes. except that the best one are made of beef brisket, aka cow bellies.
what is the first meat most people feed babies? tiny hot dogs.

my first kid and i had some lean times where we lived on the blue box mac and cheese w cheap hot dogs.
olives were good, but she wasnt much of a fan.

so, anybody?

May 28, 2020

how's everybody in here?

how is the plague treating you?

for some reason karma has been raining blessings on me till i'm about to drown.
doing my best to pass them on.

you?

May 27, 2020

greetings.

sooooo. in the midst of all this trouble, karma has damn near drown me in blessings, and i just could no longer deny.
a friend who has a dd looked me in the face, and said w/o words that i am a buddhist. then he said the word, and i said-i know that is true.

i am struggling w the duty that comes w blessings, but i am doing my best.

namaste.

May 20, 2020

there's one kind of magical thinking

i always had trouble shooting down.
karma

really my problem was that people who seemed very good had a lot of bad things happen to them.
they say they are getting what they deserve from a past life. i don’t really believe in that either.

but after pissing on me mostly, she has clearly decided to smile on me now.

not only am i having a great spring, this little farm of mine has become a haven for my neighbors.
seems like every time i look out my back window there is a family at my back gate talking to my chickens.
my plant sale sold out for the first time ever. i can’t keep up w the demand for eggs.
i could go on. fences are being mended w folks who had a beef w me like they were never there.

so yeah. karma is real folks.

this is very bad news for some in my life.
but i couldn’t stop her if i wanted to.

all i can say on whether or not i deserve it is that in my past life i was a very good dog. which is kinda funny as that has long been my wish for my next life if there is such a thing.

or maybe if profiting from desecrating an ancient burial ground gets you the ammityville horror, building a garden on an angel’s playground gets this. i dunno.

but till further notice, karma lives and appears to be on my side. you

May 13, 2020

i sent this message to some of my meatspace peeps today.

dear fellow weirdos and malcontents.
if you have been paying attention, you must be wondering if i have lost my mind. i have tried to show that what has happened is that i have switched on my brain.
some of you feel you cant trust my explanation for this, to whom i say, there is the door. some of you wonder if you can believe me. to you i say- dont. prove it to yourself.
i'm only sending this to my mj using friends. what i think has happened is that i found a level of mmj that has effectively treated an old brain injury. you cant find it on an mri. over the last 10 years of so the best brains have been trying to understand all this, and the more i read, the more i was sure that this was me.
in the early days of brain research, docs looked at brains that had a hole punched in them, and mapped out what was broken and what still worked.
there is a little koan that docs, esp brain docs, find inscrutable- how can the human mind understand the human brain. my answer is- from the inside out.
instead of measuring the holes in old brains, find a brain that had a small injury early in development.
if you are interested in seeing if i am on the right track, i will share what happened to me in a little more detail- i swore that edibles had no effect on me, but i figured maybe it just wasnt enough, so i upped it until i felt like it was having an impact. that turned out to be about 4x what most people use.
if you want to see for yourself, will you try upping your dose for a week, and let me know what happens?



May 12, 2020

welp, when i got invited to put some old work in an anniversary show,

and it was the last straw. i had to make more art.

now i have been invited, by the big kahuna at woman made gallery, to submit my most epic work because it is a perfect fit for an upcoming show. technically has to be juried in, but this one cant miss.

my friend saw it when i did it.
she was awed at the time, but like my link the other day showed, all my volunteer hours didnt get me past many juries.
hell, even the annual members show, which the 2 clay pieces got into. i got turned down a half dozen times.

funny how thing turn out.

eta link https://www.facebook.com/120776091304700/photos/a.120777147971261/528550880527217/?type=3&theater

May 11, 2020

so, if you google me, you will get hits.

most are my first gen trolls from the hood. i usually also google mopinko, so i can have a laugh at the trolls.
this gallery, where i was on the board might pop up, mostly in credits for funders.

but i got to chatting w the retired director/founder, and was on the site, and wondered what pics there were there.
hope you enjoy.

https://womanmade.org/?s=mo+cahill&post_type=product

May 11, 2020

yesterday

i had never heard of this movie, but bumped into it surfing, and was hooked from the title screen.
what a fun movie. what a clever story. and those songs.

plot- a grocery store clerk/musician's old guitar is destroyed, and his friends get him a new one.
they say- play us a song.
so he starts to play 'yesterday'
none of them had ever heard it before, and start raving about it. "did you write that?" "what? no the beatles wrote that." "who's the beatles?"

he goes home and googles- the beatles. he gets a page full of insects.
the whole sequence is good. he tries several other search terms, and gets those bugs over and over.

so he figures if no one every heard of the beatles, i'm just gonna play their music, and if anyone is stupid enough to believe he wrote it, that's on them.

hilarity ensues as the world discovers the beatles. in one man, all at once.
the criticism that he gets along the way nearly killed me it was so spot on. anyone who was ever in a creative partnership of any kind knows those convos.

kathryn mckinnon plays his manager. she is just razor sharp.

def worth a watch.


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