JRL – radical druid

Aristotalitarian Logic

Published on November 1, 2025

The world is like a file folder system in which everything has its right folder, label, drawer, shelf, cabinet, space, wall, room, floor, building, block, neighborhood, suburb, city, metropolitan area, county/parish, region, state, country, continent, land mass, planet, etc.

And your whole life is spent figuring that out.

So there, you’ve saved a minute. Don’t thank me.

Now imagine your every waking thought and most of your sleeping ones are spent doing that too. Oh, yeah, that’s right. You already do that. You’re neurotic as hell.

The only thing that cures it is knowing bullshit when you smell it.

And the courage to trust your nose.

Leave a Comment

Between a Place and Hard Rock

Published on October 31, 2025

I love hearing songs I haven’t heard in a while. That’s why I’ll test drive streaming service playlists like “70s Hard Rock” and hope for the best: that it will include essentials like AC/DC, Sabbath, Kiss, UFO, NWOBHM, BOC, etc., along with the usual suspects Zeppelin, Floyd, Bowie, Purple, Who, Stones. But skip Boston, Kansas, Styx, REO, Foreigner (after Double Vision). You can include Van Halen (Roth) and Aerosmith (pre-MTV). Maybe Rush (up to Permanent Waves). Don’t overdo the Cheap Trick or Nugent. LOL. And definitely put in some punk. I may 60 but I’m not dead!

We love classic rock because we remember a time when we were young, employed, had our own car (that ran), a little pocket money, a small bag of something extra, and a whole lot of things we absolutely didn’t need to take care of right this minute. Nothing but time and brain cells to burn. The good old days? I’d rather be here now. Having survived that nonsense. And not really missing it all that much. It wasn’t real either, then. It just took us a lot longer to find that out. Offline. Because online was only a dot then, not a com.

Leave a Comment

The Cotillion

Published on October 16, 2025

Will you be respectable down at the spectacle
once the event has begun?
When do you plan to have fun?
How long does a show like that run?

Will you be elegant at the extravagance
after the champagne is gone?
What will be left to build on?
Who will survive to the dawn?

Will you be delirious at the experience
before you slow yourself down?
Are you a serious clown?
What good is that much renown?

Will you be the piety for notoriety
until their next ship comes in?
What are you hoping to win?
You only get that one spin.

16 OCT 2025

Leave a Comment

Lose Your “Authentic” Self

Published on October 11, 2025

It feels like not that many years ago there was an interest, almost a “movement” if you will, to seek out and embrace our “authenticity”, to “get real” with ourselves and our world, and cut through all the game-playing to get back to the essentials of human living.

Am I wrong? Was that just in my head – or maybe just not in the South?

In any case, we seem to be living now in a post-truth, post-authenticity world, where it’s easier to adopt a persona (especially online) rather than be who you really are. Maybe it’s thanks to the Trump years (which ain’t over, are they?).

Maybe it’s “reality” TV. Maybe it’s because when we isolated during Covid a lot of us realized we really didn’t like ourselves all that much. Maybe it’s because of our fascination with Artificial Intelligence (AI) created not from just facts, but from our illusions, misinformation, misperceptions, and flat out lies.

Have we ourselves become deep fakes of human beings? We made corporations people. We make bots our friends. We add filters to our photos to make us younger, better looking, and cooler than we ever actually were. We imagine a world where we don’t actually have to accept responsibility or be accountable.

As Jello Biafra once quipped, the conveniences we demanded are now mandatory.

But life hasn’t gotten any easier, has it? Real life, that is. Every day here and now.

Well maybe it’s not SUPPOSED to be easy. No muscle grows without resistance.

Trees that don’t experience the wind never put down deep roots.

11 OCT 2024

Leave a Comment

What You Think It Is

Published on September 4, 2025

It isn’t what you think it is at all.
There is no solid substance underneath.
Just one small push will make the whole thing fall,
and patching it together, to be brief,
is just a pointless exercise, designed
to take you far beyond your breaking point,
and there, when you begin to lose your mind,
to leave you helplessly and fully out of joint.

It’s an illusion: what you think you see
as disconnected one-offs in the void
are neither separate, stand-alone, or free.
They try to be, but quickly get annoyed
with any effort made to reconcile
their make-believe, imagined state of grace,
with a mere safety net meant to beguile
and leave you with a smile upon your face.

This freedom that you seek, and prize so high:
what do you think it means to stand alone
while life and love’s engagements pass you by
and do not leave their numbers in your phone?
You are not an island tossed out in the sea,
a thousand miles from any human touch.
There is no place where you are not with me.
You cannot disengage the world that much.

It isn’t what you want to think. How real
does your imagination make this seem?
Beneath the shadows, will you find some steel,
or only graying remnants of a dream?
That sense of permanence is just a lie
you tell yourself makes substance out of dust,
and gives you satisfaction, by and by,
until like everything, it turns to rust.

04 SEP 2025

Leave a Comment

The Point On

Published on August 15, 2025

If you and I aren’t really seeking, there’s just not much point in speaking. If the boat is truly sinking, it won’t matter what we’re thinking. If the means dictate the end’s taste, does a life’s toil feed life’s waste?

In the end what does it matter, what the rung is on the ladder? What are we, mad as a hatter, praising most the loudest chatter? Does the way we look at things change them or the change they bring, or in any other way make a difference to the day?

How important do we think we are? Honestly, that won’t get us too far. After all, there’s more of us than more useful plans discuss. In a while will all this talking help us? If not, we could skip it and both focus.

When the two of us are honest, be assured we can get over it. It only takes a minute to change your life, after all. In that so small a speck of time almost anything is liable to happen. Hell, the quintessential post-apocalyptic society of decadence and moral decay set against a quaint background colored by a racist, ignorant, and television audience friendly social pecking order, serves as the perfect setting.

What more do you need? An invitation?

15 Aug 2025

Leave a Comment

Author: JRL

Aristotalitarian Logic

Between a Place and Hard Rock

The Cotillion

Lose Your “Authentic” Self

What You Think It Is

Engagement

The Point On