radical druid

The Last Present

Published on November 15, 2025

There is no time like the Present;
that’s what all the pundits say.
They’ll be saying it next season.
It’s the one that got away.

There is no time but the present;
that just now and yesterday,
the coming nexts or maybe soons
that occupy and stay.

Time is, just as a construct,
one more useful set of bars.
The less that you can see them,
the more watchful are your guards.

It’s the ones you don’t see coming:
that’s what gets you in the end.
There’s that one defining moment,
when we either break or bend.

And at the time it seems like
even time has had enough.
When things are tough all over,
time is all you have to bluff.

There’s no time like the present.
It’s like that in a sense.
Forget what you think you may know,
that life experience,

And wander down the hall with me
to some new secret room
where we can have time to ourselves,
until sometime in June.

15 NOV 2025

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The Soundtrack of Your Life

Published on November 12, 2025

The music that you listen to, that fills the quiet space,
is like the soundtrack of your life. Its sound describes the place
exactly where you’re at, and why, and what will happen next.

It’s not a mixtape or a set of songs. It’s more than that:
the foley artists earn their due, painting in sound your steps,
the voices in your head, the creaking joints and bones.

The music isn’t just a backdrop, mis en scene, against which life
unfolds without attachment to the meaning.

The soundtrack of your life plays on. Is it something new?
Is the music just rehashed for a quickly pulled together sequel?

12 NOV 2025

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Time The Changeling

Published on November 6, 2025

What has been need not always be what is.

There is a sense of time that must erase the world that is what was and built the now.

Against such force, what armed and booted thugs can stand and keep their sense of distance from the truth?

What is and always seems to be the stone against which endless, mindless flint is drawn?

The world may still endure the flames and from the morning’s ashes rise a phoenix.

What will be must evolve from what it is.

There is no secret alchemy of fire to draw out from a well of empty space the light that has no heritage of dark.

06 NOV 2025

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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radical druid Posts

The Last Present

The Soundtrack of Your Life

Time The Changeling

Aristotalitarian Logic

Between a Place and Hard Rock

The Cotillion

Lose Your “Authentic” Self