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The chimneys from the old brick factory at Sydney Park.
"WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.
We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.
We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.
We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the
atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of
a person’s countenance.
Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save
on psychoanalysis bills.
And so we say to all who’ll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!
Manifesto, Cloud Appreciation Society www.cloudappreciationsociety.org
We weren't going to be eclipsed by this, those feeble spirits. There was a flash of anger. He was surrounded by pygmies; pygmies of the spirit, their mealy mouths, their crushed, enfeebled, cowardly souls, and these were the people who had power over him! How appalling it all was. He looked down and all he could see was their deformed shapes. He wanted no part of them, felt immensely above them in every sense, the grandiosity of the alcoholic not a match on this feeling of superiority. They really were gnomes, hopeless little things, their pursed mouths and pinched faces, their crushed souls almost extinct now. If he could have he would reach out and squash them this instant. They didn't deserve to go on, blocking people with real talent, squashing out ideas, creativity, turning the world into a mono-chromatic, dreary, spiritless place.
How on earth did these people get into positions of power? Sucking the right cocks, he supposed, wheedling up to the right people. He had never had the knack, and stayed on the floor. And came to be in a position where people 20 years his junior were telling him what to do; where to go, how to write. His curdled dreams went round and round. Genuine creativity? In this environment? You've got to be joking. Their pursed little mouths went down towards the desk, avoiding conflict. The tweediest of them all liked to call themselves feminist men, getting, for once, a bit of attention for championing women's causes. The women wouldn't look sideways at them normally, certainly not for lust.
He could imagine them all, bared naked and limp, disgusting to look at. Contempt oozed out of him and he felt like smashing them. There wasn't going to be a solution; day folded upon day and everything went to hell. And they remained in their positions of power; and he remained on the floor. The cards he had been dealt had been so often dispersed around the room, in wildly incomprehensible acts of mouthing off, in binges of self-destruction without peer. The realm was a lower case order, a place he didn't want to be. It wasn't fair what they had done to him, crushed him, drained his spirit because he had made the mistake of sticking his head up. Mediocrity didn't like competition. He had abandoned his habit of secrecy just at the wrong moment.
They were warm and colourful friends, they offered him his only salvation. And yet he knew, too, that they would be washed away with time; that he didn't really mean that much to them. Family was all there was, some said, but even then he needed to be careful. He didn't want to be consumed by their love; inadequate as it was. The parade of circumstance in which he acted out so theatrically, this was news to him. He still didn't believe there was a future. He wanted peace but he also wanted drama, and in the end he would have settled for adventure, if it ever came. Poverty ate at his soul; there was never enough money.
He could feel them still, the ancestors who were deported to this place. There had never been money in the family, never. Whenever it came it was splurged away in drunken binges; and this had occurred down the generations, so there was no hope of status, of wealth, of community standing. The moments of gratitude were brief in passing, held in hotels or caught in short, intense friendships. These moments, when he did indeed stand tall, lasted but a flash in the swamp of the day before he reverted to his low-status self. He glared them down, daring them to say something about his defective genes, warped personality. They said nothing, but they didn't have to. They were automatically superior, higher on the pecking chain.
Oh come with me, a voice said, reaching out a hand. Let me show you how to deal with all this. Let me show you the dignity in humility, the grace in charm. Let me show you that there is peace with conciliation. That there are moments when the gift could be turned inwards, when the outer world does not matter anymore. He could be a king in his own county, boss of his own domain. He didn't have to be put down by these arseholes, these talentless gits. God, fate, the master-universe, this cloaking of place and spirit, the physical world, it would greet him and embrace him and give
him a place to dwell. Oh Lord, let me out this darker realm, he cried out; the voice, the cry, already a muffled echo. Reconciling his situation, coming to terms with the predicament in which he had been placed, they were the only ways to live with this, with himself. He looked up, startled at the new day. Good morning, his enemy said to him. Good morning he replied cheerfully, without kow towing. They weren't going to get the best of him, not this day.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/us/politics/05assess.html
In 2 Battlegrounds, Voters Say, Not Yet
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday night not only shook off the vapors of impending defeat, but also showed that — in spite of his delegate lead — Senator Barack Obama was still losing to her in the big states.
Those two states were the battlegrounds where Mr. Obama was going to bury the last opponent to his history-making nomination, finally delivering on his message of hope while dashing the hopes of a Clinton presidential dynasty.
Yet then the excited, divided American electorate weighed in once more, throwing Mrs. Clinton the sort of political lifeline that New Hampshire did in early January after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.
For Mrs. Clinton, the battle ahead is not so much against Mr. Obama as it is against a Democratic Party establishment that had once been ready to coalesce behind her but has been drifting toward Mr. Obama. The party wants a standard-bearer now to wage the war against the newly minted leader of the Republicans, Senator John McCain, who enjoys a head start with every day that the Democrats lack a nominee of their own.
Clinton advisers said her decisive victory in Ohio and her narrow one in Texas — where exit polls showed her winning the votes of women, whites and Hispanics in an extremely close race — were more than enough to argue that she should go forward to the April 22 primary in the Ohio-esque Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, even if Mr. Obama has more delegates after Tuesday night.
Mr. Obama, meanwhile, appeared likely to accumulate enough delegates from Texas and Ohio (as well as from his victory in Vermont) to strengthen his mathematical edge for the nomination and portray Mrs. Clinton as a spoiler to a unified party. Yet the results on Tuesday also bring fresh questions about his electability in crucial swing states like Ohio that Democrats are eager to carry in the November election.
“Hillary is very much in the game,” Patti Solis Doyle, Mrs. Clinton’s former campaign manager, said on Tuesday night.
Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, brimmed with equal brio. “This was her last, best chance to significantly close the gap in pledged delegates,” Mr. Burton said of Mrs. Clinton, who began the night with about 50 fewer pledged delegates and 100 fewer over all. “They have failed.”
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