Morning Ritual — 2.25.22

Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye.
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
If it was performed in a museum, we would call it performance art. If on another kind of stage, we’d call it dance. If in a tent, we’d call it circus. It is all of these things.
What we producers failed to realize early on was that the people funding all the animal rights activist groups, they were our customers.
What’s more, seventy-six percent of Americans say schools should be allowed to teach ideas and historical events that ‘might make some students uncomfortable.
America’s first newspaper dedicated to ending slavery is being resurrected and reimagined more than two centuries later as the nation continues to grapple with its legacy of racism.
I got to do it then–but I can’t do it now. Absolutely not. People have become so frightened that it seems rational to say, ‘I have to take into account this constituency and that constituency.’ So, while you’re taking all those constituencies into account, you just wrote yourself out of the equation.
Bursting with
bluster, the sun backslaps the moon to reveal
me, splintered, kissing the boulevard face first,
clutching change for a jukebox that long ago
lost its hunger for quarters.
Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.