This Is The Week That Is: Crazy?

Humanity: if you break it, you bought it.

Some poet wrote in some whacked long poem edited by Ezra Pound that "April is the cruellest month..." Okay, I'll bite: why?

Oh. That.

Now that Dzhokhar (friends called him "Jafar" according to some social media stuff I've seen) Tsarnaev has been apprehended - after half a state was locked down to search for an (admittedly dangerous) - badly wounded 19 year old wearing a hoodie, I was reminded that the Columbine shooting happened on 4/20 too. That's a day we should all be getting stoned LEGALLY, listening to music, talking wild speculative philosophical talk, reading poetry, and having transcendent sex.

April 20: it can be more than Hitler's Birthday and Columbine. Really.

No, but seriously: not to get all teleological on yer asses, but the goddess put cannabis there to help prevent people who'd listen to a little Loudmouth with a funny mustache...from taking him seriously. Sure, the Treaty of Versaille was a bum deal and we've dealt with an epically lousy economy, but dude! Get real. I don't like the way you say "lebensraum." You've got a malicious vibe goin' man. Chill.

Oh and the Oklahoma City bombing was on April 19th. And so was the Unistat government starting a fire and burning some religious nuts and their children alive, near Waco.

[Readers who do not live in Unistat: forgive my relatively selfish non-cosmopolitanisms here. It's a fair bet some really heinous things have happened in your neck to the planetary woods between the dates 19-25 April. For example: if you live in Rwanda I'm honored that you're even looking at this, but you must be rolling your eyes already. There are many more examples. Like this next bit.]

21 April: Nine years ago, in southern Iraq, in the place often cited as the possible "real" location for the Bible's Garden of Eden, Basra? Fallout from the Unistat war which was started under false pretenses: five suicide car bombers, in a coordinated attack, targeted police stations. 74 were killed, 160 wounded. And Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bush...are still free men. Which I take as a very ominous existential fact.

Are there any historical forces from this week that may be working to oppose..."all that"? Aye, viz:

Earth Day is April 22nd. Albert Hofmann, one of the most brilliant chemists of the 20th century, sampled an ergot from his lab at Sandoz, thinking it a very small amount. He started to feel odd, so decided to ride his bicycle home. Turns out the lysergic acid dose he'd ingested was a very large one, for humans of any size. This bicycle ride took place on April 19th, 1943. On a human historical time scale, nuclear fission - which could eventually make ending all life on Earth possible - happened a mere few seconds from the time Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD. Coincidence?

Stewart Brand was on LSD in San Francisco, thinking about a talk Buckminster Fuller had given, about how we're all inhabitants of one spaceship: Earth. If we could only get a picture of Earth taken from space; if only people could see the Pale Blue Dot they live on, their spaceship as seen by the rest of the cosmos, maybe enough of them would think differently about their perspectives, and we could avert catastrophe.

                                                        Reminder

Brand successfully obtained that picture. It was very widely disseminated. That pic proved a major force in getting the first Earth Day going.

What is it about this week? Or am I just stoned and cherry-picking my sources? Who is the Wizard Who Makes The Cannabis Green?

If you're keeping score, here's how I've voted. How about you?

Period of the Year: one month into Spring in the No. Hemisphere, April 19-25

• Shakespeare being born on April 23: Yes
• Hitler born on the 20th: in this universe the outcome was bad: No
• Earth Day: getting in touch with everything outside your own skin, AKA "the environment": Yes
• Timothy McVeigh and the way he handled his "patriotism": No
• cannabis, celebrated on 4/20: oh hell YEA
• overkill, literally: The State burning humans alive near Waco, seemingly because their religion was weird: NO
• the Tsarnaev Bros, and the symbolic "brothers" Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Boston Marathon bombing and Columbine school shootings, respectively), and the way voters and Authority responded: I'll go No on the violence and we really need to think about the responses.
• Bicycle Day: Yes
• all the other desperate acts of violence I haven't covered here: No
• Unistat government under Neo-Cons and everyone who did their bidding in order for them get away with it, unspeakable levels of human misery and sorrow, a $3,000,000,000,000+ war (according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) that was based on a series of lies: No
• Buckminster Fuller's idea that the human species needs to notice the "omnidirectional halo" and get their act together in order to not end the Human Experiment on Earth and to become a "success in universe": I'll go with Yes
• sex, music, poetry, wine, laughter, trodding more lightly on Our Spaceship: as the Poet has an emanation of the Goddess say, "yes I said yes I will Yes."

                                                        No

                                                        Yes

EXTRA CREDIT EXERCIZE:
Pick any one of the events mentioned above and, using your imagination and research (your ingenium), close your eyes and meditate on "This event happened because of this and this and this." Then think of what may have led those things to happen. Go back in time and, even though this is a "fiction" think of possible causes. If it turns out that the 1939-45 World War happened because someone wasn't getting enough love in France in 1473, so be it. Charles "The Hammer" Martel and 732 CE? Easy. If Alexander the Great hadn't sneezed in 326 BCE "all this woulddna happened"? Someone saying "knife" and someone else heard "wife" in 1608, and this led to a pogrom in Russia? Metternich felt much better that day of negotiation - no indigestion for a change - and the Cold War never would've happened? A servant girl caught a nasty bug and Henry VIII's immune system did not fight it off, and he died early on? Just think! Stranger things have happened. Maybe. Counterfactuals. But what really might have happened? If Yeltsin's and later, Putin's people advised him to just let Chechnya go to Chechen rule...do we get the Boston Marathon bombing? How and why did your parents meet? What if someone's car didn't start "that day" and they stayed home instead and watched "I Love Lucy" re-reuns? This may sound like a fruitless or even "stupid" exercize, but you may surprise yourself. Report your finding, 'cuz, like, heck, ya know? I'd like to get to the bottom of some of this stuff too.