patient victim

"I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone."

-Silvio Berlusconi

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2006]

New Brunswick sunset

[New Brunswick, December 2006]

birdsonpowerlines

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2006]

WHEN YOU GET BORED GRAB A ROPE (THEY ARE NOT OF THIS EARTH)

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a
depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar
buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the
counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who
seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to
breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some
local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three
violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad
- worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy,
so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are
living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us
alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted
radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone.

-Howard Beale, "Network," (1970)

[Williamsburg, Brooklyn, January 2008; Midwestern United States, January 2008; Monterrey, California, January 2008 ]

Beware the company you reside in...

[New Brunswick, NJ, March 2008]

German politicians, the medical community and especially churches are outraged by Kusch's presentation of the killing machine. What do you think about the suicide machine?.

-http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/04/germany.euthanasia/index.html"

[Chinatown, New York City, February, 2008]

PROSPERITY

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. ... At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.

-George Orwell, "Down and Out in Paris and London"

[ATM, New Brunswick, NJ, February 2008; Campbell, CA, January 2008; New Brunswick, NJ, November 2005; Fort Lee, NJ, May 2006; Donations, Muir National Woods, CA, January 2008]

YOU SET THE FIRE IN ME

Feels like all my heart can do now is bleed
We should go down to the sea
It's just you, our God and me.

-"C-C (You Set The Fire In Me)," Tom Vek

[New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 2008]