we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift

Was fun if subdued, Thursday Night Pints. Also, Siouxsie Sioux is fifty-four today.

• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Clapping for apartheid. 
• If Jeffrey Goldberg were a Palestinian. 
• World's Shittiest Human, shittier than normal. 
• Kabuki.
• Oinkful!
• Revolutionary roads.
• Heh.
• Da man.
• A frothy mix of lube and fecal matter. Does FMLFM really think he has a chance to be POTUS? cause if he does he's motherfucking crazy. If he wants the attention, wants to play the game, wants to raise money, wants to force the eventual Pig candidate to the right, OK, but does he really think he has a chance to be POTUS?
• I know it's not an original name, but this guy needs be called Fuckface.
• Rotten apple.  
• 2012.
• America will be Serbia by 2030: Of course, there are plenty of Serbs in Serbia and in the Serbian part of Bosnia who will regard the decision by Boris Tadic and his government to finally arrest Mladic as treason. These are people who will not admit, even if presented with ample and clear evidence, that he or any other Serb committed any crimes in that war, or, for that matter, in any other war they ever fought. 
• Placebo effect.
• Why humanitarian intervention isn't.
• Wish was father to the thought.
• Things people need to stop believing. 
• K asked me about my comment on the retirement of one of our Stringtown Blegsylvanian superstars, do I really think people will copycat bleggalcide (I paraphrase), and I said no, not many, not that dramatically, it'll be more that the pace of withering that's already taking place will pick up, especially since it's summer. D said, you seem to be over your doldrums. I said it's because of perceived slights, real or imagined, it's the same as when I wrote term papers, the one I wrote for you on Alexander Pope, for instance. That won me last night's round of ridiculously priced scotch which I gave to D because scotch tastes like motherfucking Nyqil to me. 
• District redistricting.
• It's not North Bethesda, it's Rockville.
• St Benny of Olsen.
• Stupidest Next Generation episode ever (mind, I can't watch seasons one and two, so there might be stupider there, though that's both easy and hard to believe).

• I am fifty-one years old. That's at least the tenth time in eight years of blogging I've used that joke. I will use it an eleventh. Blerg!
• John Barth is eighty-one today. If not one of my desert island five, certainly in my desert island ten, and Sot-Weed Factor is in permanent reading rotation (2012 next).
• Ashbery.
• Auden.
• Name that novel! 
• A Vida Avida.
• Retromania!
• Siouxie makes me think of HBV. I know one other person who loves this song. Once there, listen to the rest of the album, yes?
• When I think of HBV I think of The Januaries. I do like this Thievery Corporation remix, though someday I'll learn how to take a CD I own, burn it to a PC, and post a song.
• Pure. 
• Bruce Cockburn is sixty-six today.

WE WHO ARE YOUR CLOSEST FRIENDS

Philip Lopate

we who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift

your analyst is
in on it
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us

in announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves
but since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make
unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your
disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective