August 8. Pushkin and the Vegetarian in the box.

Happy birthday Caspar! Saint Petersburg is very pretty. Today, we visit a flea market with many interesting things on display. I remember a Russian magazine with Madonna the popsinger on its cover, lots of old clothes, binoculars, children’s toys, old photo cameras, fur coats, vantage prams, records, engine parts. I socially walk on but feel the urge to write and do so in a Russian buffet restaurant.
Then the afternoon comes and we go to Pushkin. Such a wonderful park they have built, the tsars. Tourists flock here to see the world famous amber room, taking their photographs in traditional costumes and stroll on the pretty lanes. We walk around and enjoy the park a lot. We are saturated with all those architectural highlights when we take the slow train back to the city.
Black box vegetarianism. I only care about input and output. If I put in a black box one not suicidal strict vegetarian, one living pig, one dead pig, a sack of potatoes and enough utensils to cook it, and I wait long enough, what will be in the box when I open it is two dead pigs and a frenzied non suicidal scrict vegetarian with maggots nestling in his hair. He has eaten the potatoes, the living pig has starved to death and the dead pig has begun to rot. If I would have put a not so strict vegetarian in there, the contents of the box after the experiment would have been a perfectly healthy living vegetarian and a living pig. To translate this to the real world: we have to intelligently interpret where the walls of the black boxes are.
Oh old and mighty Chickadee
America, thou art a recipe
Take a loaf of constitution
toss in the federalist papers
stir it for one century
then add Lincoln’s Gettysburg address
stir it for one more century
subsequently add the words of Martin Luther King
the sermon after Rosa Park claimed that bus seat in Montgomery
and season it with the most vehement speeches of Malcolm X
pour some shots of John Fidgerald Kennedy’s inaugural address
now shake it and serve with a handgranate and an assault rifle.