Gold Country/ the Valley

Murphys claims to be the beginning point of Joaquin Murrietta’s campaign of vengeance against Anglos.

Placerville used to be known as Hangtown due to its inhabitants’ proclivity for lynching.

A coffee shop in Yuba City, California:

The eagle later died from complications due to COVID-19.

Reification

Commercial consciousness has permeated every aspect of life so thoroughly that we no longer take note of it, like the background hum of forgotten machinery.

The scientistic jargon of commerce simultaneously elevates its speakers at its listeners expense and converts every idea into an object. It quantifies feeling in order to excrete lies. 

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying –
He had always taken funerals in his stride –
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble”.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless signs.
At ten o’clock an ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

–Seamus Heaney