Tag: criminal offence

The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond.

Random thoughts swirling through the poet’s mind after waking up

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

For millennia, people thought
that the sun revolved around the earth,
and it took a great deal of ingenuity,
pursued by burning at the stake,
to mentally set foot on the former,
or rather beyond both celestial bodies.
And yet we still have ardent flat-earthers among us.

After only a few miles on the bike,
a well-oxygenated brain may absorb a fair dose
of Wittgenstein or decide to leave the typical nine-to-five
for something more exotic, like a snake milker,
a ravenmaster, or a professional mourner.
If you are particularly lucky, you might even land your dream job
as an eternal employee, although that would require moving
to Gothenburg in Sweden.

My father used to say, ‘Ordnung muss sein,’
so that I would know that bending over a stool
and counting aloud the blows with his army belt
was for my future good;
otherwise, I could mistake it for an act of cruelty.
I wonder what his views would be
if he lived to see today, when even a light smack
is a criminal offence.

watercolour of American Bully XL on the playground

A dog is not a guppy

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

On the way to the lighthouse, there is a playground that I pass during my evening walks.
It’s usually empty at this time of day, but sometimes I see teenagers vaping or old people
chatting while walking their dogs. That particular evening, there was a family with three
huskies there—a little boy spinning on a carousel, his father throwing sticks for the dogs
to fetch, and his mother sitting on a bench with a baby. A beautiful genre scene, one might say,
except that at one point one of the dogs, running past the carousel, unexpectedly bit the boy.
You can imagine the terrified boy screaming, and it took his father a while to calm him down.
And here is the thing—it was their family dog. What would happen if it were a stranger’s
and something like American Bully XL? More importantly, if the police found me carrying
a pocket knife only slightly longer than three inches, that would be a criminal offence,
but walking around with over a hundred pounds of muscle and fangs on the loose is just fine.
I like the logic behind that.