the wedding

the wedding

He went to his niece’s wedding
and because he was old
it wasn’t the kind of wedding

where he stood the maid of honor
against a wall
in the coat closet
and fucked the be-jesus outta her.
So some of you
may want to stop reading right now.

It was the kind of wedding
where his brother
had just spent the last eight years
destroying his mother’s estate
and his brother’s financial future
while fraudulently posing
as the sole trustee.

It was the kind of wedding
where all the guests---
relatives, friends, schoolmates,
relatives of relatives, girlfriends of friends,
had no idea
or at least pretended they had no idea
that a terrible and protracted family crime
had just been committed.

It was the kind of wedding
where everybody there
preferred to celebrate
the union of two lovely, decent,
hardworking young people
instead of dragging the father of the bride outside
and disemboweling him
and then tying him to four horses
and slapping the horses’ asses
so they galloped off in four directions
and ripped him limb from limb.

It was the kind of wedding
where the only misery
which WAS acknowledged
was the terminal lung cancer
of the mother of the bride,
though that might be in remission.
No one would know until she took
a tumor-hunting CAT scan
the day after the wedding
which would either give her
life
or death.

It was the kind of wedding
where the father of the bride,
he who had inexplicably destroyed the estate,
gave a weepy tribute to his daughter
and new son-in-law
without mentioning a word
about his financial, ethical, and psychological crimes
of the past eight years.

It was the kind of wedding
where the mother of the bride
had written a poison pen letter
to her brother-in-law several months before,
essentially blaming him for her
and her husband's
crimes against the estate, against him,
and against his dead mother and father,
because it was easier to do that
than to face her own
and her husband's
guilt.

It was the kind of wedding
which was all about celebrating
the present and future
of the lovely young couple
as well as about selectively ignoring
the crimes of the past.
And who was to say, under the circumstances,
that wasn’t the best strategy?

It was that kind of wedding.

Grisly Man

8/20/05

GRISLY MAN
(We all yearn to return, but what if we did?)


Hard to say what amazes me the most about Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Is it the throat-constricting nature footage, especially the epic grizzly Sumo wrestling match? Or the portrait & self-portrait of a cosmic fool headed for death? Tim Treadwell is so utterly deluded------trying to "pet" those gigantic ursine predators, even after they gruffly warn him not to---not really understanding who they are even after camping near them for 13 years, fancying himself to be their protector though he actually gets one of them KILLED, risking not only his life but that of his girlfriend. It is hilarious, really-----his vanity, his high lisping voice, his absurd vocabulary, his uncanny resemblance to Owen Wilson and to the Chris Guest character in Waiting for Guffman----but the hilarity is undercut by our ironic knowledge that he is headed toward a grisly end and dragging his girlfriend with him. The levels of irony are breathtaking: for example, the moment when he guests on Late Night and Letterman asks him if we are some day going to read that the bears have eaten him.

We keep saying to ourselves: this can't be real. Surely this is a Spinal Tap-like comic fraud, a put on. But it really happened. It's as if Oscar Wilde, or Mr. Rogers, got outfitted at Adventure 16 and his neighborhood were the wilderness primeval. Tim, who pretends to be Australian, has more than a little in common with that showboating Aussie who's built a career on relentlessly, obnoxiously, heedlessly, baiting crocs and other wild, lethal creatures for the camera, and who seems constantly on the verge of being eaten or stung to death. Can't they let these poor beasts well enough alone?

Though Tim Treadwell is impoverished, apparently a nobody, the interviews and flashbacks and footage going back to his childhood, his mother, and his stuffed teddy bear parody Citizen Kane, with his hubris and his sled, "Rosebud." Citizen Kane, though purportedly a fictional movie, has a documentary feel which, by analogy, examines the real life mystery of William Randolph Hearst's life. Grizzly Man is prima facie a nonfiction documentary, yet quickly, eerily, begins to seem stranger-than-fact. It crosses into a cinematic no-man's-land, call it faction, between fact and fiction.

I haven't seen such a fascinating documentary character study since Crumb, the movie. We learn, for example, that Tim, as a boy, liked to dive partly for the adrenaline (it takes courage and derringdo to be a diver.....or a bearbaiter), and that he craved a similar adrenaline rush from constantly hanging too close to predators. Also, he's physically goodlooking (in a goofy way), and is constantly demonstrating his vanity, even in the wild, by the way he brushes back his golden locks, profiles for his own camera, etc. This performance vanity, too, can be traced back to his earlier incarnations as diver (the most exhibitionistic of sports) and wouldbe actor.

In the interview with his mother, we see that Tim's bond with animals goes back to early childhood, and that he was very close to his mother, indeed, was a mother's boy.

And his bevy of female admirers are fascinating types: Northwest nuts 'n berry mommas, credulous nature-lovers, physically attracted to Tim and not thinking too hard about the craziness of his proximity to the bears...... The ex-girlfriend's tormented expression speaks volumes when she watches Herzog listen to the audio track of Tim & Huguenard's last agonies. She knows what he's hearing. It's too awful. Even the intrepid Herzog can only listen to a little bit of it before taking off the earphones and suggesting to her that she destroy the tape.

One of Tim's many comic traits is that he is so fey---the high voice, the Mr. Rogerslike mannerisms, the prettiness---yet he is apparently straight, insists upon his straightness. Does he know himself at all? Does he know the world around him? The contrast between his almost mincing demeanor and the natural setting, red of tooth & claw, is priceless. He has a pied piper quality which makes him very good with groups of kids back in the States. He even resembles Depp's Willy Wonka. Willy Wonka, too, seems ageless, still part of the neverneverland of children, yet harboring reserves of fury. But this is no fairy tale; Tim actually pipes Huguenard to her death. The chasm between Tim's absurd endearments for wild animals and what the surly bear does to him (and her): literally tear him limb from limb, decapitate him, devour him alive.... has to be seen to be believed. Remember, the coroner said all that was left of Tim at the campsite was his head and a bit of his spine. But they found 4 bags of human remains in the bear's gut. How often do we see horror and hilarity this closely juxtaposed? It's also fascinating that he invented an alternative self with a fake name, pretended he was really from Australia, etc. And many of his closest friends didn't know he was an impostor.....but forgave him for the deception once they learned of it.

And underneath Tim's childlike manner are huge reserves of rage. His contradictions are many. For example, he purports to be an open-hearted nature boy, but is territorial as hell about his wild bears, deeply resentful of visits by other humans, and paranoid about their messages to him. He purports to be brokenhearted when he sees the remains of the grizzly cub devoured by a male grizzly. What would he say & feel if he saw the splayed out remains of the grizzly that was shot because he gave it the chance to eat him....& Huguenard?


We can all identify with his purported desire to protect & publicize the wilderness and the bears in particular, but how much was he USING the bears as a way to puff up his own fragile ego----the same ego smarting from not getting the Woody Harrelson part in Cheers? He has something in common with people who get off on swimming in tanks with dolphins, dolphins who have been imprisoned so they can give eco-tourists a brief thrill.

And some of the lesser characters are also wonderful: for example, the bush pilot/ex rodeo rider. The bush pilot's description of HIS encounter with the killerbear alone is worth the price of admission, and he also helps score the tale the pilot by singing along with a Country Western ballad on his plane radio. Then there's the the Inuit scientist with Norwegian surname talking about the line between men and bears which Tim blithely transgressed but which Inuits have respected for 7,000 years. And the no-nonsense chopper pilot who damns Tim with the unvarnished diction of a northwoods veteran. Or the coroner, standing beside a bagged corpse, bizarrely recounting Tim's final moments. Herzog is a genius at delineating madmen & their struggles with nature---Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, a German mountain climber, a Norweigan ski jumper. Most of the action is played out against the inconceivably beautiful panorama of the Far North. Who IS this absurd & heedless Long Islander, this urban pygmy, traipsing about in a timeless, primeval, landscape? It's startling he survived as long as he did. If we all tried to do what Tim did, we would soon extinguish the few thousand grizzlies surviving in the Far North. After all, there are 300 million Americans, rubbing shoulder to shoulder in our congested cities, living out our antlike, workerbee, existences, and only 35,000 Alaskan grizzlies. But the siren call of the wild is undeniable---just ask Jack London, a writer Herzog doubtless read in childhood. Didn't Paleolithic man spend MOST of his life in close quarters with giant predators like the bears? Weren't we really designed more for that kind of existence than for the pathetic urban ones we are condemned to lead? Isn't the memory of that existence, going back hundreds or thousands of generations, for tens of millenia, still in our genes, in our very blood? Don't we all yearn to return, though we would instantly blot out the few scraps of wildnerness left on Earth if we did?

Tim is deeply inauthentic, he's not who he says he is. And the natural world he perceives is a far cry from what it really is. And yet he does find a kind of authenticity in his embrace of the wild and of the bears in particular. And back in the States, he does succeed in publicizing these nature reserves, reserves which are always threatened by Bushian exploitative, corporate forces. There's undeniably something heroic, or at least recklessly brave, about Tim. And he at least tries, or claims, to be fighting on the side of the angels. These irreconcilable contradictions make his silly character riveting and comic and dramatic. He becomes more than the sum of his parts. Tim says he had nothing in Hollywood, that he found his life in the wild. Thoreau says: "In the wild is the preservation of mankind." But there's not room in the wild for us all. If we moved there, we'd destroy the very thing we admire and crave. So Tim saves us the trip and gives us a vicarious, a virtual, a video experience----right down to being eaten alive. How much more real does virtual reality get? Thank, Tim, for being our proxy. Better you than us. We guess that cinematic experience was worth the sacrifice of you, of Michelle, of the surly, magnificent, hungry, grizzly. And we KNOW you didn't do it for the money.

The coroner says that at least Tim was selfless when the bear had his head in its mouth and Tim told Huguenard to run for her life. But wasn't that a bit LATE to be selfless? By that time the game was up, Tim was doomed, and he had already engineered a situation which doomed Huguenard as well, doomed Huguenard not least because it was not in her character to run at that point, she was going to stay and fight to the death to save the man who led her to her doom, who led her to the bear who would devour them both. Instead of saving the damsel FROM the monster, white-knight Tim leads his ladylove TO the monster's lair and makes sure she stays there until they are both devoured.

When we see the bear maze from the air, even the most ignorant of us can see it's a terrible place to camp. A bear could suddenly surprise a man, or a man a bear, at any point in the maze, and the results would be lethal. And then when we hear that the bears Tim knew best are already in hibernation, and only the surly, less successful bears are still in the maze, foraging for food, and that the surliest, hungriest, bear of all is hovering close to Tim's camp, desperately diving to the pool bottom for the last rotten salmon of the season..... Well, it's nothing less than a video self-portrait of a protracted, orchestrated, suicide. And homicide, really, because Tim is also putting Huguenard in terrible peril. And Tim's final speeches to his camera are video suicide notes, valedictory sign offs. He's so self-absorbed that he barely photographs Huguenard or concerns himself with her welfare. And where is her own sense of self? She's amost a cipher. How much room is there for a another self around a personality as grandiose and narcissistic and deluded and self-congratulatory and self-dramatizing as Tim's? He's the star of his own life, in the movie of his own life, and there is precious little room for supporting characters, other than the foxes & bears themselves. Even in Tim's journal he records that the bears frighten her----as they would any SANE person. It's fairly easy to understand why Tim, wearying of the burden of his fantastic life, would finally yearn to MERGE with a killerbear. He's the very embodiment of a man with a boundary problem. He can't distinguish his love for bears from his deathwish. But why would he bring Huguenard down with him? Was he so self-absorbed that she really wasn't alive to him? Or, underneath his childlike magnetism did he bear secret reserves of resentment or loathing toward women?

Herzog senses that Treadwell is a wouldbe artist, a movie director who needs a brilliant collaborator to posthumously edit his footage and his performance. Treadwell needs one of those t-shirts: "But what I really want to do is direct." And like so many directors, like, for example, Jonathan Landau pushing Vic Morrow to his death during the shooting of The Twilight Zone, Tim puts his project ahead of the welfare of his cast. He and Huguenard are stuntmen, and their greatest stunt will be their last. Imagine how the movie The Bear must have made Tim's hair stand on end. But Tim would go The Bear one better---his final grisly encounter would not only be real, but fatal for man, woman, AND bear.

Treadwell is a Quixotic figure, but instead of looking at windmills and seeing monsters, he looks at half ton grizzlies and sees teddy bears. When have we been given a more fascinating documentary portrait of a fool, a madman, an artist, a conman, a clown, a lover, a killer?

Imagine

4/5/05-5/7/05

Imagine

In the light of the networks' constant bombardment, I propose that a new cable network be founded: The All Dead Pope All the Time Network, or ADPATN.
A camera can be trained upon the Pope's corpse lying in state, and both camera and Pope can be left running for the indefinite future, or until such time as the Pope swells up and busts. After that his remains, with the exception of his heart, which the Poles want, can be interred in the special grotto in St. Peter's Basilica which has been waiting for him. Then another camera can be set up and trained on his sarcophagus or packing crate or Hold-a-Pope and left running, and anybody who wants can tune in, 7/24, to see how the Pope is doing. That is, to see whether the Pope is still dead or whether he has somehow resurrected himself.
That's a pretty exciting prospect, and if the Pope does manage to return, is he going to be mad! Because by that time there'll be a new Pope----somebody will have his job, wear his weirdass hat, be traipsing about the world in his Popemobile.
So the ADPATN Network will always have that element of suspense: Is THIS the day the Pope returns?
Of course, if there's room for an All Dead Pope All the Time on the airwaves, then there also must be room for an All Dead Elvis All the Time, and there may even be room for an All Dead Terri Schiavo All the Time, not to mention an All Dead Princess Diana All the Time.
Actually, this is nothing new. Back in the '70's Spain had a special network entirely devoted to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s last days, or weeks, or months----The All Almost-Dead All the Time Francisco Franco Network. You may remember that Franco took an outrageously long time to die, so long that no one was quite sure he was dead when he finally did die. So for years after his expiration date Spain had an All Is-He-Really-Dead All the Time Network. It took decades of staring at the Generalissimo's dessicated corpse before the Spanish people could fully believe their good fortune----no more Paco!!
It's a little known fact that even earlier there was a cable network devoted to Howard Hughes. The cameras were planted all over his Las Vegas Desert Inn penthouse---The Is Howard Still Alive Network. Thing is, nobody could watch it because nobody had cable way back then. But it's easy to imagine what it must have looked like: The bearded billionaire, Buddha-like, sitting for hours in his bed, slurping up Campbell's chicken noodle soup, staring at endless reruns of Ice Station Zebra, being waited on hand & foot by Mormon attendants wearing rubber gloves and sliding about the place with their stockinged feet shod in empty Kleenex boxes. Well……I'm not dead sure they wore Kleenex boxes on their feet, but it's a believable touch. And in any case, that's the singular charm of the IHSA Network. You're forced to imagine the whole thing! There are no surviving videotapes! This means, of course, that you don't even need a screen to watch it. You can just adopt the lotus pose and meditate on Howard H, his 9 inch nails growing right before your mind's eye.
It's not a long jump from picturing Howard Hughes to imagining the moribund major broadcast networks without actually turning on your TV set. Not only are they almost dead, but so are half their viewers. Try it for yourself: Sit in front of your TV, take your clicker in hand, and……this is the tricky part……DON'T turn it on. Just stare at the blank screen. In no time you'll be seeing the ghost of Dinah Shore, singing "See the U.S.A., in your Chevrolet." And Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow will bring you the great old days of TV broadcast news, when the newsreaders had enough balls to contradict the government. ….Or did they? Anyway, YOU control the vertical, YOU control the horizontal, so you can IMAGINE they did if that makes you any happier.
And, of course, you can imagine current news, as well. You can imagine, for example, the World Trade Towers reconstituting themselves, shooting skyward like giant elevators, and all the jumpers popping up from the ground and back into their windows and the flames going out and the planes backing out of the towers and the terrorists backstroking to Saudi Arabia having done nothing worse than take a few flying lessons and tip a couple lapdancers. You can further imagine that the invasion of Iraq never happened, or, if you're so inclined, you can pretend that we're pulling out tomorrow and leaving the Iraqis to fend for themselves. You can imagine bemasked Iraqi insurgents putting the heads of their victims BACK ON and the poor hostages smiling, weeping with joy, and embracing their captors.
But why stop with the small stuff? Why not imagine George Bush and Dick Cheney announcing that they're sick of war and will be trashing the Star Wars boondoggle and will instead spend those tens of billions on education, medicine, infrastructure, and the environment? Why NOT imagine it? It's easy if you try.
Now that you're warmed up make a HUGE leap of the imagination and picture Gore winning the White House in 2000.
That was exhausting, so take a break and go pee and make yourself a peanut butter sandwich. Just imagine that some commercials are playing while you're away from the set. When you get back, imagine you're watching a baseball game. Imagine that the players are no longer jacked up on 'roids, and that things like fielding, baserunning, and strategy still matter. The game in your head is bound to be a thousand times more compelling than the real ones. Do you see what's happening? You're turning back the clock to the days when radio ruled the Earth! We listened to accounts of the games and pictured them for ourselves. It was ever so much richer an experience.
But the trouble with radio was that you still had to LISTEN. With the Imagination Network you don't have to watch OR listen. You connect the dots, you fill in the blanks. Actually, you don't even connect dots. There ARE no dots. It's ALL in your head.
If you want Princess Di to stride the Earth again, voila! There she is, miraculously emerging in one piece from that crumpled Mercedes! Turns out she was wearing her seatbelt! But creepy Dody wasn't. So now she's free to date YOU! And what's that knocking at the door? Why yes! It's herself, come to have some tea and crumpets, some very wet crumpets, with little ol' you. How did she find you out here in your Arkansas trailer park? God knows, but here she is, and she's lookin' damn good for a horsey Brit of a certain age. And don't think Dody and her other lovers haven't taught her a few tricks, tricks she'll be glad to use on you! Maybe she'll even demonstrate some of the tricks which Camilla Horsey Parker taught Prince Charles and which Charles, in turn, taught Di. What kinda tricks? Horse tricks, of course. The kinds of things the British nobility pick up very young in the haylofts of equestrian stables.
But maybe you don't want to imagine Princes Di sitting on your face. Maybe you're a bored housewife who wants to watch The All Brad Pitt Giving Me Head All the Time Network. No problem! There he is now, knocking on the door of your doublewide, fresh from having dumped Jennifer Aniston AND Angelina Jolie. Is he disappointed when he beholds all 320 pounds of you, splayed out on your barcalounger stuffing your maw with Bavarian mints? Hell no! You're in charge of the vertical, baby, and Brad gets REAL vertical just at the sight of you.
And after he worshipfully pleasures you, why, he'll drive you over to WalMart, where he'll push the cart while you shop till you drop. And when you get to the register, why, the girl will say: "Your money's no good here." And she'll just wave you and your hundreds of dollars of appliances and toilet paper in bulk, right on through. Because this is YOUR network now. The one in your head. The one where it's all coming true just the way you need it to.
And the next time you look down at yourself, why, you'll have slimmed down something amazing……just like Anna Nicole Smith did. You'll realize you've become so hot that Brad Pitt doesn't rate you any more. "Go on back to Angelina……IF she'll take you," you say. And just as you're about to imagine an even handsomer, younger, studlier, lover knocking at your door, well, here comes a REAL knocking at your door.
It's your ex-husband, and he's here to claim his TV set AND his barcalounger. Suddenly it's no longer The Imagination Network, it's Reality TV in surroundsound and smello-vision. And your ex DOES smell pretty ripe after sittin' in the cab of his 18-wheeler all day.
"Go ahead," you say, "take your damn TV. Ain' nuthin' good on it no ways---just wars and degradation of the environment and political corruption and Pampers commercials."
"Oh. Listen to Miss Priss. Getting too good for America, are you?" he says as he lugs the set out to his semi. Then he comes back in for the barcalounger. "Go 'wan, get outta that thing." But you can't. Your 320 pounds is STUCK. He goes back out to his truck and comes back with a dolly and slips it under you AND the chair and tips you over. You fall heavily to the floor. "Aw hell," you say, sprawled in front of what used to be your Trinitron. "I've fallen and I can't get up."
The door of your doublewide slams shuts. Hubby and his barcalounger are gone for good. He sounds a couple earsplitting blasts from his airhorn and then starts up the big diesel and rumbles outta your trailer park. You're STILL on the floor, and you STILL can't get up. What's that wetness? Danged if you ain't peed yourself! And isn't that your peanut butter and jelly sandwich that your elbow is stuck in?
But it ain't all bad. Golden silence, broken only by the drip drip drip of your broken faucet, reigns in your doublewide. It's a silence undisturbed by the sounds of CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, or the Home Shopping Network. You can't hear or see ESPN or ESPN II or the Golf Network or A&E or C-Span or Univision. Ranting infomercials? Hell no! In-NO-mercials. No Popeil pushing his Popeil pocket fisherman, no Pope John Paul praying, no Pope John Paul George & Ringo playing, no Jerry Falwell braying, no Tom DeLay delaying, no Osama bin Laden inveighing. No, no, no. Just the sweet silence of a summer evening in a trailer park somewhere in Arkansas.
You wonder if you're gonna die there in a puddle of your own pee. Then you hear a mourning dove's tender coo. What IS that? Oh yeah. Mother nature. There IS another network out there. It's the All-World-All-The-Time-Network. It's not in your head and it's not on any screen. It's something you're living in and on and with, and it's there all the time, but you gotta open your eyes and ears and arms to receive its broadcast. Let it in and it will let you in. See how that works? You are the world and the world is you. What a multi-dimensional treat!
Sure, you're still collapsed on the floor of your doublewide, too fat and depressed to get up, lying there in a puddle of your own pee. But at least you're no longer dependent on CBS, or ABC, or NBC. You're going cold turkey from the History Channel, from Turner Network and Nickelodeon and the All Dead Elvis Network. This new channel you've tuned into is the REAL YOU Network. It's not at all clear how long this network is gonna survive. No more than 48 hours if you can't crawl to the phone and dial 911. Because it's clear you're suffocating, whale-like, under your own weight.
It's a terrible death you're dying, and you're tempted to tune out YOU and tune in your IMAGINATION. When you do, you picture yourself suddenly slim and trim. You bounce to your feet like Mary Lou Retton. You stride outta that doublewide and take flight into the heavens. As you soar toward your reward and St. Peter's Gate, you glance back over your shoulder and catch a glimpse of your moldering corpse through the window of your doublewide. You imagine cameras trained on your earthly remains. You imagine your bloated corpse broadcast to millions of homes: The All Dead You All The Time Network. You hope the sight of you will give your millions of new fans what they think they need.
You flap your wings a couple times more, wondering: What channels does heaven get?

Nobody Writes in Heaven

2/23/05

THIS IS ONE OF THOSE MORNING EMAILS THAT EVENTUALLY TURNS INTO A SORTOF STORY.............

NOBODY WRITES IN HEAVEN

Cat wakes me up with a jolt early this morning by leaping on my chest. After I feed her, I notice that she has spread some little diarrhea driblets on the bed. This is a first for her----she's never malfunctioned before. In my unpleasantly awake, unguarded, state, I have a sudden depressing vision of college classmate Scott Turow's industry and brains and enterprise----grinding out more million dollar novels, energetically pursuing his law career, having the requisite haute-bourgeois wife and kids and big house on the North Shore... As in, "What would Scott Turow be doing this morning?" And: "What was Scott Turow doing at 19 when you were moldering in Nam? He was already meeting with publishers and planning & laying the cornerstones of his career, THAT’s what he was doing." Like the voice of a dim, nagging, mom.

Of course, my own living mother has forgotten, in her Alzheimer’s ward, all that bullshit, is very sweet and giggly and quite beyond ambition, society, achievement, & time. But the mother introject (or some other nagging voice, maybe the voice of my own thwarted ambition or self loathing) continues to haunt me.

I suppose it's small consolation to reflect that, though I respect his craft and prose and experience and civility and talent and work ethic, I've never been able to get through any of Turow's novels. I mean, I’ve finished them, but only by skipping big chunks in the middle. (If you PAID me to read every word I'd probably more or less like 'em. Or maybe just wonder who the hell the writer is speaking to. Presumably everybody but me.) Nor could I bear being a Chicago D.A. or whatever he is or was (though I would kill to see that slice of society, get that people-watching experience).

Heck, I could depress myself the same way thinking about any gogetter. (If I were George Bush, I'd be having my super summarized briefing be read to me this morning, my lies of the day prepared by Karl Rove, my decisions made by Dick Cheney, I'd be attending the morning White House Bible study class, I'd be thinking of more ways to subvert the Constitution to advance the agenda of greedy corporations, I'd be working out for two hours, dispensing fatherly advice to Jenna & Barbara: "Don't drink and drug like I did, not that I ever did. And get your orifices checked daily for STD's, not that you, or I, have orifices...", I'd be thinking about all the mistakes I never made in my life, I'd be letting others do my bleeding & suffering for me, I'd be making more plans to take from the poor and give to the rich.... Jesus. It sounds like W is in hell on Earth! Yet he's under the impression he's enjoying himself.) One man's hell is another man's heaven.

Hell is other people. --Sartre

Nothing's either good or bad but thinking makes it so. --Hamlet.

The mind is its own master, and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. --Milton's Satan.

It's mind over matter. I don't mind and you don't matter. ---My DI in basic training.

Is it slightly consoling to consider the life of recent-self-shooter Hunter Thompson, who at least wrote some stuff which actually meant something to me? And who clearly never tamed his demons and was often possessed and finally taken down by them? But Hunter must have had some good times, plinking gongs in his "compound" with his high powered rifles (and fantasizing turning them on himself?) even as he watched, with disgust, his beloved Aspen turn into a private reserve for piggies.

If I were Sam Shepard (the playwright, not the 1950’s wife-murderer) I'd be galloping my horse about my Virginia estate, I'd be savoring the memories of all the beautiful actresses I've fucked, I'd be planning my latest surrealist epic, I'd be congratulating myself for the beautiful children I had with Jessica Lange (I did have some, didn't I?), I'd be considering which juicy movie part to accept (the intriguing Bulgarian-French artsy-fartsy production to be shot in Herzogovenia? Or the cameo in the upcoming James Cameron blockbuster?) Or maybe I'd be on a set in Arizona, evading prying phone calls from Jessica, who's heard I'm banging the ingenue. (Am I still married to Jessica? Does she still care whether I'm straying?)

Of course, if I were Arthur Miller, I'd be in heaven, trading notes with Eugene O'Neill and Ibsen and Strindberg (ooops, no, he's in hell, he wouldn't be comfortable in heaven, heaven would BE a kind of hell for him, even if God had sent him to heaven he would have undoubtedly opted for hell as a lesser hell than heaven) and Shakespeare and Moliere and, yes, even Sophocles. Would Tennessee Williams be there? Or would he be in a separate quarter of heaven, rather like the French Quarter, stocked with juicy young gonorrhea-free hustlers? And when all the playwrights got together, would there be some pissing contests? Would everybody STILL be just a tad jealous of The Bard? Would Christopher Marlowe be blowing it out his ass about how many more plays he could have written had he not been skewered in a sword fight at age 29? Would Keats toddle in from the Poets’ Corner, saying: "If only I HAD lived to 29, what I would have written!"

And over in the musicians' quarter (do the various disciplines mingle in heaven? or are they carefully segregated for their own protection?) are Mozart and Mendelssohn and Gershwin bragging about the brilliant shit they would have written had they lived into their 40's? And Keats, overhearing them: "Listen to 'em, talking about 40! When I had ceased to be before I even hit 30!" "Aww, go back to the poets' crib," says John Lennon. "How'd you like to be me? ---Struck down by an assassin's bullet with 3 lp's still in my head, crying to get out?"

Keats retreats, and runs into Sylvia Plath. "At least you made it to 30," he says, and she slaps him, hard. "What's more, you had the choice of living on. I was struck down by the white plague, which so exhausted me that my last two years were like a posthumous life."

She slaps him again and says, "You know NOTHING about depression."

"Read me again," he replies. Could the man who wrote: "....then on the shore/Of the wide world I stand alone and think/Till love and fame to nothingness do sink," have known nothing of depression?"

"Well, you weren't so depressed you committed suicide, so how depressed could you have been?"

"Not only was I dying young, but I knew, and here I quote myself, 'the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression.'"

"Who hasn't considered making his quietus with a bare bodkin?" says The Bard, who has been eavesdropping on them. "But that the dread of something after death,/The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns, puzzles the will/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others we know not of?"

"Well it didn't puzzle MY will!" says Plath, I just stuck my head in the oven! "It didn't puzzle my will either!" cheerfully chimes in Hemingway, toting a shotgun but still missing half his head. "Nor mine neither!" says Hunter Thompson, still bleeding a tad from his recent self-inflicted mouthshot. "Well, it puzzled my will for 67 years. Plus, I self-medicated and that might've gotten me through some rough spots. And for a long time I managed to turn my firearms on other things beside myself. But by and by my body broke down, plus I wasn't writing like I used to...."

"That's a killer combo. And add to that having suicide and bipolarism run in your family!" says Poppa Hem.

"Is bipolarism a word?" says Hunter.

"No, it's not," says Joe Heller. "And death runs in everybody's family. So that's no excuse. Look at me: I got a horrible wasting disease. But did I give up on life? Hell no! I went on to write several more books."

"But were they GOOD books?" says Hemingway.

"No, they weren't," says Heller. "But they paid some bills."

"Do Jews have a prohibition against suicide? Jews don't seem to kill themselves very often," says Hemingway.

"That sounds vaguely anti-Semitic, Poppa," says Heller. "Anyway, Catholics have a big prohibition against suicide but that didn't seem to slow you or your uncle or your granddaughter down. But since you asked: the reason Jews DON'T kill themselves more often is because we have learned to enjoy suffering. Plus, we're hoping to outlive the competition."

Tennessee Williams, attracted by the hubbub, ambles over from the gay ghetto. "I hear you killed yourself, too," says Hem. "Welcome to the club."

"Not really. I choked on an inhaler…and my own puke. I mean, I might as well have killed myself. I did enough drugs and booze to kill myself. But you know what? I kept waking up and going to the typewriter, morning after morning, grinding out the plays...."

"....And they all sucked. The only decent writing you did in your last two decades was your memoir," says Hunter Thompson.

"...That's what they said about me, too," says Hem.

"What the hell do THEY know?" says Tennessee. "If I had listened to THEM I would have stopped writing at 25."

"25!" says Keats. "If only I COULD have written at 25."

"You didn't die until you were 26," reminds Williams.

"Yes, but I was so blasted by the White Plague the last two years were a write off," says Keats. "Why, I had written more and better stuff, by age 24, than did Chaucer, Shakespeare, OR Milton. Can you imagine the moves I woulda busted had I lived to 45?!" Just then, attracted by the hubbub, Chaucer and Milton saunter over and are joined by HNG's (Heavenly New Guys), Arthur Miller & Spalding Gray.

"So, I'll bet you guys have written some unbelievably fantastic stuff since you've been here," Miller asks them.

"Nobody writes in heaven, newbie," says Chaucer.

"We're too busy getting laid," says Shakespeare.

"Or getting awards," adds Ibsen.

"Or just getting used to SEEING again," says Milton, blinking brightly. "I'm STILL not quite used to it."

"If it's writing you want," says Franz Kafka, "you're better off in hell. That's where I'm going as soon as I get my paperwork processed."

"Is there a hold up?" asks Miller.

"There's ALWAYS a hold up. God is a very busy guy. I've been petitioning him for decades. So far the best I've managed is an appointment with his assistant secretary, Albert Schweitzer, but even that keeps getting postponed. Meanwhile, I live in hope."

"Hope?" asks Miller.

"Hope of some day getting to hell and writing again."

"I know what you mean," says Miller. "I wrote a couple good things in my youth, then spent 50 years coming up dry. But I never stopped trying."

"Oh, so you've already SPENT some time in hell," says Kafka.

"No, that happened on Earth," says Miller.

"50 years coming up dry, and yet you didn't kill yourself?" chorus Hemingway, Plath, and Thompson.

"Well," says Miller, "I'm Jewish, too."

"I was writing pretty well right up to time I killed myself," says Spalding Gray.

"Lemme guess," says Kafka. "You're not Jewish."

"And I probably could have written a fantastic piece about my suicide."

"He's not kidding," says Miller. "His performance pieces, while a bit narcissistic for my earnest tastes, were nonetheless excellent."

"You could write a piece up here," suggests Thompson. "Maybe I could, too."

"Nobody wants to hear about suicide. Not in HEAVEN," says Hemingway. "You're lucky they even let you in. In the old days they didn't. I tried writing something about my suicide and it just about made me want to kill myself. Plus, I couldn't get it published."

"Suicide is frowned upon up here," says Plath. "God wouldn't publish my posthumous suicide poems, either. He keeps saying: 'Write about LIFE, Sylvia, LIFE."

"God talks to you?" says Kafka.

"Sure. He drops in on the writers' commissary all the time."

"I never see him there."

"You have to get up very very early to catch God," says Plath.

"I'm too depressed to get up early," says Kafka.

"So? See what you're missing?"

"But I thought you were depressed, too. Suicidally depressed."

"Oh I am, I am," says Plath. "But I'm not so depressed I lie in bed whinging about it! Any writer worth her salt can at least jump out of bed, the earlier the better, write some final despairing poems, and then kill herself before the kids wake up. But what would you know? You're so self involved you never had kids."

"Well you're so self-involved you killed yourself even though you DID have kids."

“Well you’re so self-involved you never even married your fiancé…….just dryhumped her with despairing epistles….”

"Well you're so self-involved your husband left you."

"Well you're so self-involved you barely got published in your lifetime. Plus, on your deathbed, you told your best friend Max Brod to burn your unpublished works.”

“Well you’re so self-involved you heedlessly created a posthumous suicide cult of young women fans---an unintended consequence of your self-absorbed self-destruction. Or WAS it unintended?”

Plath just gives Kafka her best Cheshire cat smile. “Well you’re so self-involved you continue to fruitlessly petition God to send you to hell rather than actually doing something constructive or creative.”

“Well I haven’t noticed YOU writing anything lately, or since you got here, for that matter.”

“And why are your EIGHTY years of writer’s block better than my FORTY years of writer’s block?”

Both Plath and Kafka, shamed and shocked and exhilarated by their own vituperation, their stock of insults depleted, fall silent. In fact, the assembled host of genius writers ALL fall silent. They're all listening, listening for their muse. And they hear nothing. That's the way it is in heaven. That's the way it's always been and that's the way it's always going to be. They walk over, en masse, to the train station, the station with the tracks leading down to hell. They stand hopefully on the platform, looking down the tracks, waiting for a train. Either one arriving or one departing would do fine. Because what comes up must inevitably go back down. They do this every day. And every day they see nothing. Every day they are disappointed and cast down and know they must remain in heaven, which is hell for writers.

Oh, and my cat? She's been sitting on my leg the whole time I've been writing this. And yes, she's left cat poop spots all over my sweatpants.

---FIN---

The Wrong Stuff

1/24/05
THE WRONG STUFF

These days, I've been taking a weird pleasure in thinking thoughts like: I'd say my life is over, but I would have had to have had a life in the first place to say that. And also: Every decision I have ever made is the wrong one. And I'm willing to reform, but I know that no matter how I change, I'll just change into someone who continues to make perfectly wrong choices, just DIFFERENT wrong choices from the wrong ones I used to make. As I say, I take a monstruous and perverse pleasure in thinking like this.

Oddly, I'm not comfortable calling myself a loser. Loser has all sorts of associations I don't relate to. What is it I'm losing? What are others winning? I'm certainly willing to indict myself for either: 1) not living fully and/or 2) living wrong every second of every day for my whole past, my present, and my future.

Do I associate "wrong" with "sin"? Sin seems to be a quaint and almost hilarious concept, like wickedness or iniquity. I prefer, it really gives me pleasure and release, to think of myself as irretrievably wrongheaded, and, yes, pigheaded. You know that line: "everything I say is a lie, including this"? Well "everything I do is wrong, including this."

There ought to be a 12 step program for the Wrongheaded Anonymous. But no one would ever attend because they'd take the wrong way to get there. And if they did, through accident or spite, manage to attend, they would, of course, always say the wrong things at the wrong time. They would manage to mortally offend one another. They would break all the rules of the organization, such as destroying one another's anonymity. They would never EVER get any closer to being right.

This is the one club which would have me, and I should say right here that it's therefore a club whose invitation I reject out of hand. But because I am so wrongheaded, so perverse, so counterproductive, I WILL accept its invitation. I will even accept its nomination for the presidency, and if elected, I will serve. But I will misrule at every turn.

Some might argue that Wrongheads Anonymous is the one place where it's safe to be Wrong, right to be Wrong. They know nothing. It's ALWAYS wrong to be wrong. When it's right to be wrong, wrong is no longer wrong.

Wrong always cuts, hopelessly, irrationally, against the grain. Wrong is anything but the sensible thing to do. Wrong is indefensible. And inexplicable. And irreducible. Wrong leaves the rest of the world shaking its head in disgust and wonder at the folly of the wrongdoer.

You may sense a certain defiant pride in us, the hopeless wrongdoers. You are mistaken. We have nothing to be proud of. We strip ourselves of the possibility of pride at every turn, with every mistake and misbegotten deed.

Wrong should be ashamed of itself, knows it should be ashamed of itself, hears every day from the rest of the world that it is shameful. Bipolar, it swings between the extremes of shame and shamelessness. Because it is so wrong, wrong can't find the happy medium, the golden mean. Rather it either crouches in the shadows or flaunts itself hideously, offensively, flamboyantly.

What you see in us is not pride, but the grotesque nugget of self which is all that is left to us. We are almost nothing. We wish we could be completely nothing. Yet we are something. When you boil away the superfluities of personality what are we but the essence of wrong. Eau de wrong. Yet we are stunned and horrified, and perversely gratified and grateful, to find ourselves, in spite of ourselves and all reasonable expectations, waking up morning after morning. We are still here. We are still alive. We, monstruous, unspeakable, cockroaches that we are. We do everything wrong yet we somehow don't erase ourselves (until we do) from the face of the Earth. We'd like to take back who we are. We'd like to take back all we have done wrong. We'd like to fill in all we have failed to do. We'd like to be correctly here and now. We'd like to live out a proper future with glowing dreams. We'd like to realize the dreams, rather than the nightmares, of our forefathers. We'd like to be a shining example to our descendents, if we happen to have any.

We'd like to be respectable. We'd like to live the kind of lives, in the kind of houses, with the kind of families, which could bear unembarrassed national exposure on reality TV.

Instead, we remain incontrovertibly, incorregibly, what we are: those who never get it right, who never got it right, who never will get it right, and who won't stop getting it wrong. It's not so much that those around us care. They don't much notice us any more, or consider us a minor nuisance or irritant. If they take time, for a brief moment, to consider our lives, they tsk tsk and shake their heads at our folly. They might, if they are pious, send up a brief prayer on our behalves, petitioning the Holy Father to straighten us out so that we might have at least a taste of right living before our ends.

If they see any value at all in the grotesque wastes of our lives, they might allow as how we can sometimes be cautionary tales, negative space, road signs that tell those who are capable of rightliving what to avoid. Everything we do, after all, is a mistake. So the safe thing for the rational to do, when in doubt, is to do the opposite of what we do.

We may also prove to be objects of fun, or butts of jokes, for the rightliving. When the rightliving are depressed, or feel they are failing or losing, they can look at us and their spirits are lifted! For their lives will always look great compared to our folly.

So is it fair to say that we, the wrongheaded, are fools? Not really. Even being a fool is something. There's a place in the world for foolishness. God protects and loves fools. In foolishness and fools is a kind of truth. There is no place in the world for the wrong. We don't belong. Yet we are here. That is the horror of us. And at every turn we have the chance to redeem ourselves. Every moment we have the chance to do the right thing. And we never do. It's not even that we refuse to do the right thing. We don't have any choice in the matter. We are doomed to always do wrong, say wrong, live and breathe and shit wrong.

It could be argued that we, the wrong, should do the rest of the world a favor and stop consuming valuable resources that the right thinkers and right doers need to survive. We should, en masse, make an end of ourselves, Jonestown style. We should stop sucking up right people's air. We should stop slurping the clean water that rightdoers thirst for. We should stop taking jobs that the right need to support themselves and their right-thinking families. We should stop taking up space on this Earth, space that the right need.

And if we were capable of doing right, perhaps we WOULD do away with ourselves, post haste. But that would be right, and we never are. If we DO end ourselves, and sometimes we do, we inevitably do it at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, in a manner most inconvenient for those who are right.

And there are those who have speculated that we, the always-wrong, the perfectly wrong, may sometimes console ourselves with a brotherhood or sisterhood of the wrong. This, of course, is wrong. We are always and inevitably solitary and cutoff from one another, no matter how much we have in common with others who are wrong. To feel a common bond with any other human, even or especially the most despised and wrongheaded of humans, would be right. And we never are.

It's not just that we butt our heads, ramlike, against the right-thinking of the world. We also oppose, at every turn, our fellow wrongheads. It's the wrong thing to do. So we must do it.

The sensible of the world, concerned for their own, and possibly even for our own, well being, warn us: Don't go there. That's wrong. That is verboten. So that is where we must go. Even warning voices in our own heads cry out: Don't do it! Now's your chance to go elsewhere. And perhaps, for a moment, or for an agonized eternity, like tyro skiiers poised at the top of the Triple XXX Beyond Category Blackblackblack Slope, we successfully fight the impulse to go where we must not. But the struggle is futile, a joke. Shooooosh! It makes it all the more tragic, ridiculous, wasteful, when we again go where we should not. Whooooosh! The wrong place is not where we belong, because we belong nowhere. The wrong place is where we must be, careening into every tree we see. It is the only place in the universe open to us. We can no more fight our tropism for the wrong than we can fight gravity, or time.



....Of course, this is only a serious problem if I AM being serious.....isn't it?

aceh ache

12/29/04

You can't outrun the angel of death. –‘less'n you're in really great shape or have a muscle car or a nearby hill......

QUESTIONS & REFLECTIONS RE THE DEATH AQUATIC: ACEH ACHE

Is there REALLY an Aceh Province? Never heard of it. A Meulaboh? Pronounced how? Goofy names. How do I know they're not putting me on? Is this scifi or geological/oceanographic nonfiction? How bad should I feel for the drowned Aceh-ans (what ARE they called?) whose existence I never knew of until they were already lost? Should I feel as devastated as the President of Indonesia says he feels? Or should I just SAY I feel devastated? Is this like mourning the lost and possibly mythical kingdom of Atlantis? Do I have a big enough heart to grieve for the Aceh-ans AND the suffering Sudanese AND the Mess o' Potamians? Should I temporarily prioritize and stuff some of my concern for Iraqis, Sudanese, and American welfare mothers and nearly extinct blue whales and concentrate for now on Meulabohans? Or ALL Aceh-ans? Or Sri Lankans? Or Phukettians? Or Phi Phi Islanders? All of the preceding? None of the preceding? One of the preceding? Should I save some room in my grieving heart for drowned islands which have not yet been counted? Estimates of the drowned have doubled in the past few days. Should my sorrow correspondingly double? How grateful should I feel that I'm not a Meulobahan? Did Bush cause this tragedy, too? I'm more than willing to blame him for it even if he didn't.

The Great Earthquake of Lisbon inspired Voltaire to write Candide. Will Sunday's Sumatran Tsunami similarly some day give rise to great literature? If it does, will that in any way redeem it? I can answer THAT one right now: NO. It happened on Sunday, the Christian God's day of rest. Does that mean some other evildoing God did this dastardly deed? What did these folks do to piss Him/Her off? Why them and not me? Aren't I, this very moment, doing, wittingly or unwittingly, something to piss off an equally cantankerous and powerful God? Is it just a matter of time till I get mine? How do the Aceh-ans know there won't be another tsunami tomorrow? Would they stop doing what it is that's displeasing the Earthquake/Tsunami God even if they DID know what is they were or are doing wrong? Maybe He/She squashed them for just being themselves. Maybe He/She mashed them into the beach and sucked them out to sea for doing the RIGHT thing, for pleasing Him/Her. Maybe He/She squashed them for no reason whatsoever.......just whim. And how do I know I'm not just another whim to Him?

Hundreds of German, Swedish, & Norwegian tourists in Thailand are missing and presumed drowned. Some of those were bound to be international sexual predators looking for Thai child prostitutes. Did an Angry God engineer this event in order to nail them? --Like that time he downed a plane full of besotted German tourists returning home from Bangkok? Was this a watery Sodom & Gomorrah number? This time, did he drown all the tens of thousands of others as a cover for his retribution against 1st World Eurotrash sex criminals?

Which major studio will be the first to produce an Irving Allen style tsunami-disaster Summer blockbuster? In which theme park will the new tidal wave ride debut? Will a waterpark beat the others to the punch by converting an in-place surf pool into a tsunami plunge by next summer? How long must a theme park corporation pretend to mourn before breaking ground for its inhouse mega-wave?

I live in a very low lying, barely above sea level, floodplain in the earthquake-ridden Ring of Fire, hard by the Sea of Apathy. There are more faults under my feet than there were wrinkles in W. H. Auden's face. There could be a big ol' quake tomorrow morning, or tonight, or in five minutes, which would sent a huge chunk of Palos Verdes tumbling into the Pacific, thus generating a 500 MPH 50 foot high wave which would roar up Ballona Creek and drown me as I sit here typing this. Should I therefore forthwith & post haste find housing on higher ground tomorrow or sooner? What if I can't afford anything better or cheaper than what I'm in now? Should I remain in place and risk taking the Palos Verdes tsunami right in the face? If I do get flattened and drowned, should I expect folks halfway around the world who never heard of me & my neighbors until we got swept away to grieve our passing? If the Earthquake/Tsunami God is planning to drown/squish me for being who I am, who else should I be? What if I switch identities and he doesn't like the new guy, either? If he's planning to to take me out on a whim, and it doesn't matter how naughty or nice I'm being, should I let down my ethical guard? How do I know my naughty & nice corresponds with His? I could break my ass trying to be righteous and just end up pissing him off more and more because he's got a different idea of what "do the right thing" is all about. Or maybe he hates righteous dudes worst of all. Should I consult Spike Lee about how to do the right thing and about exactly what the right thing is? Or should I ask Spike Jones? Or would I be better off asking Chuck Yeager about the right stuff? Righteous dudes and dudettes Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Timothy Leary, and Tiny Tim are all dead, so I can't ask them. I could ask that Book of Virtues guy what the Right says is right, but he turned out to be a gambling addict. I could ask Rush how to do right, but he's an oxycontin addict. I could ask Bill O'Reilly, but he's a phone sex pig. I could ask Billy Graham, but he's an anti-Semite. I could ask Jesus, but I like to think I already know: What would Jesus do? Drop that cross and run like hell for the hills, even if that hill is Calvary. Should I be afraid, very afraid, or just go with the flow? If only I could afford to live on a hill I wouldn't have to worry about this shit. If I lived high enough on hoghill, I could live any damn way I pleased and no 50 foot tsunami could reach me. On the other hand, the Fire God could roar out of the Santa Monica Mts. and barbecue my ass. The Earthquake God could send my cantilevered mansion, with me and my Swedish au pair girl in it, tumbling down the cliffside. The Nuqular God could vaporize me in a snap of a terrorist's detonator. The Coyote God could eat my cat and then eat me. The Cancer God could eat me from the inside out. The Mugger God could pop a cap upside my funky white head. And the Old Age God is a lock to get me if one of the others somehow forgets to. I can try to cut the odds,/ but there's no getting away/ from ALL of dese Gods. Therefore send not to know for whom the sea roars: It roars for me. AND thee.
---FIN--

We'll Never Have Paris

12/14/04

EBAYUS INTERRUPTUS
Or
WE’LL NEVER HAVE PARIS
(a very short essay with a very long footnote)

Just this second, I am feeling a tad chagrined because I logged on one minute too late to get in the winning bid on a really perfect, underpriced bike which I absolutely DON'T need but which, nonetheless, would have been a nice Xmas present to myself this year. I've been (I couldn't control myself, it was weird) poring over and sorting and resorting thousands of bike choices for days. I don't know why I was so casual about logging on and pulling the trigger at the last minute. I guess I wasn't expecting the thing to be within reach as it came down to the final bidding second. Or I was oppressed by the possible expense and unconsciously WANTED to miss the bike by a matter of seconds. That way I could give myself the thrill of the possibility of acquisition without actually having to pay for or own the damned thing. But what's several hundred more dollars when I'm already several thousand in debt?

I guess the question is: would the new acquisition (and its expense) have weighed on me more heavily than does the thought of missing out on same.* This whole ebay thing is irritating. I've had this "missed out on a bid" feeling before and then later been immensely relieved that I did NOT acquire the putative bargain. And no, I haven't been eBaying for months. Just a few weeks. And no, this phase won't go on much longer. It's sort of a pre-holiday jag. And yes, it's a cousin to Vegas gambling and/or sports betting.

Also weirdly, I've rechanneled some of my pre-election political energy and my post election depression and frustration into Planet Ebid. I'm guessing that pretty soon there will have to be Ebayers Anonymous meetings for the afflicted…that, as Cheryl Crow sings, "I'm not the only one." And that there are others in far graver shape than I, others for whom this is no joke. They're the Internet descendants of those poor little ladies on fixed incomes who buy daily fixes of porcelain kitties and costume jewelry on the QVC Channel.

What there REALLY should be is an Ebay-like site where men & women can seek each other. I mean seek each other in a fully dimensional way, not just for sex, though that's certainly part of it, along with da soshul, da sikolojikul, da kulchural, da romantikal. Not bid, just try to match up properly. The personals that I've scoped out look horrible. Of course, people being the lying weasels and predators they are, they inevitably misrepresent themselves behind virtual curtains. Though some might argue that they also misrepresent themselves in person (except in my Eng 30A--creative writing class, of course).

Am I still (5 minutes later) kicking myself for missing out on the perfect bike at a bargain price? Well, I'm relieved to still have my money, or at least less debt. And I've already GOT a bike as good as the one I might have purchased. So the chagrin is easing, but not entirely when I remember what a phenomenal bargain it was. Relief chagrin relief chagrin relief chagrin. Maybe all I wanted was that exquisitely tuned moment of possibility when I actually thought I MIGHT be acquiring the perfect bike at the perfect price. Maybe I just engineered an almost experience in order to inspire myself. Maybe I used Ebay as a temporary muse. Maybe I find writing about the experience more gratifying than the eBay surfing itself (maybe I find the experience of writing more gratifying than the experience of the rest of the universe). Maybe I ought to be an Ebay columnist, but that's too much of a commitment. Who wants to be caged up with Ebay for the rest of his life? It would be hellish to have to come up with an Ebay column every week. What good is writing if it's not a surprise and a possibility? If I wanted to grind out sausage I'd open a sausage factory. In another couple weeks I look forward to jumping the Ebay ship entirely, possibly for the human world, though the human race IS overrated.

You've seen that moment in the movies, the one where the guy in the bomb shelter emerges, blinking, into the sunlight after 10 years underground, to discover that there was NOT a nuqular holocaust, that the world is STILL THERE. 'Cept in my case I'll emerge blinking and blinkered from my shuttered (shuddered) little office and online PC into that blinding Culver City sun, I'll stand in my front yard and behold the grandeur of the living world for that one brief moment. Then falls the shadow, and NAAAAW, and I'll turn, like Paxutawny Phil, and dart back into my gopher hole, there to contemplate the omphalos of the world through my online CRT.

*the hidden rationale is my new acquisition would have allowed me to sell off a couple extra bikes and thus upgrade the whole collection while scarcely costing me a cent. No chance for that now. I'm stuck with the shit I got. Well, if I were sane I would sell off a couple bikes ANYWAY, especially right now that I've ginked my back and can't bend over the drop bars, can't ride me bikes, for weeks. And, of course, there's always another bike on Ebay, and another, but my intuition tells me that THAT was the one I shoulda pulled the trigger on. And I sense I've lost my zest for the hunt: I won't want to bother chasing down another. The critical moment came and I dawdled and missed it by a casual nanosecond. I seemed to know what I was doing as I did it. Really took my sweet time. So presumably in my heart of hearts I didn't want to bother with it. Or else I blew it out of sheer ineptitude. This makes me think of the WOMAN I had a huge crush on in high school. In fact, I dated her equally pretty sister instead because she was never available. And then, years later, in a whirl in Paris, by sheer happenstance, I briefly bumped into her, had my fantastic opportunity, didn't take her phone number, and then regretted it for the next couple days alone in the City of Lights. And, of course, regret it to this day. "We'll never have Paris." My life, as Robert Lowell said of the mobster Louis Lepke, a "series of missed connections." Though for a time, I seemed to be hurrying on to OTHER connections so it was OK to blow by the connections I missed. I guess my real regret is that I can't live all the alternative lives I imagine, can't buy all the bikes that are right for me, love all the women, visit all the countries, write all the plays and poems and novels, have all the children, can't make EVERY connection all the time. As the poet (me) once said: "I'm in permanent mourning for lost opportunity:/pasts I didn't let happen/futures I won't let be." Carpe diem? Why just one day? How about seizing an infinite number of days? Of bikes, of women, of worlds? Why settle for just one? Why settle for a hundred, or a thousand? Why settle, like Wilt Chamberlain, for a mere 20,000 women? Perhaps God's cruelest joke on man is that he gave us the opportunity to imagine all the lives we choose not to lead because of the life we choose to lead, but he didn't give us the power to infinitely redivide or replicate ourselves so that we COULD lead those other lives. Instead we must live with the awareness and pain of, yes, I'm going to use that horrible, that most threadbare, that most footworn of cliches now: "The path not taken." And if one more terminally smug, braindead gasbag starts talking to me about how he has no regrets, that he'd live his whole life over again exactly the way he has, I may just explode him and give him his chance for reincarnation. Sure there are the gratifications of the lives we are leading. No one's arguing with that. But, even given the cornucopia (and inferno) of real life, how can any imaginative person NOT be stabbed by the infinity of missed possibilities? Maybe that's the real attraction of Ebay surfing. One can briefly, in one's imagination, try on an almost infinity of goods and services without actually burdening oneself with them. There need not be any followthrough or responsibility. It's a funzone, a kind of Disneyland of alternative universes for consumers. It can stand in, however briefly and inadequately, for their inability to be (or at least own) all things and all men (and women). I'm guessing that in a crazee way that's what swingers and sex addicts are about. Maybe at heart they're super romantics who want an infinite number of romantic partners and experiences. Presumably this obsession strips their romantic lives of depth and dimension, substituting the extensive for the intensive, quantity for quality. But I can only speculate here.

Thing is, we first world folk aren't simple tribesmen and peasants, blissfully cloistered away from the rest of the world. We're assaulted with an infinite number of choices (cultural, sexual, religious, economic) every day. How can we not be haunted and even dumbfounded by the possibilities and, more importantly, by the IMpossibility of seizing all, or most, or even a fraction, of those alluring, Sirenlike, choices? Our whole lives are like that part of Odysseus's journey when he bound himself to the mast while his crew, their ears stuffed with wax, sailed his ship past the Sirens and their fearful rocks. So Odysseus was the one dude who heard the Sirens' exquisite call and lived to tell the tale. If normal, 21st Century konsumers, heeded the Sirens' call they would smash up on the rocks of infinite acquisition, of promiscuity, of frantic travel, of moral relativism, of terminal konsumerism in all its forms. And many are so terrified by the amazing prospects and possibilities of the modern world, have so little faith in their own boundaries and integrity and judgment and imagination, that they retreat into dark caves of choicelessness, of fundamentalism and fascismo, of viewing their pastor and President, even if they're patent morons, as wise fathers who know best. In short, they retreat from an infinity of choices and possibilities, from freedom, into darkness and slavery and a self-imposed benightedness. From daylight into night. From freedom into slavery. From imagination into the literal and fundamental. From hope into fear. From love into hate. From the future into the Dark Ages.

I know, I know, the real question is: how do we learn to live with the bike,or bikes, we have. How we learn to live with the woman or wife or wives we have. How do we learn to live with the life or lives we have while remaining aware, imaginatively and creatively aware, of all the other choices-not-taken out there? How do we learn to do that without becoming paralyzed by choice, as Hamlet temporarily was. How do we learn do that without becoming terrified by choice, as George Bush's sheeplike followers are. How do we learned to do that without being driven mad by choice, as so many restless, frustrated, in debt Americans are. How do we find ourselves, remain in touch with ourselves, in the midst of infinite choice? Choice is a good thing. Choice is opportunity. Choice is freedom and possibility. How sad, or rather, tragic, that we are led by a President who constantly invokes the word freedom while leading the nation AWAY from choice, freedom, possibility, imagination. "Freedom?" he seems to be snarling, "you can't HANDLE the word." And maybe it IS too much--- for the red half of the country. Maybe it’s something we, or at least the red ones among us, would rather pretend to export to Iraq than actually experience at home.

--FIN--

Vegas: The 4 Corners of the Apocalypse

1/31/02

The 4 Corners of the Apocalypse

Which Vegas did I find last weekend?

The glittering spiritual landfill and backofbeyond lot where lost souls are temporarily yet eternally warehoused & exhibited & buried & married & ferried. Here the blinking neon makes the void in each tourist's hand look all the blackjackier. Here are the desperate, the clueless, the enanddisenfranchised refuse of Bushamerica shipped in by the planeful. Here are they marched through the gates of McCarron, where the overarching credo shouts: You Cannot Beat the House. Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here, Fall Down Upon Your Knees and Console Yourselves with Worship of the King, Ol' Blue Eyes, Buddy Hackett, Tom Jones, Siegfried & Roy, Wayne the RootintootinNewton & buffets serving bloody prime ribs au jus. Here find the modern Manzanar wherein are remanded the hopelessly helplessly hopeful, the addicted, the compulsive, those whose imaginations are as sterile and overheated as Area 51 on an August afternoon. It is the deadend, the box canyon, the lethal flashflood of adrenaline in the afternoon of nothingness, the cardiac event, the bolt from the above on the dolt down below, the floorshow from hell, the ground zero of mirthless Modern Man, the White Sands firing range of the impotent, the 4 Corners of the Apocalypse, the Roswell of the Malignly Extra-terrestrial, the tomb of the unknown anti-hero, the last crappy roll of the lowbottlemized proles before--Eyeless in Gaza, Oedipus Wrecked and his K-Mart Shoppermate ball&chain, bursting out of her easy fit stonewashed jeans, limp back to their anti-Vegas, their bungalow, their rabbit hutch, their planned community of pain, their foreclosure, their downsizing, their plaque-ed up hearts and tartared teeth, their lumpectomies, their SUV's & STD's, their imploded 401K's,their prognoses negativos, their PTA controversies and 700 Club Bookburnings, their Smith&Wessons and Undesirable Discharges and dyspepsias and smug bumper stickers and life everlasting and weedwhackers and vague unexpressed yearnings and silent primal screams and bowel yawps and serpent-toothed ingrates and mute mothers and dead fathers and grasping mistresses and groping supervisors---- to resume their slow two-step on their suburban/exurban/urban/Bourbon/rural/rustic/rusting killing grounds.....

The Vegas I found is the Vegas where the die always come up snake eyes and the hookers demand you hurry up and don condoms and cum, damn you! and there are no swallowers, only those who SPIT you on the wall or vomit drunkenly in your lap and the friends betray you the husbands beat you the whores roll you the celebs scorn you the preachers decry you the prophets prophesy your demise the JP's marry you the chorines kick you the cabbies fleece you the troubadors sing you to your ruin the bellboys importune you the deskclerks dun you the one armed bandits fist fuck you right between the eyes the floorbosses refuse you credit and you come to face to face with your own private demons-in-the-desert, your worst fears about yourself, which you more or less held at bay your whole life but which now step forward in the 3 AM of your mind and kick your ass from here to the Bellagio to the Mandalay to NewYorkNewYork to Caesar's Palace.... for which revelation you pay nothing less than your skin, your bones, your skull, your soul, and your last ragged illusions about your future, past, and present.

What have I done to deserve this you squeak and gibber to the merciless desert stars, to the sadistic stares of indifferent onlookers, your fellow inmates, your fellow wearers of the invisible armbands of befuddlement, your fellow herdlings in the stockyards and feedpens of the City with the Empty Eyes. And the answer comes from the hole where your heart used to be, like an echo from a crypt, or a dry well, or an empty, paid out, mineshaft: You dared to hope you would somehow win the cosmic lottery that is always stacked overwhelmingly against you and demands nothing less than your life and your soul. Now climb back on your plane, you 18 carat zirconium loser. Now face spouse and kids with your flattened wallet, your maxed out cards, your double-mortgaged house and barren prospects and wall-eyes fried by the sight of a millionmillion flourescent suns burning on the ceilings of tenthousandfootballfieldsizedcasinos. It's official. Be you Taiwanese or Montanan or Venezuelan or Saudi Arabian, you have walked across the burning coals of your own starved psyche, danced the night away with the dropouts of a billion 12-step fandangos, linked tongues with the Great Harlot Mammon and been given the brainblowingskullfucking blowjob which has left you twin black holes for eyes & cratered your cranium for good. Or at least until you can get another credit card and a long weekend off to see whether your luck has improved, which surely it has, because how can it get worse? It can. It will. Ladyluck will gladly, gleefully, drill you again and leave you for dead by the shores of Lake Powell and your clattering, grinning, dead flat broke skeleton will do a last danse macabre before it falls to white dry pieces under the burning, pitiless, brass bell of a Nevada sun. Halleluia! You have faced your final temptation, surrendered instantly, and found it joyless, savorless, flavorless. It's official, baby. You're a redwhite&blueblooded American, whatever your nationality, race, creed, or religion. You've just done Vegas. And Vegas has just done you.

The Four Freedoms of the United States of Geezerdom

3/16/99

THE FOUR FREEDOMS OF THE UNITED STATES OF GEEZERDOM

I’m immigrating to the United States of Geezerdom without emigrating from the United States of Boomerdom. I’ll always be a Boomer, but now that the dew is off the rose, I’m applying for dual citizenship as a Geezer as well. I already look so bad that ticket takers have carded me……in reverse. That is, they’ve asked me if I qualify for the senior citizen discount. No, I say, but I’m getting there.

The First Freedom offered by the United States of Geezerdom, a shadow nation which occupies the same space, more less, as the United States, but which occupies a very different psychic reality, is Freedom from Want. True Geezers no longer want. They no longer Wannabe. They’ve given up hope that they’ll ever become anything better than they already are. In fact, they’re sure they’re doomed to getting worse each day. They know their memories are getting worse, their looks are getting worse, they’re growing weaker, their tripes are rotting, their teeth are yellowing, their hair is falling out and that which remains is turning bristly, their skin is drying and wrinkling and their eyes are glazing, hazing, and bagging. You might think Geezers would at least hope that their descent into physical hell would be a slow one. You would be wrong. True Geezers hope for nothing. Which leads us to the Second Freedom.

Freedom From Hope. True Geezers no longer hope for deliverance of any kind, including a woman. And if they’re already stuck with a mate, they no longer hope that mate will some day take human form and grow a heart. True Geezers no longer even hope to afford cable TV. They’ve resigned themselves to sitting in their Barca-loungers in front of their black and whites, watching the same asinine major networks that lulled them through what should have been the best years of their lives. They’re gonna go down with the video ship that brought them to this sorry pass. The only technological innovation Geezers permit themselves is a clicker, so they don't have to rouse themselves from their stupors in order to get up and change channels. But Geezers will not go out and buy a color TV with remote. If they can’t scrounge one out of somebody else’s garbage or inherit one, they’ll stick with black and white. And if they’re too weak and tired to climb out of their loungers and switch channels, why, that’s OK too. They’ll just sit in front of the same damn channel, hour after hour, day after day. Don’t make no never mind to them if it’s a talk show, confirming their worst prejudices against the human race with an endless parade of physical and psychological wreckage, or a test pattern. True Geezers will NOT climb out of their Barcas, not even to pee and crap. If they have to, they’ll get themselves fitted with catheters and colostomy bags. And if they can’t get either one, why, they’ll just sit there in their own filth.

Freedom From Regret. False Geezers still gnaw on the bitter cud of remorse. True Geezers know they’ve botched their lives, admit it, and understand it’s too late to do anything about it.

Freedom From Rap. Geezers, black and white, refuse to say “Dah Bomb.” They’ve got no more hops. Or hips. The closest they’ll ever come to hiphop is an artificial hip replacement. If they were offered an artificial hiphop replacement, fully paid for by Medicare, their bodies would reject it. True Geezers of all colors and stripes don’t care to listen to rap and if they happen to hear it they don’t and won’t understand it. Geezers are angry, very angry. But the anger of rap is not their anger. Geezers are outlaws, and you might think they could identify with rap’s gangstah ethic. But they can’t and they won’t. Rapsters make a big show of not belonging to society. Geezers don’t have anything to prove. It’s perfectly clear they don’t belong to anybody and anything and that nobody wants them. There is a single word Geezers are willing to share with Rappers. Dis. But they don’t mean no disrespect when they use it. Geezers say dis because their teeth are falling out and they're trying to say “this” but it comes out sounding like “dis.”

Freedom From Pride. Rappers still cling to pride. They’re proud of their allegedly big dicks and their anger and their gangstah ways and their ability to rhyme and dance. They’re proud of their alleged prowess with women and their alleged courage in battle. Geezers know better than to take pride in themselves. They know they have much to be ashamed of, but they’re too tired to be ashamed, as well. Geezers may have once accomplished something*, they may have once wooed and wowed women, or been brave in battle, or even done something smart. But they know those times are past. The present is a holding action, a struggle to subsist. The future? Perhaps it will bring the mercy of Alzheimers, sparing the Geezers from realizing just how bad things have gotten.

OK, that’s Five Freedoms so far, not Four. You wanna make something of it? If so, go pick a fight with someone else. I’m angry enough to quarrel with you, but I’m not vital enough or strong enough or limber enough. Now that osteoporosis is turning my once-steely bones into honeycombs, they’re way too frail to risk in battle. Go pick on somebody your own age.

Up your nose with a rubber hose, here’s the Sixth Freedom: The Freedom to be a Crank. Because Geezers are so frighteningly alone, they no longer have to try to get along. Though they’ve given up, they’re still bitter….about everything. And they’re physically miserable. This accounts for their fantastically unpleasant demeanors. They lose their tempers continually, but are unable to vent their anger. So it just hovers there, rendering them rancid and dyspeptic. I don’t recommend looking directly into the face of a Geezer. You might just get turned to stone. And don’t be deceived by his laughter. If he is laughing, he is once again realizing that he is the butt of a cruel cosmic prank. His irony brings him neither dignity nor relief.

Number Seven, coming right up: Freedom From Being With It. Geezers are out of the loop. Their diction is a time capsule of earlier, benighted, eras. Their clothes come from department store giants----Sears, Penney’s, Montgomery Ward---which once bestrode the earth like mighty marketing collossi but which now are fighting for their lives. Geezers cling to the mores, styles, gestures and values of now-discredited times. They are like suddenly-rediscovered creatures, marsupial dogs, for example, which were once thought to be extinct. Their original ecological niches have been taken over by sleeker, more ferocious and efficient beasts. They cling to freakish margins of the environment. Their survival is an uneasy balancing act. Their appearance, their very existence, is vaguely disquieting to more modern, better-constituted beings. There are too many of them, they eat too much, they take resources away from young, healthy, upcoming animals, and they contribute nothing of value to the natural scheme of things. But fear not; more efficient predators, and the Geezers' own frailties and unfitness for life, will eventually cull them out of the herd. The problem with Geezers is that no matter how frequently they die, and they do die like flies, there are always reinforcements marching into their ranks from what were formerly youthful and appealing generations.

Freedom to Amount to Nothing. The game is up for Geezers and they know it. They’re not taken in by that self-esteem bullshit. They don’t waste energy trying to boost their own or anyone else’s. Nor do they try to make anything of worth of their lives or their moments. They are beyond worth and worthlessness alike. Once they overvalued their existences. Then they devalued them. Now value is beside the point. It takes too much energy for them to worry if they are fulfilling their potential, or if they have any potential at all, though they’re pretty damn sure they don’t.

Freedom to Eat Sugar and Take a Good Dump. Geezers have a morbid fascination with sugar and eat as much of it as they can get their crabbed hands on. It rots their teeth and gives them adult diabetes, but that’s OK because what few teeth they have left in their heads are already yellow and black and they’re going to die soon anyway. Sugar is one of the two comforts left to Geezers. The other is a good solid dump. A Geezer knows for sure he’s a Geezer when he takes more pleasure and interest in crapping than he does in sex. Sadly, few Geezers have plumbing which is sufficiently intact to allow them to enjoy the working of their bowels.


*Some Geezers even have big dicks, but if they do, they’re probably fitted with catheters or are, at least, impotent. If they are still potent, they’re just a bother, because no woman in her right mind would want to couple with a Geezer. And as for self-abuse, well, Geezers are too weary and dispirited to bring themselves to orgasm. They might get started with the task, but once they are embroiled in it, they begin to realize that all the images they once conjured up to stimulate themselves no longer seem to turn them on. They think about the once-beautiful women they yearned for, or possessed, and they realize those women are now menopausal, perhaps even hags. Then the Geezers subside back into their sloughs of despond, confident in the knowledge that their nagging erections will soon wilt and leave them alone. And that’s the Geezers with big dicks. Most Geezers, even the ones who once had big dicks, now have withered genitalia which dangle sheepishly and uselessly, like artifacts in a dusty museum case, like spoiled fruit, waiting to be pecked at by birds, or oncologists.


ADDENDUM: THE FUTURE OF GEEZERS IN AMERICA

Is bleak. Geezer prospects, with rare exceptions, are unspeakably grim. So I will not speak of them. Not, at least, in too much or too painful detail. OK. Maybe I'll give you a taste. Geezers can expect what remains of their lives to be nasty, brutish, and short, especially the last few months, when they, if they are lucky, lie in a helpless stupor between pee soaked rubber sheets while their personal effects are looted by Third World attendants. Geezers who don't manage to find their way into nursing homes can be expected to be found, in Winter in more northern latitudes, frozen solid in alleyways, underpasses, and subway tunnels. Stacked like cordwood on the flatbeds of collecting trucks which pick them up each morning so their skinny carcasses will not offend the public eye, the Geezer stiffs are then taken to great garbage barges which majestically transport them to potters' fields on islands set a discreet distance from any respectable habitation or place of business. There they are dumped into unmarked graves while gulls soar overhead, crying angrily, mournfully.

In southerly latitudes, Geezers not able to get into assisted care residences drift down to the beach, where they cower in the shadows of pier pilings and subside into an angry lassitude. Their last hours are spent in the open sun, just beyond the reach of Mother Sea. There they crouch, occasionally lifting their bleary eyes to try to see a passing girl, voluptuously bursting out of her bikini. In their last moments, these southern Geezers are like starving sea lions, mere shadows of their former selves, washed up on shore to die,. Their pasts shimmer in their unsteady brains like half-remembered dreams: ecstasy & despair, triumph & defeat, health & sickness, love & hate, wealth & poverty, anguish & joy, all blur together in a soup, a neuronal stew, a foggy, staticky confusion of random, exhausted, synaptic firings, crosswirings, short-circuitings. The Geezers, thinking they hear another beautiful girl jog by, summon the strength to lift their heads one last time, but what they see is not a woman, but Death, in the form of the merciless, subtropical, sun, bearing down on them for the kill. And what they hear is the final fibrillations of their own lacey, depleted hearts, and the wheeze and death rattle of their brittle lungs.

They open up their mouths in surprise, and out pops their souls, which momentarily rise heavenward, then are vaporized by the sun's remorseless rays. All that remains on the beach are their leathery corpses, the hides tight and dry around the thin bones. Now they are indistinguishable from any other largish dead, unidentifiable entity along the shore. At last the burning gold ball of the sun plunges, steaming, into the sea and darkness falls upon the sands. Overhead twinkle the indifferent stars. The moon casts a ghostly pallor upon the Geezers' stiff pelts. The tide rises, lifting them, floating them, and away they go, into the arms of Mother Sea, never to be seen again.

All this is disgraceful and unspeakable, of course, so I will speak no more of it. Except to cite the happy exceptions to the usual Geezer rules. I refer to those Geezers so wealthy that they are able, if not to defeat time, at least to ameliorate its effects. Thus, we have John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest man in America at the time of his death in the mid-Nineteenth Century, an octogenarian who died at the breast of his hired wet nurse. And then there is Nelson Rockefeller, who had the good sense to expire, in coitus, in the arms of his 20-something mistress, a zaftig creature named Marshak.

Did these billionaires find it any easier to stare into Death's eyes in that final moment of rictus and agony when their bill came due, when it came time to cough up their souls? Yes. Because they knew they had gotten away with murder. They had lived the lives other Geezers could only dream of.

Short of being a billionaire, is there any hope for the Geezer? In general, no. But a few thousand will end up the final male survivors in nursing homes populated primarily by old women. There will be women, women, everywhere, but romance, should it blossom, will be a cruel, wizened, parody of its former self. Both desire and capacity are become mummies, mockeries. The Geezer, putative harem master, his lifelong dream come true at last, is, in fact, a eunuch, unable to satisfy or keep pace with his dessicated seraglio.

The only hope for a Geezer in this circumstance is for him to step past the bitterness of a broken dream, the dream of unlimited feminity granted 50 years too late. The Geezer who can transcend remorse, who can gnaw his way through his chysalis of rue, will emerge a new creature, a kind of geriatric butterfly of platonic love, fluttering from one crone to the next, staring into her cataracked eyes with his own teary, bleary orbs, now able to see afresh thanks to his rebirth & resurrection. This Geezer, radiant source of unlimited amor, will at last understand what all the years spent in a soiled Barca-lounger in front of network reruns were about. They were a preparation, a meditation, for the ecstatic life, and happy death, to come.

--FIN--

My Friend Duke

1/20/99

MY FRIEND DUKE

Yesterday I dropped by an old friend’s house and was greeted at his front gate by the warning bark of his new companion, Duke. Duke is short but spirited. His new job is protecting his master’s house. Just two months ago, he was found under a car. He is half dachshund, half Jack Russell terrier.

As soon as his master opened the gate for me, Duke seemed to realize I was a friend, not an intruder. The altered greeting he gave me was joyful. You would have thought I was a special and honored friend of his. So furiously did his back end whipsaw back and forth, his behind seemed powered by an engine separate from that which animated the rest of his body. His narrow tail slashed the air like a weedeater, and his powerful goatlike hindlegs kept lifting off the ground as though his propellor-tail were getting him airborne.

I felt….remembered. I felt as though someone on this Earth was made glad, made glad in every cell of his body, to see me. Duke was so glad to see me he literally could not control or contain his joy. Moreover, he had no interest in hiding his emotions. On the contrary, he was seized by the need to express his joy to me and make me know he loved me and thought well of me.

When I entered his master’s livingroom, I chose to sit on the floor with Duke because Duke was not permitted to sit on the sofa. As soon as Duke was able to restrain and calm himself enough to sit in one spot, he took up residence on my lap. He was a perfect fit. Not only was he overjoyed to see me, he seemed to be saying, but he trusted me and wanted to be very close to me.

I felt like an alpha wolf, returned to the pack’s lair after a long, tough, caribou hunt and greeted by one of my companions and co-adventurers. I also felt like an honored guest at the home of a seignorial host who was doing everything in his gracious power to make me feel welcome and at ease. Duke’s initial warning bark made his later, joyful recognition all the more special. “I don’t,” he seemed to be saying, “welcome just any old body into my master’s house. But you’re special. I know you and remember good things about our past times and look forward to even better ones in the future.”

I should mention that Duke has an even newer job than that of protecting his master and mistress’s house. His mistress takes him to hospital wards where he shares his charm, humor, love, and good will with sick children. I have some idea of the effect he has on them because I, too, went through a years-long period of pain, sickness, and isolation.

Sometimes the physical pain and emotional depression was so great that I lost sight of the gift of my own life. I felt worthless to myself and others. I was cast down. If Duke had come into my life at such a time, he would have reminded me that life is good, even when one is often alone, even when one frequently feels unloved, even when one is in physical discomfort and pain, even when one has been given a death sentence.

Duke says to those he knows and loves and to those he is befriending for the first time: “I don’t care how healthy you are. It makes no matter to me if you are well or ill. It’s still a joy to see you. It’s still a joy to share this time, this life, with you.”

“It’s amazing, isn’t it,” I said to Duke’s master, my old friend, as I sat in his livingroom with Duke on my lap, “what you can get for free in this world.” Duke’s master chuckled as we both thought of how Duke had come into our lives as though he had been conjured. What I mean is, Duke’s master and mistress had been planning to buy a Jack Russell terrier even before Duke strayed into their neighborhood. So the thought, the readiness, was already there. His owners had cleared a psychic space in their minds, and there Duke materialized.

But Duke has upped the ante and exceeded expectations. He has turned out to have not only the virtues of a Jack Russell, but those of a dachshund, as well. For one thing, though Jack Russells are extremely cute, Duke is even cuter. There is, for example, his antic pelt. He has large and whimsical spots, like those of a Guernsey cow, at random places on his body. His warm brown eyes are set in a crab-apple-shaped-and-sized head. With his bandy, bowed front legs and his rolling sailor’s gait, he seems both cowboy and cheerful pirate. He is foreshortened in every direction, yet his fierce vitality makes him appear to be bursting the bounds of his body. He is small in physique yet great in heart. He is always, as terriers are, ready for a good fight. But he is also capable of great tenderness and affection, which is a characteristic of dachshunds. Of course, dachshunds were originally bred to drag the ferocious badger from his burrow, that’s why they have such short legs---so they can dig into the low-built beast’s tunnel and then seize him under his neck, where he is vulnerable. So perhaps Duke is double brave, combining the pugnacious courage of the terrier with the Teutonic, tunnel-rat, determination of the hund.

This makes Duke’s good will especially gracious. For he is such a brave dog that we know he is not kowtowing to us. He’s not trying to curry favor. He’s afraid of nothing. His joy upon seeing us is fearlessly genuine. He’s like a warmhearted, unpretentious, war hero. We are flattered that such a great spirit should prove so immediately accessible. And we are encouraged and strengthened for the challenges of our own lives by contact with such a brave heart.

Recently, Duke’s owners and I went on a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains. Thinking of Duke’s short legs, I was a little worried. I thought the long, steep, climb might exhaust him. I should have known better. Our little hiking expedition split into two parties along the trail, perhaps because the women were slowed by their talking. These parties were divided by 100 yards or so. On the way up the mountain, Duke was always with the men, in the lead. On the way down, he ran back and forth between the lead party and the stragglers, keeping both groups in good order as any conscientious leader would.

“What a glorious thing it is to be in the great outdoors!” he seemed to be saying. “The sights, the smells, the other dogs you meet on the trail, there’s nothing like it! And when I get home, how good it will be to rest and relax indoors, with familiar objects and spaces and those I know and love best.”

Duke is a beast and a heathen. He heart burns with pagan joy. In his eyes flickers the flame of his wolfish ancestors. But he is also a gentleman and a Christian, a Buddhist, a Taoist, and a Zen master. He is an example and a reminder to us of what life is and what it can be. He always lives in the moment. He shares his full heart with anyone who is open to him. He’s a living lesson, though there is nothing pedantic about him.

His life span is shorter than most of ours will prove to be. But somewhere I read that all mammals, great and small, average about 2 million heartbeats in their allotted spans. The shrew and the pachyderm alike have their 2 million. The shrew, and the dachshund/terrier, merely complete their allotments more quickly and intensely than do larger beasts like primates and ungulates.

There is an urgency about Duke. He has a mission to complete. He must use himself fully, enjoying everything life has to offer, draining life to the dregs, before death takes him. He offers, in his very being, that same message to the rest of us. If you have the good fortune to be in his presence, he will doubtless awaken in you, too, what he has sparked in me. And if these words remind you of the worth and the gift of your life, if they prompt you to enjoy and share what you have while you have it, even if you are, at times, suffering, even if you feel you have been given a death sentence and are cast down and cannot understand how it is possible to live with both a fierce joy and the knowledge of impending death, then thank Duke. For it is his spirit which I am expressing to you through these words.

--FIN--

Princess Grace of Monaco

July 1998

PRINCESS GRACE OF MONACO

Once in a generation, maybe not even that often, is born to a rich guy in Philadelphia a girl child so pretty, so perfect, so downright untouchable, that he names her Grace, and this is the child who grows up to be the paragon we have come to know as Prince Grace of Monaco. Before Princess Grace was Princess Grace, she was Grace Kelly, the prettiest and most perfect Mainline Deb who ever came down the Schulkyll Expressway. But don’t get me wrong. Grace may have been perfect, and I’m talking 1940’s and ‘50’s perfect, which was way more perfect than shitty ol’ befouled 1990’s perfect, but she wasn’t so perfect and clean she wouldn’t commit The Act of Darkness.

This is what made Grace so fab. She had the platinum hair, just so. She had the turned up nose that she was born with---she didn't have to resort to cheap medical tricks to get hers. She had the perfectly proportioned body, toned with country club sports like swimming, tennis, golf, and making out in Packard limos. She had that Catholic girl thing going for her, with the cross with the dead Jesus around her neck. You can be sure that Grace didn’t wear a big ol’ scary low-caste Goth cross. Hers, if she wore it at all, had to have been dainty and gold and delicate and tasteful and classy. And this cross said that her sex thing was a special thing, a protected and consecrated thing, not available to just any slob with a dime for a taxi dance.

Now bear with me, because I’m going somewhere with this, somewhere special. Grace had that exquisitely tasty, consecrated, rich girl sex thing which said: Don’t even THINK about it, shit head! You’re never going to come within a hundred miles of my patoochie! You’re just not good enough! You know what you’d have to have to even get within sniffing distance of what I have? First of all, one million billion jillion dollars. Second, you better be famous, a king among men, an all-around hotshot. Third, you better be sexy and suave and debonair and able to order a martini at 21 with an olive, and aplomb. Fourth, you better have damned sharp wheels. Some hopped up, off-the-rack, Chevy or Ford will not do, my friend. This girl doesn’t take a tumble for just any yabo off the street!

Here’s the thing about Grace. She was that one girl in a million whose shit didn’t stink. I know what what your father told you: That no matter how beautiful a girl is, no matter how much you worship her, no matter how shiny her hair is, no matter how daintily she minces through rain-puddled streets, no matter how delightfully perfumed her shampooed tresses are, her shit still stinks. And that’s a great truth that I normally wouldn’t dispute.

But there ARE exceptions. Exceptions who come along once in a generation or maybe even less often than that. Exceptions with fabulous little short noses and gorgeous green eyes and perfectly platinumed hair. Such a one was Grace. The woman simply didn’t shit shit. She shitted melon balls and little sweet-smelling packets jammed with nutmeg and citrus products and oriental spices and sandalwood shavings. Myrrh and frankincense, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. That’s what you woulda found in the bowl if you had happened to use it after Grace if she had happened to forget to flush.

And my sources tell me that DID often forget to flush because, because, she was DIFFERENT. Because she KNEW that anyone who happened to come upon what she had made after she had made it would be GRATEFUL to her for NOT flushing. Because what she made was unlike almost anything that any other mortal babe in the history of mankind had ever made in all the long generations of humans-taking-dumps. Something special. Something like ambergris, whale puke, worth its weight in gold, prized by perfumiers the world round.

But I’m not going to stop there. It wasn’t just that Grace’s shit didn’t stink. It was also that she deigned to share herself with us, the unwashed masses. You see, normally, a fabulously perfect rich girl like Grace wouldn’t want to expose herself to the attentions of scum. What do they need us for? It’s us who wish we were them, not vice versa. But Grace was different. She stepped out of her perfect world of class, country clubs, martinis, good dye jobs, and hot rich-people-sex, and into the foul, foul, corruption which is Hollywood.

Why? Because she was a good Catholic girl who knew we needed her. She saw that we were horny and had no class. She realized that she could bring a ray of sunshine into our dark, troglodytic, existences.

That’s why Grace became a movie star. Do you think she needed the money? Hell no! Her daddy was rich. Do you think she needed the attention? The girl couldn’t step onto her front porch without a gaggle of lustful jillionaires trying to get a sniff of her perfumed behind. Why, then, did Princess Grace subject herself to the slimy gropings of studio execs and paparazzi and dykey wardrobe mistresses and over-eager autograph hounds? Because she had a heart as big as all outdoors. Because what she had was too good to keep to herself.

Grace was like Mother Theresa. They were both good Catholic girls, but Grace probably endured a busier and more varied sex life. What they shared was a desire to uplift the downtrodden, or at least give them a sniff of what they were missing. Mother Theresa crept into the slums of Calcutta and embraced the suppurating sores of lepers. Grace plunged into the sewers of Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox and became a sexworker for God.

Because of her work, Grace had to ball a lot of guys who were not in her class. That’s just the way it goes in Whoreywood. Actresses schtupp their leading men. Grace got it on with Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable, and William Holden, and even Der Bingle himself, Bing Crosby. She also made a movie with Jimmy Stewart, but it’s hard to imagine that they got it on because Jimmy loved his wife Gloria with a love which was faithful and true. Still, you never know. Things are different for hotshot movie stars. Maybe they’ve found a way to fool around with the leading ladies and still be faithful to their wives. You just never know.

Anyhow, Grace must have suffered hideously while those big, famous, lugs sweated over her perfect body, licking sweat from behind her shell-like ears, sucking on her perfectly manicured toes, getting lost in the spun gold of her tresses, taking her roughly from behind like the evil hound-dogs they were. But she was party to those innumerable Acts of Darkness because she loved US, the fans, the huddled masses, the lumpen proles. In order to do her best work in front of the camera, in order to get the fire and ice up there on the forty-foot screen, Grace had to talk the talk and walk the walk.

It wasn’t enough that she be dropped off in a limo at the studio gates and then be carted back to her rich-girl world when the long day’s shooting was done. No. For Grace to do this movie star thing right, she actually had to be INTIMATE with show folk. She exchanged bodily fluids with the aforementioned scum. She allowed those stud-muffins to soil her perfect body in the privacy of her boudoir, on the moonlit greens of the Los Angeles Country Club, on the Plains of the Serengheti, in Santa Barbara resort hotels, while snorkeling in the Caribbean, in barber chairs which permitted any number of angles and adjustments, under the boardwalk, on the decks of tuna trawlers, and just about anywhere else you can imagine. And when those horny bastards roughly took our darling Grace, do you think she enjoyed one single solitary moment of their ministrations?

HELL no! This was Grace Kelly, good Catholic girl. Sure, she might delight in a night wrestle in a Mainline jillionaire’s Bucks County gazebo, because that jillionaire was a righteous part of her girlish world. But those lowlife movie stars who helped themselves to heaping handfuls of her lightly perspiring, golden body were as foreign to her as Venusians would be to us. When Grace Kelly banged, and was banged by, Clark Gable in a darkened studio dressing room, it was as strange to Grace as if she had been taken up in a flying saucer and forced to do rude, crude, and uncouth things with an extra-terrestrial---an extra-terrestrial who probed her perfect, golden, lightly perspiring body in all her most private and delightful crevices.

Now think about it. Grace probably gave head to some of those horny movie apes. She probably got stinking drunk with them and then laid back and let them tongue her from stem to stern. She probably did stuff so sordid and untoward that she pretended to forget ever having done it. But you can be sure she NEVER ENJOYED ONE SECOND OF ALL HER SEXY ADVENTURES. Why? Because she was Grace Kelly, good Catholic girl.

Grace had been trained by special, sex-hating nuns to loathe pre-marital sex and pre-marital men. And it wasn’t just pre-marital sex she had been trained to hate with a passion, with a vengeance; it wasn’t just pre-marital sex she equated with self-crucifixion and Christian martyrdom. She also abhorred marital sex. THAT’S the hallmark of a really good Catholic girl. Especially a really good Irish Catholic girl. Every time she did it with Prince Rainier she hated it…hated it, hated it, hated it….reminding herself she was only doing it for procreation, or as part of her connubial duty and obligation to her husband. Because she was a good girl, the BEST girl, the prettiest and most perfect colleen.

But she went ahead and had lots of pre-marital sex anyway. She had sex with jillionaires and movie stars and ballboys and busboys and stableboys---not because she enjoyed it, because she didn’t, she was repulsed by it and felt soiled by it, but because she loved US, her lowly filthy fans, with all her perfectly coiffed head and heart and soul. She did it all for us, but are we grateful. Sadly, many of us are not. We’re so needy and self-absorbed that we cannot bear to realize the sacrifices that Grace made on our behalf. We wallow in cesspools, but when we look up, we see the stars, we see Grace, little understanding the suffering and stains that she endured so that we might be lifted upward from our benighted, apelike, plights.

And I’ll tell you something else. When Grace had extra-marital sex, she hated that, too. But that didn’t stop her from having plenty of it---for OUR sakes, God love her. And if she had out-lived that hound dog hubby of hers and had post-marital sex, she would have hated ever minute of that, every groan, every moan, every droplet of sweat, every steamy endearment. But that wouldn’t have stopped her from having plenty of it---once again, for OUR sakes.

Because that’s the kind of girl Grace was. A good Catholic girl. A very very good Irish Catholic girl. The kind of girl who was too pure and pretty and rich and fit and class and retroussee and fragrant for this filthy, carnal, septic tank we call Earth. But the kind of girl who allowed herself to be ravished by the bodies and imaginations of her lessers, no matter how much it repulsed her to do so, because a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do. Grace so loved her fans that she gave her only begotten, way way perfect body, that our souls might be redeemed, or at least partially refunded. And now she’s gone. But the memory of her sacrifice shall live forever on screen, in fanzines, in the lubricious and heavily publicized lives of her offspring, and in the inflamed imaginations of us, her insatiable fans. Father, forgive us, for we know not what she did for our sakes. And even if we do know, there’s no way we can adequately thank her for allowing us to have a second chance at a sex life, vicariously, through hers. Amen.

PRAYERFUL POST SCRIPT: When Grace tumbled to her death, flying off a narrow mountain road into the bottom of that Riviera ravine in her luxurious, leather-lined, Mercedes, she gave her last gasp for us. We, the unwashed and yearning millions, had been living through her for decades, and she was quite used up.

Grace, sick to death of crucifying herself to satisfy her public’s bottomless appetite, must have longed mightily for the end. She probably yearned for the end so terribly that she put a hoodoo on her own poor brain as she sat behind the wheel. The hoodoo burst a blood vessel, causing a ministroke and forcing her to drive fast and wild and out of control around a narrow hairpin turn and voila!, suddenly she and her playgirl daughter Stephanie were airborne, sailing over a narrow gorge. Grace’s deathwish was limited to herself, so it was she alone who suffered the fatal blow when the Benz hit the bottom. Stephanie escaped with cuts and bruises, free to live another day as the heiress, along with her sister Caroline, of her mother’s heavy legacy. Now Grace’s fans try to live through her daughters’ madcap tabloid antics, but this, of course, is impossible, because the daughters lack their mother’s icy purity. Yes, they have her brow, her magnificent physique. But they also carry the genes of their Gaullic, sensualist, father. They are clearly committed to carnal pleasure, unalloyed by the exquisite reservations of asceticism. Their juicy, hungry lips say so, their lupine eyes, avid for playboys and romantic misadventures, say it again.

Beautiful as they are, they lack what their mother had, a magnificent ambivalence. Grace was torn apart by the wolf of lust, which she both loathed and loved. We, her fans and devourers, danced in her heart, where lust and repulsion threatened to tear her apart. Finally, we trampled her and she was no more. Now she belongs to the ages, or at least, to the pages….of the tabloids and coffee table books…and to our own prurient imaginations.

If we want to return again to the cool, anguished, paradise which was Grace, we can depend no more on current bulletins, but must refer to our memories. There, in our records of the past, Grace will always be breaking the surface of aquamarine waters with her crown of gold; there, thanks to the images she surrendered to Unholywood’s invasive lenses, she will never stop flirting with a wheel-chair-bound Jimmy, leaving poor Gary to face alone a trainful of thugs at high noon, fretting that Bill will be shot down over the Bridges of Toko-Ri. In our memories, Grace will always be 25 and the perfect mix of virgin and slut, movie star and heiress, insouciant snob and calculating social climber.

We study her perfect brow and try to fathom what was going on inside her head and finally find nothing but our own feverish thoughts and desires……lethally projected onto hers…..

----FIN----