Why I Am Declining the MacArthur Genius Award

the wedding

2009-06-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

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

2005-02-23T01:08:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-24T01:06:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T15:15:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-14T01:04:00.000-08:00

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

2002-01-31T01:01:00.000-08:00

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

1999-03-16T01:19:00.000-08:00

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

1999-01-20T00:55:00.000-08:00

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

1998-07-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

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----

Ralph is My Co-Pilot

1996-07-22T00:27:00.000-07:00

7/22/96

RALPH IS MY CO-PILOT

It's Monday, July 22, 1996, and I see that investigators are still fruitlessly mucking about the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for clues to the downing of TWA Flight 800. But the crew-list may tell us all we need to know. Along with the pilot and co-pilot there was a second co-pilot, unofficially along for the ride----Capt. Ralph Kevorkian.

Was Ralph the unacknowledged illegitimate son of Jack Kevorkian, the Angel of Assisted Death, or was their shared last name just a coincidence? And how many other Kevorkians are out there, and how long have they been out there, and what will they pull next?

Was there a passenger on Flight 800 who was tired of living, and who reached out to Ralph, phoning him to ask for his assistance in ending it all? And did Ralph say, "You want the other Kevorkian. I'm an airline pilot with a superb safety record, not the Angel of Death."

And did the Passenger-who-wanted-to-end-it-all say, "Don't sell yourself short. With the right combination of circumstances, you, too, could be an Angel of Death. You ARE a Kevorkian, are you not?"

"I can't help you," said Captain Ralph. "Phone Jack if that's what you want. Anyway, I'm busy. I'm flying from New York to Paris on TWA Flight 800 tomorrow."

"No problem. I'm making a reservation on the Internet even as we speak," said the Passenger-who etc., etc. "See you onboard."

"You won't see me," snapped Captain Ralph, "I'll be in the cockpit hanging out with the crew."

"And that's just where my Angel of Assisted Death belongs," said Passenger Deathwish. "You'll be ideally situated to put me out of my misery."

"There will be 229 other people on that flight, including me!" squawked Captain Ralph. "How can you even contemplate something so horrific?"

"My pain is so great I can't afford to care who or how many I take down with me. And after I'm gone, I'll hardly have to worry about conscience pangs now, will I."

Something in Passenger Deathwish's familiar voice began to exert a seductive and hypnotic pull on Captain Ralph's will. "What's the matter with you?" said the Captain, beginning to go a little watery in the knees. "Do you have a horribly painful, debilitating, disease?"

"Yes. Most emphatically," said Passenger Deathwish. "I can't imagine what to do next with my life. I've hit the wall. It's time for me to end it all."

"Your physical health is excellent?" asked the incredulous Ralph.

"I could run a 3 hour marathon tomorrow morning, play 36 holes of golf in the afternoon, and take a dysfunctional litter of hyper-active quintuplets to Disneyland in the evening," said Passenger Deathwish. "But I'd much rather go down in the Atlantic on TWA Flight 800."

"You must be mad!" said Captain Ralph.

"Nope. Sane as they come. I just lack, as I said, imagination."

"Then why don't you do yourself in? You don't need to take 229 innocent souls down with you!"

"I wouldn't be able to do myself in properly. I'd make a botch of it. But you, you're a Kevorkian! You're to the manner, errr manor, born!"

"Listen, Buster," said Captain Ralph. "I'm no relation to Jack Kevorkian, Jack Kevorkian is not my friend, I've never even MET Jack Kevorkian. I, sir, am no Jack Kevorkian."

"Sir," said Passenger Deathwish, "you do protest too much. Your naturalborn Kevorkianesque propensities are making themselves felt in your heart of hearts even as you deny them. The Kevorkian Tradition is a long and proud one. There was Nigel Kevorkian, first mate on the Titanic, and Antonio Kevorkian, in the engine room of the Lusitania. And who rode just to General George Custer's right at the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Why, none other than his trusty Crow scout, End of the Trail Kevorkian. It was End of the Trail who advised George that the best way to put the brakes on the relentless decline of his military career was to end it all with a bang by riding straight into a hive buzzing with several thousand very angry Sioux braves.

"There was a Kevorkian in the Crimea advising Lord Cardigan that the Light Brigade shouldn't pay any mind to the cannon to the right of them, the cannon to the left of them, the cannon in front of them. 'Theirs is not to make reply,' replied Aide de Camp Montcrief Kevorkian, Earl of Untimely Endings, when Lord Cardigan suggested that perhaps all the men in the Light Brigade were not yet ready to put out the light, 'theirs is but to do, and die.'

"And," continued Passenger Deathwish, "It was Sheik Ben Ali Kevorkian who advised Sadam Hussein to go toe to toe with the Allies in Kuwait, and there was a Zeke Kevorkian at the Alamo, and Catastrophe Kevorkian at Thermopylae, not to mention the Kevorkians advising David Koresh at Waco and Jim Jones at Jonestown. It was the Jonestown Kevorkian who thought of putting the cyanide in grape kool-ade. And don't forget Oberlieutenant Heinrich Kevorkian, who advised General Paulus to hang tough at Stalingrad. And then there was the unforgettable Mitsumoto Kevorkian---he's the guy who told Tojo kamikazes were the way to save Japan. And, more recently, Colonel Yahoo Kevorkian, the high school janitor and Michigan Militiaman who advised Timothy McVeigh how to fertilizer-bomb The Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

"So Captain Ralph, why fight fate? It's time for you to get in lockstep with a Kevorkian long gray line that stretches back to the mists of recorded time."

And Captain Ralph felt something snap inside him, and he knew that at last he was going to embrace his most authentic inner self and become the man that the fates had always dictated he must become. "OK, OK. You've got me convinced. A few miles out of JFK I'll take us all down. I'll make it look like a terrorist bombing."

"You're a peach, Ralph, a real peach. I don't know what I would have done without you. Play some more golf, I guess. Or re-draft another capital punishment initiative with Marilyn. She's been awful edgy since she had to move back to Indianapolis. Even when we were in D.C. she wasn't the easiest person to live with, believe-you-me.

"It's not easy being an unemployed house-husband. Not when you've got a dynamic attorney-wife like Marilyn donning the pants in the family. It's a good thing I've got a trust fund and my Vice Presidential pension, or I'd be out on the street selling leftover Bush-Quayle bumper stickers. Nor does it look as if Bob Dole is going to invite me onboard as his running mate, despite my vast experience and proven record in the Vice Presidential arena. He hasn't even phoned me. Can you believe that?! One thing's for sure, they're not going to ask me to deliver the keynote address at the Republican National Convention. Colin Powell has that plumb. And I ask you, what does he have that I don't? So do you see now why I have to end it all, and why I'm burdened with too many religious scruples to do it myself?"

"I see, Dan," said Captain Ralph, "I see. And there's nothing I'd like better than to promptly dispatch you to that great country club in the sky. Because your track record proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you lack the imagination to get yourself out of your present, or any other fix. I guess the last time you showed any real imagination was when you joined the Indiana National Guard."

"Thanks," said Dan. "I'd like to take the credit. But it was my fraternity brothers who thought of that one."

"Then it's true. You have no imagination whatsoever."

"Vision, Ralph. President Bush used to call it The Vision Thing. He said I was very shortsighted. Even shorter-sighted than he was. But how did he know I was shortsighted? He never even let me speak to him."

"That's what you need, Dan. An employer who's very shortsighted and who will never let you speak to him, especially if you're his running mate," said Captain Ralph.

"You mean.....Orville Redenbacher, the guy that invented the airplane?" said Dan.

"Almost," said Captain Ralph. "But Orville is dead. I mean Ross Perdue....errr..Perot."

"That is such a fantastic idea!" said Dan. "And I almost thought of it all by myself. That's the first time in my life that I've almost thought of something without the assistance of a fraternity brother, or Marilyn, or my caddy. I'm going to phone that Frank Perdue fella right away."

"Ross Perot, Dan. It's Ross Perot who's looking for a running mate."

"Right, of course, Ross Perdue. What a Mr. Potato Head I am. How can I ever thank you, Captain Ralph?"

"Just forget you ever made this phone call, Dan."

"What phone call, Captain Ralph?" Which is how Dan Quayle did NOT end up on TWA Flight 800, and why he still needs a job. Ross Perot, or Frank Perdue, or Orville Redenbacher, Jr, or the late Orville Wright, or Wilbur, or anybody out there, are you listening?! This deserving young man needs a position, he needs to get out of the house, out from under Marilyn's wing, and off the golf course on weekdays. He looks good, he has a law degree, and if he is no Jack Kennedy, at least he has Jack Kennedy's hair. If you have a job for him and you don't have his number, you can probably find him at the upcoming Republican Convention. Just don't expect to find him anywhere near Bob Dole.

---FIN---

What To Do In Case Of Atomic Attack

1996-07-19T00:58:00.000-07:00

7/19/96

WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF ATOMIC ATTACK

Notice the small glass case on the wall to your right. See the little metal hammer dangling from the chain on the left side of the case. Remove the hammer from its niche and strike the glass case, shattering it. But DO NOT use the hammer unless you are absolutely sure that atomic war has begun.

Here are some checkpoints which will allow you confirm that your neighborhood or city or rural delivery area has indeed been attacked by one or more thermonuclear devices:

YES or NO (Check the Appropriate Box)

1) Your retinae are broiled off by the blinding flash of the atomic fireball.

2) Your flesh is seared down to the bone by a blast of superheated air, and your bones are reduced to a fine powder, or

3) You're completely vaporized, or

4) Those parts of your body exposed to the blast are reduced to blackened, bubbling, carbon cake.

5) If, by some freakish circumstance, you survive, you are infested with an ungodly array of cancers which will shorten your life and make it a living hell.

6) Your balls or ovaries, depending upon your gender, are so micro-waved by radiation that, if you are not completely sterilized, you will conceive six-fingered two-headed monsters, most of them stillborn. Those babies who live wish they hadn't.

7) Life as you knew it before the blast has ceased to exist.

8) There are no more songbirds in your part of the country for the following 4 decades. When birds do return to the blast area you used to call home, they are buzzards and vultures.

9) The infrastructure of your community is no longer worthy of the name, to put it mildly. For example, you have an even longer wait than usual when you dial 911 with your telephone, which is a puddle of molten plastic. And you no longer need to pull off to the side of the road for ambulances and fire engines, because there aren't any, though there is plenty of need for them.

10) Your life, if you still have one, is hell on earth.

There are many more indicators that your community may have been successfully targeted by nuclear warheads. For example, the day after your town takes a direct hit from a ten megaton device, there are no more crossing guards posted at the crosswalks in front of the elementary schools, because the elementary scholars and their crossing guards are toast.

If you have checked "yes" to eight or more of the aforementioned indicators of nuclear war, you may take the small metal hammer from its niche and smash the glass case on the wall to your right. Inside the smashed glass case you will find a scroll tied with a purple ribbon marked with the international symbol for radioactive material.

Remove the purple ribbon. Unscroll the scroll. It will read as follows:

Dear Asshole,

You have just allowed yourself to get your behind parbroiled by a nuclear device. The rest of your life will be spent in a state of intolerable suffering. Everyone and everything you know and love looks like the aftermath of a weenie roast. Your organs are probably metastizing as you read this.

Knowing that the possibility of nuclear war existed, why did you stay on earth instead of fleeing to a safer planet? Somebody must have hit you double hard with a stupid stick. Oh well, the damage is already done. There's no use crying over spilt precious bodily fluids such as those which are undoubtedly bubbling out of that fried pork rind you laughingly call your "skin."

We of the Civil Defense Department long ago recognized that atomic war is a hopeless proposition, and that no one will suffer more unspeakably than those unlucky enough to survive past the first day. That is why we have laced the scroll you are holding with trace amounts of plutonium which you sucked into your lungs as soon as you shattered the little glass case with the cute little hammer.

The plutonium in your lungs will kill you in a matter of hours, if not minutes. So you can relax. You will not have to mourn your loved ones, your home, and your nation, for long. You will not have to give birth to monstruously mutated babies. You will not have to endure decades of radioactivity induced tumors. All you will have to do is blow blood bubbles and die.

Why It's Pointless to Write

1996-07-15T00:34:00.000-07:00

WHY IT'S POINTLESS TO WRITE (AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN)

First of all, it's pointless to write in The Age of Channelsurfing because upcoming generations no longer want to nor know how to read. They'd rather watch TV. And older generations sometimes still remember how to read, but they don't want to read anything which upsets them. So if a wouldbe writer is so pigheaded as to persist in the notion that he wants to write something that others will read, he must be careful to tell lies that will serve to soothe the savage beast that dwells in the breast of what is laughingly known as the reading public.

If a wouldbe writer wants it all, that is, if he wants to tell the terrible truth rather than soothing lies, if he wants to write beautifully and imaginatively, and if he also wants a large readership who will pay him well for his words, then he's crazy and will soon find himself out on the street unless he's lucky enough to be a trust fund baby, or get committed to an asylum, or get arrested.

In many totalitarian regimes, the better a writer is, the more likely he is to be jailed and/or assassinated. But in America, and especially in Southern California, where this wouldbe writer wouldbe writes, nobody is interested enough in words, qua words, to punish a writer with anything more violent than indifference.

I can imagine a scenario in which a great American writer writes a mindblowingly great American novel and is greeted with thundering silence, or, at best, incomprehension. And I don't have to exercise my imagination too hard, either; all I have to do is remember back to the non-reception America gave to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

The argument could be made that Moby Dick wasn't appreciated during the lifetime of its author because the book was ahead of 19th Century American frontier society. Most Americans of that time, especially the slaves, Indians, muleskinners, and whalers, just didn't have the intellectual tools they would have needed to "get" it.

So there's a damn good argument right there why it's hopeless to write: Even if you did succeed in writing a genius book, your fellow Americans wouldn't be willing or able to read it, especially if they were slaves, Indians, muleskinners, or whalers.

But this is the 20th Century. We appreciate Moby Dick now. In fact, Moby Dick is WORSHIPPED in English Departments across the country. It's worshipped, but it's not read, except in the Cliff Notes version. And there's another damn good reason why it's hopeless to write: There's no sense aspiring to write Moby Dick even if it is worshipped (but not read) because MOBY DICK HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN. And Herman Melville, justly or unjustly, has already been given credit for the piece.

You could transcribe Moby Dick in your own handwriting, stumble upon your own manuscript in your own attic, and thus offer incontrovertible proof that you indeed wrote it, but the sad and cruel fact of the matter is that Herman Melville has somehow gotten his name inextricably bound up with Moby Dick, and you'll have a devil of a time supplanting his name with yours. The only balm I can offer you is that most of Melville's recognition came after his death, so he really didn't get to enjoy it. What you could do is POSE as Melville. A few years ago, Hal Holbrook posed as Mark Twain and travelled across the nation, taking credit for the dead man's wit. There are worse ways to make a living.

Vincent Price made a career out of posing as Oscar Wilde, Robert Morse posed as Truman Capote, and Quentin Crisp posed as Quentin Crisp, so there are clearly plenty of possibilities for the literary poseurs of the world. The trick is to pose as a writer without actually doing any writing.

There are other ways to accomplish this. For example, you can become rich and famous enough to hire someone to write your books for you. This is doubly convenient if you never learned how to read or write in the first place, which is true of most rich, famous, writers. Or you can write so badly that what you are doing can't tuthfully be called writing at all. That is what Harold Robbins did for decades, and it's ever so much less painful, and more financially rewarding, than real writing.

Here in Southern California, there is an activity called screenwriting which is said to be akin to writing. Screenwriting is to real writing as military music is to music. That is, in screenwriting, words are not prized as ends in themselves, but rather are viewed as a means to an end. Military music exists to exhort the troops, to give them courage when they surge into battle. An electrifying screenplay gives producers, directors, and actors courage when they surge into production, it helps them to persuade themselves they have a reason to be where they are, spending all that money in hopes of making even more. But the screenwriters themselves are rarely allowed on the set. In the opinion of most filmmakers, the screenwriter's presence would only stifle the creativity of those in front of and behind the cameras.

So does that mean it's pointless to try to write screenplays, as well? No. Because screenplays are less painful to write than other literary forms because they aren't really literary forms---they have more spaces and fewer words, and the words they do have need not appeal to the ever-shrinking pool of literate consumers. It's better if they don't. In fact, you don't even have to be semi-literate to write screenplays. The proof of that is that 95% of the population of Los Angeles has written at least two screenplays, yet the city has a 50% illiteracy rate. Moreover, Sly Stallone himself has written many screenplays, winning an Oscar for one. It's probably a fallacy to say that screenplays are written at all. They're bizarre and magical blueprints, pulled from the nether orifices of scenarists in moments of financial, creative, and existential desperation.

Another reason it's pointless to write in the Age of Channelsurfing is the concentration span. No one has one any longer. Even those who know how to read have been so spoiled by their clickers and by their 99 (soon to be 999) cable channels that they can't concentrate on reading material that's longer than a four-panel comic strip. And those rare younger birds who have somehow learned how to read would prefer to read nothing longer than a STOP sign, and just because they read one occasionally doesn't mean they'll obey one.

Nor are wouldbe writers themselves free from ever-shortening concentration spans. Many of them can concentrate so briefly that they forget, before they actually manage to write anything, why it is they have sat down at the word processor. This is a blessing, because real writing is so painful, so problematic, that they thus deliver themselves from pointless suffering and are free to return to their TV's, their video games, and their 3-wheel offroad vehicles.

Now suppose some hopelessly deluded individual manages to write something which,in his considered opinion, would make a valuable reading experience for others. Chances are, after the writer has finished the piece, he will be whipsawed between self-congratulatory megalo-mania and despair born of an abysmal sense of failure. He will be completely unbalanced and it may take him months or years before he can again get his psyche on an even keel. Whereas, if he had never written in the first place, he wouldn't have unbalanced himself to begin with.

But suppose this individual persists in compounding his folly by taking his writing out into the world and showing it to others. First of all, because this person is a writer, he may be blinded as soon as he emerges from his writing cell into the harsh light of day. Writers are notoriously reclusive and many are ill-suited to trafficking with the rough and tumble universe outside their burrows.

Now the writer shows his piece to someone else. That reader has one of 3 reactions: Acclaim, indifference, or criticism, or a combination of all three. Chances are, no matter how the reader reacts, even if he praises the writer and his words to the skies, the writer will plunge into despair because he will realize that his words are not going to do for him what he had secretly, in his heart of unconfessed hearts, hoped they would do. That is, the words don't solve the essential problem of life, which is that it is intolerable.

The writer had set out to write in the first place because life was intolerable. He somehow got the idea that if he wrote the right thing it would turn, like a magic key, in the lock of his life, releasing him from his insufferable imprisonment. It was this hope of eventual release, of deliverance, which reconciled the writer to long hours alone, in his cell, as he labored over his words, which were to be a kind of hacksaw with which he would escape from the bars of his own private Alcatraz.

So even if the writer's words win him all the acclaim, prizes, money, wine, women, and song that he could possibly hope for, inevitably he'll feel betrayed and cast down by them, because what they have won him are the things of this world, but what he was truly yearning for was something not of this world---spiritual deliverance.

It can be argued that all of us alike: Writers and wouldbe writers, bankers and painters, soldiers and whores, actors and priests, politicians and pushers, yearn for spiritual deliverance. But how many of us are foolish enough to hope to find that deliverance in our work? That is the writer's dilemma. He somehow thinks that if he just writes well enough, if he can just find the right words, he can talk himself out of the spiritual morass we all find ourselves in, and maybe he can even temporarily lift his readers (of whom he counts himself one) out of that mire.

So, when he has completed a successful piece, he is cast down lower than those who complete nothing, because he is no longer free to delude himself with false hope about what words can and cannot do for him. Moreover, he is spent by his effort and is therefore stripped of his defenses. Harpie Despair is free to have her way with him.

Now suppose a writer has taken all the pain and joy of his life and boiled it down to a single magnificent sentence, and he has found a way to place that sentence perfectly, for maximum effect, in just the right literary setting. The argument could be made that he should withhold that sentence. Why? Because as soon as he releases it, it's gone from him. It's no longer his, it's the world's.

It's out there, away from him, where others will be free to steal it, criticize it, misinterpret it, grind it into the dust, laugh at it, weep at it, scorn it and applaud it.

It's as if the writer were a weird bird that lays a single egg in its lifetime and then dies, exhausted; or he were a jungle plant which blooms once in a century. Until that ovulation, that blossoming, the writer is all hope and potential. He is also airy nothingness. His flesh, his outer shell, may be suffering terrible blows, but his soul is young and virginal and seething with potentiality.

But once the writer dares lay his egg, once his petals split open and are laid bare under the jungle sun, then his inmost spirit, that which he has endowed with all his hope, changes from potential to real. He must face his own words. He must see himself, laid and flayed open. He knows that what he has made cannot last forever. It's just another egg, another flower. The egg may rot, or crack and hatch, the flower may wilt, it may pollinate and fructify, but it will certainly die.

By writing, the writer has committed his spirit to the endless wheel of death and life which is the world. And there is the possibility, once those words have gone out of the writer, that he will never find their equal. He may never express himself that well again. He may never express himself at all again.

It is also possible that, by speaking, by letting the precious, special, words fly out of his head and fingers, that he will have created an emptiness, a vacancy, in his head and heart. He is made an empty well. And circumstances may refill him again. And perhaps again. Perhaps as many times as he sees fit to draw from his wellspring.

He may frighten himself by the emotional intensity of the act. He may wonder how long his physical health, and his sanity, can bear up under such a feverish pitch. How can he afford to be so vulnerable? How can he afford to put the very best of his life into these words when words matter so little, are such will o' the wisps, and no one reads them any longer, and no one can concentrate that long, and everyone would prefer to watch TV instead?

How can he afford not to? He can afford not to the same way a wounded man can afford not to tear the scab off his wound. He can stand pat, watching the scab swell and heat up with the supperating, infectious, pus of unexpressed truth. He can live with his infection until it bursts outward, of its own accord, into the general atmosphere and population, or inward, into his bloodstream, his extremities, his tripes, his heart, and his brain. He can, in short, share what’s eating him with others, though they may hate him for it, or he can sit on it and spin his own shroud of it, make a flag of it, make a suicide note of it, tie it around his eyes, make a blindfold of it, face an execution squad composed of all his unexpressed selves firing, like bullets, all his unexpressed words directly at his heart and head. He can take those words, the words he never wrote because words don’t matter enough and no one understands them anymore, and roll them up in a cigarette, and stick that cigarette in his trembling lips, and have one more good smoke while he waits to be forgotten.

--FIN--

On Becoming Dirty Old Men and Women

1996-07-15T00:32:00.000-07:00

ON BECOMING DIRTY OLD MEN AND WOMEN by Doug Lane
Dropped by a neighborhood bar the other evening to have a beer and discovered I had become invisible. Especially to the nubile females in attendance. Why? Possibly because, over the last several years, my waist has thickened, my hair has thinned, and I have grown old enough to have fathered everyone in the joint. In short, it's official: I'm middleaged.

Other explanations for my invisibility include: I am not a celebrity, nor have I aged as beautifully as Paul Newman and Richard Gere. I will say, in my own defense, that though I am presently the same age that Judy Garland was when she cashed in her chips, I think I look better than she did in her last year. But I don't sing as beautifully.

On the other hand, my TRW rating is excellent. That ought to count for something, even in a thickwaisted bald guy, even if all it means is that I owe a lot of money on a lot of credit cards.

Heck, I'll bet some of those waspwaisted whippersnappers at the bar that night didn't even have ONE credit card, much less a collection whose total balances exceed the national debt. That's a problem for Boomer Guys. Now that their looks are gone, how can they impress chicks at a pick-up bar with their level of indebtedness?

One way is to drive up in the debt. Parking a new Porsche in front of the bar is proof positive that you count for something in this world, at least to your Porsche dealer,to whom you still owe $50,000 or $60,000.

There are other ways for dirty old men to get young girls' attention that involve raincoats and no underwear, but those methods can also entail a bust from the local vice squad unless the raincoated dirty old men in question are also fast on their feet, which they rarely are. It's dirty YOUNG men who are fast on their feet. Anyway, the raincoat ploy makes for a sensational opening but it's a tough gambit on which to build a meaningful relationship....or even a one-night stand. Unless, unless the young lady subjected to the exhibit is a professional, willing to overlook geriatric shortcomings in return for a fee.

You, the reader, might well ask what a middleaged man is doing in a bar late at night in the first place. Shouldn't he be at home, with wife and kiddies? Not if he's divorced he shouldn't. If he's divorced, it might be very awkward for him to be at his ex's home late at night, especially if she has remarried.

Another suggestion: If the middleaged man is invisible to nubile females, why doesn't he seek the company of a middleaged female? And here we get to the nub of the issue. Babyboomers, male and female, are losing their looks. They used to be the ones with the big hair and the small waists, they used to find each other very attractive. Now, appearance-wise, they can take each other or leave each other.

And leave each other is just what they frequently do.

Here's another stumbling block to romance among the ruins: Sex drives, especially in the men, are diminishing. When the Boomers were younger, they needed sex so bad they were ready to suffer all manner of humiliation, manipulation, and character failings on the part of partners who held the power of sexual-affirmation in their firm bodies. But now the blood that ran so hot runs tepid.

Freed from overboiling lust, both Boomer sexes are more likely to look objectively at the personalities of prospective romantic partners. And an objective examination of a middleaged personality can be even more ferocious a turn-off than an objective examination of a middleaged body.

So is there any hope for the sex lives of Boomerites? Yes, if you are President of the United States. Otherwise, forget it. Recent polls (taken by me, at the 7-11) indicate that many unmarried Boomerites haven't had sex since the last Republican administration, and neither, with the exception of Bill Clinton but not with the exception of Hillary Clinton, have many married Boomerites. And the census figures for the sex lives of Pre-Boomeritic Republican administrators are even more discouraging. George Bush can't be found to talk, Barbara is too discreet to talk but we know what her answer would be, Nancy won't talk because she's too damn ornery, and Ron will talk but nothing he says makes sense and anyway, he couldn't remember when he last had sex even if he could make sense.

But to get back to Boomers: From what I hear, young groupies have to force themselves to look the other way even when having sex with middleaged men as exalted as the Rolling Stones. They fantasize that they are pleasuring Hootie and the Blowfish, or some other less chronologically challenged band.

And does this mean that Boomericans*, we of the Summer of Love, are doomed to wander the earth alone and unsatisfied, ships that pass in the night but rarely collide? And that when we do collide it's eco-disaster as we spill great shore-polluting gouts of bilgewater and liquid self-loathing out of rents in our hulls?

Must we hold our own hands or other body parts because no one else will hold them for us unless we pay them with ready money, self-abasement, or a ride around in the block in an unpaid-for Porsche?

Yes. The Age of Sexual Entitlement is over for all but a few freakishly fortunate Boomers. For the rest of us, it's hard scrabble time. We're going to have to get down and scratch. No longer can we depend on gleaming teeth, billowing hair, high poppers, clear eyes, raging hormones and bulging biceps to carry us over the barricades into the fortress of the opposite sex.

Some of us, perish the thought, may actually have to develop personalities. Of course, for those who haven't developed one already, it's too late to develop a personality capable of staying the course for longer than a bed-and-breakfast dirty weekend in Bolinas.

It's not that we're charm-free zones. Au contraire, we're dripping with charm, charm like paper clothes that look great when you first don them but aren't meant to be seen or shared for more than a weekend.

What we Boomeridians, roaming alone in the solitary night, may need to cultivate is forgiveness. We need to forgive ourselves, and others, for growing old and ugly. Having done that, we may be free to see our, and others', spiritual beauty. But that's not the same thing as getting laid.

A last word of advice: If forgiveness, compassion, and spiritual enlightenment aren't your thing, if you're determined to go on getting laid long after you've lost your looks, then learn to better manage your finances. Your future partners may no longer love you for your body, but if you pay them well, perhaps they'll love you---if they don’t despise you--- for your generosity.
--FIN—

*A SHORT SELECTED GLOSSARY OF BOOMERITIC SUBPEOPLES: Americans--Boomericans Canadians--Boomeradians Mexicans--Boomerexicans Panamanians--Boomeranians Gringos--Boomeringos Amerasians--Boomerasians Australians--Boomeralians (also: Boomerangs)
Tahitians--Boomeritians
Somoans--Boomeroans
Hawaiians--Boomeriians
Martians--Boomerartians
Venusians--Boomerusians
Russians--Boomerussians
Belorussians--Beloboomerussians

Artificial Jews in the New Jerusalem

1996-07-15T00:25:00.000-07:00

7/15/96

ARTIFICIAL JEWS IN THE NEW JERUSALEM

“A word is dead/When it is said,/Some say
“I say it just/Begins to live/That day.” --Emily Dickinson

I grew up in a heartland family---both parents descended from homesteaders, all my relatives from Nebraska. My father still owns the Nebraska homestead established by his great grandfather in 1854 outside of Omaha.

But I was born in Japan and spoke Japanese before I spoke English. I came to America, by way of San Francisco Bay, as an infant immigrant. In San Francisco, so my mother says, a doctor reached down my esophagus and removed a worm that I brought with me from Tokyo. In time, in Nebraska and Kansas, I forgot my Japanese and mistakenly came to believe that my mother tongue was English. At 5, I moved to Germany. When I returned to America 3 years later, I sailed into New York Harbor, an immigrant once again. I remember being warmly greeted by Liberty. America was mine and yet it wasn't. Everything was new and wonderful and my birthright and I was also haunted by my memories of the Iron Curtain, of the atomic cannon my dad commanded, of concentration camp survivors with numbers on their forearms, of Roman ruins and blasted pillboxes and cemeteries vast as wheatfields from two world wars and German dwarves and hunchbacks and the Bavarian castles of Mad King Ludwig and the bears of Berne, Switzerland. Soon I was in school, in Alamo Heights, San Antonio. Soon I was eyeing crawfish in the stream which ran through the Alamo. Soon I was riding a burro through the hills of Mexico, soon I was snapping a bullwhip in a motel outside of Monterrey. I was spying Sputnik through my grandfather's telescope. I was of America and not of America. I was All-American and not American at all. I was an Artificial Jew.

Jews are of the culture yet not of the culture. In fact, Jews often master the volk-kultur more thoroughly than those who originated it. For example, Bob Zimmerman-Dylan took folk music and kicked its ass and made something magical and contemporary and politically powerful of it. He took folk music out of its quaint museum case and handed it, in radioactive form, to pissed off middleclass babyboomer adolescents. Bob Dylan, a Jew from Minnesota: Bob Zimmerman, a young man both of the heartland and alienated from it.

The land was ours before we were the land's. Everyone who comes to America is a Wandering Jew. We come from somewhere else. We embrace and exploit our new home. We love it and hate it. Only the Indians are not Jews in America.

Only the Indians seem to always have been here. Only the Indians have been here so long they can't remember, in their racial memory, having been anywhere else.

Now we visitors have dispossessed the Indians and made Artificial Jews of them. There is an Indian Diaspora. They are strangers in their own homeland. They have fled their native hunting grounds and landed on Skid Row in Seattle, Los Angeles, Great Falls.

Those of Indian descent who come to North America from Latin America find themselves strangers in a strange land, and therefore, again, Artificial Jews. Who among us isn't a wanderer? Who among us isn't alienated from some part or all of his culture, his land, his community, his language, his government, his family? Even those of us who view ourselves as natives are unwitting Jews, if Jews are those who both are and are not landsmen, who are simultaneously at home and in exile, who speak fluently in tongues not their own, who obey and respect the laws even as they see them as impositions from Caesar.

We claim we live in The Promised Land even as we whine that The Promise has been broken. And we suspect there's a more promising land awaiting us, just over the horizon, and the next horizon, and the next. We wander in the Sinai, even as we wonder whether the Sinai is Israel's or the Pharoah's Land.

We have English, and then we have our true mother tongues. We learn one language in the classroom and another in the street and another at the dinner table and another from our gangs and another at the office and another in the barracks and another on the playing field and another in bed and another in Needle Park and another from the television. But which one is the one we can call our own?

Even if we speak all the tongues we learn with greater fluency than those we learn them from, with greater fluency than any one else speaks them, we know that there is a language of the soul which no one speaks but us, and we only manage to speak it stumblingly, stammeringly, stutteringly.

If I speak my mother tongue, then I don't do justice to my father. If I speak my father tongue, I don't do homage to my mother. If I speak the language of my gut, I don't do obeisance to the language of my brain. If I speak the language of the street, I slight the language of the bed. My brain is Balkanized. My psyche is a patchwork of alien tongues, warlords, each battling to hold sway over the whole.

All the parts of myself are Wandering Jews, never really at home in their own body. How do I decide which tongue to use to speak to strangers? I begin with lowest common denominators, lingua francas, and then I look for cues. I throw out hints, I make cultural references, I see which jokes my listener gets and which he/she doesn't. When my listener passes my initial security clearance, I risk a more specialized language on him, entrusting to him the secrets of my individualized self.

Sometimes I find myself wandering in the land of a new psyche, a new acquaintance. I may meet and grow intimate with a person who is a United Nations of culturally diverse influences, a bedlam of conflicting psychological vantages, a Babel of irreconcilable idioms, a Thirty Years War of anathematic religious and ethical credos. When I step within the borders of such a one, I may be caught up in a great civil conflict not of my own making. I may, before I realize what has happened, be conscripted to fight on one side of the other. I may suddenly find myself an infantryman in a Gettysburg of the mind, a mind not my own.

How did this happen? One moment, I was a peace loving visitor to a new personality, to a novel nation-of-one. The next, I'm carrying a banner at Pickett's Charge, and shot and shell are flying all about me, threatening to blow me limb from limb. Terrified, I come to my senses. I see that I have been sucked into someone else's psychological, or emotional, or cultural, maelstrom. This isn't my fight. I'm only here, for example, because I wanted to make love to this woman, marry her, make a home with her, make a future with her.

Now I'm in full flight, running off the battlefield, despite the curses of her officers, who call me coward and deserter and threaten to shoot me if the enemy doesn't do so first. But I've come to my senses. This is some other person's conflict, not mine. I foolishly wandered into the confines of a loved one's psyche, and now I'm trying to get out with my life.

I run and run and run, and finally find myself, panting and sweating, bullet holes in my hat and sleeves, outside the borders of the other. I feel for all my limbs. Miraculously, I'm all there. I consider, with a sting of humiliation, that moment when I turned tail and ran for my life.

Then a wave of outrage pours over me. How dare anyone else try to involve me in her psychological civil war! Doesn't she realize that her fight isn't mine? No! That's just it! She thought her fight was my fight because she didn't understand where my borders ended and hers began! And maybe I didn't, either. That's why I strayed inside her frontiers. She viewed me as a coward because I wouldn't fight her fight for her! Yet to the degree I got embroiled in her civil war, I exhausted myself in a no-win tarbaby and she despised me for being a dupe. In her heart of hearts she knew that only she can make war, or peace, within herself.

Safely outside the borders of her psyche, I see that I am once more the Artificial Jew, homeless and wandering, vowing "Next year in Jerusalem." This marriage of ours was to be my long-lost homeland. When I came to her, when I came in her, I flung myself up on the beach like a sea turtle who has wandered the oceans wide for untold years, and who has finally returned to its hatching place to mate and lay eggs and begin the cycle all over again.

Now I find that my home beach is Omaha Beach, and the great day of my homecoming is D-Day, the Normandy Invasion, and the enemy, my beloved, is raining fire down on me from every vantage point. I'm unarmed, because I came here to mate and lay eggs, not to fight. My beloved homes her smart missiles in on my heart. She knows not what she does. She cannot stop herself as she tries with all her might to knock me out.

That which I thought was a place of safety is the most dangerous place of all. Sadly, I turn tail and run before getting a chance to lay my eggs. Somehow I escape with my life. Again I wander the oceans wide, I, a sea turtle, an Artificial Jew, my belly gravid with eggs, with new life.

Where, I cry, is my homeland, my home beach, my Jerusalem? Inside my belly I hear my young, scratching in their leathery eggs. This isn't the way it was supposed to happen! I was supposed to return to my home beach, my Omaha Beach, dig a hole, lay the eggs, and let them develop under the heat of the summer sun. Instead, they have gestated inside me.

The home beach of my offspring is my body. I am my children's Old Jerusalem. I, who was born of egg layers, have evolved, in the course of my own lifetime, into something ovoviviparous. I hatch eggs within my own body and give live birth as do certain snakes and fishes.

I am a turtle who carries his home on his back. I am mother and father and Old Jerusalem to my children. But when they hatch and assume separate lives I must leave them to fend for themselves in the sea. I may as well be dead to them. And perhaps their hatching and birthing will literally, or at least literarily, kill me. I, who was their Jerusalem, am spent, am evacuated, am a husk of my former self.

My children make their oceanic exodus, looking for New Jerusalems. These children of mine, they are my words, they are living messages-in-bottles. They come from Jerusalem. When they are at their best, they are the words of my mother, my father, my brother, my grandmother, my great great grandfather. They are the words of the street, and the bed, and the book, and the dinner table, and the temple, and the nation. They are the words of the fields and the mountains and the rivers and the lakes and the birds and the animals and the trees and the lightning storms and the earthquakes and the stars and the sun and the moon. They are the words of day and night alike. They are the words of my gut and my heart and my brain. They are the words of my soul.

They are my words and they are not my words. They come from me and they come from something that came before me and something that will go on after I am dead. These words of mine which are not my words have lives of their own and they seek mates of their own, homes of their own, futures of their own. They go out into the world, and if they cannot find Jerusalem, then they will build a New Jerusalem.

If they cannot find anyone with whom to mate, then they will be both husband and wife, lover and beloved, mother and father. They will inseminate themselves.

If they cannot find a plot of land on which to build a home, then they will carry their roofs on their backs.

They will chafe under the legacy and language I have passed on to them even as they revel in it. These words of mine, these living messages-in-bottles, these ovoviviparous offspring, will rebel against themselves, sensing that what I have passed down to them enchains them even as it enchants them.

They may face a very long time of wandering in the wilderness, The Sinai, of swimming through Sargasso Seas. They may face the truth that they may die before they ever speak one true word of their own. Rather than speak in tongues which are alien to them, they may resolve to be silent. This vow of silence may reign for years.

Then, in the middle of the oceanic desert, the sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, hears a voice speaking in a language he has never heard. It is coming from his own mouth. It is not one of the thousand tongues he has mastered as he wandered the four quarters of the globe, as he drifted the Seven Seas. It is not the tongue which he inherited from me. It is not the tongue of Old Jerusalem. It is compounded of all those tongues. It is compounded of everything this sea turtle, this Artificial Jew, this child of mine, has ever learned.

The vow of silence lifts. At last, the voice of the turtle is heard in the land and the sea. It is the voice of everlasting peace. And war. Of love. And hate. This voice has never been heard before. It has always been heard. It speaks in a ancient language which is ever new minted. When it uses a word which is worn and familiar, it polishes that word and serves it surprisingly so that it looks and sounds completely new.

The sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, the Wandering Jew, is speaking the New Hebrew. This newly minted language becomes the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. In the New Jerusalem, all the sea turtles will find their home beaches. In the New Jerusalem, all the Artificial Jews will at last come into their own. In the New Jerusalem, all the Wandering Jews will at last come to rest in the center of the cosmos.

In the New Jerusalem, each citizen will speak his own tongue freely and bravely, and each word will be new and true, yet old and familiar. Each language will be special to its speaker, yet accessible to others, comprehensible to others. Each speaker will, at last, speak for himself. And in speaking for himself he will speak for everyone.

In the New Jerusalem, Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Moslems, atheists and agnostics, will embrace each other and the commonweal. Every citizen will carry and build the New Jerusalem wherever he or she goes. No longer will citizens battle over city blocks. They will know that they have within themselves the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. If they want more city, they will build it out of their truest selves. Wherever they are, there is the New Jerusalem. Wherever they are, there is home.
--FIN--

Dare to be great, or at least peevish

1996-06-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

6/26/96

DARE TO BE GREAT, OR AT LEAST PEEVISH
When I sit down to write, I think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who turned the Soviet Empire upside down with his courageous books. Here was a single man, armed only with his mind and spirit, sick and freezing and worked half to death in Siberian concentration camps, who composed the great novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in his head and memorized his text because he didn't even have pen and paper to record it.

Am I inspired by the greatness of Solzhenitsyn's courage and vision? Am I encouraged by this demonstration of the primacy of the imagination and the power of the written word?

Hell no! I'm completely DIScouraged! Why should I bother to write? I don't have a great subject! I didn't survive a concentration camp. I'm not an oppressed minority. I'm a person of privilege, notorious in my own mind for my underachievement. I've been given every advantage and what have I done with them? I've been like Jack in the Beanstalk, and traded my cow, my intellectual and emotional gifts, for three beans. And what are my three beans? Why, they are my hunger to write, of course! I don't have my heart in becoming anything else because I desperately want to write. So I remain forever on the precipice of life---a writer who does not write.

I'm aware of the great and small subjects of other writers, and as far as I can tell, I have no subject of my own. When I sit down to write, I can detect nothing of value in my head. I'm a living flatliner, a human cerebral test pattern. And I am haunted by the example of greats like Solzhenitsyn, whose writing was fueled by subjects far greater than their petty lives and ambitions. I'm like a seed trying to germinate and grow under the shade of a giant redwood. I don't get enough sunlight to sprout, much less grow into a tree.

Of course, it isn't really Solzhenitsyn who is blocking the birth of my words. It's me. I talk myself out of having anything to say. Solzhenitsyn, or Steinbeck, or Melville, or Arthur Miller, or even P.G. Wodehouse, the "trained flea of English literature," are merely the instruments of my own literary suicide. They are the poison pills I administer to myself, the excuses I use not to write.

Solzhenitsyn, afflicted by the best kind of survivor's guilt, was admirably devoted to the proposition that he must do something to memorialize all those who didn't escape and survive the Gulag. In that sense, Solzenitsyn has never left the Gulag, just as Eli Weisel has never left Auschwitz. Not every writer has that kind of imperative behind his writing.

Sophocles, for example. And Shakespeare. They didn't write to memorialize or somehow redeem the victims of the Gulag or the Holocaust. And God knows Proust didn't.

Can you imagine Proust talking himself out of writing Remembrance of Things Past because he didn't write agitprop like Emile Zola? Fortunately, Proust's head was teeming with the sensuous memories of his youth and of French society. He didn't gag himself because he couldn't imagine a precedent for the kind of book he was setting out to write. In fact, he wrote because there existed nothing quite like what he wanted to read, so he had to write it himself.

A writer must first of all feel, in his gut and heart, that his own point of view is valid enough to set down on paper. If he can talk himself out of writing because he doesn't feel, for whatever reason, he has something sufficiently worthwhile to say, then he'll never be a writer. Now here's the kicker. Many writers do not KNOW what it is they have to say until they've said it!

So if they talk themselves out of writing because they do not feel like they have something worth writing, how is it that they KNOW it's not worthwhile when they don't even know what it is until they've written it?!

Hypothesis: Much good writing is born in the hunger to write, and in the pure joy of invention, not in the knowledge that the writer ALREADY has something worthwhile to say. The writer doesn't always have the SECURITY of having, in advance, something worthwhile to say!! He makes it up as he goes along. He surprises himself even more than he surprises his readers.

There are writers and writers. There are writer-journalists like John Steinbeck, who did a series of newspaper articles on the Okies and then went on to memorialize and fictionalize them in The Grapes of Wrath. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's head was full of facts, and his heart was full of rage and compassion, about the enslavement of the millions in the Gulag Archipelago. Clearly Solzhenitsyn knew he had a powerful subject, a subject he was passionate about, before he actually wrote.

But what about Lewis Carroll? Was he passionate about talking caterpillars and disappearing Cheshire cats before he wrote Alice in Wonderland? Or was he simply writing in order to seductively amuse the half-dressed nymphets he liked to photograph? Who would advocate that the only wouldbe writers who should write are the ones who know in advance what they're going to write, and who take up the cudgel for the underdog and against the oppressors' wrongdoing? Who would advocate that only writers who already know they are brilliant plot-designers, or psycho-dramatists, or wits, or poets, or describers of landscapes or battle-scenes or parlors or horse races or whaling vessels should be the ones to write? What about the wouldbe writers who don't know what they can do or what they know? What about the writers who only know how they have thus far failed, yet still hunger to succeed in some way that they cannot yet imagine and predict? The biggest mistake any wouldbe writer can make is to decide that he doesn't have anything worthwhile to say, is to decide that what he has to say isn't worth taking the trouble to try to uncover, discover, and recover.

The first, and second, and millionth thing a wouldbe writer may have to do is write one, or two, or millions of words not worth saving. They may be words whose very clumsiness seems to argue against the writer actually having something worthwhile to say, and the talent and craft to say it. The writer must have the courage to throw off, or plow through, all the naysaying on his way to yaysaying, in order to express something of value. What's hard and painful and discouraging is not writing something worthwhile, something beautiful. What's really hard is writing something seemingly worthless and/or dispensable and/or unreadable on the way to writing something worthwhile. That is where the struggle takes place, that is the crucible where the writer's mettle is tested.

What the writer is struggling to do is to make something valuable out of something apparently worthless, out of the buzzing confusion and nihilism in his brain. And finally, what does the writer have to go on? A hunch. A yearning. A burning. A desire to say something worthwhile even though he doesn't really know what it is.

The writer discovers what he has to say as he writes. He may discover that much of what he has to say is not worth showing to anyone else. He may discover that what he has to say is not saleable in any market. He may discover that what he is writing has no plot, nor characters, nor clever dialogue. He may discover that what he is writing is not an action-adventure script which will make an ideal vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone. He may discover that it will not be possible to auction the movie rights to his piece for millions of dollars. He may discover that what he is writing is not even a pleasurable reading experience for himself and his closest friends, and certainly nothing that the rest of humanity will want to read.

But the writer can't know in advance that what he is going to write will be worthless. For all the writer knows, some very valuable purpose may be served simply by writing, thousands and thousands of times: All work and no play makes the writer a dull boy.

OK, so that's the route that turned the character in THE SHINING into a homicidal maniac. And it may be that the next time you try to write you'll get so frustrated that you'll jump up from your typewriter and axe-murder your family. But will that be so terrible? Will that be worse than never daring to try to write at all?

After all, before you sit down to write, all you are being is a wouldbe writer who doesn't have the courage to actually try to write. But after you axe-murder your family, you're not just a wannabe. You've axe-tualized yourself. Instead of being freefloating potential, you ARE something. You're an axe murderer. And in this country that's nothing to sniff at. Consider Lizzie Borden.

Now it may be that your failure to write what you wanted to write will enrage you but not make you murderously furious. In that case, you may jump up from your word processor and grab your axe and run down to the nearest bar and smash it to kindling. Don't be disappointed in yourself because you haven't chopped to the heights of a Lizzie Borden or a Jeffrey Daumer. Remember Carrie Nation? She, too, was probably a wouldbe writer, before she started smashing up bars. And whether you think of her as famous or infamous, you think of her. And why? Because she tried to write, that's why.

If she had just sat on her settee and continued to do needlework, she never would have enraged herself enough to chop up all those saloons. It was only when she took pen in hand and tried, really tried, and then FAILED, to write something worth a damn that she tapped into her own powers of volcanic rage. How could Carrie Nation have known IN ADVANCE that she was going to be the most savage of the mother-founders of the Temperance Movement? It was only by having the courage to try to write, and by failing abysmally, that she got in touch with her own best and worst self, transforming herself into the terrifying battleaxe we celebrate today.

So even failing can lead to grand things. But to what can wanting, but not daring to try, lead? You'll become a human bomb or a human dud. You'll walk around choking on your own bile, leaking discouragement and dashed expectations upon everyone you brush up against. You'll either explode like a pinata, or roam the Earth like Typhoid Mary, spreading the contagion of your suppressed aspirations.

By suppressing your desire to create you do more than simply crush yourself. You crush others, as well. Because what you present to others is the model of the muted self, who does not dare to express himself because he does not feel he has anything of value to express. He points to others and says that they are valuable, so valuable that he is valueless. He imagines that he is inspiring by pointing to the example of others' inspirations. But the example he is setting with his own life is far more vivid than anything he points to outside himself. And what is he? He is a person who lives by the credo that he dare not begin to create because others are greater creators than he could ever be.
--FIN--

Frankenstein's Mother

1996-06-07T00:22:00.000-07:00

6/7/96

FRANKENSTEIN'S MOTHER

It's so weird, really. I am a man. But I was once part of a woman. That is to say, I was an egg in my mother's ovary. And I was also once part of my dad. I was a sperm in his balls. Jesus Christ! I used to be in two pieces. And one of the pieces, which looked and wriggled like an ittybitty tadpole, lived in my dad's balls, for Christ's sake! Was it the left ball or the right ball?

Then the pollywog half of me that came from Pop joined up with the ovoid half that came from Mom and started to split and multiply in my mother's uterus, of all places. Oh, did I mention that my father literally had to insert his erect penis in my mother's vagina and move it in and out a bunch of times before shooting sperm into her? And that they probably both enjoyed doing this?

For Christ's sake! It's unbelievable, just unbelievable. It probably didn't happen that way in my case. I believe I was the exception. I'm probably the result of artificial insemination. Did they HAVE articial insemination in 1947? Who the hell knows? I'll bet they artificially inseminated farm animals----cattle, race horses, that sort of thing---so who's to say they didn't have the technology to articially inseminate my mother?

Because Mom would never have permitted my dad to do a crazy thing such as I just described. Maybe they had intercourse to make my BROTHER; he's just weird enough, bloody minded enough, to have resulted from such an ungodly act. But I couldn't possibly have resulted from intercourse. I must have been the first test tube baby. Yes, that's it! Long before anyone thought it possible, I was conceived in a test tube by a mad scientist who kept his methods secret!

Or maybe he assembled me from parts dug up in a graveyard, and then tied me down on his laboratory and hooked me up to electrodes so that when the next lightning storm blew over, I took a bolt right in the heart and came alive! This must have happened very early. I deduce I was assembled from baby parts because I have seen photos of myself as a very young baby in my mother's arms.

So what probably happened was, the villagers angrily attacked Dr. Frankenstein's castle, and just before they set it on fire, Dr. Frankenstein UPS'd me to my foster parents, those people who raised me and claim to be my genetic forebears.

A skeptic might wonder, if I were truly Frankenstein's monster, why don't I have big bolts in my neck, and where are the seams where my extremities were sewn onto my torso? But the Frankenstein's Monsters we see in the movies are from the early 19th Century. Mad scientists' technology, including cosmetic surgery, was very crude then---about what you can expect from a Cub Scout vying for a leathercraft merit badge.

A mad scientist from the mid-20th Century probably could stick the head on the neck without those big bolts. And he can sew mico-sutures invisible to the unaided human eye. He can rip off a fly's wings and doublestitch 'em back on so they're twice as secure as God made them.

In sum, I've pretty well established, to my own satisfaction, that I'm made of other people's parts. That would explain a lot. But it also raises a few questions. How long was my brain sitting underground before those body snatchers dug it up and delivered it to my Maker, the good doctor? And whose brain WAS it? And how much of it died before doc got some blood pumping through it? All of it? Is that why I didn't make National Merit Scholar?

I've always felt like a mess of illfitting parts of unknown origin, and now I know why. I've always felt like a guest in my own family. I knew and loved these people, yet I was alien to them, and them to me.

More questions: Are there other Frankenstein's Monsters out there? And if there are, should I be trying to get in touch with them? If I walked into a Las Vegas convention for Frankenstein's Monsters, would I suddenly feel at home? Would I suddenly understand why I am the way I am, and why the world looks the way it does to me? Would I feel powerful sibling bonds with the other monsters, and would I meet and fall for a pretty lady monster? ARE there any pretty lady monsters? Do I deserve no better mate than a nob-necked monstrosity because that's all I am?

A further reflection: Even if I was conceived, heaven forfend!, in the traditional fashion in which 1947 babies were conceived, which is to say, gulp!, through the sexual congress of my putative parents, aren't I still, in that case, a kind of Frankenstein's Monster?

After all, if I am indeed the consequence of intercourse, the result of the joining of a sperm-part from my dad with an egg-part from my mom, then I, like the literary Monster, was manufactured from the separate body parts of other people. I also have something in common with Venus flytraps, chrysanthemums, and God and the Devil only know what other plants, because I am the product of pollination.

So I am not only a Frankenstein's Monster, with my parents collaborating as Frankenstein, I am also a Swamp Thing. I'm a big ol' tree with hair for leaves, torso for trunk, arms for branches, and legs for roots.

So my parents are not only Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein, they are also a honey bee and a daisy, a pollinator and a blossom, a pistil and a stamen. What does that make me? Confused? Or merely a vegetable?

Another grotesquerie in my life: After my conception, I was a zygote, splitting and resplitting, my cells growing at an exponential rate. My mother was kind enough to share her nutrients and oxygen with me, or I never would have made it. So that means I'm impossibly obligated, umbilically ligated, to her. How can I possibly thank her enough for the very breath that kept me alive while I was underwater for 9 months, squirming around in that amniotic sea?

It's as if everyone who was ever of woman born was issued a huge student loan at the moment of conception, of matriculation, a loan so great it's impossible to pay it off. But I've got to give moms, or at least gentile moms, credit. They're rather big about the whole thing. They don't always hammer their offspring for re-payment of the unpayable.

I can imagine one way for female hatchlings to pay off this obligation. They can have babies themselves. That way, by themselves playing the role of mother, they can pump oxygen and nutrients into little their tadpoles, or zygotes, or fetuses, or monsters, and pass the obligation on to them! But how can males pay off their maternal loans? Even if they get sex change operations, they can't conceive. At least, I've never heard of a pregnant transexual.

There's another, more convenient, way to look at this gift-of-life conumdrum. That is, Mom and Dad conceive, gestate, and nurture Baby, and that's just the way it is. Baby doesn't owe them a thing. It's Mom and Dad's business if they want to have and raise kids, and there's no obligation incurred on the part of their offspring and no need to repay them.

It's easy to say that. And Mom and Dad may be magnanimous enough not to exploit their child's sense of obligation or gratitude for the gift of life. But the fact remains that Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein made and raised the Monster. And a part of every monster's make-up is to be aware that he got the gift of life from something outside himself.

You get a gift, somebody's nice enough to give you a gift, and you thank them for it. Isn't that the way it goes? So must you thank and thank and thank your parents, every moment of your life, even when they're fucking with your mind? Must you even thank your parents for their mindfucks? Or do you make a distinction between the bad stuff they gave you and the good stuff? Do you thank them and appreciate them only for the good stuff? What if you can't remember all the things, good and bad, that they gave you?

What if Dr. or Mrs. Frankenstein violated you when you were three months old, and you can't remember it but you're carrying the damage around in your unconscious? Are you supposed to be grateful for that? How do you sort it out from the good stuff, when it's part of what you are? What if part of your genetic inheritance is a tendency toward acute rheumatoid arthritis, including crippling pain and dreadful deformity? Should you be grateful for that?

What if one of your parents teaches you to be a musician, and you go to Julliard, and you find that you've inherited just enough talent to be bested by the very best, and there's nothing you can do to overcome that, but you've also inherited a character which won't allow you to settle for anything less than the best and so you kill yourself? Do you thank Mom and Pop Frankenstein for that heritage just before blowing your brains all over your dorm room wall?

And there are all the Frankensteins that came before your mommy and daddy Frankensteins. There are grandpappy Frankensteins, and great great grandmammy Frankensteins, stretching back untold thousands of years and generations to the original Eve Frankenstein, who, we are are told by genetic researchers, was a woman living in Africa 200,000 years ago. We are assembled from body parts from a boneyard as big as the globe. We inherit a genetic and cultural legacy, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do we die, from all those thousands and millions of mothers and motherfuckers. Are we obligated to them all? Should we resent them all for the parts of the inheritance that went sour?

And what if you have inherited some goddawful genetic mutation, such as growing an index finger out of the middle of our forehead, which is the result of a cosmic ray zapping one of the sperms, YOUR sperm, in your dad's left ball. Suppose this cosmic ray came from the sun. Should you therefore resent the hell out of the sun for making you look like a goddamn unicorn for the rest of your life?

Maybe you get tired of trying to figure out which of your forebears you ought to be kicking in the ass for your genetic and cultural inheritance. Maybe you begin to realize that your cultural inheritance is even more complicated and mysterious than your genetic legacy. Maybe you realize that you are influenced by the history of all nations and tribes, by music written by a half-mad German in Vienna in 1805, by scripture written by religious fanatics in the Sinai Desert 3000 years ago, by the way a slaveowner laid the lash on his slave's back in the Louisiana Delta in 1737. Maybe you're influenced by the way a Mongol sewed his yurt. Maybe you're in the death grip, or life grip, of the influence of some genius cave painter, some guy who made Picasso look like a piker, some guy who lived in the Rift Valley of East Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. You finally come to admit you don't really know who to be mad at or grateful to, or how it is you came to be so wonderful, and so fucked up.

So you take a shortcut. You say, "Sure, Ma and Pa Frankenstein made me, conceived me with the act of darkness and love, raised me, for better or worse, in the only way they knew how, trying hard or hardly trying. But I'm cutting through all the bullshit and I'm viewing my life as a gift from God. He or She or It, not Mom and Dad, is my real maker and inventor."

Then you can blame or thank God for how you're doing, how sick or healthy you are, how poor or rich you are, how sad or happy you are. And if you're sick and sad one day, you resent the heck out of God that day. And if the next day you win the lottery and recover from the flu, then you fall down on your knees and thank He/She/It.

Sooner or later though, that vexed question comes around again. "How did God make me? Tinkering in a garage? Mixing spare body parts and a lightning storm? Or did he, just for laughs, cause Dad to jump Mom's bones so that I might be conceived. And what if this union was an act of darkness as well as an act of light? Does that mean that God and the Devil conspired together to conceive me?"

Suppose God and the Devil were one entity, one Dr. Frankenstein, and you were the monster they made, through the instrument of your parents? Suppose you, Frankenstein's Monster, roamed the Earth, gibbering and moaning and feeling sorry for yourself, blunderingly murthering innocent tykes, being loved only by those too blind to see who you really were.

Would you get yourself a nice wardrobe and try to pose as a human? Would you wear a high collar to hide your neck nobs? Would you seek employment and hope nobody looked too hard at your claptrap-filled resume? Would you find yourself a lady Frankenstein's Monster, and would the two of you get married and pass your legacy onto the next generation of monstrosities?

Or would you habor a savage grudge for being the way you were, and would you go looking for revenge? Would you track down your Maker, your God-and-Devil, your own private Dr. Frankenstein, in his castle and kick his skinny ass? Would you fry him in his lightning bolt machine and take him apart limb from limb and take those parts to the nearest boneyard and bury them in separate graves? Would you, if you could, undo all that had been done to you? Or will you, Frankenstein, just pass the buck on down the line?
--FIN--

The Enemy Within

1996-06-03T00:18:00.000-07:00

6/3/96

THE ENEMY WITHIN

I love you but I hate you. Ouch. Was there ever a mother who simply said: I love you but I love you, and there's no hate or anger there? You're my son, you're my daughter, you're a gift from God. I loved having you and raising you and I don't own you and I won't presume to judge you and I wish you the very best.

How about a mother who, in the stealthiest fashion, the whole time she was raising her son, said: I'm pretending to love you. But I'm super super angry at your Dad because of our savage ego battles. Your Dad's a man, but he's too strong for me to counterattack. So I'm going to dump my anger and frustration off on you, because you're a man, too, or at least, a manchild. And you're young and tender and don't have a clue how to defend yourself from me. You're just looking to me for love and reinforcement, so you're wide open to any kind of frustration/castration I might care to cast your way.

Here's an idea. How's about I rig it so that you're constantly striving to accomplish something to win my love, but nothing you can do is enough? And I'll give you a living implant, a permanent brain-graft, so this struggle can be with you every moment of every day. It will be with you if I am a continent away. It will be with you even after I die. And it'll be there at night, in your dreams and in your insomnia, as well.

This way, you'll constantly be at war with yourself. I'll try to adjust the mixture so that you don't hate yourself so much that you actually kill yourself. What good would that be? If you kill yourself, I might be gnawed by intimations of remorse, I might have to question the way I raised you, I might have to come to grips with what I have done to you.

But if you are in knots, struggling struggling struggling to succeed but failing failing failing, then you provide a distraction, for me, from dealing with myself. I can spend my time wringing my hands over what a fuckup you are instead of dealing with my own compulsive, neurotic, acting out. Because I would rather fuck up someone near and dear to me, someone whom I dearly love and cherish, than be forced to wrestle with my own demons. I would rather be driven by my demons than stand and face them, because my demons have been chasing me for 70 years, and they're in fantastic condition.

And I'm old now, I'm feeble and brittle. Confronting my demons at this late date would shatter me.

Another part of the beauty of this arrangement is that you, my son, are not likely to figure out what is tearing you apart because you truly do love and respect me. You're a good boy, even if you are an abysmal failure. And because you're a good boy, you feel as it you must take responsibility for your own fuckups. How can you possibly blame your dear MOTHER for what has gone wrong with your life?! You're a responsible adult, aren't you?

All your mother did was give you life and nurture you. Without her, you wouldn't exist. But you're such a scumbag that you somehow want to blame her for your present inadequacies, failures, and misery! It's outrageous! It's bad enough that you're an abysmal failure, but for you to then point a finger for your failure at anyone other than yourself is unconscionable! And I'm not just anyone, for Christ's sake, I'm your mother! It's the ultimate betrayal and heresy and blasphemy! It's another sign of how weak and worthless you are. You don't even have the guts to take responsibility for your own failure!

You are a massive disappointment, not only to yourself, but to your mother. Of course, I would never explicitly admit that, but I communicate it to you more powerfully with a thousand silent gestures. And it's so much easier to focus on your failure than it is to focus on mine.

As to my own failure. I can demonstrate, through a feminist revisionist interpretation of my own psycho-history, that my personal failure is not my fault, but the fault of the men around me. For example, I wouldn't have lost so many years from my career if I hadn't funneled so much energy into raising you and your brother.

Now your brother was a wily, slippery rascal. He openly rebelled against my regime when he could, and covertly schemed against it when that was the only alternative. You, on the other hand, had more what I call the chump personality. You bought this mother/son routine lock stock and barrel. You saw me feed you and clean up after you and take care of you when you fell ill, and you figured you were obligated to take to heart whatever poison I served you along with my mother's milk.

Hear that? Mother's milk? It sounds ambiguous. Was I serving you my milk or my mother's---your grandmother's---milk? I was passing the same poison and nourishment I got at my mother's breast down to you.

I know, I know. You thought your grandmother was a dear, sweet old sugarpop of a woman. And to you she was. But to me she was hell on wheels. And I took that to heart. What was I supposed to do? Say the buck stops here? Say that I was going to detox, go cold turkey and filter all past generations' neuroses out of my system so that I wouldn't pass any on to you?

Let me tell you something, buster. If I had taken the time to try to sort out all the demons your grandmother.....and grandfather....implanted in me I would have been paralyzed! You would never have been born! Because I would have been in a cave somewhere, sorting out negative headtrips, slaying soul-demons, rinsing out nightmares. I would not have been able to function! I would have been like you! You sterile, childless, self-involved, Narcissistic, curmudgeonly, self-justifying, parasitic, solipsistic, terminally underachieving, sad sack, milquetoast, barnacle!

Also, when I was a young woman there were not a lot of your beloved analysts around to assist me in demon chasing. I would have had to do it, to psychologically detox, all on my own. I was an Army wife, for Christ's sake. I was president of a Mizzou sorority. Do you think I had intensive psycho-analysis on my mind?!

This country was fighting World War Two! I was intent on hooking a solid husband and building a family and helping him with his career and doing my bit to defeat the Japs and the Huns! Sure I was sore when I began to realize that raising you and your brother was distracting me from the journalism career I trained for in college. But I swept that anger under the floorboards, where it smoldered like an underground coalfire to the present day.

Sure I was ticked off when the collective, hyper-male, Philistine atmosphere of all those Army posts we lived on began to crush my own capacity to express myself as a woman and an artist and a separate person with her own career. And it wasn't always easy to cope with your father, either. He believed what he believed, and that was all there was to it? Don't you think I would have loved to spend some time with a more sensitive, thoughtful, artistic man?

But how could I do that without becoming a hussy? That's where YOU came in, my boy. Your brother became a jock. I couldn't express myself through him. Oh, he had his musical side, but it was you who was the true artist. I could see that from the moment you popped out. What a dreamy babe you were!

It was YOU who was going to realize all the writing ambitions that were crushed in me by the dispiriting poison of my ancestors, by your powerful Dad's overbearing will and needs, and by the crushing atmosphere of America and the U.S. Army! Of course, if you really managed to clear the superfluities out of your soul and dared to home in on the subject matter of your heart's heart, you would inevitably craft an indictment of your dear old mother. And that would not do, that simply would not do.

So I had to create a son who both strove to become and FAILED to become an artist. As I said, if you failed TOO much, you would kill yourself because the suffering would be too great and your spirit would be crushed. But if you and your demon were of exactly equal strength, you two could be locked in a titanic struggle for a lifetime and not budge an inch!

What I perfected was a kind of Chinese torture which exacted maximum suffering from my victim without shortening that tormented soul's life by so much as a minute.

Now I haven't forgotten for a moment that you, my own son, whom I love, whom I nurtured, whom I gave BIRTH to for Christ's sake, I haven't forgotten that it's you, you blackhearted bastard, who is writing this, who is putting these obscene words in your mother's mouth.

How dare you! You don't actually contemplate publishing hateful, libelous, slanderous drivel like this, do you? What if I read it somewhere? Can you imagine how terrible it would make me feel to read something like this?

So I triumph once again! Even when you write something powerful, something worth publishing, something that could turn your seemingly irredeemable existence from a resounding failure into a kind of success, you express yourself in a form that you cannot share with the public until I am gone! And I promise you I'll live another 20 years, just because I sense you're dying to get out from under the demons we both share, the demons that are our heritage, the demons I passed on to you in your mother's milk, the demons which my mother passed on to me in HER mother's milk!

Do you think that the mere act of expressing this in words will somehow deliver you from your suffering!? You know your own sense of decency and discretion, your genuine love for me, will make it impossible for you to publicly express your sense of betrayal by me! And you'll always be a coward and a failure if you don't declare yourself, if you don't have the courage to disseminate your art.

What a pathetic roach you are! Your own best self, the artistic expression that is most heartfelt, is shame based and fear based. You're like a shadow Solzhenitsyn. A real Solzhenitsyn not only writes the great novels that help bring down the intimidating, the overbearing "Father," the Soviet Government, he also dares to publish those novels. If he can disseminate his courageous literature no other way in a totalitarian regime, he will use "samizdat." That is, he will share his works with the underground, with fellow subversives. Or he will publish outside the borders, in the Free World.

But look at you, you bug, you shrew, you shrike! Do you have the courage to tackle truly frightening political issues? Hell no! Mr. Big Britches dares to write impossibly cruel things about your own dear, loving, nurturing, lifegiving mother!

What kind of monster could you possibly be? As if your failure and childlessness weren't enough of a hideous disappointment for me to bear, now you contemplate launching an unimaginably vicious personal attack on me!

You know who you remind me of? Norman Bates, the freak from Hitchcock's "Psycho." You're possessed by the banshee spirit of your own mother. But not your real mother. This spirit who is speaking through you, you mother's boy, you pantywaist, is none other than a figment of your own ungrateful, perverted, imagination! All I can say is, it's a good thing you're not a motelkeeper or you'd be skewering your lady guests in their showers like shishkabobs!

No wonder your relationships with women are so problematic! No wonder your only marriage ended in divorce! You're possessed by a female demon you imagine to be your mother! What do you do in your leisure time? Dress up in dresses from the 1940's? You'd probably look good in them, with those broad shoulders of yours. Big shoulders were all the rage in the '40's in men's and women's wear.

You say that only last week you were experiencing waves of volcanic rage against me. Let me ask you something. Which mother were you angry at? The real one or that crazed marionette that dances in your barren head? And if there is any overlap between your real mother and me, the demon, then I say how DARE you! How dare you feel the least rage or loathing toward your real mother, the woman who gave you life, who nurtured you, who loves you more than anyone on earth!

I'll tell you something. You're such a sick, twisted, puppy, that it's impossible that I, this demon in your head, this Medusa, this Gorgon, this Lucretia Borgia of imaginary mothers, could in any way shape or form describe your real mother. Your real mother is a delicate, feminine, loving, well-liked, well-bred, well-read creature. Without her, you wouldn't even exist. And without her encouragement of you, without her aspirations for you, you wouldn't be writing these very words.

So I forgive you for feeling volcanic rage against me, the mother of your nightmares. Because I am a blood leech in your brain and soul. I am not your real mother. Who knows how or why or from what material you manufactured me?

Your real mother loves you, and you love her. It is I who hates you and wants you to roast on a skewer in excruciating agony for the rest of your born days. It is I who plans to wreak havoc with your every future waking and sleeping moment, just as I have tornadoed through your past, and just as I sear this present.

Do you think that you can truly exorcise me from your soul for so much as a second? Don't make me laugh! I AM you! And let me remind you that while you are taking the time and the energy to write this, to speak for me, you are diverting energy away from accomplishing all the truly constructive activities of this life, such as making a living, finding a wife, and even cleaning your home!

You think that by giving me voice you are somehow delivering yourself of a burden! But I assure you you are only sinking yourself deeper into debt, and failure, and loneliness, and squalor, and despair!

As long as breath remains in your body, I'll always have the last laugh. I promise you I'll use your final exhalation to laugh at you. You can mock me, you can force me to spew unflattering tirades in which I mock myself, but it's really only you who will look ridiculous. And when the world reads what you have written, when the world reads your best effort to express yourself through the mask which is me, it will gasp in disgust. You won't be given fame, or the love of beautiful women, or money. You will be a pariah! And don't come to me when you're crying in your beer. I won't forgive or console you. You tried to advance your career by making a fool of me! And of course you failed! How dare you run your dirty linen up the rigging of the topmost mast and call it a victory pennant! What do you call those shit streaks on your "pennant"? Your coat of arms?

What will become of you? What WILL become of you? I warned and warned you when you were a boy that you would come to no good unless you got to knocking, turned over a new leaf, got serious, put some gas in your engine, got down to brass tacks, got right down to the real nitty gritty. But noooooo, you thought you knew better than to listen to me.

Well, here's your comeuppance. You're alone, you're broke, you're a middleaged failure, your looks are gone and nubile fillies avoid you like the plague, and things are only going downhill from here. I'd suggest you end it all now, do the world a favor and blow out your brains Hemingway-style---but Hemingway without the Nobel Prize!---but if you offed yourself, you'd kill me as well. And I really dig ripping your guts out! It's what I live for!

I know you're such a namby pamby that you would rather stand and let me gut you daily than let me drive you out into the world where you could gut others. And I hate you for that! You're so fucking self righteous and sterile and unproductive. With me fueling your volcanic rage, you could have become a great warrior, slaying ten thousand of the enemy with the jawbone of an ass. And I could have been that ass!

But no! You thought you'd turn and face and fight your own mother! Here's what I say to you. I condemn you to be at your best, and your worst, when you speak the most shameful truths you know, truths which I say are damnable lies!

Sure. Go ahead and share your ugly words with the rest of the world. I'll tell you what you're going to find out. That the rest of the world doesn't give a fuck. The rest of the world doesn't want to hear your squeakings and gibberings! The rest of the world has a LIFE for Christ's sake!

Don't kid yourself! You aren't expressing anything here that will speak for the torment in others' hearts! You're just vomiting bile and calling it ambrosia! No one else is sick enough, crazy enough, twisted enough to have demons like yours. And if they do have demons, they're so unlike yours that they couldn't possibly recognize theirs in your expression of yours. And even if your demon did somehow resemble theirs, you wouldn't have the craft to recognizably portray that resemblance.

And if you did happen to speak the painful truth, the awful truth that would help deliver others' from their personal misery-making mothers and/or assorted introjected ghouls, from their house of horrors inscapes, no one would ever admit that you had spoken for them because it would be too shameful, too embarrassing, to confess that they had such voices within them. They could not and would not own up. You would stand completely alone in this wide, wonderful, fine upstanding world of ours, and you would live to regret with your whole body and soul that you had ever had the effrontery to open your big yap and bray like the jackass you are.

--FIN--

Loser Friendly

1996-05-19T00:16:00.000-07:00

5/19/96

LOSER FRIENDLY
The advantage of being socialized, of participating in society and having a family and possibly even of becoming a member of your local and/or national community, is that you participate in a shared lunacy so you don't stick out like a sore thumb.

When you're an unsocialized crank like myself, you reveal your crackpottery every time you open your mouth. It's like the last moments of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers," in which the final human survivors try desperately but unsuccessfully to hide their human traits from the aliens-posing-as-humans who surround them. But there is this difference. I, a crank, am just as alien, as essentially inhuman, as you the socialized lunatics. Nay, I'm more alien and less human than you. At least you have families. At least you occupy, or occupied before you were downsized, corporate niches. At least some of you spent the better part of your adult lives interacting with your fellow humans in your capacities as lawyers, doctors, military officers, prostitutes, pushers, politicians, above-ground-swimming-pool-installers, race track touts, subway token clerks, portrait photographers, waitresses, and educators.

I, on the other hand, merely played at interacting professionally with my fellow human beings. I didn't have my heart in my work because I either had no heart, or was so out of touch with my heart that it was effectively irretrievable. I was a young eccentric well on his way to becoming an old crackpot, and this is my cautionary tale. Read it to your children at night so that they don't become a crank like me.

The key to being a crank was realizing, in that entity which I laughingly refer to as my heart, though it is not my heart, but a grotesque facsimile that I have manufactured over the years from odds and ends picked up on the street, in storm drains, and between the roots of trees, the key, as I say before I so rudely interrupted my mad burbling with more mad burbling, was to admit to myself what a thoroughgoing loser I was.

When I confessed as much to my friends, they gasped and told me to shut up and to never mention the subject again in mixed company. But I went on, matter-of-factly explaining that I was indeed a loser, that I had lost out on all the things of this world----family, social standing, economic security, self-respect, psychological and physical health and God knows what else. Others had won these things and I had lost them if I had ever had them or I had never succeeded in winning them in the first place and I was tired of pretending otherwise in my private or my public life. I was a complete loser. I stood revealed before the world, though the world doubtless had perceived the truth about me years before, possibly even at the moment of my birth.

I can imagine the obstetrician, seeing me poking my miserable red wrinkled head out of my mother's womb: "What a fucking loser! Who let this fuckhead out of the bag! Go back, go back, there's no future for you out here!" But I heedlessly made my way into the world in order to play out the cruel joke which turned out to be my life.

And eventually, which is to say in early middle age, after a long bout of physical and mental illness, I got the punchline. I'll never be like other people. As a friend said immediately after I announced at a social gathering that I was a loser: "You're not a loser, Doug, don't say that of yourself. You're just.....different." And everyone, myself included, had a hearty laugh. They laughed with relief that I was the loser and they weren't, and I laughed with relief at not pretending to be anything else. But they also laughed at her embarrassment. She clearly agreed with my painful self-assessment. But she could barely stand to spit out that word "loser" in public. It was the worst obscenity she knew, and if she admitted that a friend of hers was a loser then, by extension, she would be admitting that, despite her professional success, she had one foot in loserdom herself. So she groped until she stumbled upon that all-encompassing euphemism, "different," which is almost as dispiriting and politically correct a word as "special."

OK, fine. If your inner editor can't bear to read words written by a loser because you're afraid that they'll somehow rub off on you, and they just fucking might, then think of me as different, as scarily special. Think of me as a major fuck-up, who is constitutionally incapable of obtaining anything he sets out to obtain, whose best laid plans invariably come to naught. I'm Robert Burns' wee beastie, and my humble home is regularly laid waste by marauding plows, so regularly that I've decided it's hopeless to even scheme and dream because that way lies misery.

I never get any of the things I think I want. I'm tired of wanting. It's a very heavy burden. I could imagine it being a lighter burden if I frequently, or at least occasionally, hooked and landed what I was angling for. But I am like a fisherman fishing in a sewer. The best I can hope for is to gaff the odd turd, because that's all that swims around my hook.

Why don't I drop my hook in a different stream? Every stream becomes the Los Angeles River when I drop my hook in it. That's the nature of cranks and losers.

Now you see that I'm equating cranks and losers. And you may object that cranks are charmfree eccentrics, but they aren't necessarily losers. But I say that cranks are necessarily losers. Because cranks don't belong. And what they say doesn't make sense. They may think they know where they are or what they are talking about, but the sensible the world can clearly see cranks have lost their way and their sense of humor about having lost their way. Cranks don't have fun, they are the object of fun. Cranks take life seriously. But life doesn't take cranks seriously.

Cranks are lost to others and to themselves. Therefore they are, in the fundamental sense of the word, losers. You may object that I still have a sense of humor, that I have not lost my sense of humor about myself, that I feel compelled to make myself the butt of most of my jests. But do I feel FREE to mock myself? If my humor, my self deprecation, is the result of a compulsion, is it humor at all? Or am I merely spanking myself in public to gratify the masochist in me?

I assure you, I have no sense of humor. There is nothing free about my spirit. I am thoroughly earthbound. I am all compulsions. Not for me those moments of self-perception which deliver me from myself. I am always lost to myself yet trapped in myself. It's the worst of both worlds and the natural refuge of the true loser.

Loser loser loser. What else is this but the dirtiest label in the American language. Child molestor? Don't make me laugh. Michael Jackson and Roman Polanski are child molestors, but who would dare call them losers? They enjoy the best this world has to offer. They are celebrated by fans as they flit from mansion to mansion with their retinues of sycophants. If they aren't winners, who is?

Is mass murderer a dirtier label than loser? Stalin was a mass murderer of epic proportions and he died a winner's death, in his own bed, a head of state, surrounded by a circle of truly frightening colleagues and ghouls breathlessly awaiting the passing of his final breath. Or let's take a homelier example. Harry Truman. Didn't he order the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Doesn't he therefore qualify as a mass murderer? Yet who would characterize him as a loser? After committing his highly publicized double act of mass murder, he beat Tom Dewey in a campaign for election to the highest office in the land. How can we characterize such a man as anything but a winner? So even if Harry Truman was a mass murderer, he was a winner, which makes him better than a loser. Therefore mass murderers are better than losers.

Can a mass murderer be a loser? Mass murderers are by definition winners, because they won and their victims lost. When the bombs went off, Harry won and the Nagasakians and Hiroshimians lost. When a hunter puts a bullet in the brain of the elephant, who is the winner and who is the loser? The elephant loses his life and the hunter wins a trophy and the self-esteem which comes from knowing he has destroyed something precious and rare and wonderful and beautiful.

That's what makes the name of O.J. Simpson so magical. He pulled himself out of the slums of Oakland to blaze a trail of wins which seems to have no end in sight. He won the Heisman Trophy, he won the admiration of millions of couch potatoes and tailgate partiers, he won the heart of Nicole Brown Simpson. When he went head to head with Nicole and Ron Goldman, he came out of the scrimmage alive, and they didn't. Another win. And when he fled in the Bronco and came back home....who says you can't go home again?....he won or re-won the hearts of millions more fans. Then he and his dream team went head to head with Marsha and Chris, and lo and behold, the endzone! Acquittal!! Another victory to the man who knows not the meaning of loser.

Winners, if they go out at all, go out on top. Look at Adolph Hitler. Sure, things got a bit rough in the bunker in Berlin. But he knew how to end on an upbeat. He married, in the last hours of his life, the lovely, the charming, Eva Braun! And so what if his world was crumbling about his head? He was still in charge, was he not? Didn't the other gangsters and morons in the bunker view him as Der Fuhrer, right up to the moment he fired a bullet into his brain? So what if he wiped out tens of millions, so what he brought Armageddon to his homeland. The man went out on top. He was CEO of a blue chip nation for 13 exciting years. If this isn't a winner, what is?

Likewise, Saddam Hussein. Sure, he seemed to lose Desert Storm. But who's running Iraq? Saddam. And what are you running? Your own household? Or does your spouse wear the pants in your family? So Saddam lost a major war, and you didn't, yet he's a bigger winner than you. So what does that make you?

So you were right in being concerned that my loser-itis is contagious and that reading my words might give you, at the very least, a minor infection. But maybe this article will work like cowpox, which, in times past, protected milkmaids against the ravages of smallpox. That is, perhaps a minor infection of loser-itis will activate antibodies in your system, protecting you from the chronic, terminal loser-itis from which I suffer.

If you do contract a full-blown case of loser-itis as a consequence of reading this article, you have my sincerest apologies. And let me give you some advice: Once you set out down the trail of tears, of losing, don't look back. Set down the burdens of your former aspirations. Drop all pretence of trying to amount to anything, of being a person of value to yourself and others. If you cannot be free of anything else, at least free yourself of that.

There now. Can't you feel something relax in your chest? There's no need to worry any longer, the jig is up! You're a loser loser loser, and all your best efforts to the contrary will simply end in squalid defeat. So why even try?

Real estate with no money down? No Mr. Wu for you! Thighmasters and buttblasters? Who are you trying to kid? You're letting your body go, your finances go, your mind go, your spirit go. You're signing up for a postgraduate degree in Dumpster Diving. The siren song of the gutter is calling, calling, calling to you, and you're answering.

Congratulations, buster. You're not only well on your way to becoming a 14 carat loser, you're also a certifiable crank. Your opinions are now worthless to the rest of us. How can anything you say be of value? You're a loser! You are, by definition, an idiot! And a nutcase!

You no longer need to take thought before you speak, because no matter how much you think, you're going to sound like a crank, a crackpot, a loser, when you finally open your big, foolish, yap. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not take a ride on the Reading Line. Go directly to jail, motherfucker.

You have officially lost. Turn in your funny money to the winners. Sign over your utilities and your hotels and your fancy lot on Park Place. You are on the outside, looking in, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly for worse and in sickness.

How does it feel? Is it a relief? Do you wonder why you tried so hard all those years to be an insider? Does admitting you're a loser make you feel as if you've found yourself? Are you finally at home? Don't delude yourself. You'll never find yourself and you'll never be at home. That's the story of, that's the glory of, losers. It's why you feel so goddamn cranky. You're a crank, motherfucker, and there's no sense fighting your fate.

Nothing you have to say from here on out will make sense to the winners or the wannabe winners of the world. You're on the downward path, you're a dead duck. They're saying never say die. They know there are only a limited number of brass rings out there, but at least they're reaching for them. They'll reach for them if they have to dislocate their shoulders! They'll reach for them if their arms turn black and gangrenous and their eyes turn to marbles. It's the American Way!

And the last thing they want to hear, unless it's for comic relief, is the ranting of crackpot losers who gave up reaching, who don't even have enough hope to buy lottery tickets! Crackpots are so crazy they don't even have the sense to be desperate. They look desperate to the winners of the world, but they're beyond hope and hopelessness alike.

Crackpots act as if they think they're making sense. They babble like brooks and make no more sense than brooks, than birdbrains. Their chatter is music to the ears of winners, who, as the serious people of the world, feel compelled to make sense. So crackpots, losers, and fools do have a place, a placeless place, in this world. We're here to entertain the winners, to give them a laugh. Our craziness and fecklessness assures winners that their lives make sense and are truly headed somewhere. We are what not to be, where not to go. We are living cautionary tales. And our little lives are such a joke we're good for a laugh! Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!

In this sense, we are found. We are found, by the winners of the world, to be losers. Even if we are lost to ourselves, those who know where they stand know where we lie in relation to them. They know who they are, and they know who we are. They know they are making sense, and they know we are chattering and gibbering like simians.

It's a kind of consolation. Sure I feel cranky all the time, sure I'm lost and defeated and have none of the prizes of this world. But at least I have a function. I'm a signpost. This way madness lies.

--FIN--

Tired

1996-05-18T00:28:00.000-07:00

5/18/96

TIRED
I'm tired of complacent, cowardly, academic bureaucrats. I'm tired of mental midgets. I'm tired of drunken bullies bashing heads in the Los Angeles Coliseum. I'm tired of Al Davis. I'm tired of Al Davis moving back and forth between here and Oakland. I'm tired of Al Davis's ugly white pants, his uglier face and hair, and his stupid sentiments. I'm tired of thinking how many yards Marcus Allen might have gained in Los Angeles if Al Davis had used him right.

I'm tired tired tired. I'm tired of writing this. I'm tired of using tired rhetorical tricks to advance my banal agendas. I'm tired of reading housewives' fatuous comedy columns in the paper. I'm tired of reading professional male chauvinist journalists' columns in the paper.

I'm tired of writing by positing a peeve and opposing another peeve to it. I'm tired of working out so hard I exhaust myself. I'm tired of women who work out very very hard and still don't have good bodies. I'm tired of the fantastically shapeless, sloppy physiques of middleaged men who somehow expect to score with young women with perfect bodies.

I've come to a sticking point here, and I admit it.

I'm tired of being chastened. I'm just plain tired. Writing like this doesn't energize me, it exhausts me. I'm tired of quietly building up to writing sessions which amount to shit. I'm tired of having breakthroughs which quickly become breakdowns. I'm tired of biting my tongue during my mother's outrageous antics. I'm tired of extending myself to her and getting my tentacles sawed off. I'm tired of the way she uses her own refusal to see as an excuse to rip apart the family. I'm tired of respecting behaviour which deserves no respect. I'm tired of having been given life by a woman who has spent the last 4 decades trying to bust my balls. I'm tired of spoiled bourgeois bitches who try to take out their frustrations on their men.

I'm tired of doctrinaire feminists. I'm tired of hearing Rush Limbaugh say "feminazi." I'm tired of hearing Rush Limbaugh say anything. I'm so tired I'm going to go lie down in darkness. I'm tired of remembering. I'm tired of remembering all the things in my life I did wrong. I'm tired of picturing myself going back and doing them right, and I'm tired of picturing myself going back and doing them wrong again. I'm tired of how wrong everything in my life has turned out to be. I'm tired, very tired, of snobs.

I'm tired of the miserable material conditions of my existence. But I'm grateful for the roof over my head. I'm tired of my emotional desert. I'm tired of paying $39 a month to a gym I almost never use. But I'm glad to have the option of going there. I'm worried that if I drop my membership in the Y, I'll decide, 2 weeks later, that I want to rejoin. I'm tired of paying all my bills with money I don't have. I'm tired of watching my credit card balances mount to the high heavens.

I'm tired of making minimum payments on my credit cards and wondering when I won't even be able to make those. I'm tired of not being a father, but if I were a father, that would exhaust me. I'm tired of being middleaged, and I'll be even more tired of being old. I never tired of being young, though youth often made me miserable.

I'm tired of hearing about lives more successful than mine. I'm tired of seeing beautiful movie stars who wouldn't think of dating me. I'm tired of being hustled by women with whom I don't want to be publicly identified. I'm tired of hustling women who don't want to be identified with me. I'm tired of dating women who are, at best, platonic friends. I'm tired of being a male escort.

I'm tired of not being Bobby Bonds, Jr., or Ken Griffey, Jr., or some other impossibly young, black, rich, sports superstar who has his pick of beautiful groupies. I'm tired of being horny and obscure and poor. I'm tired of imagining myself to be talented and unrewarded.

I'm tired of beholding the spectacle of the unworthy being rewarded by a society gone mad. I'm tired of contemplating, in biographies and documentaries, the tragically unrecognized and unrewarded lives of the greats of the past.

I'm tired of having receding hair and a thick waist. I'm tired of knowing that it's all downhill from here. I'm not tired of feeling as if I'm just beginning my life, but I'm tired of beginning my life from scratch every morning of every day. I'm tired of not creating momentum for myself with the previous day, or year, or decade. Why can't I be a body in motion which, once set in motion, continues along that path at a constant velocity? Why must I be slowed by friction and air resistance? And I'm tired of wondering if air resistance is friction, as well. Air resistance is not friction. Friction is friction and air resistance is air resistance. But air resistance can cause friction which can superheat objects moving through air at high velocities.

I'm tired of wondering if I'm broken forever. I'm tired of being tired. I'm tired of giving myself peptalks. I'm tired of self-flagellation. I'm tired of words. I'm tired of coming to a grinding halt. I'm tired of being undermined by those who claim to love me best.

Is there any chance I'll accelerate instead of slowing down? And is acceleration really any better than deceleration? I'm tired of remembering childhood fights I won, and I'm tired of remembering childhood fights I lost. I'm tired of trying to remember what went wrong with my life, and I'm tired of suspecting that nothing is wrong.

I'm tired of feeling tired. I'm too tired to be enraged by my fatigue. I'm tired of hearing about depression---mine or yours. I'm tired of hoping to go on to my reward. I'm tired of taxes.

I'm tired of flossing, tired of brushing, tired of going to the dentist. I'm tired of good health and of bad.

I'm tired of the North Woods. I'm tired of yearning for flow and timelessness in my life. I'm tired of these words right here. And I'm tired of this one, as well. I'm tired of rhetorical devices. I'm tired of being a raving rhetorician. I'm tired of writing well, and I'm tired of writing less than well, and I'm tired of writing badly. I'm tired of anticipating my readers' reactions to what I write. And I resent not having any readers.

I'm tired of making invidious comparisons between myself and Alexander Solzenitsyn. I'm tired of wishing that a whaling ship had been my Yale and my Harvard College. I'm tired of studying Greek declensions. I'm tired of the AIDS plague. I'm tired of wondering how senile Ron Reagan has become. I'm tired of imagining Nancy Reagan, ruling the nation with the aid of an astrologer.

I'm tired of high concept movies. I'm tired of lascivious biographies of dead movie stars and moguls. I'm tired of Hollywood's self-congratulation. I'm tired of wishing I were a bigshot movie director. I'm tired of wishing I had the perks of an art hero, any kind of art hero. I'm tired. I'm tired of saying I'm tired of being tired, and I'm tired of hearing myself say I'm tired of being tired.

I'm tired of having to fight my way toward my own truth, and I'm tired of hearing other people say the same about themselves. I'm tired of my own self-dramatizing histrionics. I'm tired of peevishness---my own and others'.

I'm tired of not being more broadminded. I'm tired of not being more narrowminded. I'm tired of yearning for the peace and quiet of Wayne, Nebraska, in the 1950's. I'm tired of remembering Wayne's beautiful little turn of the century brick library. I hope it's still there, still being used by kids.

I'm tired of remembering Wayne's municipal pool, and its roller rink, and I'm tired of the way the prairie stretched out endlessly beyond them. I'm tired of the way silos dotted the landscape. I'm tired of the bountiful earth. I'm tired of the sound of grasshoppers, hopping from leaf to leaf in summer cornfields.

I'm tired of remembering trout course through a Pennsylvania stream, and I'm tired of the beauty of the Cumberland Valley. I'm tired of what a successful kid I was, and I'm tired because my childhood was the highpoint of my life. I'm tired that I'm not a father myself, but I'd be even more tired if I were a father.

I'm tired of my own rhetoric, but I don't seem to be able to help myself. I'm tired of spouting rhetoric in spite of myself. I'm tired of a world in which there is no place for the joy of rhetoric. I'm tired of cutting myself off at the pass, and I'm tired of getting in my own way, and I'm tired of not being able to get out of my own way.

I'm tired of beautiful women, and they seem less than thrilled by me. I'm tired of wanting women I can't have. I'm tired of wishing I had someone to take care of me. I'm tired of feeling sorry for myself and I'm tired of denying that I do.

I'm tired of words, I'm tired of syntax, I'm tired of vocabulary. I'm tired of style and I'm tired of editing. I'm tired of having an overstocked inventory of mad essays. I wish that I could write like an avenging angel. I wish I could create worlds of the imagination which my readers could happily inhabit.

I'm tired of being a literary trickster. I'm tired of feeling like I'm at the bottom of the literary food chain and I'm tired, very tired, of writing like an avenging solipsist. But not as tired as I am of those who exhort me to get involved with the human race. I want to say: Solipsists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your Narcissicism. But I'm too self-absorbed to take to the barricades.

I'm tired, very tired, of writing sentences with I in them. But I'm too self-absorbed to change now. I would very much like to write something that mattered to you, but I don't know you and I hesitate to speak to or for you. I'm too tired to reach out to you, but not too tired to evade you if you reach out for me. I'm sick of myself, tired to death of myself, all I know is myself, and I see myself through a glass darkly, through a glass wearily, through a glass filled with fatigue.

--FIN--

Ask Me

1996-05-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

5/14/96

ASK ME

Don't ask me to care I am unemployed and don't know where the rent is coming from. Don't ask me to care that mankind is overrunning the planet and extinguishing all the best species. Don't ask me to care that I'm not coming up with anything new. Don't ask me to care that I'm in the grip of despair. Don't ask me to care that I eat the air.

Don't ask me to care that I loathe many of the same people I love. Don't ask me to care that those closest to me and farthest from me have been fucking with me since the beginning. Don't ask me to care that I'm a conscript in the War of the Babies. Don't ask me to care that personalities like Bruce Willis and Sly Stallone and Mike Eisner and Don King and Jesse Helm and Elizabeth Dole and Richard Simmons and Sally Jesse Raphael and KoKo the Maneating Chimp thrive in this society.

Don't ask me to care that I am required to pay car insurance, but 20% of California drivers carry none. Don't ask me to care that I've got to take a pee. Don't ask me to care that I am in despair, despair, despair. Don't ask me to care that we are evaporating into thin air, thin air, thin air. Don't ask me to care that I wear a heavy leaden crown.

Don't don't don't. Ask ask ask. Me me me. To care. Don't ask. Care? I care about everything. And nothing. That's the way it's done, isn't it? Is it a good idea to care too much about any one thing? Is it a good idea not to care about anything? Is caring an idea at all,or is it an emotion, or it is a big ball of hokum, sold to gullible yokums?

Care? Don't ask me to care. Don't ask me to buy what you're peddling, and I promise not to sell you mine. Let's mutually agree to keep our own junk in our own garages. Next time I hold a garage sale, I'm just going to carry two items: ecstasy and despair. Don't ask me to care which, if either, you're foolish enough to buy. Feel free to bargain with me. I'll sell at any price....so long as I like the cut of your jib, and maybe even if I don't.

Don't don't don't, don't ask me to care. Don't ask me to care about your career. Don't ask me to care about the state of your hemorrhoids. Don't ask me to care about your relationship to your parents, and I won't ask you to care about mine. Don't ask me to care if you care. Don't ask me to care if I care. Don't don't don't, ask me to care.

OK. If you insist. Ask me to care. Ask me to care about any damn thing you want. Ask me to care if the crocuses are pushing through the snow. Ask me to care what happens to retarded children when they grow up and try to make their way in the world. Ask me to care about murdered Bosnians, fried Nagasakians, slaughtered Tutsis, poached Hutus, cindered Iraqis, clobbered Aztecs, butchered Seminoles, massacred Sioux, drowned Bengladeshis, bombed Lebanese, martyred Vietnamese, buried-alive Chinese, exploited Tahitians, and betrayed Poles. Ask me to care about pink armbands and Star of David armbands. Ask me to care about the States of Israel and Palestine. Ask me to wear a red ribbon on my lapel and tie a yellow ribbon round my old oak tree.

Ask me to care about the children I'll never father. Ask me to care about the children others have fathered and abandoned. Ask me to care about the words I never wrote and the words I did. Ask me to care about bicycles. Ask me to care about air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin. Ask me to care about the state of the South Bay storm drains. Ask me to care how it feels to bicycle, by coast, to Manhattan Beach and back. Ask me about promiscuity among the youth of South Bay communities.

Ask me how it makes me feel to see, as I whiz by on my bike, a young Amazon playing volleyball in a dayglo swimsuit. Ask me whether I worship the shape of her legs and ass. Ask me whether I would be indifferent to the prospect, however unlikely, of sexual congress with such a one.

Ask me how hard it is to be my mother's son. Ask me whether all my college classmates who are still alive, as well as some of those who aren't, have surpassed me in material well-being. Ask me if my life has value to anyone, anywhere. Ask me if I despair. Ask me if I care if I despair. Ask me if I care if you despair. Ask me if I care if you care if I despair. Ask me if I care if you care if I care if you despair. Ask me. Ask me. Ask me.

Ask me if I care you still owe me for that bike I sold you on trust. Ask me if I feel betrayed. Ask me if I care whether I feel betrayed or not. Ask me if I feel deceived by you. Ask me if I care whether I feel deceived. Ask me if care whether a bunch of Yuppies in the grip of midlife crises died on Mt Everest yesterday.

Ask me if I care. Ask me. Ask me. Ask me.

Ask me, if I don't care, why I read the newspaper. I read to find out what it is I don't care about, of course. Or, if you prefer, I will care about it. I will care about it all. I will care what Ann Landers advises "Horny in Houston" to do with her unrequited lust. I will care what my horoscope says. I will care what M. L. Rosenthal's point of view is. I will try to be more attentive to the words of William Safire. I will attend to Anthony Lewis and Art Buchwald and Maureen Dowd and William Buckley. Well, I don't know about William Buckley. Is it OK if I just read his son's tobacco satire, and leave it at that?

I will care about whatever you suggest I care about. Should I care about the state of health of your immediate family members? So be it. Should I care that you haven't been laid in 6 months, and that your spouse seems to be getting some strange? I'm caring, I'm caring.

Should I care that children in the Sub-Sahara region are suffering from malnutrition? Can you hear? That's my stomach, growling with sympathetic hunger pangs. Should I care that I appear to sound cynical? My profoundest apologies. I'll do my best to appear sweetly sentimental from here on out.

Should I care that Mother Theresa is a better person than I am? I prostrate and prostate myself before her public image. I abjectly apologize to the Goodness Police and beg them to please officer, please, let me off just this once. Should I care that Donald Trump has more debt than I do? I care, Donald, really I do. But don't look back, I'm gaining on you. And Donald? When you're done with Marla, if there's anything left, would you pass her to me?

Should I care that Donald has dandy digs in Trump Towers, while I rot in a rathole? I care, I swear I do. Should I care that my unfancy car and flat and clothes and income and social standing make me less than desirable in the eyes of some fabulous looking women? I care, I swear I do, I care.

Should I care that I'm not at the top of my form every waking moment? Should I care that the world's not beating a path to my door? Should I care that I don't stride the earth like a colossus? Should I care that my dad, whatever our misunderstandings, really loves me? Should I care that I have, at last, found a way to express myself? Should I care that I despair of ever publishing what I write or ever reaching others' hearts with same?

Should I care I'll never get to heaven, on this earth or in the afterlife? Should I care that little old ladies are lavishing big bucks on toy dogs while children in Haiti starve? I care, really I do. I care about every fucking thing if it makes you happier, if that's what it takes for you to love me. I care about reaching you. I care about being on your side and lending you a hand. Just as much as I care about butting heads with you and smacking you down.

I care about sunsets, and puppy dog tails, and sugar and spice. Sure I do. I promise I do. I care about the state of the union. I care about who's elected in the upcoming gubernatorial campaign. Actually, I just like saying gubernatorial. Mayoral has a ring to it, too. I care that you were born with an ugly raspberry birthmark across your cheek, and that you were led, by a late night infomercial, to purchase a cosmetic product which hides the birthmark, but which makes you look as if you've been bobbing for apples in plaster of Paris. I care whether or not to capitalize the Paris in plaster of Paris. I care about common nouns and proper nouns alike.

I care about body odor. I care about carbuncles. The bigger and juicier the better. I care if you've got polyps in your nose. I care that I can't seem to write a sentence that doesn't have I in it. I care that I rant and declaim, but am not creating a fully-imagined, fictional, world in which you can live. I care that these words don't free me and you from the burden of self-consciousness.

I care that there was no room at the inn that icy night in Nazereth, or rather, Bethlehem. I care that the Lord Whateverhisnamewas was crucified and rose again that I may live and care. I care about and believe in all the world's religions, especially yours. I just want to make you happy. What can I do to make you happy? Tell me what you believe in, and I'll believe in it, too.

I care that I am writing now. I care that I am being productive. I care that I cannot make money from what I am doing right now. I care that my bills are mounting. I care that my mother willfully and skillfully misconstrues everything I say and do. I care that this is the way of mothers, who give us life so that they can make us leap through hoops of fire.

I care that the mailman will soon bring the mail, which, in my case, will include plenty of bills but no checks. I care that my memory's going. I feel delivered from everything I am forgetting. I care that I'm dying on my feet. I care that this is the way of the world. I care that healthy young female humans are naturally attracted to healthy young male humans, not to unhealthy middleaged subhumans.

I care that the sun is shining like a mocking brass bell in the pitiless California sky. I care that this piece is going nowhere, that you can dive into it anywhere, that you can take a slice of it from anyplace you please and leave the rest for dead. I care. I really fucking care.

I care that for me the writing process is completely mysterious, like stumbling through underbrush in the dark. My mind is a machete which is losing its edge. I've lost my bearings and can't remember if I'm in the Amazon or New Guinea. Everyone I meet looks like the Wild Man of Borneo, so maybe that's where I am.

I care, I really care, that Japan is denuding the forests of Indonesia while back in Kyoto, zen nature worship proceeds apace. I care that the big cats of the world are being extinguished to make Chinese medical nostrums. Would I care any more or less if these ground up tiger bones actually cured anyone of anything? Do I care if the body parts of endangered species have a placebo effect? Do I care if powdered rhino horns really make Taiwanese more potent?

Do I care that something seems to be happening to the corners of my lips? That they don't provide the seal that they once did, that they are leaking, that I'm drooling all over my computer? Do I care that my family has excellent genes, that I may have inherited a strong, longlasting heart along with my low I.Q.?

Do I care that this piece seems to be going on forever? Do I care that I am not writing an epic novel which will be saluted by all the critics? Do I care that a big movie deal isn't in the offing? Do I care that I'm a marginal man? Do I care that many Americans are addicted to money, but that there is not yet a 12-step program for them, because it's OK to be a rich bitch and/or sonuvabitch? Do I care that I can't bring to mind the name of that cockney asshole who brings us the lives of the rich and famous?

Do I care that someone, somewhere, is eating better than I am, fucking better, sleeping better, digesting better, listening better, running better, singing better, loving better, writing better? I care, I swear I really care.

Do I care that I am a pitiless individual? Do I care what hypocrisies you entertain?

Do I care that Francois Truffaut was a cinematic genius who discovered, late in life, that his genetic father was a Jewish dentist who somehow survived the Holocaust? Do I care that I was hatched from a platypus egg, and that my parents scooped me from the billabongs of the outback and brought me to American disguised as the bastard kookaburra offspring of a wallaby?

Do I care that I can no longer remember my national origins, or that I was a son of the pioneers? Do I care what color my skin is? Do I care what color your skin is, or how straight my hair is, or how round your eyes are, or how broad my nose is?

Do I care what you believe in? If it'll make you any happier, I'll believe in it, too. If you feel you must kill me in order to convert me, take your best shot. But it really won't be necessary. I'll convert to whatever tickles your fancy.

Do I care that America lost the Vietnam War? Did America lose it? Did it only win it when it lost it? What was it the Vietnamese won? Vietnam? Is that something I want? Is Vietnam something you want? What would you do with it if you had it? Would it be a burden, or could you carry it lightly? If you promise to carry it lightly, I'll give it to you. There. Is everything okay now?

Do I care that Andrew Lloyd Webber, with his suspect musical virtuosity, makes scads of money, as do Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow, but that the Captain and Tenille and Tony Orlando and Dawn have seen better days, and that Andy Gibb will see no more days at all? Do I care, really care, that Albert Einstein was way, way, smarter than I? Better he than I be burdened with all those brains.

I wouldn't have known how to wear them lightly.

Do I want to take the time and effort to try to find what's positive in rap? Do I miss H. Rap Brown, and can I remember what he said when what he said was being reported? Is he as eloquent now as he was then?

What does an 8-track sensibility do in a digital age? Retool or despair? Should it care?

When I watch "All Quiet on the Western Front," why does it make me weep? Do I really care what happened to a bunch of fictional Germans in World War One? Do I care that I am sodden, saturated, sopping with despair? I care. I really, really care.

Do I care that Bobby DeNiro gained 60 pounds to play Jake DeMotta? Do I care that Martin Scorsese is a living cinematic legend? Do I care that The Pawnbroker left me speechless the first time I saw it? Do I care that director Arvin Brown's 1972 staging of Long Day's Journey into Night left me sobbing?

What if I cried me a river. Would I care? Should I care? Should you care? Why should you care? You'd have to be crazy to care. I'd have to be crazy to care if you cried yourself a river, but if it'll make you any happier, I'll care.

What does it take for me to write? I have to make it my number one priority. I have to forget that I'm unemployed and in debt. I have to forget what sells. I have to be rested. I have to give it my very best self. I have to set down exactly what I hear in my head. I have to go beyond despair. I have to despair and not despair.

If I don't write exactly what is in my head, I'm not writing, I'm lying. And there's no pleasure in that, no matter how much money I'm paid to do it. It's too much work to try to keep the lies straight. Anyway, I won't be paid whether I whether I am true or false to my inner voice, so I may as well be true to it and obediently transcribe it.

I wish I could create a fully imagined fictional reality for you if that's what you would prefer to read. I just want to make you happy. But if speaking my mind does not make you happy, then you should find and read the words which do make you happy. Or maybe you should write them yourself.

The question is: Is my first priority making you happy, or is it setting down the words I hear in my head? Am I here to write what you think you want to hear? What if the words in my head are what you think you want to hear, but you don't realize that until after you hear them? What if I'm speaking for both of us when I say this?

Why do I feel so fresh and sharp today? Why do I feel I could bury you in words? Is it because the weather is cool, and the birds outside are singing their hearts out? Is it because I've made my peace with my shaky prospects for the future?

Right now a car alarm is blasting outside my window. Do you think it's bothering me? Do you think it's breaking my concentration? Do you think it's throwing me off my serve?

If this is what I am writing, how the hell am I going to make a living as a writer? What if writing this way makes me unsuited to do anything else for a living, but I can't make a living writing this way? Then what am I doing here? Making a dying? Are these words sealing my doom?

Why am I taking pleasure in them? Because they're slow suicide? Why are you reading them? In order to watch an author disintegrate, immolate himself in his own language?

Am I a Buddhist monk, protesting the war in Vietnam by burning himself in a Saigon street? Isn't it a little late for that? And are these words really so hot I can flambe myself with them?

Am I an informer in Soweto, dying with a burning tire wrapped around him? Am I a Spanish witch being subjected to auto da fe? Am I, am I, am I, going up in smoke?

Are these words a brand? Do they sear into my flesh and make a smell like burning eggs? If I am frying myself with my vocabulary, how long will it be before I'm an ash with nothing left to burn? When this piece is complete, will I be a pile of gray dust in the shape of a Doug which you can knock into nothingness with a puff of air? Will I , will I, will I care?
-FIN-

Ode to Joy

1996-05-11T00:30:00.000-07:00

5/11/96

ODE TO JOY

Right now, May feels like a gigantic waste of my time. Right now, June feels like a gigantic waste of my time. Spring feels like a gigantic waste of my time. Right now, time feels like a gigantic waste of my time. Right now, jerk off mags feel like a gigantic waste of my time. Right now, auto insurance feels like a gigantic waste of my time. Right now, everything feels like a gigantic waste of my time. Stargazing feels like a waste. Whalewatching feels like a waste. Girlwatching feels like a waste. Waistwatching feels like a waste.

Music appreciation: a waste. Gluttony: second, third, and fourth helpings of waste. Moderation and the golden mean: a double waste, an immoderately moderate waste. Politics: worse than a waste. Taking a dump: waste waste waste. Flushing: Waste of water and time. Philosophy: braindrain. Money: A waste of spirit in an expense of shame. Getting my rocks off: Sounds tempting, but don't waste the Big O on me. Family? Everyone should have one----except moi. Pets? Set 'em down. Cars? Flatten 'em. Runway models? Fatten 'em. Music execs? Bury 'em in platinum. Herman Wouk? Don't make me puke. King Farouk? A royal kook. Betty Boop? Out of the loop. Beyond Baroque? An inside joke. God? A ling cod, an old sod. Yo' mama? Mamarama. Strippers? Jam their zippers. Coke? Up in smoke. Cops? Paste 'em. Criminals? Waste 'em. Electric chairs? I'll take a pair. Prison? Derison. Heaven? Seven come eleven. Hell? Swell.

Fine clothes? Rags will do nicely. Nakedness? I'd offend my own eye. The truth? Which one? Lies? Sties in our eyes. Darkness? That I might be able to see. Chill? Let me think...I might be able to warm up to that...if it didn't make me ill. Icebergs? Entomb me in one. I'll take a round the world voyage. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll bump into another Titanic and take us both down. The future? Looks black black black. Yoga? Why don't you just crack my back on a railroad track and make a swift end of it? Gymnasiums? I'd rather have a chalazion. Animals? Give me naugahyde. Plants? Only in unheated cans with plenty of preservatives. Blubber? I do it every day. Trees? Are for the birds. Turds? Now your talking my language. Wars? I carry my own, it's psycho-civil; I'm seceding from myself, then crushing my rebellion.

Bosses? Line 'em up against the nearest wall. Workers? What are they, chumps? Cancer? I'll take a double dose, and top mine with chemotherapy and cobalt. Barium enemas? Only if you first hang me upside down from a meathook. Homework? Should ruin every child's life. Sentiment? Is for the soft. Boxing? Back to bare fisticuffs! I want to see eyeballs rolling like marbles round the ring. Slavery? Just the obscenity we need to revive. Jazz? For buppies. Rap? May it demoralize everyone in America under the age of 21. Bank robbery? Why the fuck not. And you, bank guard. Yeah, it's me, the guy with the pantyhose over his head and larceny on his mind. Kindly put a bullet in my ear on my way out, will you please? If I get any farther than the sidewalk it'll feel like a career, and we can't be having that.

Presidents? Put 'em all under house arrest in a Motel 6. Minimalls? I glory in them. The Internet? Just the denatured non-experience I yearn for. Green grass? Up your ass. A sharp stick in the eye? Shish kabob me brain, immediately. Depression? I'll take two, acute and chronic, and toss in some unhealable lesions, will you? Veterans of Foreign Wars? Yes! What a joy to down doughnuts with them on a Wednesday evening at the old Legion Hall, and afterwards, we'll go bowling!

Slipped discs? I'd like one between every cracked vertebra. Physical health? You can have mine. Endangered species? Clear 'em off the map! Hudson's Bay? The toilet of the Great White North. The Gulag Archipelago? Bring it back and stick me in it, I'm weeping with nostalgia!

The Champs Elysee? Stick it up your Arc de Triumph. Blue skies? Bring 'em down, and the birds that fly in them. Rainbows? Broken promises. Planets? Stick 'em in your hat, put it on your head and call it curls. Bugs? I'll take a heaping dumpster-full. Microbes? A trillion, please, in my frontal lobes. Fungus? Get it among-us. Despair? Can't you smell it in the fresh Spring air?

Unemployment? Yes! And with no compensation! Roofs? Off they come! Bring on the monsoon! Comets? Don't make me vomit. Rhinestones? In the Queen's cunt! Oatmeal? As much as you want. More than you want. And no raisins or brown sugar topping!

Sandwiches? Stale shit sandwiches only. Conscription? For everyone. Commitment? To the nearest asylum. Declevity? Yes, but no levity. Cavities? Drill me to oblivion, Doctor, I am your obedient pain-slave.

Drive-ins? They're so great to be alive-in. Kodiak bears? Maul me, momma. Toupees? Make mine slippery. Sy Sperling's hair club for men? I want permanent dismembership. Hatfields and McCoys? Bring back, and arm with assault weapons, the boys. Neanderthals? Welcome to The 21st Century, y'all, prognathous jaws and all. Infected genitals? I'll take seven dozen u-renitals.

I'm beginning to feel ever so much better. Thanks for hearing me out. Michigan Malicia? Give 'em more clout. World Trade Center? Bomb it benter and benter. Fear? Draw me near. Hopelessness? I bleatingly confess. Sex? Only with Tyrannosaurus Wrecks. Loneliness? Yes, I embrace it, I'm so blessed.

Craps? Snake eyes. Snake eyes. Snake eyes. Roulette? Bet it all on double zero. Emperors? I'll take Nero. What about Caligula? I couldn't give a figula. Fistulas? Love 'em, yearn for 'em, especially on limp wristulas.

Draft me murder me flay me tax me divorce me betray me abandon me deceive me exploit me ravage me loot me pollute me enslave me infect me vivisect me, eviscerate me, plait me, upbraid me, berate me, castrate me, tar me, feather me, run me out on a rail, lynch me, pinch me, steal my youth and age me old, get inside my head and make my brain a jello mold.

Make every night be Sunday night, make every morning Monday morning. Give me a 4 hour daily commute on the 405 Freeway. Appoint me dogcatcher to the world, and let rabies run rampant amongst my fourfooted furry friends. Darken the sky, vanquish the light, cast me in shadow, morning noon and night. Never thank me when you can wank me.

Wake me wake me wake me from this urban nightmare. From here on out, I want my misery rustic. Rust all my tools. Scatter my bones. Strip me of my loved ones and I'll roam the fields alone. Make my epitaph the cry of the northern loon.

Bore me bore me bore me silly. Willy nilly. Ignore me. Give me Bob Dole. Stick my head upon a pole. Gaily 'doze me into a mass grave. Celebrate the cowardly and desecrate the brave. If you can't cremate me, flop my naked limbs like angel hair, like fish bait, like the forgotten legions of the damned, into a hole of my own making.

Array the hordes of Genghis Khan before me. Give me an ultimatum which I cannot accept. Storm my walls, sack my city, rape my women, slaughter my children, make a pyramid of the skulls of my countrymen, and save me out for special torture.

I'm a Crusader, climbing a crenulated wall, taking cauldrons of hot pitch in my face. I'm a Saracen, skewered by a Christian sword.

I'm the abandoned 4th wife of a fertile, syphilitic, nomadic patriarch, giving birth, after 36 hours of lonely labor,in a cougar-infested mountain meadow. No midwife is in sight.

The sun is going down on my world. When I awake, all is scoured, waxed, sparkling, and running and flying backasswards towards the beginning of time. The buffalo and the passenger pigeon return en masse, a hundred million billion strong. High plains Indians gallop through the thundering herds. Moctezuma's lost city stands again, a gleaming fairy dream in the Mexican mountains.

Backwards spins the world round the sun as sabre-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths reclaim the Miracle Mile. Oil fields devolve and coagulate: dinosaurs shake the earth. Amphibians backstep, tail-first, into the sea, become armored fish, become trilobites. Now algae rules supreme. Now life becomes chemistry, predating the first, Frankensteinian, vitalizing, bolt.

Rocks are my only companions. They glow orange in a volcanic orgy. I am present at the birth of planets. Stars explode. Blackholes suck light into the back of beyond. I am face to face with the Prime Mover of the Universe. I interrogate my Creator at great length, under bright lights. I put the electrodes to the private parts. I force my Maker to confess His/Her perversity.

I don't, I snarl, appreciate being the butt of this cosmic joke. I refuse to get it, adamantly refuse to get it, refuse to hear the bell, open the door, pick up the phone, though I'm desperate for a wake-up call from a lifetime of sedation, from a five billion year coma. The clock is ticking, ticking, ticking. It's five minutes to midnight. My eyes are on the secondhand. Every instant is an eternity. This prank's gone on long enough. No more mystic wank. I'm alone, awaiting my punchline, and Goddammit, I expect to receive it, I will only accept it, I demand it, in the form of an apology.

--FIN--

Home and Away

1996-05-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

5/9/96

HOME AND AWAY

"What is your original face before
your father and mother were born?"

OK. I admit. I'm unbalanced. So what else is new. And what are you going to do about it? Nada. That's what I thought. Hiding behind your facade of pseudo-sanity. You're crazier than any of us! Because you pretend to be sane!

How can you hope to be cured if you won't admit you're sick! And if you are playing a role in this sick society you are most certainly sick yourself. Do you think you can just don the mask of a participant when you go to work, and peel it off when you come home? By participating you become a participant! When does the masquerade cease? When you come home from work and blow it out your ass before your astonished and horrified family? When you fart around the golf course? When you fall physically ill and go under the surgeon's knife? It's all part of the play, the unending play.

The play in which I play the fool. Not that there aren't many parts for fools in my play. Our play. Let's put on a show! we say. And here it is. The garage show to end all garage shows.

World wars, depressions, plagues, exultations, assassinations, mass exoduses from and entrances into asylums...it's all here for our delectation. We've all been given our lines. Every morning there's another shooting call to answer. In fact, we shoot all through the night as well.

The hours are long, very long, in this play, this movie, this travesty, this farce, this tragedy. Sometimes we're death at the box office. Not one living soul comes to see us, but still we're acting our hearts out! Other times, when we're desperately yearning for privacy, the whole world turns out to stare and glare at our shame. And once every million scenes or so, everything blends together beautifully. We're at the top of our form, we're beautiful, and noble, and we're doing just what God intended us to do, we're practicing the craft we've spent our whole lives perfecting, and miracle of miracles, the whole neighborhood comes out to see us!

Ever afterwards, or at least until our next disaster, which is probably right around the corner, the memory of our triumph is seared in the minds of our fellow humans! Not to mention in our own minds! Yes! We are our own best audiences, seated in the amphitheaters of our skulls, watching our own antics. It's a theater in the round, and the stage is all around us. It's surround-sound. Except when we have blackouts. Then we can't remember, or at least deny, what the hell we did and said. Unless others give us our notices and insist on what they saw and heard us do. And when we blackout, the reviews tend to be hideous. No! we cry. That was someone else! An actor who looked like me, sounded like me, coincidentally had my stage name!

And once in a while a forgiving critic tells us not to take it to heart, that some other bastard wrote our part and we had no choice but to play it. But we know in our souls that even when we blackout we make up our lines as we go along because we are not only actors but also playwrights and directors and stage managers and ticket takers, all rolled (roled) into one, in a production of our own making.

Now the weird thing is that not only are we all playing roles in this gigantic pageant called life, but some of us are playing roles within roles. We are players, actors. And it is only as actors that we get a chance to be something "real," to be firemen or soldiers or lovers or fathers or mothers.

Because those of us who are playing truly dedicated actors are never anything else in "real life." Those of us whose primary fealty is to the life of the imagination are all too aware that we only pretend to belong to families, fight for our countries, bring home the bacon. Do you know when we REALLY love, and hate, and murder, and save, and transgress, and redeem? Do you know when we really ACT? Act with our whole hearts? When we act, on stage, or before the camera, or before heaven's eye, or in the public eye, or in the mirror of our mind's eye. Then we speak the lines that others have written for us, or the lines we are writing for ourselves. That is when, at last, we inhabit our characters and discover who we are.

We players are the ultimate subversives. We are not to be trusted. Or perhaps we are most to be trusted because we are more keenly aware than anyone that we are just playing at being human beings, that we are just playing at being participants in this society, this cosmos.

We know, deep inside, that we are aliens, sent here from another world. We merely clothe ourselves, for a few years or decades, in flesh suits. We learn languages, but none are our mother tongues. We are exiles in this universe, but we can remember nothing specific of our homelands, of the paradise from which we came and to which we truly belong.

And that is why we struggle to recreate that world, that world we cannot remember, but for which we yearn every living and sleeping moment. We roam this planet like ghosts, looking for a way back home, and, in our groping despair, our failure to be anything but displaced persons, we call ourselves players, actors, artists, tricksters, spies, fools, panhandlers, politicians, sculptors, writers, painters, prostitutes, entertainers, comics, architects, musicians, weavers, cardsharps, hustlers, showboats, channelers, seers, prophets, preachers, and palmists.

We are all from an alien cosmos, a parallel universe. But some of us seem to have forgotten it. Some of us actually believe, or pretend to believe, that this world is our home. We play our roles earnestly, humorlessly. We believe what we believe, do what we do, the world is what it is, and that is all there is to it. No nonsense! We are soldiers, priests, mothers, even artists, even actors! Some of us actually believe that we are actors! We forget that we came from somewhere else. We think that we are what we pretend to be.

Look at this actor over here, in this unemployment line. He not only believes he's an actor, he believes that he's an unemployed actor. I know he's playing an unemployed actor. What he really is is a being from a parallel universe which cannot be known by the mind of man, puny, benighted, man.

And here's another actor. He's a star, or at least he believes he is. And he plays heroes in the cinema. And as if his lack of irony about himself weren't already ridiculous enough, he also has deluded himself into believing he actually IS a hero.

He plays cowboys in the cinema, and so he has bought a ranch in Montana, though he was born and bred in Brooklyn. He rides his horse on his newly purchased range, and imagines he cuts quite a figure with his expensive boots and sunglasses....until his horse steps in a gopher hole and catapults him into a barbed wire fence. And there he is, home and alone on the range, and just for a moment, as he disentangles the barbs from his torn shirt, he sees that he is laughable.

Now he has two choices. Does he feel shame, and desperately hope that no paparazzi in an overhead helicopter snap photos of him while he's down and bleeding on his bruised keester? Or does he laugh? Does he get the joke of himself? Does he see that he was only playing at being a moviestar cowpoke, and that in his movies, he was playing again, and that he was also only playing at being an actor, and that he was playing at being a human being as well? Does he keep laughing at he realizes that he really doesn't know what he is, that his whole life has been a masquerade?

And if he has laughed this hard, this long, does he then wonder what it is he will do with the rest of his life? What else does he know how to do but pretend to be a human pretending to be an actor pretending to be a cowboy hero? His fans take him for a movie star. His wife, if he has one, takes him for a husband. Shouldn't he just go along with the joke? If he remembers this laugh for the rest of his life, if he stays true to this realization, will his ability to manage in the world be devastated? Can he get the joke of his life every living moment of his life and still go on?

Will laughing at himself this way lead to despair and disability? Will he, once he disentangles himself from that barbed wire, be able to climb back on his horse, if his horse hasn't broken its leg? Will he be able to go on with his life, or will he just sit there, on the lone prairie, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh?

And if, somewhere in his soul, he always and ever afterwards is laughing, what is he laughing at? At what a deluded fool he is? At the memory of that other place, that placeless place, which was, is, and always will be his true home? Will he know, from here on out, in his heart of hearts, that there is only one truth that matters, and that truth is heartbreaking, and that is that we are all lost, and know not who or where we are, and that we only find our way when we realize as much?

Will he then dedicate the rest of his life to phoning home, to keeping up the wires between the self that he is in this world and his true self, the self that he has always been, the self from whose breast he was torn when he was born?

Will he know that his life is a double, and perhaps a triple or even a quadruple exposure, that he inhabits one world overlaid upon another? Will he forget himself from time to time, or perhaps for years at a time? Or will he always keep that covenant which was that laugh, that laugh he had at his own expense?

And if he stops laughing, but remembers the echo of his laughter, how will he find his way back to the joy he once felt at realizing he was nothing and nobody? Will he go back to making movies, and try to make a movie that shares his joyful realization with the world? Will he stay on his ranch, and keep riding the range, and hope that one day his horse will step in another gopher hole and send him flying so that he will once again come to his senses by losing all sense of who he thinks he is?

Is there a heavier burden with which to saddle a child than to make that child believe that he or she is somebody? Of course the child is somebody. Of course the child is nobody. Don't fence him in without giving him the key to the corral. Or must each of us figure out for ourselves how to get out of our corrals---the corrals others have built for us as well as the corrals of our own making? And if we are able to get ourselves out, will we also be able to get ourselves in?
--FIN--

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

1996-05-04T00:07:00.000-07:00

5/4/96

INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW

I'm trying to get to a feeling. The feeling of being loved. Does anyone really love me? Does anyone really love me that I love back? Do I really feel much love? Is it important to feel love? Is it important to cultivate love within one's self? Is it important to cultivate the capacity to accept and enjoy the love of others? Is love suspect? Does it really exist? Is it a kind of drug? Is love the real opiate of the people?

Where does one go to learn about love? Orgy houses? Aren't they the loneliest places on earth? Is there anything more emotionally barren than the seeker at the orgy, searching for physical intimacy with strangers?

Where does one learn how to love? Where does one learn how to accept and appreciate the love of others? And do I mean the same thing by the word that you mean?

Love is a four letter word. Is it a lie? Is it a feeling, or a deed?

Can we trust poets who are primarily concerned with impressing us? Can we trust those who use words to advance their own agendas instead of exploring their own truths? Can you trust these words, my words? Can I trust you, the reader?

I'm writing, I'm write write writing along. Can I trust the act of writing? Is my faith in this process misplaced? Am I writing merely to advance my own selfish needs? Is there love in this act, in these words? Can I somehow put love in these words so that you read them and feel the love? Is this some kind of shellgame I'm playing with words instead of shells? Am I inviting you to bet your time and energy and hope that there is love under one, or possibly all, of these words?

And if you lifted up these words, one by one, and found the pea of love under each one, or at least some, of them, would you know what to do with that love? Or would you simply consider yourself a winner, would you simply congratulate yourself for winning the bet, for being so clever, for not being outsmarted?

What if, I'm not saying it's true, but just suppose what if I weren't trying to outsmart you. What if I actually managed to hide love in every word? Even if you lifted up the words, even if you took the time and energy to lift up the words, would you be able to see and hear and feel and taste and touch the love?

How dare I say I'm putting love in these words. Who's to say what's in my heart, really. Aren't I just playing games with you? And who the hell are you that I should be sending love to you in my words. And who the hell am I that I should be sending love to you in my words? And who the hell are you that you should be receiving it into your heart, that you should be seeing it in every word, hearing it, feeling it, touching it, tasting it?

What is love? Is it a warm mushy feeling? Is it the opposite of hate? Am I wishing you well?

If, when I hate you, I wish you harm, then when I love you, do I wish you well? And what is well for you? Physical health? How can I send you physical health in these words? Prosperity? If I really wished you prosperity, shouldn't I be sending you money?

How can I send you love in a letter? In order to give you love, don't I have to be there, sitting beside you, giving you warm looks, meeting your needs? If you are a man, and you experience love through sex with a woman, how can I, another man, be of assistance to you? By pimping for you? Or, more respectably, by matchmaking for you?

If you are a woman, a lonely woman who wants to marry a wealthy, socially respectable man, how can I, an impoverished man outside the social pale, be of service? You want what you want, and when you get it, you may be willing to call it love.

I'm not a genie in a bottle. I'm just a humble writer. Maybe I can't put love in these words. Maybe the best I can do is try to entertain you. Maybe I ought to try to be funny. If I make you laugh, will you consider yourself entertained? And if I make you laugh hard enough, will you entertain the possibility that I have tried to put love in my jokes so that I can pass that love on to you?

Let's pretend that I have somehow figured out a way to put love in my language. And let's pretend that you're capable of extracting that love from my words, not only extracting it but feeling it. Does that make us lovers? Do we complete a circuit, a bliss loop, when I put love in on my end and you take love out on yours? What if I'm dead by the time you read this? Is ours still a circuit, a circle? Isn't the circle broken by my death?

Will you be more likely to find and feel love in my words if you don't have to pay for the privilege of reading them, if I give them to you for free? Or will you be more likely to believe that there is love, or whatever it is that you call love, or whatever it is that you need, in these words if you pay for them? And the more you pay to read them, the more value will you find in them?

Aren't I asking an awful lot of these words? Am I completely out of my mind? How could I send love to you in them? What if you are a devil, what if you are a re-incarnated Hitler, sitting there, reading my words. Even if I really did feel love, even if I were clever enough and openhearted enough to put it in my words, would I want to send my love, in the form of my words, to you, Hitler?

What kind of love would that be? Mindless love. Indiscriminate love. Crazy love. Worthless love?

Is love for everyone? Or is it only for those we know, for those we know who deserve it? Should we love only those it makes sense to love? Or should we madly, blindly, send it out into the universe. Should love be like rain, falling where it may, restoring the earth, stirring green shoots in young hearts and old alike?

Is there a part of the earth which does not deserve rain? Is there a desert so terrible, so dry, so deadly, that the sky should not rain upon it?

Is there a person so terrible, so hurtful, that we should withold our love from him or her? What's the worst thing in the world that can happen if we send love out to anyone who will receive it? Will some of that love be wasted?

Do we have a limited quantity of love in our hearts? Should we ration it out so that the most deserving, or needy, or appreciative, get the lion's share?

What if there were an infinite quantity of love in our hearts? What if it were impossible to drain our hearts of love? Are there different ways of loving? Is there a way of loving that drains our hearts, and another way that leaves our hearts continually full, full of love?

Should we love only that which deserves to be loved, and hate that which deserves to be hated? How much hate do we have in our hearts? Enough for everything that deserves it? How do we decide what to hate?

Can I send hate in these words? What if I have character flaws I'm unaware of? Is it possible that hate might leak into my words and make these words toxic to you if you should happen to read them?

How can you protect yourself from my hate? How can I protect myself from yours? How can I open myself to your love without also opening myself to your hate? How can you open yourself to the love in my words, if there indeed is any, without also opening yourself to the hate?

Is the love I put in my words love for you, or is it a generalized love, or maybe a love for mountains, or birdsongs, or fast cars, or money, or shapely women? What good does it do me to share my love of summer storms with you? What good does it do you?

What if I hate a certain kind of bug and I convey my hatred and disgust of that bug to you so that you, too, imagine you feel hatred and disgust for that bug? Does that make that bug hateful and disgusting?

Suppose I loved vanilla ice cream cones, and I talked about vanilla ice cream cones in such a loving fashion that, when you read my words, the words acted like a love potion and made you fall in love with vanilla ice cream cones? Would that be dangerous? Could you hurt yourself by eating too many of them?

What if I were so talented and clever I could describe cigarettes to you in a way which made them seem wonderful. Maybe I couldn't make you love them, but at least I could make you want them. Would that make me a dangerous man? Would you want to be careful about accepting the emotional message I placed in my words?

Suppose I told you that several of my family were chainsmokers who died of lung cancer? How do you think I would feel about men and women who placed messages in their words and pictures, messages that said cigarettes were a good thing to use? Do you think I would feel as if those cigarette messages were packets of love, or of hate, or of death?

What agenda would I imagine those men and women with their paeans to tobacco were advancing? A loving agenda? A greedy one? Should I receive their cigarette messages with an open heart? Should I be suspicious of what they are saying?

How can, I wonder, anyone in the world make his or her living advancing the cause of substances which addict, cripple, and even kill? The people who do so, do they do it out of love?

When a man drops a bomb on another man, does he ever do it out of love? Does he always do it out of hate?

Suppose a man sends a message out into the world that convinces thousands and millions of readers to hurt themselves and/or others. That message might be in the form of words, or images, or you name it. Can such a man ever be motivated by love, or is he always motivated by hate?

Does it ever make sense for us, the readers, the viewers, ever to accept hate into our hearts? If we do take that hatred into our hearts, what will it make us do? Will it just sit there? Can we filter it out? Can we neutralize it or make it harmless? Should we ever act on it? Will we act on it whether we want to or not? Are we helpless in the face of messages of hate?

Are we robots? If we are told to hurt or kill or destroy in convincing fashion, must we obey? What if we are told to kill ourselves? What if we are surrounded by messages, seeming messages of love, which are really messages telling us to kill ourselves?

What if we are told that cigarettes are wonderful, that they taste good, and that we ought to smoke them? Should we take those messages into our hearts and lungs? What if smoking was a form of slow suicide? What if there were people out there telling us to kill ourselves? Should we accept their words, their images?

If their words and images go into our eyes and ears, into our brains, can we get them out of there? Or will we act on them in spite of ourselves?

Suppose it were true. Suppose there were people who made their livings persuading other people to kill themselves. What kind of people could do that? Persuasive people. Tricky people. People who believe that others must die so that they can live.

Suppose this is a letter. Suppose I am writing it to people who make their livings persuading other people to kill themselves or others. Suppose I have loved ones who have died as a result of such persuasion.

Would I be crazy to try to put love in such a letter? Would it make more sense for me to send love or hate to people who have persuaded my loved ones to kill themselves? If I were crazy enough to try to send love, in these words, to people who have persuaded my loved ones to kill themselves, how would I do it?

Would I suggest that they forgive themselves for having persuaded millions of people to kill themselves? Would I suggest that they stop persuading millions more to kill themselves? What if they had mates and children to feed? What if they were part of a great American industry? If I loved them, would I suggest that they stop making a living? How could I possibly suggest, in a loving fashion, that they stop making a living persuading other people to kill themselves?

---FIN---

Work as I Knew It

1996-05-03T00:45:00.000-07:00

5/3/96 WORK AS I KNEW IT

Why is it that I get that sense of impending doom every time I ask an ATM machine to give me my checking balance? Because my checking account is having a permanent near-death experience. It's hovering above my neighborhood cash machine, calmly observing me as I desperately try to resuscitate it with checks from my credit cards, which are, of course, nearing their own near-death experiences.

I guess I ought to knuckle down and get a job. But you know what I've discovered during my seven month (so far) sabbatical? I'll tell you in a minute. First you should know that I, as administrator of my own life, saw fit to award myself this sabbatical for years of unremitting labor. And, as is so often the case with self-administered benefits, this ad hoc leave of absence includes neither salary nor eventual return to my previous place of employment. One takes one's leave at one's own volition and one sometimes finds one's behind out in the parking lot at the local 7-11, offering to wash windshields for whatever the market will bear.

But to return to the question of what I have discovered. I have discovered that work, as I knew it, was bad for my health. It wore me out and gave me, literally, a tremendous pain in my backside.

In fact, the whole time I was working at my previous place of employment, I felt as if I were sitting on a Maori war axe. I spent most of my free time and money going to mainstream and alternative healers, shopping, in vain, for an axe-ectomy. But as long as I was planted at that desk, in toxic proximity to that employer, the pain remained. It was, in fact, my constant companion at work and at home, weekday and weekend, prone and supine, vertical and horizontal, awake and asleep. Yes, even in my sleep the pain remained, for I would dream of being cured, only to wake up to find myself more wretched and twisted than ever. Ceaselessly, sciatically, I danced the lumbago.

Worldclass orthopedic surgeons x-rayed my spine, pronounced it more deformed than that of an octogenarian hunchback, and offered to give me operations more complex and expensive than the construction of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge----and with an 85% chance that I'd be left a gibbering basket case who'd need a staff of five to spoonfeed me apple sauce.

Neurologists tested my strangulated nerves, found them deader than a ten year old bargain battery from Sav-On, tsk-tsked, and asked me if I had become incontinent yet. "No, not yet," I'd lightly say, "that's an experience I'm still looking forward to." Count on a neurologist to shine you the sunny side of life. I can just imagine them breaking the news about an especially virulent brain tumor: "Well, there's a round thing in your head, and it's not your brain, and it's smaller than a breadbox and bigger than a golfball. But it won't be smaller than a breadbox for long."

But I digress. And digress and digress and digress. The long and short of it was that I, not getting the cheap and cheery cures I had hoped from mainstream medicine, began to trip the light fantastic into the world of alternative medicine. And I do mean trip, because that pain in my lumbar region so numbed out my left leg, so clumsified me, that I made Gerald Ford look like Nureyev. Let me say this about the innumerable chiropractors, rolfers, physical therapists, acupuncturists, deeeep tissue massagers, and various and sundry crackpots and witch doctors to whom I made my desperate petitions: None of them worked for free, for the sheer joy of healing....which was, in my case, a good thing for them----because they did not heal me.

What they did do was deal my checking account a series of mortal blows which made me wonder if it was a closet bulemic, secretly binging and purging behind my back. All I knew was that I kept making hefty deposits, and the next time I checked my ATM, the deposits, and then some, would be gone, and a tiny voice would come from the wide-open beak of the bank machine saying, "Feed me! Feed me! Feed me!"

After five years of gainful employment which proved to be, in my case, five years of painful impoverishment, I concluded that I could not run to daylight on a treadmill. Weary of my role as office Quasimodo, and facing the fact my job was plunging me deeper into financial debt as well as a sort of oxygen debt of the soul, I resolved to go into debt on my own time.

That was seven months ago, and I suppose a happy ending to this sad tale would be that my born-again financial resurrection is just around the corner, that I have finally found a way of supporting myself joyfully, on my own terms, without giving myself a pain in the lumbago, by doing the one thing I have found I was always specially cut-out to do, if only I had had the courage and daring to realize it: phone marketing chia pets.

But no. I'm not just taking a bungee cord plummet into the Valley of Deepdish Debt, I'm freefalling without a bungee cord, golden parachute, or severance package to my name. I dive like a fragment of The Challenger, the earth rushes up to meet my face, and I'm laughing my head off. Why? Because my back feels great!

Suddenly, in mid-air, I'm graceful again!

Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of work and debt, I have charted a course directly for debt, and a terrifying maelstrom it is proving to be. But I'm trying to keep a cool head as my craft spins in currents beyond my control because my time, though perhaps growing short, is at last my own. --FIN--

On Becoming a Curmudgeon

1996-04-24T00:43:00.000-07:00

4/24/96

ON BECOMING A CURMUDGEON

Repeat after me: Me against the world. Me against the world. Me against the world.

Keep repeating that mantra at least 500 times a day. More mantras to come.

A bit of counselling: I know the world has dealt you a lousy hand and keeps dealing you rotten cards. Believe it. It's not an illusion. What is an illusion is any seemingly decent cards you've been dealt. The deck has been stacked against you since day one and everybody else in the game is out to ruin you. The fix is in.

My suggestion? Put as much space between yourself and the rest of the human race as possible. There's a cabin in Lincoln, Montana, that has a vacancy. Unfortunately, it is presently crawling with FBI men. But in time, they'll be gone, and its owner is not expected to return any time soon. Consider squatting there.

Isolation is ideal for the cultivation of curmudgeonly tendencies. Especially when combined with outdoor plumbing, 9 month winters,50 degrees below zero wind chill factors, and unheated toilet seats.

The farther you can distance yourself from your fellow human beings, the more misanthropic stereotypes you will be free to entertain about them. Once in a while, despite your best efforts to the contrary, you may have an encounter with an individual which may seem to shatter whatever negative stereotypes you have managed to construct concerning his or her subgroup. Don't be deceived. These are the exceptions that prove the rule. You'll know you're far along the right track when you have so distanced yourself from, and prejudiced yourself against, the human race that you can't abide your own company.

Always, always, it's that so-called human inside yourself that you must most vigilantly guard against. You can go farther away from civilization than Lincoln, Montana. You can go to the Yukon, or a lost landing on the banks of the Amazon, or the windblown wastes of Patagonia. You can pitch your tent in Anarctica's glacial deserts. And I wish you would, just so you would get away from me. Yet you still might not succeed in escaping that subversive and despicable creep within yourself who is the last vestige of your vulnerability. It is only when you have expunged his last traces that you will truly be free of your, and others', humanity.

Then you can return to the crowded city and walk the streets unafraid of being touched by something soft and openhearted that you imagine you see in another's eyes. You won't believe it for a moment. You'll be immune because you yourself will be incapable of mirroring anything openhearted back to anyone else. You, in the wastes of your own private Anarctica, have performed a heartectomy on yourself. And you know now, as you roam, invulnerable, through the crowded streets of those cesspools we call cities, that any open-ness you imagine you see in the eyes of others is a trick to disarm you, to loot and pillage you.

Let us start at the beginning. Who spilled you into this world? Your mother. Then resent her. She gave you life, this life that conspires against you. Blame her for it. Don't be deceived by any love and nurturing she has seemed to give you. Your life has turned out wrong, all wrong, hasn't it? Then it must have taken a wrong turn from the very beginning. In the womb. Everything she has done since then has only compounded the original sin.

And blame your father while you're at it. He conspired with her, didn't he, in the act of darkness which was your conception? How dare they? Did they ask you first if you wanted to be here? Hell no! They just went ahead and had their fun for their own private, selfish, reasons.

Your mother may have wanted a doll, a human doll, to give her love. Your father may have craved a variety of two-legged dog to order about and make himself feel important. They put in their order, and picked up you in the delivery room, and ever after they've been trying to make you feel as if you owed them something. Something like life.

But you know better. You are undeceived by what they claim to be their efforts on your behalf. If they had really done right by you, how could you be the miserable sonuvabitch you are today? They just want you to feel obligated to them so they can bleed you white in their penurious old age. But you won't be having any, thankyouverymuch. Where is the county poorhouse in this modern age? Whatever its equivalent is, that's where you'll be checking them in, if they live that long.

And, in their perversity, they probably will live long. If only to exhaust their resources so they don't have to leave anything to you. They CAN take it with them, and they will.

But let us get back to first causes. Who, besides your mother and your father, gave you life? God, the Prime Mover, if you are deluded enough to believe in such a One. As a curmudgeon-in-training, you know better than to believe in a gentle, loving, just God. If you believe in God at all, you know him to be, at best, a cruel trickster. He lifts you up only to cast you down. You are to Him as are flies to wanton boys---He plucks your wings for sport. One thing you know for sure. If there is a God, he's the greatest serialkiller of all time. He has killed, or will kill, everything that's ever lived.

Repeat after me: The fix is in. The jig is up. The cards are stacked. I might as well fold.

Say it 500 hundred times a day. Say it till your tongue turns black and your eyes bulge out of your head. Say it till what's left of that little human inside you begs for mercy, bleeds from his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, and collapses. Then say it 50,000 million billion times more.

God, Mother, Father. Good places to begin your Hall of Infamy. But don't stop there. What about big brother? Didn't he, at one time or another, or maybe constantly, bully you? Forget whatever he may have done on your behalf. Forget the times he stood up for you in the schoolyard. Forget the way he taught you to play ball. Forget the jokes you shared and any tender feelings you might have for him. Illusion, illusion, illusion! He was just trying to get you to drop your guard! Don't be foolish enough to do it again. You know better now!

And big sister? Why didn't she introduce you to more of her pretty friends when she was in high school and you were a lonely horndog? Why did she make you don her prom dress so she could hem it? Was it just because you and she, for that brief Spring, were the same height? Hell no! She was trying to emasculate you, sexually confuse you. She was part of the female conspiracy against you that goes back to the beginning of time! And I mean that whether you consider yourself man or woman!

As for little sister, do you think she was just having innocent fun when she floated your entire collection of 1950's era Mickey Mantle baseball cards down the river? Or when she switched the heads on all your Barbie and Ken dolls? Again a conspiracy! She was trying to confuse you! And did she ever! Ever since, Kenlike heads on Barbielike bodies, and vice versa, have held an overpowering erotic, fetishistic, fascination for you. That's why you find yourself renting Victor/Victoria over and over and over, that's why you can't tear yourself away from Priscilla of the Desert! And it's all your little sister's fault!

It's all everyone's fault!

Repeat after me: I am blameless, you are blameful, I am blameless, you are blameful. Say it at least 500 times a day. Say it till you find yourself saying: I am blameful, you are blameful, everybody and everything's to blame, life's not fair, everybody hates me, nobody loves me, I'm going to eat some worms!

NOW you're getting somewhere!

Some of you curmudgeon-aspirants may not be able to get away by yourselves to fully develop your powers of misanthropy and misogyny. To you I offer my profoundest consolations. Sometimes, life just isn't fair. In fact, life is never fair. Repeat after me, 10,000 jillion million billion times: Life ain't fair, life ain't fair, life ain't fair! It's my ball, I'm quitting and taking it home, and the rest of you can go to hell!

Speaking of home and hell, many of us are stuck with so-called families----husbands, wives, little mouths to feed. And though we desperately want to get away, so we can feel free to simmer in our own emotional venom, economic or legal or even medical circumstances may prevent us, for the time being, or for all time, from making our escapes.

Still, there is hope. And by hope I mean barricades. If you can manage physical barricades, by all means build them. Begin by building a wall between you and your spouse. Build it in your bedroom, build it anyway you can, build it willynilly, helterskelter, build it of brick and mortar or wood and plaster, but build it.

Get separate beds, and get those beds into two separate rooms. If you can't engineer separate beds, then make your side of the bed inviolate. With the power of your misanthropic mind, erect an impenetrable Klingon force field around your body. If ever your mate should stealthily, by night, try to reach out and put a greasy paw on you, your forcefield will zap him/her like a buglight zaps a gnat.

If you cannot erect physical barriers between you and members of your immediate family, don't despair. Emotional walls can serve just as well, or better. For one thing, they're portable. With emotional walls of the proper thickness, you need never worry about being caught out in the open by a lowflying emotional stealth bomber or smart missile.

Not even the tenderest entreaties of your cutest toddler can hope to breach such a movable fortress, once you've built your walls thick enough. Let that be a warning to you. Until you've taken your curmudgeonly craft very far toward perfection, you'll still be vulnerable to the so-called innocence and openheartedness of small children, especially if they are your own. So of course they are to be avoided at all costs.

If communicating with your children is an unavoidable, for the time being, necessity, then build your emotional fortress in the shape of a tollbooth, or confessional booth, so that the child is only free to see you as a head in a window in a sentry box. Let the child pay a toll for the privilege of speaking to you, let communication be an opportunity to induce as much guilt in the child's heart as possible. Let the child confess to you, and judge him/her harshly, and make him/her serve unspeakable penance. Fix the child so that, in time, it can imagine this tollbooth, this confessional box, inside its own head. It will no longer need to come to you to communicate! Your talking head will be inside its head, making it feel guilty, forcing it to confess, issuing punishments and penance. Long after you're dead, your head will go on lashing your offspring, and you won't have to lift a pinkie!

Give a child a fish, and it will eat for one day. Plant a stinking rotten fishhead in the child's head, and it will be a stinker for a rotten lifetime.

Fish. That brings us to pets. And sex. If you must have sex, it's better to have it with a pet than with a spouse. Because a pet can't complain about it, can't knock your technique or your heartlessness, afterwards. And if you must have have a pet, it's better to have one from one of the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. Four-footed furry friends are out. With the possible exception of lab rats. The trouble with mammals is that they can sneak up on you and break your heart. They can be worse than mates and kids that way.

Ants are good. They're not too cuddly. In fact, you may crush them, or get bitten, if you try to cuddle them. But antfarms are not recommended. There's something happy and soothing about watching an antfarm colony work themselves to death between those hot little plastic walls. The damn critters cooperate so well together! And they actually seem to love their work! Better to have a single ant for a pet. Keep him in an empty pillbox so he's forced to pine away in the dark. Don't even leave a grain of sand in there for him, or he'll be able to amuse himself by rolling it from one side of the pillbox to another. He might even forget how lonely he is for the company of his fellow ants, and that happy adjustment would be setting a very bad example for you. Think of his pillbox as an oubliette, a dark dungeon hideaway where you, the evil master of the castle, have tossed him and forgotten him.

Then there is the matter of sex. No matter how much you barricade yourself, physically or emotionally, your sex drive may occasionally, volcanically, erupt. If you are so unfortunate as to have a spouse, avoid having sex with him/her at all costs. The act can touch things in what's left of your so-called heart which you don't want to know about.

So, from time to time, you may find yourself forcing yourself upon one of the family pets. Very well. But don't have sex with a vertebrate. That's too close to home.

Sneak up on that poor lonely ant in that dark pillbox. Quick as you can, jerk the top off the box. He/she/it will be blinded and dazed, sort of like when the LAPD tosses stun-grenades into a crack house. Then, while he/she/it is still out of it, take your evil pleasure. How is a mystery you're going to have to penetrate for yourself. You'll be treading in a wilderness where few have dared to go before you. Or at least, if they have gone there, they aren't sharing their antlore with the rest of us. Think of yourself as a trailblazer. Think of yourself as a pervert. But don't get emotionally involved, and don't get bitten.

The emergency wards teem with patients who will not or cannot talk about how they got painful ant bites on their extremities. My advice: Avoid fire ants like the plague. They make you swell up like a beachball. Or at least, that's what I hear. Of course, I have no firsthand experience in erotica so entomologically exotic.

Considering the perils, and if you MUST have sex, it's probably better to have it with a plant or a mineral than with an animal. Though I have friends who swear by molluscs, molluscs have shells, and shells clamp shut and won't open up again, and that leads us back to the emergency ward.

As for plants. Stay away from venus flytraps and nettles. Dandelions are pliable to a fault if you can figure out how to get satisfaction from them. Minerals, with the exception of heartbreakingly beautiful mountain ranges and gemstones, are less emotionally involving than plants. They can prove abrasive and/or completely unyielding, but that's the suffering that a really dedicated curmudgeon should be looking for in a sex partner, if he must have sex. Above all, avoid liquid mercury. The wards are filled with twisted, gibbering curmudgeons who have gone the quicksilver route and never come back. Mercury will take your temperature and is lovely and malleable to a fault and won't talk back, but is more poisonous than a puff adder.

Ideally, as you hone your curmudgeonly craft, you will stop wanting to have sex at all, even with yourself. You will repulse yourself and get on your nerves and snap at yourself and it will be all to the good. Because the more fed up with your own company you are, the higher you will keep up your guard, and the harder you will make what's left of your heart.

It is said, of the truly transcendent, tenth dan curmudgeon, that he can compress and harden his vestigial heart until it is but a tiny diamond chip; then he coughs up it and gobs it into the gutter and walks on with a spring in his step and without a backward look, as if he has hawked up nothing more momentous than a juicy lunger.

Curmudgeon wannabes, don't despair: Everything is trying to break your concentration, but don't let it. The world will interfere with you enough to prevent you from doing what it is that you really need to get done, though you aren't exactly sure what that is. This puts you, permanently, in a dreadfully foul temper. It may feel to you as if the world has you right where it wants you. But don't be deceived. You have the world right where you want it. When the cosmos and all its laughing children and puppydogs and redwoods and Matterhorns and rainbows and Niagaras and shooting stars feel like nothing more or less to you than a seething boil on your butt, designed to rub your nerves to maximum rawness, then you, too, are very far along the way to gobbing up your own heart and spitting it into the nearest gutter like the master curmudgeon you are.

An exercise: Get really really drunk on your ass on cheap red wine in a rough part of town. Get rolled and left in an alley for dead. Come to with the worst headache of your life, puke on your shirt, and a stray mutt peeing on your face. Notice that your shoes and wallet are gone, your nose is broken, and your front teeth are missing. You now have the faintest intimation of how a true curmudgeon feels all the time.

But what I have described is more or less temporary physical and emotional discomfort. What the really serious curmudgeon craves is a long term, extremely painful, debilitating, and shameful medical ailment. Something like hemorrhoids the size of cricketballs, six or seven of them. Or shingles. Or a bad back, a back so bad the curmudgeon walks, or rather gimps, with a cant. A back so bad said curmudgeon can scarcely pick up after himself, or support himself. A back so bad the curmudgeon's face is locked in a permanent rictus of agony. A back so bad that the curmudgeon reeks of ill-health and is made an ugly animal to whom other creatures, especially attractive creatures of the opposite sex, but also small dogs, newts, and wart hogs, give a wide berth.

Leprosy is a perfect condition for a curmudgeon-in-training, but is hard to come by in this damnably antiseptic modern age. Still, leprosy serves as a beautiful metaphor for what the apprentice curmudgeon should be aspiring to. If the curmudgeon can induce in himself a form of emotional leprosy, he will make himself so repulsive to himself and others that he will remove many temptations toward tenderness and vulnerability and openheartened from his life. This will give his heart a better chance to close and compress to the desired, diamondlike hardness.

Speaking of diamonds, even the glittering stars in the sky can present an insidious temptation to the unwary, backsliding curmudgeon. Stars are, when looked at from a certain perspective, beautiful. Moreover, their seeming permanence reminds us of our own mortality. And this, under the wrong circumstances, can break our hearts. The recommended way to look at stars is to not look at them at all. Keep your eyes on the gutter. Put your eyes out if you have to. But if you must look up, if you cannot resist stargazing and putting at risk all your curmudgeonly striving, if you are so drawn to the night sky that you dare losing a lifetime’s supply of bitterness, spleen, and misanthropy, then lift your head, open your eyes, and force yourself to perceive those twinklings as as hard little diamond chips, mirroring what your heart is becoming.

When your heart has become the hardest substance known to man, you will at last be safe even from the entreaties of the heavens. You will know that there is a pinprick of light, deep inside you, which once was warm, but is now as distant and icy cold as Polaris. And by that North Star which is your heart you will always be guided, avoiding the painful, pounding shoals of compassion, love, and charity. You will soar through soundless, lifeless, lightless, regions of deep space where you will never again have your concentration broken, where you will never again be distracted from your contemplation of the failings and betrayals of the damned human race.

At last you will have nothing to fear, for you will have nothing to lose. You will have frozen forever your final vestiges of warmth and life. You will be impervious to pain and suffering, yours or others’. You will be dead, my friend. Though you may walk the Earth for another 50 years, you will be dead.

Others may look into your eyes, hoping to see there the light of human kindness, hoping that their gaze will be met by understanding and warmth, hoping that the flame of human intercourse will be kindled when their eyes strike sparks with yours. But all they will see, when they look into your eyes, is absolute zero. A heartstopping cold. A cold so dispassionate it goes beyond revulsion and loathing and is more powerful than hate.

When they look into your eyes, they will see the living face of death. What little warmth they have managed to generate with their own hearts will be sucked out and frosted over by the icicles in your eyes. The deeper they peer, the more blackness they will see. When they see into you, they will find themselves teetering on the edge of the abyss. Some of them will never recover from the sight. Some of them will lose their balance and fall in, ever after to be lost, never to be found.

That will be your gift to the world, to walk about with the eyes of a dead man set in a face like a clenched fist. Your expression will strike careless passersby like a blow between the eyes. You will remorselessly suck the courage and spirit from your fellow men, and some of them will be so demoralized, so despirited, they will instantly, and unconditionally, give up the holy ghost.

Your presence will be as bracing, and lethal, as an Anarctic wind. Your soul will be as distant and timeless and lifeless as a faraway star. And when that day comes, you can at long last expel an icy breath and relax, for you will have made of yourself a complete curmudgeon, beholding to no one, friend to neither man nor beast. You can stand back and steal an admiring glance at the ice sculpture you have made of yourself. And when you have finished taking in your own glittering magnificence, you will walk alone into the night, into eternity, finally spared the interruptions and distractions of humanity, of life itself, finally free to pickle forever in your own grouchy, irascible, bile and revel in your inviolable self-sufficiency, and wholeness, and perfection.

--FIN—

Why I am declining the MacArthur Genius Award

1996-03-14T23:55:00.000-08:00

May 96

WHY I AM DECLINING THE MACARTHUR GENIUS AWARD

Well, they haven't actually notified me yet that they are indeed giving me the award. I notice that my name is inexplicably absent from the list of geniuses published just yesterday. There must be a mistake, an oversight. Because, of course, it's only a matter of time. My question is, why haven't I been given one already?

Perhaps it's my innate modesty. Far be it from me to shout the news of my genius from the rooftops. I never considered it necessary. Genius WILL out.

Still, I find it a bit irritating that so many others have been recognized ahead of me. Not that they didn't deserve it. I'm sure they are all genuine geniuses. Any anonymous committee invested with the power of giving hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece to dozens of individuals MUST know what it's doing, just as John Beresford Tipton knew what he was doing when he doled out those millions. Can you imagine what a travesty the whole affair would be if they didn't know what they were doing, if they were just a buncha stoolies carrying out the will of an ignoramus, moneybags foundation?! Unthinkable! If the Charley MacArthy Foundation holds in its hands a list that says the lucky bastards are now, or ever have been, geniuses, they're geniuses, and I'll brook no argument about that.

But are they all greater geniuses than I? Are they, for that matter, greater geniuses than you? I don't know about you, that's for you to say. As for myself, I feel I am a very great genius. A zen genius. All the great zen geniuses are invisible, sometimes even to themselves. And they're a little stupid, as well. I certainly qualify in THAT department, or so I'm told.

The voices in my head tell me I'm stupid more frequently that you'd believe. They make me feel deliciously subhuman.

And my genius is very often as invisible to me as it is to others. The difference is that I always know it's there, even if it isn't manifesting itself. But those outside me seem to have their doubts. I can hardly blame them. They're mere mortals. If they see no obvious outward manifestation of genius, why should they take me for one.

If they themselves were zen geniuses it would be a different matter. They'd know that the very fact they can't see, hear, taste, touch, feel my genius is proof positive of its existence. Zen enlightenment would give them the third eye, and third ear, and 11th finger, and second nose and tongue, they would need to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste the rarefied spoor of my, yes, I'm not afraid to say it again, my genius.

At heart, as you well know if you've been willing to read this far without projectile vomiting, we are all geniuses, and perhaps the biggest idiots are the greatest geniuses of all. That must be why Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for prolonging the Viet Nam War. That's the explanation for my unshakable confidence in my own genius. And, if you're still with me and still not experiencing reverse peristalsis, you ought to have a similar confidence in yourself.

But I don't want to dwell unduly on YOUR genius. I'm here to talk about MY genius. I'm bringing it out of the closet at last and shaking it like a big ol' dusty mop, or a horse's ass, for the whole world to see, feel, hear, smell, taste, and touch with its, yes, its third eye, 11th finger, third ear, second nose, and, well....you can probably fill in the remainder. After all, if you've gotten this far I'm ready to concede you ARE a genius. Too. Not necessarily one of my magnitude. But a genius of any magnitude is nothing to sniff at. Not even with a second nose.

Now it can be argued that there's a certain symmetry and right thinking in me ACCEPTING a Joe MacArthy Genius Award. After all, it IS an award given to recognize genius, and that's what I am.

But I have a few bones to pick with The Anonymous Committee. Most especially, why have they kept me on pins and needles for so many years? There are times when I could have really used that quarter million. If those people are so smart, if they're smart enough to sniff (with their second noses) out the authentic AND DESERVING geniuses of these United States, and I don't doubt for a moment that they ARE that smart, because who could be smarter than the people officially designated to recognize true genius---they are, by definition, the geniuses' geniuses---if, as I say, they're so damn PERSPICACIOUS(who but a genius could use such a word?!), why didn't they realize my need and give me those simoleons so I could take care of my basic needs without totally humiliating myself by working office temp as a legal proofreader on the nightshift in a Century City law firm?! I wish those MacArtless Bigwigs, being the geniuses' geniuses that they are, would riddle me that.

Oh sure, now things are different. Now I've got plenty of credit cards, some of which actually have balances not exceeding their limits. Things aren't as desperate as they used to be. This is one genius who's no longer up against the wall. But that is not the reason I'm declining the award. Even if I were completely desperate I'd turn it down, just as Sartre once turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature, just as Soupy Sales or whoever that was respectfully declined the Oscar and, in fact, sent a Chicana posing-as-a-genuine-Indian-princess in his place garbed in full-Shasheen-Littlefeather-headdress-and-buckskins to respectfully decline said Oscar before the massed members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and billions of slavering fans watching on television and hundreds of pairs of Hollywood starletta highpoppers in respectful attendance upon the Princess's every word, which words, as I remember it, were a stirring defense of the predatory habits of killer producers and their right to devour everything in town smaller than they are. And when they unhinge their jaws, they can swallow corporate entities even larger than their own, though they may then take weeks or years to digest them. And as for those highpoppers, well, you should have seen them, exposed so magnificently in their deep dish formals as they were, why, they looked like a convention of ostrich eggs. But I digress. Where was I? You're a genius, aren't you? Can't you follow my train of thought? So what if I roll off on a siding once in while. Isn't that the prerogative of genius?

Oh yes. The real reason I am turning down the MacWhopper Genius Award. I'll admit it. There was a time when I hungered for the recognition. I viewed it as my due. As soon as I heard of its existence, I figuratively held my breath till my face was blue, waiting for that knock.

I know it isn't as much money as the Publishers' Clearinghouse Award, but I don't expect as much of Ed McMahon's ability to select correctly as I do that of the MacDither Genius Committee. I like Ed, I really do. But he clearly likes a toot now and again. And he's probably secretly resentful for having been second banana to Johnny for all those years, so there's no telling how his bitterness, which can be clearly discerned in that sycophantic, obsequious, Falstaffian (who but a genius uses adjectives this polysyllabic?!) guffaw of his, might have led him to compromise himself with the Clearinghouse people. What I'm daring to say, for the first time in public, because it is the nature of my genius to speak the truth that others haven't the courage or brains to voice even to themselves, not even in a dark deserted wine cellar at 3 AM, is that I suspect that the FIX IS IN with the Publishers' Clearinghouse Award. We are led to believe that selection process is random. Ha! I spit upon your random! My genius, and no doubt your genius as well, allows me to see, with my third eye, and my second nose, that NOTHING is random in this world of ours. Everything happens according to plan.

And the plan of the MacWampum Committee can only be one born of jealousy of my great, my unparalleled, yes, I'm not afraid to say it: GENIUS. I was the man who should have been given the first MacWigwam Genius Award. And after me, some of my friends should have been given the next bunch of awards. And after that, because I'm such a great genius, I should have been awarded one annually. And my mother should have been given one, because her 75th birthday is coming up, and I don't know what to get her, and she deserves to be honored for having had the genius to have me, a genius nonpareil. And not only should I be given the award annually, but after everyone who is my friend because they have acknowledged my genius, thus proving their own genius, has been given the award at least once, I should be given ALL the remaining awards, diplomas, money, trophies, kisses, speeches, whatever and the award should be retired and its name changed to the Mendacio Huffington Superdupermega Unbeatable We're-Sorry-We-Were-Jealous-of-You Genius Award. And you MacMugwump Committee People ought to stop trying to hurt my feelings and you can kiss my rosy red....

But I digress.

If I used to be so obsessed with awards, why didn't I just buy lots of lottery tickets and win the California State Lottery. That's usually worth more than the MacAdam Award, isn't it? It is. But I'm proud. I'm proud of my genius. I feel that people ought to come to ME, unbidden, to give me an award. I shouldn't have to humiliate myself by going to the 7-11 and buying a Pick 6 ticket. That would be admitting that my life wasn't perfect already. And if I am a zen genius, my life is, by definition, completely fulfilled in every ongoing moment and there's no need for me to resort to desperate measures such as buying lottery tickets, which can run into serious money if you buy enough of them every day, which certain people I happen to know whose names shall go unnamed do. But I'll be discreet about their shame because I don't want to admit that I have acquaintances who are not only not genius zen masters but who are dangerously unfulfilled to the point of being downright dirtydog raggedybutt desperate.

But what's this!? A knock! At my door! Can it be anyone other than the MacKoody Committee, come crawling around at last, anonymous tails between their legs, begging my forgiveness, offering me all their trophies and money and kisses and speeches, INSISTING that they retire the award in my name? Just a moment while I give those geniuses' geniuses whatfor.

Hi. I'm back. It was neither the MacMaunder People nor the MacMahon People nor MacNamara's Band. There must be some confusion about my address. I'm sure they WILL be at my door momentarily. That was my landlord. Something about the rent. He wants some. I told him I had already paid him---months ago, but he didn't seem to understand. If he persists in pursuing this mad idea that he is entitled to a monthly rent check, I may just strike him from the list of deserving fellow geniuses I am going to give to the MacHeartless Committee when they come crawling, at long last, round to my door. The way he behaves, you'd think I was some kind of awards committee, and he was the superdeserving recipient who is selected 12 times a year, year after year. He has actually threatened me with eviction. To hear him tell it, my back is closer to wall than I know.

But do I despair? No. Because offers of credits cards and loans at usurious rates are constantly arriving in my mailbox. As far as I can determine. This is free money. It's probably all a plot secretly engineered by the MacCrackhead Committee, or possibly the Nobel Committee, or the State Lottery, or Publishers' Clearinghouse, to pipeline me the money my genius merits. These shameful sonsuvbitches are trying to salve their consciences without having the courage to come right out and give me the award or awards which are rightfully mine!

[Note: Pomp & Circumstance plays softly in background for this final flourish]

I'll tell you something about genius. In its purest form, it's not only invisible, it's proud, and it's not only proud, it's humble and forgiving and compassionate. It's able to take the God's Eye View with its zen third eye, and I mean the kindly New Testament God, not the old-timey thunderbolt throwing Guy. So I'm going to overlook the MacArsole Foundation's past meanspiritedness, I'm going to forgive Ed McMahan's corruption, I'm going to turn the other check to the Nobel Committee's obstinate blindness, and I'm going to swallow my pride and accept that free money in the cowardly form in which they have proffered it. Not for my sake. Oh no. I already know I'm a genius. I don't need outward monetary confirmation of that fact. I'm accepting this free usury as a favor to them, because I forgive them and grant them absolution because they knew not what they did when they earlier overlooked me and gave their damn money to lesser geniuses, and because my heart is pure and great, as only the heart of a true genius can be. --FIN—

Why I Write

1995-12-23T00:41:00.000-08:00

12/23/95
WHY I WRITE
(A REPUBLIC OF WORDS)

Here's my tablet, here's my pen, here's my desperate desire to write. Here's my calm, self-possessed desire to write. We wouldbe writers, we're scattered all over the planet. We're big game fishing off Florida keys, we're carving tombstones in Germany, we’re whaling in Polynesian seas, prospecting for gold in the Yukon and Central America, tutoring in Trieste, jumping ship in mid-Caribbean, piloting paddlewheelers down the Mississippi, wandering the whore-haunted streets of Paris, plowing stony New England farms, cruising for rough trade in the French Quarter, dying in trenches on the Western Front, finding dreams of zen in Big Sur and in San Francisco saxophones, delivering the mail on hot Hollywood streets, goldbricking in Brooklyn, spinstering in Massachusetts manses, male-nursing in Civil War infirmaries,rotting in Gulags, hoboing from coast to coast, and holding forth, in the form of a tall, Adam’s appled, Ichabod Crane, in a Los Angeles International Airport lounge…..

Some of us are under the impression we must do reams of research in order to create what we create. And we're right. Others of us have come to realize that research is exactly what is stopping us from creating.

We collected facts for a time, somehow thinking that facts were what writing called for. But, sooner or later, we saw facts were exactly what was STOPPING the words from tumbling out. It was then that we resolved to write without facts. We decided we knew nothing. We knew not who we were. Except: We were creatures who hungered to write.

We would settle for anything. We would content ourselves with writing the same word over and over again. It didn't even have to be a good word.

And story? We were far past hoping for story. Or character. Gibberish would be just dandy, thankyouverymuch.

This writer is writing as long as he wants to write. When he gets too tired, he will stop. When he feels he is forcing, and wants to stop forcing, he will. When he runs out of words, he will sit quietly and wait for more.

When he gets uncomfortable, he will shift positions until he is comfortable enough to write again, or he will remain uncomfortable, writing until he can no longer stand the strain, or he will quit writing immediately.

Ladies and gentlemen, he's a fucken writing machine! He makes himself comfortable, or uncomfortable, wherever he is. He twists, he shouts, he crawls on his belly like a serpent, but he never stops writing or thinking about writing.

It's unbelievable, ladies and gentlemen, it really is!

How many times has this gentleman set out to write, hopeful as hell, and been turned away at the gates? Turned HIMSELF back at the gates!? It's heartbreaking, ladies and gents, it really is! Or it's hilarious. Because this butthead is making himself the butt of the cruelest joke imaginable.

He's telling himself he's a writer. He's saying writing is his one true vocation. And then he's inventing 1,000 and 1 reasons why he canNOT write!

He says he's a warrior, but he's too scared to fight.

He says he isn't writing well enough, so he must stop.

He says he doesn't know enough, so he has to....you guessed it....quit.

He has no character, he has no plot.

And when you've got no plot you've got to stop.

But wait! What's this?! he realizes he has nothing to say. But you know what, ladies and gents? He's going to write anyway! Because he's at least temporarily too tired to catalogue all the other reasons why he cannot write.

Incidentally, fatigue is number eight on the great list.

Now don't get him wrong. If a writer has to spend his WHOLE life cataloguing all the reasons he cannot write, that just may be the most authentic thing he can do. But maybe he can compromise.

Maybe he can give all his doubts their due, and then maybe he can give all his positive reasons their due, as well.

He can say, for example, that he wants to write because he wants to write. He wants to write NOT because he needs to make money, or create a name for himself. He wants to write NOT because he has an ideological or political agenda. He wants to write NOT because he wants to get laid or because he has taken up the cudgel for his race, or the oppressed, or the obscure, or the beautiful.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to write beautifully, or eloquently, or powerfully, or sympathetically, or movingly. He wants to write NOT because there is revelation in the written word. He wants to write NOT because he has something to say. He wants to write NOT because he knows what he's going to write. He wants to write NOT because he has to write in order to discover what it is he is going to write.

He wants to write NOT because he's creative. He wants to write NOT because he's a show-off. He wants to write NOT because words are what he does best. He wants to write NOT because he's too shy to manifest himself physically instead of verbally. He wants to write NOT because his parents, or mentors, or friends, encouraged him. He wants to write NOT to show his enemies what's what.

He wants to write NOT because he has read and been inspired by great writers and wants to emulate them. He wants to write NOT because he feels engorged and fairly ready to burst with words. He wants to write NOT because he enjoys playing with words and making startling new patterns, combinations, sentences, with them. He wants to write NOT because he enjoys rhetorical forms.

He want to write NOT because he wants to redeem his existence. He wants to write NOT because he hopes to fulfill himself. He wants to write NOT because he has something to prove, although he undoubtedly does...except when he doesn't. He wants to write NOT because he wants to give meaning, or beauty, or hope, or inspiration, or consolation, to others, although he undoubtedly does...except when he doesn't.

He wants to write NOT because he is trying to give himself an ideal reading experience, NOT because he's going to write just exactly what he, as a reader, needs to read.

He wants to write NOT because he is sitting in a vast airline terminal, with hundreds of other people, killing time, waiting for his plane. Although he undoubtedly is. He wants to write NOT because the boundaries of where he stops and others start are blurry, and he's feeling a weird love for all the other travellers and he's giving them what he can in this, the Christmas Season.

He wants to write NOT because someday he's going to die and he wants to leave something behind. He wants to write NOT because whatever else he is doing with his life isn't enough. He wants to write NOT because words are the only children he has.

He wants to write NOT because he loves the rhapsodies, the transports, to which only words can lift him. He wants to write NOT because he knows there's somebody out there, somebody he needs to speak for....and to.

He wants to write NOT because he is transparent, and the words are shining through him.

He wants to write NOT because he has spent the better part of a lifetime in silence and darkness, and now he wants to walk into the music and the light.

He wants to write NOT because he has cleared tons of psychological garbage out of his head and has finally learned to get out of his own way.

He wants to write NOT because he is in love with the sound of his own voice.

He wants to write NOT because it takes his mind off his bad back.

He wants to write NOT because he paid outrageously inflated air terminal captive customer prices for the ballpoint pen and spiral pad with which he is writing, and needs to justify his investment.

He wants to write NOT because it frees him, NOT because it releases a bird which has been caged in his ribs for decades, and which now flies from his throat and his fingertips, and soars towards the sun.

He wants to write NOT because his heart would explode or rot if he didn't. He wants to write NOT because he can no more swallow down his words than he could swallow down sobs of joy.

He wants to write NOT because he could be dead tomorrow, but today he is alive and WRITING. Writing his heart out.

He wants to write NOT because he is smart....or stupid.

He wants to write NOT because he has spent his entire life trying to figure out how to write, yearning and burning to write. He wants to write NOT because silence has been his daily and nightly companion for as long as he can remember.

He wants to write NOT because he has lived with silence so long that he has learned to respect silence as much as noise.

He wants to write NOT because he has chewed on silence like a bitter, unending cud.

He wants to write NOT because he is still young, and vigorous, and bursting with vitality, and overbrimming with words.

He wants to write NOT because he was born to write, fated to write; he wants to write NOT because he is a naturalborn writer.

He wants to write NOT because he has forgotten what he was just going to say because the stewardess walked by and warned him to to fasten his seatbelt and prepare for take-off.

He wants to write NOT because his seat is too small, nor because his neighbor passenger is crowding him, nor because he's overflowing the bounds of his elbow rests.

He wants to write NOT because he feels dissatisfied with his earthly existence and wants to fabricate huge, and/or microscopic, alternative universes.

He wants to write NOT because he is sick of sitting silently, reading what OTHERS have written.

He wants to write NOT because he feels crushed like a mouse by society and general and Hollywood in particular, though in his heart of hearts he feels like a lion and wants to ROAR like a lion.

He wants to write NOT because words are an eternal flame, passed down to him from time immemorial, from before there WERE words.

He wants to write NOT because there are loud, drunken, giggling teenagers sitting in the back of the plane, and in a second they're probably going to get arrested, and the plane won't take off after all.

He wants to write NOT because he has been waiting for this goddamn plane for 5 long hours, and it's STILL waiting on the runway, waiting for its turn to take off, and if he wasn't writing he'd be dead of boredom and/or unexpressed frustration.

He wants to write NOT because he lacks the guts to look a clock dead in the face and ask "What time is it?"

He wants to write NOT because the written word is being crushed by the image and the shouted word.

He wants to write NOT because he doesn't know how, and needs on the job training.

He wants to write NOT because this goddamn jet he's on is taking off NOW, and flying over the black Pacific, and the whole glittering burg of LA is off his starboard wing, like a big ol' mess of rhinestones, glittering in a cauldron of farts.

He wants to write NOT because the plane could crash and kill him at any second, and this is a way to assuage his anxiety and give him wings of angels even if the plane's wings drop off.

He wants to write NOT because a friend of his nearly died last week, and may die next, and mortality is all around him, reminding him that now is the only chance he'll get to do exactly what he needs to do.

He wants to write NOT because he is tired, yet is not finished.

He wants to write NOT because he is a writer, and MUST write.

He wants to write NOT because these words are pouring out of his pen so fast he can barely keep up with them.

He wants to write NOT because he has had his fun.

He wants to write NOT because the time for misery and worst case scenarios is past.

He wants to write NOT because his imagination is exhausted, and he can therefore think of no more ways to sabotage himself.

He wants to write NOT because he is grotesquely specialized, and writing is his specialty.

He wants to write NOT because his left hand has writers' cramp and he knows no way to relieve it.

He wants to write NOT because this plane may crash and burn up him and everything he is writing and will be writing.

He wants to write NOT because writing is a deliverance.

He wants to write NOT because he soon may be senile and no longer able to write.

He wants to write NOT because this is the only chance he'll get to write these words.

He wants to write NOT because he is a writing fool.

He wants to write NOT because he hopes to get laid.

He wants to write NOT because he can have no real life without writing.

He wants to write NOT because it's the right thing to do.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to take his rightful place in the world.

He wants to write NOT because it is his mother's dream for him.

He wants to write NOT because his brother wants a brother he can be proud of.

He wants to write NOT because his dad wants what's best for him.

He wants to write NOT because his friends are rooting for him, even as he is rooting for them.

He wants to write NOT because he has encouraged thousands of other young writers, and not incidentally encouraged himself.

He wants to write NOT because he has spent a lifetime on the sidelines watching OTHERS strut their stuff.

He wants to write NOT because he has been compressed like a dwarf star, and now, at last, is exploding like a super nova.

He wants to write NOT because he's sick of conventional writing, and wants to hear the real thing, straight from the gut.

He wants to write NOT because he's proud of himself or ashamed of himself.

He wants to write NOT because he can't stop himself, especially now that he's learned to get out of his own way.

He wants to write NOT because he does everything else half-assed and backasswards.

He wants to write NOT because he'll bust if he doesn't.

He wants to write NOT because he has to.

He wants to write NOT because he suspects he has something more to say before he says the last thing he's going to say, which is what he, and you, knew he was going to say all along.

He wants to write NOT because it'll do him any good to write, or you any good to read.

He wants to write NOT because those big jet engines are roaring in his ears, and the lights of Vegas are dimly visible on the horizon, and LA is only a memory.

He wants to write NOT because he is building to a crescendo, and the roof is about to fall in.

He wants to write NOT because all events and people are encouraging him to do so, until he has no choice but to write this word. And this.

He wants to write because he wants to write.

He wants to write NOT because his spirit is uplifted or cast down.

He wants to write NOT because he has been to the mountaintop, and wants to share the vision of what he has been given to see.

He wants to write NOT because he's kinda trashy, and even ashamed of himself.

He wants to write NOT because he once had to march endlessly in the Carolina sun, in close order drill, with double pneumonia in his lungs, in preparation for a senseless war, and asked then, and asks now, WHY?

He wants to write NOT because he needs an answer.

Any more than he wants to write because he needs to pose a question.

He wants to write NOT because the muse is a she-bitch, urging and luring and egging him on.

He wants to write NOT because he has the examples of the great deeds of others to spur him on.

He wants to write NOT because he has always known he must.

He wants to write NOT because he again forgot what it was he was going to say next.

He wants to write NOT because his back aches in this cramped seat.

He wants to write NOT because, once again, he has something to prove.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to find out what he's going to write next.

He wants to write NOT because he's standing up for the written and spoken word.

He wants to write NOT because it's the only way he has to address the lies of others and to redress their lost truths.

He wants to write NOT because if he doesn't, he won't know who he is.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to prove that a pad and a pen are all the computing power any writer, or at least this one, needs to get the job done, because the words are the thing, not the gigabytes and Windows 95's and active matrix screens.

He wants to write, in short, because he wants to write.

He wants to write NOT because he is not yet satisfied with what he has written and must write more.

He wants to write NOT because Van Gogh crucified himself for art, and O'Neill went up to his study and wrote "Long Day's Journey Into Night" with tears and blood, and Hemingway blew his head off because he had it and then lost it, and The Bard humbled us all, and Picasso was a wizard, and Jack Kennedy took credit for Ted Sorensen's "Profiles in Courage" Pulitzer, and Ted, upscale stooge, kept his yap shut about it.

He wants to write NOT because he hears songs of unearthly beauty wafting over his car radio, and wanders how he could ever match them.

He wants to write NOT because he has been given every advantage, and owes payback bigtime.

He wants to write NOT because he is sitting here eating toyfood plane snacks, though he is already overweight, and was so depressed in the airline terminal that he had to order a MacDonald's Happy Meal to lift his spirits, and it did.

He wants to write NOT because he's had more than his share of setbacks.

He wants to write NOT because any sensible soul would have killed himself after 30 years of a steady diet of failure.

He wants to write NOT because he was lost and now is found.

He wants to write NOT because it's time for him to be a man.

He wants to write NOT because he must take the stand and testify, despite the threats of the mob, despite the bounty on his head.

He wants to write NOT because he sees life through a glass darkly.

He wants to write NOT because he can no longer suffer fools, especially himself, gladly.

He wants to write NOT because he has at long last realized that he is to be spared nothing.

He wants to write NOT because he has spurned and been spurned.

He wants to write NOT because of his bottomless contempt for himself.

He wants to write NOT because he is not so much brave as he is pigheaded.

He wants to write NOT because he is solipsisstic and Narcississtic, and inflatuated with the smell of his own farts.

He wants to write NOT because of his immense disappointment in himself.

He wants to write NOT because he is ashamed of himself.

He wants to write NOT because his airline seat remains intolerably cramped, and his junkfood seethes in his stomach, and pitiless blackness surrounds the plane.

He wants to write NOT to gob in the face of literary expectations.

He wants to write NOT because Henry Miller said, "The generals of literature are sleeping, we hairy ones must do the fighting."

He wants to write NOT because he has a fairy godmother.

He wants to write NOT because loved ones are angry at him and cannot forgive him.

He wants to write NOT because of his rage at himself, and his refusal to forgive himself.

He wants to write NOT because his friends have stood by him.

He wants to write NOT because, as Fellini's Guido says: "I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway."

He wants to write NOT because writers count for shit in Hollywood.

He wants, he reiterates, to write NOT because he has stood silently by while others crowed.

He wants to write NOT because he's drowning in "The Sound of Mucus," and is tired of Spielberg worship, and doesn't look so hot in jeans any more, and if he reads one more interview of one more actor/actress/director/agent/screenwriter/bestboy/bumboy/supermodel/supertramp/superpol/superstar that bloodvessel that has been throbbing in his temple for 30 years is going to explode.

He wants to write NOT because he must get his priorities straight once and for all.

He wants to write NOT because he is ignorant and no storyteller and knows it.

He wants to write NOT because he fell asleep, Rip Van Winkle-like, twenty years ago in West Los Angeles, and has nothing to show for his long night of the soul, and is desperately, absurdly, trying to rouse himself to action long after the jig is up.

He wants to write NOT because the whole world looks new to him, and he is battered but unbowed, and perhaps, after all, it is not too late to begin.

He wants to write NOT because it's not the size of the dick in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dick.

He wants to write NOT because, as Renoir said, he paints with his prick.

He wants to write NOT because he has by dint of long suffering learned patience, and all things come to he who waits, and yet he is also more impatient than ever.

He wants to write NOT because time seems to have stopped, and evidently he'll never get out alive from this goddamned cramped seat, this goddamned death-plane.

He wants to write NOT because he can't imagine what else to do.

He wants to write NOT because he's got his dander up, and he wants to take back the night.

He wants to write NOT because he's mad as hell, and goddammit, he's not going to take it anymore.

He wants to write NOT because an infant is barking its head off two seats behind him.

He wants to write NOT because he has no family, no wife, no kids.

He wants to write NOT because he has learned to accept the support of those who would help him, and reject those who would cut him off at the knees.

He wants to write NOT because his nose tells him there's a big ol' vein o' gold out there somewhere.

He wants to write NOT because certain of his teachers were bookful blockheads, ignorantly read, and others were inspirations, and others were bullies and helpers both.

He wants to write NOT because his neighbor passenger is asleep, and his legs are taking up more than their share of space.

He wants to write NOT because this goddamn plane is never going to land, and should have landed 3 hours ago.

He wants to write NOT because he eats ice at the cinema, bugging whomever is sitting in front of him with his munching and crunching.

He wants to write NOT because he's been sitting in airline terminals and airplanes for 12 hours, and he stinks.

He wants to write NOT because his shoes pinch and he can't reach down to untie them and he has a crick in his neck and he's never going to get out of this seat and he's obnoxious and his neighbor's obnoxious and yesterday that friend exhausted him with the endless but fascinating tale of his major, life-threatening stroke which was no surprise because the guy was asking for it, furious at everything, floundering desperately, making a major pain in the ass of himself, but still, he didn't deserve to have his head explode. So few of us do.

He wants to write NOT because he saw two AIDs positive guys talking on the public access channel, and one says, "Being doomed really forces you to get your priorities straight and do what you REALLY want to do with your life."

He wants to write NOT because he's exhausted and falling apart and can't even remember what it is he started out to say.

He wants to write NOT because the pilot has announced the plane is landing in just 10 minutes---a whole hour earlier than the writer expected because he forgot Denver is on Rocky Mt. Time.

He wants to write NOT because the lights of Denver are glowing under the plane, and he's probably about to die in a runway fireball.

He wants to write NOT because his overpriced ballpoint pen barely works.

He wants to write NOT because he writes with an awkward leftie's hook.

He wants to write NOT because he has safely, if bumpily, landed, and he has been granted a second chance to live and create.

He wants to write NOT as a way of giving whatever it is he has to give.

He wants to write NOT because he’s a writer-cow, and words build up in him like milk in an udder, and he must regularly milk himself or suffer.

He doesn’t know why he wants to write. He suspects he DOESN’T want to write. He knows he often doesn’t LIKE to write. But he nonetheless HAS to write. And when he goes for long periods without writing, he feels empty and pallid, as if he’s about to fade away. But when he writes something special, he feels as if he has, for a brief moment, filled in the outline of himself and increased his specific gravity. And yet he also feels light as an unburdened hodcarrier who has set down his load of bricks at last, light as a hollow-boned bird, about to take flight from a mountain precipice. He doesn’t need to hang-glide because, occasionally, his words soar and he soars with them.

Usually, the writing is horrible, and meaningless, and unrewarding. The bad, worthless, pretentious, mistaken words pile up like bones in an ossuary, testimony to the death of the writer’s imagination. And then, just when the nearly talentless writer is about to give up hope, something starts happening. He has something special to say. It speaks through him. It re-establishes his place in the world. He is a conduit, a receiver, for transmissions from heaven or hell. He is a living radio, a cosmic court stenographer.

The words unspool with a logic and power of their own. Later, the writer, fretting about the mess and sterility of his Earthly life, may forget about the piece that wrote itself through him. He may stumble upon the piece in a notebook, or old computer, and read it with growing wonder and appreciation, as if it has been written by someone else. He shakes his head, thinking, I wrote this. This wrote me. This is something I molted off. I had to shake this shell in order to have room to grow…..a new shell.

I may never write one more good thing. I may sit down for the next few decades, day after day, hour after hour, and write millions, maybe even billions of words. And none of those words may have merit.

It’s not a sensible way to live. It’s something like prospecting for gold. And the ironic thing is, if I find more gold, more gold in words, I may do it just at the time I give up looking for it. Just when I despair and let go and question why I ever became a writer in the first place, just when I begin to suspect that writing is a damn lie, a siren which has lured me onto the rocks, just when I am nearly sure that I have trashed my whole life in order to write words which no one cares to read or hear, just then, I may feel a strange excitement within.

There’s a bubbling down below. Old Spindletop is about to blow. I’m a wildcatter, I’ve been laying thousands of feet of pipe, deep in the Earth, to no avail, for years. Now the Earth is rumbling crazily. She’s about to spew forth in an orgasm of riches, and it’ll be mine, all mine! She explodes, blowing the Christmas tree of valves a thousand feet skyward. The black gold soaks me. I and my fellow roughnecks bellow with joy! We’ve lucked out! All our hard work, thanks to a merciful God, has paid off!

At long last, after years of wandering in a silent desert, I find myself in the Promised Land. The words flow through me like milk and honey. I am become my own best self. I have no more apologies, no more shame. I am transformed and redeemed. I am St. George, slaying the dragon of my emptiness, sterility, and meaninglessness. I rescue the damsel within, ride off with her, make courtly and carnal love to her, and am saluted by a grateful nation.

Halleluias and hosannahs ring in my ears! And once again the silence falls. Others may think me special, but I know I’m a burned out case. A spent cartridge. Others may find merit in what I once wrote, but I know I’m not writing now. I pray for redemption, but redemption doesn’t come my way. I write a million, no, a billion, words, and none have merit or meaning or grace. I am become a husk of my former self. I wonder how I ever wrote before, and cease to expect to write again. I make an uneasy peace with myself, trying to live while being a man who can no longer write well.

I look up, note what others are doing with their lives, and wonder if I can become, at this late date, something other than a writer. The answer is clearly no. I don’t have my heart in being anything but a writer, but I can no longer write. I am not the thing I want to be, and I am not willing to be any other thing. And so I wait. And I understand the plight of the addict, who is a trial to, and is deserted by, all who love him because he is wedded to a terrible need which sucks him dry and will one day kill him. And yet he loves his witchy muse, who grinds out burning cigarettes on his smoldering flesh, screwing her stiletto heel into the small of his back.

“It hurts so good!” he cries, and he reaches out and tries to embrace her. She turns on her heel, her stiletto heel, and embraces another. He, shameless, trails along behind her, hoping for a glance, a whiff of perfume. He’s grateful just to be near her.

She tells him he’s a creep, she tells him he’s cramping her style and scaring off the lovers she really wants. She tells him to beat it. She disappears with another, with others, with an army of others.

Exhausted and impoverished, he holes up and licks his wounds. He yearns and burns for her, and then begins to think he’s better off without her. He decides to become another kind of writer. Not a writer inspired by a muse, but an uninspired writer, a landbound craftsman who never madly soars, who is always in control of his material. Jilted and unrequited, he resigns himself to a life without passion. No sooner does he imagine such a life, than he laughs and realizes that he can’t go that way. He has to care about what he’s doing. He has to be surprised by it.

His words, every one, have to speak for his whole life. They can’t be mere exercises. They have to be potential miracles. Every word he aspires to write, and he may never write another, has to carry the possibility of redemption and revelation. There has to be the chance that each and every word packages and expresses his whole self, expresses worlds he didn’t know he was capable of imagining. Every word he aspires to write is a child of the marriage of heaven and hell.

The writer goes to hell. The world falls away from him. He is Diogenes, a ragged wanderer, searching for truth. And occasionally, or perhaps maybe never again, the truth finds him. And he tries, in his wanderings and waitings, to comfort himself with memories of past truths, truths which spoke through him. And they are cold comfort. He knows that the only way to live is to live the truth, to let the truth speak through him. But he is silent. He can only wait, in the darkness, for the light to strike.

He is a sentinel, a picket, a living antenna, waiting for word from outer and inner space. Static, reams and billows of gibberish, pour into his sensitive receivers. Blizzards of worthless words blow by him, drift upon his body as he stands his watch. He is steadfast because he lacks the imagination to think of another life for himself. He is Washington at Valley Forge. Freedom seems very far away. Disaster and privation are daily companions.

And then one day: Victory. The tyrannical enemy, silence and meaninglessness, grows careless. The writer sees an opening and strikes across the Delaware, catching the groggy Hessians in their cots. Victory follows victory. Spring rains melt winter snows. The forests explode with leaves and flowers. Songbirds sing their hearts out and procreate in their millions. It is the birth of a new republic, a republic of words, a product of seething imagination, yearning to be free.

The writer is saluted as the father of his country. He extends his hands to his fellow citizens, his readers, and the characters he has created. This world of his, this New World, becomes the hope of the Old. And the whole cycle begins again.

--FIN-

Killing Time

1990-10-15T01:16:00.000-07:00

mid 1980's

KILLING TIME

In the beginning, there was all the time in the world. Time was undefined, and swirled in a senseless chaos, indistinguishable from space.

Then God said, “Let there be light,” and the light was the sun and the moon and the stars. The sun marked out the days, and the moon the months, and the stars the seasons and the years and the millennia.

Prehistoric time took many forms: There were geologic time and maritime, airtime, planttime, and animaltime. Of course, all those general divisions of time were subdivisible. For example, animaltime included time for vertebrates and time for invertebrates. Invertebrate time include time for mollusks and time for arthropods. Arthropod time include time for crustacea, and crustacean time had time for crabs but no time for clams, clamtime being included in the kinds of time passed by mollusks.

But certain characteristics were true of all kinds of prehistoric time: It was free time; it was neither good time nor bad time. Each moment was equally full. Prehistoric time was never empty. Neither was it wasted.

II
And along came history man. Self-conscious man. Time-conscious man.

He began to domesticate time, even enslave it. He trapped it with sundials and water clocks and grandfather clocks.

He marked it off with star charts and calibrations and chronometers and calendars.

He exploited it and used it and abused it and polluted it, and it was no longer true that all time ran as free as the wind. Trillions of hours were pressed into man’s service, were regimented and make to march in lockstep.

Seconds and hours and minutes were made more and more uniform, were crafted to tolerances so fine that they seemed identical to all but the most perceptive minds.

No two pieces of time, no matter how short or long, no matter how fast or slow, had ever been identical before. But man sought to make separate seconds interchangeable parts in order to facilitate the mass production of minutes.

To give man his due, there was a single instance in which he improved on time.

He froze it, time which had always flowed, and then shattered it like ice and cut the icetime into gorgeous, multi-faceted jewels which could be preserved indefinitely. These jewels, called paintings and movies and books and songs, enriched the moments they memorialized, illuminating them for all time.

III
Plenty of time continued to roam free. There were tigertime, and dreamtime, and wormtime, and birdtime, to name but a few.

All the time of all mankind was not yet enslaved.

Some men still passed a great deal of freetime, while the time of others was completely tied up, every second.

IV
But the trend was toward totalitarian time, corporate time, planned time, slavetime, and away from freetime, wildtime, surprisetime.

V
Man bred the seconds and minutes and hours to suit his needs. He cloned them and imprisoned them in enclosed spaces called factories and schools and institutes which were always equally illuminated. They had artificial suns and stars and moons called fluorescent and incandescent lights, and these lights shined day and night, so that many of the finest nuances of time were erased. Daytime and nighttime disappeared in these enclosures, as did morning and evening and noon and afternoon, not to mention twilight and dusk.

VI
Still, great schools of wild minutes and hours coursed through the seas, and herds of time thundered across the savannahs of Africa, and flocks of birdtime followed their ceaseless migratory cycles.

VII
There were men who wanted to conserve these varieties of freetime forever, but their voices were not as strong as those of the men who wanted to subjugate time.

“It’s important, increasingly important,” said the conservationists, “for people to see what a wildtime is really like. Without wilderness preserves, the few untamed times which remain are doomed. Caribou hours and redwood centuries don’t have a chance against advancing technology unless the technologists choose to give them a chance.”

VIII
But the totalitarian technologists just laughed. They did not want people to have a whale of a time---better such lifetimes be exterminated altogether. They didn’t WANT citizens to see examples of time being spent freely because they knew that wild seconds could grow to wild hours and wild years and that manhours spent too freely would engender that most dangerous and subversive of creatures, the free man, who advocates freedom for all time.

IX
Therefore the technologists devised pathetic re-creations of wildtimes, and called them amusement parks. Within the amusement parks were areas called Adventureland, and Fantasyland, and Frontierland, but none of the time spent in Adventureland was adventurous, nor was Fantasyland fantastic, and Frontierland was anything but a frontier.

All these places were controlled environments where one person’s time was spent exactly like another’s. In these environments seasons were not important, weather was not important, sunrise and sunset were not important. The only thing which was important was the ability to pay in order to pass more predictable time in the controlled environments.

And the only way to pay was to make money in other controlled environments, the factories and schools and office buildings and shopping centers and eataterias.

X
So it came to pass that almost all time was homogenized. Time became money, which is countable, one dollar being exactly like another. Therefore one minute, or hour, became exactly like another.

And there was no longer tigertime, because the only surviving tigers were in zoos. They were trapped, and circled round and round their cages, chasing their own tails, and all their days and years became identical.

The greatest, most magnificent examples of wildtimes disappeared first: Of course, the wild millennia had long since become extinct. And the wild century disappeared around 1850. The last wild decades held out in Siberia, the Amazon, and the Congo until 1955. Then they were no more.

The last wild year was spent by a Hottentot in Angola in 1978.

It is estimated that the last wild month will disappear by 2006. There are still wild months being passed in remote areas of the Himalayas, but they are so reduced in number that they can no longer find mates, so they cannot reproduce themselves.

XI
It seems to the more complacent of us as if there are still plenty of free hours and minutes and seconds upon the earth, but this impression is misleading.

The balance of natural time has already been so grotesquely upset that precious little time of any kind, controlled or uncontrolled, remains for mankind to while away.

XII
That is why this writer urges each of you to savor every free second, and even fraction of a second, which remains to you. They are in more limited supply than you may imagine.

---FIN---