WATCHING ALL THE TELEVISED BODIES, BODIES WITHOUT THE HUMAN SMELL

On the bed, you're rolling on top of the skinny girl who's growing out of her satin training bra. That's when the noise arrives. First, it sounds like a bang, but then you realize an orchestra has piped up outside your window. The bang was merely the kettle drummer tuning up before the overture.

How on earth did that orchestra get there without you knowing it? Were you so involved with your daydream that you didn't hear it? You didn't hear the shouts, the powerful gasoline generators cranking up and spluttering, and you didn't hear the horns tuning, re-tuning and practicing particularly difficult lines.

Without realizing it, you are starring in your own romance movie.

Magically, you are dematerialized out of your bed by forces you can only imagine. It just doesn't make sense--but you go with it just the same. After a few disoriented moments, you realize you've "landed" in the middle of a New York-based magazine newsroom. You're pissed off, but the anger you feel isn't real. Instead, your ire is part of some sort of script. In fact, you're feeling an unusually "female" ire.

No, it's not a cat-fight. You're upset because the magazine for which you work has suffered a sudden change in regime and you're worried you may not have a job if you don't fall into step with the new management. You go to the ladies room to powder up for a big meeting with your managing editor, but it's there you get the shock of your life: You're not the person you've always thought you were; rather, you're Jacqueline Smith! You're Jacqueline Smith, suffering the indignity of having to kow-tow to an editor who wants puff instead of the hard-hitting journalism for which you're known!

During the meeting, you discover that you're not only a journalist, you're the star of a formula romance movie. The formula romance movie, you slowly begin to realize, is designed to play on the sentimentality of the female mind, a mind that operates on the romantic plane to such a degree that sex and touching are only one part of the bargain. In some ways, you are a willing participant in what might be called "the feminine vision quest," but in real life you know you're a man. But for some reason, you've been selected to become Jacqueline Smith, star of a sappy Lifetime Network romance adventure flick.

How many men are there out there who are playing Jacqueline Smith in their heart of hearts?

The meeting with the managing editor (this man may be God, you're not sure) ensues, and without any question you're to be sent way out to British Columbia to do a story about "where our salmon come from." This really upsets you. You're Jacqueline Smith. They can't do this to you. Besides, you're also a middle-aged woman. Words like "salmon" have multiple meanings. There isn't any reason to believe the managing editor is making some kind of snide statement about your status as a single, middle-aged woman who hasn't had any "salmon" in awhile, but you're wondering just the same. British Columbia? Do you have to go that far just to know where the real salmon are?

You land by boat-plane in a beautiful, albeit romantic, setting in British Columbia. You're not exactly dressed for the occasion: For some reason people are staring at your white pants and tiger skin blouse as you lug a suitcase on rollers across the dock. Everyone else is wearing jeans and plaid shirts. The only person who will talk to you is an Indian woman. What does all this mean? You are in the wild. It's far from NYC. You are in the vast unknown of middle-age. Sure, it's a beautiful place, but you're not used to that kind of beauty. You want to go home where you can sip fancy wine and nibble on caviar with your catty friends from the NYC literati set.

Then you meet the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody." He's a local legend. He's a loner. He has something on his mind. He seems to have a tragic--and mysterious--past. Which, you think, is pretty safe. So far, so good: You're right in formula here. The Indian lady boats you out to his skiff, the Indian lady convinces the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody" to let you interview him, and you get on board--still wearing white pants and that tiger blouse you bought at Sakowitz. Oh, those and the high heels. You apparently didn't think about wearing tennis shoes.

On board the ship, you and the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody" fight over trivials: You ask him, for example, if he has any cream for the coffee and he tartly replies that the cream is in the same place as the bagels and the cappuchino. This miffs you. But you like being miffed, don't you?

Of course, it would take an act of God to bring you together with the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody," and soon enough, that miracle occurs. You're caught in a terrible storm. The boat is rocking so hard you can barely stand up. Then you and the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody" hear a thump. He goes on deck and discovers the fishing skiff has been hit by a log and is taking on water. He gets on the CB and calls, "Mayday! Mayday!" But nobody responds. He tries to fix the leak, is forced to give up. And where are you? You're off in the corner, Jacqueline, shivering your cute little ass off! Your clothing is soaked.

"We're going to have to get you out of those clothes!" shouts the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody." You argue, but the argument is a meek one. Next thing you know, you're totally naked underneath a blanket with a rugged individualist in the middle of a horrible storm, the boat rocking back and forth so roughly that it's impossible to keep from touching him under the blanket.

Soon, however, the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody" and you are rescued. Yes, the fisherman has friends. They've all come to rescue you from the raging storm. See? All you had to do was take off your clothes and snuggle against a "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone" and you got rewarded by having your life saved by the friends of a man who seemed a little scary to you until then. Now he's not so scary. He's a good guy. You go back to the boathouse and have a party. You're half drunk with the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anybody" and all of his rugged fisherman friends.

What? Where's your white pants? Where's that tiger print blouse? Huh? Now you're wearing bluejeans and a thick plaid shirt. Are you part of the gang now or what? Of course, although you're Jacqueline Smith, generally recognized as being one of the most beautiful women on earth, not a single one of those drunk fishermen has hit on you. In fact, the drunken fishermen are perfect gentlemen, far more civilized, in fact, than the white-collared boors in NYC. Yes, you are being converted to a new way of life. That new way of life is symbollic of settling into middle age in a graceful way.

Next: The Continental. It's after the party. You and the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone" have now bonded and are in his "house," a finely decorated place with stuccoed walls and tasteful paintings on every wall. Of course, you're thinking to yourself that a "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone" would have stuffed salmon on all his walls, or at least a few velvet Elvises, but the truth is that this fisherman is one of the most civilized men you've ever encountered. He's not only educated, he's a poet. You sit on the expensive looking couch, in the condo knockoff (remember? this is British Columbia!) swirling your wine in your crystal wine glass.

As you fall in love with the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone," he shows you the wonders of nature. He takes you to a salmon stream. You watch those huge fish--and do you ever mean huge--jump out of the water as they fight their way to, well, the spawning grounds. The "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone" tells you that all this is in danger--due to some corporate types who want to build a dam. Now, that dumb puff piece you were writing for that NYC magazine has been given an entirely new dimension.

Your editor calls you back to HQ--interupting your
ruggedly individual romance. You've barely started screwing the guy and now you've got to get back to "reality." The editor, who has read your piece, has also completely re-written it because he doesn't think the corporate interest section is relevant to the fine dining interests of the NYC readership. You're really upset. A friend of yours takes you to a bar to get drunk. It's there you see the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone." He's come all the way to NYC to see you. He has an Igloo container in his hand. Inside is salmon. Of course.

Now that the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone" has come to you, now that you've proven to yourself that middle-age isn't any big deal, now that you've shown your friends you can still catch big fish, you also begin to realize your perception of the world has changed. You look at your life: I'm not going to take this shit anymore! you cry.

Next scene? You're standing on the docks again in British Columbia. You look pretty hot in those tight bluejeans as the "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone" chugs into the harbor. It's so romantic, isn't it? No telling how many frequent flier miles you've used up going back and forth across the continent. The violins begin to swell....

....and you realize who and where you are. You're not Jacqueline Smith. You're just some guy who's been sleeping. First you dreamed you were having illicit sex with a fourteen-year-old and then you dove into a deeper dream that was designed for fourteen-year-olds. What is this? Jacqueline Smith? Is this a sign you're a latent homosexual? Or, is it that you've completely associated your ego with your feminine aspect?

Crimony! You have no idea what's happened. From outside the window you hear strange noises: The orchestra is packing up and apparently going home. Now it's just you, you: Wondering how on earth your notions of romance and relationship were warped to such a degree that this--Jacqueline Smith and a "rugged individualist who won't talk to anyone"--is what you dream of. You're middle aged yourself. You should be more mature than this. You should have a different viewpoint. You should have lost that psychic training bra years ago.

I'M NOT A DOCTOR ANYMORE, I'M AN UNDERTAKER!

So what? You're bored. Watching some B-sci-fi on one of the B television channels. At one point, an embittered doctor on a faraway planet looks at his population-charges' aspiring rescuers and tartly pronounces, "I'm not a doctor anymore, I'm an undertaker!" He looks at the scene of suffering behind him. Dozens of women and men, deep red blotches on their faces, walk around like dazed zombies. Apparently, nothing can be done for them. The disease is incurable. If the visitors from earth don't come up with a cure, the entire planet will die.

Funny, you think. You've felt that way yourself. Not that you're influential enough to cause even a miniscule change in the lives of those who surround you. It's that you feel the passion to do something, anything, that will somehow make a difference on this earth. You see sick people around you, people who need a difference to reveal itself, people who need a surprise, a development, a real change in a world of increasingly suffocating circumstances. But what can you do?

Sure, that need to make a recognizable difference might be a male obsession in USA culture. USA Males don't really make any direct, nature-dictated contributions to the world anyway. Instead we in the USA have to invent new ways of looking at the world, new expressions to describe qualities that have escaped the hovering masses. Women produce our children, and their production stems directly from God or from Nature or whatever it is that allows this miraculous dream to continue even after our thousand-petaled blossom of perhaps 75 years has wilted and turned to dust in a cement casket. Men have nothing do do but search for ways to make the women and children more comfortable.

There, of course, are sages among people in the USA. As you peruse this self-evident mystery, you are drawn by memory to the sages of China, the men who, when the responsibility of family was behind them, retired to the wilderness to become sages. This was an acceptable routine in ancient China. It persists today.

In the USA, sages are much less visible. We do see pretenders to the title "Sage" on television political talk shows. Opportunists and futurists who have produced a bright and witty book about, well, opportunity and the future, mewl like kitty-cats from behind politely polished news desks. They pontificate until their eyes are literally crossed in pleasure. Their voices prowl the vicinities of confidence like lords of the jungle, the jungle of rhetoric. But their prattle is a con: What such men and women excel at really involves social politics, the politics of the personal. Those pretenders are merely graceful among the movers and shakers of our age. Still, their words and their presences are like shadows of the great Rasputin. Their brushy eyebrows raise under the camera-lights; the eyes of a nation fall into a thralldom that is essentially meaningless.

Where, then, are the "real" sages in the USA? Each man (and many women) I know is in a continual battle against anonyminity. This battle is not about being invisible per se in a veritable sea of voices and persistently distracting information. Instead it is a battle against death. Against anhilliation. It is a struggle for survival in a milleu in which struggle has been all but eliminated. Sages, of course, emerge from the authentic culture. Sages appear to us daily. In one way or another, we are all sages.

Perhaps because we all pursue some sort of wisdom in our alienation (because that is what a sage really is--a person who has withdrawn from the mainstream of society in order to pursue the authentic struggle as revealed to him (or her) in a vision, dream or sudden brainstorm), we tend to adulate sages who stand above others. This mass tendency has a strange neighborhood effect: In the USA, we have a conventional wisdom or generally-accepted notion of whom or what constitutes a sage; those who don't share in the conventional wisdom of the great majority of Americans see through or miss completely the meaningfulness of various sages.

Take, for example, Anthony Robbins. For thousands of Americans, Robbins is the ultimate expression of the 21st Century sage. But those who don't share this notion surrounding Robbins and his kind of charisma either find him a fraud or a poster child for a pseudo-culture that has been prefabricated by market forces like a Potomkin Village--all in the name of consumerism. Of course, such "individualists" could be deceiving themselves. Maybe they miss Robbins' appeal. Perhaps they simply don't see how deft and limber Robbins is in the so-called realms of success. In many ways, the motivational speaker is an ultimate demiurge in the cult of the American Dream: He's tall; his televisual features are chisel-sculpted to look good on camera; his entire image is almost an exaggeration of the appearance to which most American males aspire; he's clean-shaven and neat; his smile is intimidating. Moreover, people adore him. His public appearances are so popular he can fill basketball stadiums like American Airlines Arena in a matter of hours.

What if Anthony Robbins stepped out of his relatively tame role of American Consumerist Sage and into the realm of politics? Suddenly, we would have a charismatic, near-Aryan demogogue; somebody worse than Ross Perot to subdue. The Anthony Robbins self-motivation movement would become the American exponent of National Socialism. It may have gone that far already.

Another good example of the American Sage is Jerry Springer. Here's a man who, in the 1970s, had been pinpointed by pundits and other politicians as one of the most charismatic politicans since FDR or JFK. Then, after a scandal, Springer disappeared, only to reappear as if out of a mystery. No one quite understands how such an apparently principled man as Springer can produce a show as low-spirited and mean as "The Jerry Springer Show." Some commentators point to what some have dubbed "The Gawk Factor": people like to rubberneck at auto accident sites and gossip about other people's problems. Springer, then, has co-opted those basic American instincts to create a television show that literally roars at mainstream American culture. Then, to top it off, Springer summarizes the lessons we are to learn in a short piece at the end of each hour, and the piece only highlights Springer's apparent wisdom. It's said Springer writes his own editorials.

As you sit here, your mind in the no-man's land of a daydream about the power of the sage in American culture, you feel important. You are engaging yourself in the wider issues that confront us all. Still, you can't help but see through all the Sages of America: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Andy Rooney, Oprah Winfrey and Doctor Phil, and Doctor Joyce Brothers and Doctor Laura Schlessinger, and all the big newspaper and magazine pundits. To you, they seem unreal. You don't know who they're talking to, but you know it's not you. Even some of America's noteworthy actors are vying for the position of Sage in America: Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Tim Robbins, Sting.

You realize: Those men and women aren't doctors; they're undertakers. Where are they really leading America? Back into itself? Where are we following?

Yes, the flowing river we once fondly knew as the American Experience has coagulated, and the so-called Sages of America--all of them more interested in the getting of power than in the giving of wisdom--have become buryers of the dead. And we, in all practicality, are the dead. As shovel after shovel of dirt washes over our little bubbles, we see less and less of the real world.

You think of yourself as a poet. The poet in your mind is a revealer, a conveyor of wisdom, a kind of spiritual doctor. You have information, important information, others need to peruse. But look at where you appear in the picture: You're way over on the side of the picture, almost out of the screen altogether. This is an intentional placement. Someone beyond your range or your scope has planned it this way. Yes, the information you carry with you is important information. Hence, the careful manipulation of the social pecking order that provides you a harmless sphere of influence. Your wisdom usually only goes as far as earshot. Then it stops. God only knows if anyone took anything of your words away with them. Remoter still that anyone actually did something with the information they received.

Until you change this dynamic, until you step outside of the conventional role into which you have been placed like a little nail or a wood screw, the funeral of America will continue. Part of you wants to like that idea. Better sense--that and the need to cheat death--mandates you become even greater than you are. Not that you're great. Greater than right now. The poet's role: Greater than right now. Anything less is, of course, complicity with the undertaker.

WHAT IF EVERYBODY CHANTED AT THE SAME TIME?

I heard on the radio that a group of scientists from Harvard or somewhere really important discovered a group of Tibetian monks chanting and sitting in a cross-leg circle around a pile of big rocks. To the Westerners' amazement, the rocks hovered in the air. The scientists ran some tests and came to the conclusion the monks were chanting the rocks to levitate.

Aside from remembering not to believe in everything I hear on the radio--imagine a radio chanting at me until I levitate--this incident suggests a number of questions:

1) WHAT ARE A BUNCH OF SCIENTISTS DOING JUST WANDERING AROUND THE HIMALAYAS? Surely they weren't out looking for this. I heard the report and thought: Right; some of the finest minds in the world just "happen to be in the neighborhood." But as usual I'm most likely the idiot here. Most certainly, these eminient personages were on "some other assignment," whereupon one heard about the amazing Tibetian monks and they all went scrambling up K2, 63-year-old profs with osteoporosis and the one with the penile implant,and all to merely "look-see." That would explain all the computerized equipment they'd need to run the tests they supposedly ran, computerized equipment they surely rented from all those advanced scientific research institutions in Bangaladesh. What kind of tests were these? Did the Harvard scientists "run their hands under the rocks" the way magicians do after they've halved somebody from the audience with a chainsaw? Or did they conduct "serious experiments" like radio frequency analyses or sonic vibration studies? If so, how did they get all this equipment into Tibet's forbidding mountain ranges? Some of those monestaries cling to mountainsides as high as 20,000 feet. Winds rush high and frigidly. Helicopters don't go there. Photon detectors, satellite dishes, all sorts of indescribable instruments of high technology, would somehow survive the cold, the ice, the wind, the altitude and human frailty for the sake of figuring how the monks managed to lift the rocks without hands. Maybe the monks levitated the equipment up the mountainside themselves, but it was probably more like this: Dude. Yeah, you. Sherpa. Put that gasoline-powered generator on your back...and see that slope over there?

2) WHAT ARE A BUNCH OF MONKS DOING SITTING AND CHANTING AROUND A PILE OF ROCKS? I've always respected Tibetian monks, even though some of the more magical legends surrounding Himalayan holy men read like not-so-subtle con-jobs. Don't those men, many of whom have spent entire lifetimes in search of nebulous truths, have better things to do than raise rocks? Was this some kind of contest between this monk and that one? Maybe it's a macho deal: You know, Quien monk es mas macho? Devadip? Or Goomba? Maybe Tibetian monks, because they're human beings, get together and show off. Kind of like a bunch of old coots sitting on the front step to a country drug store and spitting sunflower seeds at a puddle. Perhaps the monks thought they could raise a little money with the trick. All I know is that I picture a group of old men in strange robes sitting in a dark, torch-lit cave, all humming and warbling that obnoxious way those kinds of monks always do on National Geographic Specials. The announcer always talks in a hushed voice about ambrosial wine that's made out of goat's milk, which is supposed to taste just great, though if you've ever smelled a goat you'd KNOW that can't be true. And maybe that's why the monks hum: They're either trying to get the curdles from between their teeth, or showing the guy with the leather wine bag that they're occupied at the moment and can't part their lips to drink any more of that goat wine as long as they're humming. Whatever the case, so many more important things than a bunch of rocks need to be lifted in this world: We could have lifted cars off wounded children in Iraq; we could have moved broken buildings after earthquakes in Turkey; we could have made the Pentagon move a little. Because of the sheer impracticality of lifting rocks by kinetic energy in a mountain cave, or so it seems to me, it's evident the Tibetian monks in the cave have completely punked out: They don't believe in anything anymore: Hey! Let's just sit around and hum until the rocks start floating around the room. Wanna do that?

Westerners think the spurious linkage between practicing meditation and miraculous occurance is is "mystical." Westerners also believe that wearing weird clothing and practicing a non-indigenous religion is "mystical" as well. The monks are aware of both cases. Worse, the monks seem to have punked out so badly already that they've allowed themselves to go commercial: Dudes! We've gotten our act together and are taking it on the road! Kind of like the Kundalini Hillbillies.

This humming of Tibetian monks is supposedly a healthy thing that puts people into a mutually-transcendent state of mind, but the mutually-transcendent state is really a dead end. It has no practical value. Sure. It feels good. But isn't it funny that relaxation in the Western World has become so far removed from our daily lives that it's now a mystical experience people like Harvard scientists will travel halfway around the world to study?

The Tibetian monks sit and make rocks rise up in the air. It seems miraculous. But isn't just walking over and picking up a rock equally miraculous? Isn't walking over and telling a monk that he doesn't have to drink the goat's milk if he doesn't like it a miracle? Isn't any and all action a miracle? Why don't those guys go out and plant fields or herd horses? They'd get a lot more done.
Instead, all they do is emphasize the futility of changing suffering through the vehicle of direct action. There they sit, together possessing the most powerful direct activity known to man (and even then, it's only rumored...), and they're using it for purposes that border on the absurd. It's like using the power of the atom to make bombs. It's like utilizing the miracle of microwaves to get sex-addicted to a 976 number. It's like travelling all the way around the world to see if a bunch of old farts can make rocks fly. Enough said.

3) WHAT ARE THE ROCKS DOING VIOLATING THE LAWS OF NATURE? I don't know about you, but if everything--even our average DART transit stop--doesn't have a soul, my entire spiritual program, personally speaking, is going to go limp the second I get into Heaven. I don't know why I've always felt such an urge, but I sincerely want everything to have a soul. I really do. That hope of mine has come close to ruin because a bunch of moralists have completely screwed the majority of the objective world right out of God's Kingdom by requiring souls to have moral or ethical codes. By most philsophic prognostications, which really mean a whole lot, in order to have a soul, an object must first have self-awareness. That disqualifies most philosophers, but that's not the point here. What's so self-aware about a rock violating the laws of nature by levitating? The laws of nature tell us that rocks aren't supposed to fly and that's one of the moral codes for rocks. Perhaps the rocks are simply criminal rocks that have been "hanging out on the block" for eons until some rube came along as an accomplice to a crime. If the rocks were so self-aware, they would probably have taken a clue from the monks...WHO ARE DEMONSTRATING THE FUTILITY OF VIOLATING ANYTHING AT ALL, mainly because acceptance and transcendence of suffering is perhaps the most macho thing anyone, East or West, can do. Instead, the rocks, having skipped the school for rocks, have decided to conduct themselves in ways radically different and criminal from the acceptable ways of the other rocks: By levitating, the rocks are craving, they are expressing contempt and, most profanely, they are deluded if they actually believe that rocks, levitating, can ever amount to a hill of beans in this world.

What have flying rocks accomplished? Look at Gaza, man.

4) WHY AM I WRITING THIS? I responded to a stimulus (the radio), welcomed a thought into my intellect, chewed it over really good, and then spat it out for others to digest. This is the way goats teach their babies to eat grass. Still, it's pretty futile, all this figuring and analyzing. What good does it do? At very bottom (as if I didn't already know this), I am writing this because it gives me comfort.

The world is an uncomfortable place. It should go without saying that discomfort is no neighbor, cousin or ken to danger; yet nothing really fits in this godforsaken place.

One hundred thousand years ago, some ancestor of mine stood in a field, perhaps on a hilltop, gazing down on mile after mile of high, green grass. Suddenly, something that doesn't fit--a cave lion--nudged his perepheral vision. This seeing-stuff-that-doesn't-fit syndrome has been part of our human survival mechanism since we first climbed out of African trees millions of years ago, and probably since long before that. It's a syndrome that runs deep within us. We won't be getting away from it for a long, long time. Things that didn't fit one hundred thousand years ago could probably kill you. They can do the same thing today, but as we all can see, we've invented so much crap designed to protect us from the unforseen that we're relatively out of danger most of the time.

Sure. Very few things that don't fit kill you these days, but just because they can't kill doesn't mean they don't fit. Those things make us restless. The world is so vast, we have so much information coming in, and there's a small part of us that demands we fit it back together into an organic whole that actually makes sense. Since that goal is unrealistic and altogether impossible, we look for shortcuts--conspiracies, ideologies, religions, political ends and means--ways, in other words, that will make the world seem more reasonable, and therefore, more comfortable. We think churches and temples, and all the rules and moralities and sensibilities they represent, will give us comfort, mainly because we can't understand what happens when we die. We can't understand why we have to suffer, either, and no matter how hard we try to put that puzzle together, it's futility. We might as well forget about it.

Instead of trying to survive in a world where some things just don't fit into the proverbial scheme of things, we're now trying to make ourselves more comfortable with the world of nature, not to mention with the world we've designed to protect us all from nature. We are uncomfortable. Discomfort is usually at the very bottom of all our civilized and domesticated ills.

Now, I'm trying to make myself comfortable with things that don't fit--IN THE WORLD OF NATURE. I am suspicious of floating rocks. I'd bet you are too. Of course, with all the video games on hand, we're conditioning ourselves to believe just about anything. That's something we'll all have to get comfortable with.

ATTACK OF THE VOMIT-HEADS

Thinking of the persecution I have endured, the coy and sometimes sassy misunderstandings that have been foisted on the innocent in my name, I have often wondered what the big attraction is. Honestly: You'd think people could find something better to do with their time than find ways to torment me. After all, most with whom I find company more often than not constitute part of a group that seems to consider itself "progressive," "part of the vanguard," maybe even "superior." All that is possible, of course, yet it's always something small that ruins the entire pitcure. Isn't it? I mean, haven't we overlooked the glaring inconsistency between considering ourselves "progressive" or "leaders of the pack" and then turning around and torturing those around us who just can't attain the same perfection as we do? And, what should we be thinking about our deep dislike for all the so-called snobs we encounter in our lives? How do we explain our own snobbery? If we're so superior, we should have transcended such hollow traits long ago. Take a sip of this: Is it possible that the old saw, "it takes one to know one," isn't that far off the mark in this case of "Uberitis" visiting itself upon us?

Here's a quick takedown on the process that develops into the disease of "Uberitis": Everywhere I go, I am persecuted, alienated and misunderstood by others. Most of the time it seems to me these stances regarding me are deliberate and designed to make some kind of point. Therefore, wherever I go, I persecute, alienate and misunderstand complete strangers. I, too, am trying to make some kind of point.

What is that point? That we're all hog-tied and dense? That we're only trying to be like the vomit-head crowd? That we feel rejected by vomit-heads? And that, because we feel rejected by them, we've been rejecting them in a tit-for-tat tete-a-tete?

Some of us have been playing this game for so long we don't even remember that it was a game in the first place. Somewhere in third grade, some airhead in the elementary school cafeteria spit stew on our favorite shirt or pushed us down on the playground, and because of it, we've been out on a vengeance trip. The faces change, the targets shifting, but the trip remains the same, dudes. What's really happened is that we've been trained to become vomit-heads. We have been trained to sneer and snivel at others.

Man! Sometimes I feel so much ire for perfect strangers that I could just explode, blood and pieces of organs splattering everything in a city block's radius. One day, long ago, I was just fine, and the birds sang. Then everything changed. I began hitting balls with huge, storebought cudgels. The balls, naturally, represented effigies of all the heads on the people I hated the most. Crack! I'd slam the ball and the symbolic head of my arch-nemesis would fly "out of the ballpark."

Because of slights and rejections during impressionable moments in my life, I have become a raging, frothing-at-the-nostrils vomit-head. I look at buildings and VOMIT! I see a tiny, crippled old woman hobbling across the street downtown and VOMIT! I look at the window displays at Neiman's and I VOMIT SO HARD I'VE BROKEN WINDOWS AND BENT FLAGPOLES!

Yet I am in complete denial regarding my chronic case of "Uberitis". I really couldn't tell you that I honestly have a problem--the only difference I feel is a solid sense of superiority over others--because I don't remember if I ever felt differently. I'm not even certain anything registers in my brain as it is. When I'm by myself, all I think of are the vomit-heads in my life and what I would like to see done to the vomit-heads in my life. This is all unregistered, as unregistered as a squatter in a hotel room. I am tired all the time because I am using up a lot of energy to keep from letting such unregistered thoughts from registering in my brain.

But I do recognize when someone is purposely persecuting, alienating or misunderstanding me. That lights up like a halogen bulb in the center of my head. Usually, I'm already looking for it, literally watching the eyes of the people I know for signs they might be persecuting, alienating or misunderstanding me. If I look hard enough, I know I can find it.

I may not know exactly who the persecutor is, but I do have an image of him or her in my head. Picture this: A snivelling, snotty-nosed, slope-browed, sloop-shouldered, "shitty" fashion-slave turns a profile my way. What do I see? Simple: A snivelling, snotty-nosed, slope-browed, sloop-shouldered, "shitty" fashion-slave turning a profile my way. There's probably a little sweat on his or her brow, and the brow is pale, kind of chalky--pasty. What ever "it" is, "it's" got a sneer on "its" face. "It" looks like a peasant. It has a long, bean-shaped head. On it, a long, bean-shaped cone-hat perches like a pharoah. This, my friends, is known as "a vomit-head."

Vomit-heads think everything is puke-worthy.

Vomit-heads would gag the entire world with a spoon if they could get away with it.

Vomit-heads make waiters take meals back, but they spit in the plate first so the "help" in the back can't feed on a vomit-headed meal.

Vomit-heads criticize everything, and talk about God as if God was some sort of cartoon sitcom like Scooby Doo.

Vomit-heads have so little substance that they have to wear the latest fashions in order to compensate.

The latest fashions distract us from the vomit-head's typical lack of depth; in fact, the average vomit-head is all surface anyway--like a paper doll.

For some strange reason, the United States of America is going through some weird period in which the government and even the culture itself indulge in the compulsion to reward vomit-heads.

Because of the aforementioned fact about vomit-headedness in America, vomit heads are the most pampered and most pandered to class in America.

Though it wasn't that way in the beginning, when vomit-heads, being parasites, attached themselves lamprey-eel style to truly creative and individualistic members of the species, a gradual public relations and propaganda wave slowly engendered an association in the minds of its target audience, one that linked the vomit-heads to truly creative and individual clusters in American culture.

The above fact is usually far too complicated for a vomit-head to comprehend, but the powerful use of image at the usual vomit-head's disposal allows one to completly make that matter of dysfunctional communication utterly my fault.

So there they stand in my mind, each one of them looking like one of The Seven Dwarves--most likely "Grumpy" or "Urrrpy"--turning their noses up at me and finding ways to start trouble for me.

See? They want me to be like them.

But there are also other reasons behind this strange dynamic. In our culture, for example, there have always been the crucifiers and the crucified. This is a never-ending self-destructive spiral. People victimize each other. It's always "the fucker" screwing "the fuckee." Contract law is based on that axiom. But I'd rather not use my reason to explain LIFE IN THE VOMIT-HEADED WORLD. Instead, I look for explanations that help me to see myself as the most important person in the entire world. Here are some of those theories:

1) I AM THE CHRIST Yes, you've read me correctly. I am the final mountaintop, the crown of creation, the ultimate exponent of a massive and slow-moving genetic experiment engendered 2,000 years ago: Take a special line of kings and slowly graft it onto another, equally powerful, line of kings. This line of kings stuff isn't just a bunch of words, you guys. When the ancients spoke and wrote of KINGS OF MEN, they were talking about a superior race of men and women, people who had powers beyond the quotidian strengths of the average peasant. The Kings of Men were the ones meant to be rulers. This is the way the natural world operates. It's the way God, or Allah, or Jehovah, or Whomever wanted us to organize ourselves: Kings, Guardians, Lowlifes. However, the lowlife peasantry--like the devil--has never been satisfied with the status quo, and since the Death of Christ, those vomit-heads have been trying to kill off every single last member of all the races of Kings on the planet. I am one of the few left, but I have telepathic contact with my like-minded bretheren. Otherwise, I am constantly being tormented by vomit-heads that hound me like mutts, all of them thinking they can somehow gain power over my will and force me to become a lowlifed vomit-head puppet. Beyond that, I'd be a dead man, King of Men or not.

2) I AM BEING GROOMED TO BECOME A U.S. PRESIDENT Once again, you have read correctly: Because the government has become such a complicated beast, America can no longer rely on the simple method of electing just any old guy or girl. These people have to be carefully selected long before they become candidates. Some of them, like myself, were selected as children. My particular selection was part of an agreement between the people who killed Kennedy and the government: Since you killed a President, you have to help us groom a new one in Dallas. That process has been difficult and full of adversity. Which partially explains all the adversity I have experienced. However, there is naturally a reason that a certain segment of people want to interrupt this process: They think it's fraudulent and are trying to restore the original promises of democracy to the people.

The natural resistance to this presidential selection and grooming process has been incorporated into the process itself: Because those giving me so much shit are actually only making me stronger, my chances of reaching the goals set out for me by my handlers are all the better. Thanks surely must go to the vomit-heads: They're helping to insure a stronger America.

3) I AM BOTH THE CHRIST AND BEING GROOMED TO BECOME A FUTURE U.S. PRESIDENT No, you're not crazy. Soon after the end of World War II, American soldiers discovered long hidden birth records--some etched on ancient, golden plates--many of which went back to the birth of Christ. With help from the Morman Church, an organization legendary for its obsession with genealogy, the U.S. Government was basically able to learn the true secrets behind the Holy Grail. One of the lines of Jesus Christ--me!--happened to live in Dallas, Texas. Since that time, the U.S. Government has been trying to steer me towards a career in politics. Because I am the Christ, because all the Christs in the past have been gifted with special powers over reality, I will be empowered so much more as President. I will be a kind of Uber-President. And I will fulfill, according to some in the Pentagon, the prophesies.

Unfortunately, there is an obverse side to this matter of my being the Christ. The Catholic Church, I have learned, has long been pursuing the Holy Grail and has been trying to exterminate descendants of Jesus. The Catholic Church's secret police--the Mafia--have been tailing me for a long time. Sadly, the Arabs want to kill me too. They don't want any funny business over the Temple Mount. Then there are all those who don't believe in Christianity whatsoever. They want to make it difficult for me to enact or embody Christian principles like love.

So there you have it: A picture of the vomit-heads, and three conspiracy theories that easily explains to any truly rational human being their obsession with me.

Oh. And they're obsessed with people like you, too. Never know who's identifying with who these days.

TOTALLY DELUDED BOLSHEVIK WHORES

I had a dream last night that the Bolsheviks were at it again. Perhaps the dream was having me, but what's really important is that, in the dream at least, a bunch of professional revolutionaries from the pre-Soviet era had been flash-frozen in some sort of primitive cryogenic process. Where my narrative picks up--you know, where I come in--actually takes place after I've gone to sleep.

Of course, dreamwise, we were all awakening together. The biggest difference between myself and those succubi and incubi is that I am really real, and they are really dreams. However, aside from the astonishing remarkability our 21st Century liberal-democratic life in America seemed to reflect in the eyes and consciousness of the Bolsheviks, they were still intent upon labeling the entire liberal-democratic tradition "capitalism" and overthrowing it. Why? Just because.

After all, it didn't matter to those Bolsheviks that life in 21st Century America had transmogrified into something so totally alien to Marx, Engles, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin as to be unrecognizible. What mattered to them was the revolution, and that's pretty much where I somehow slipped in and got to watch some of the stuff that went on.

In the dream, I still had my conscious memory and continually recalled a biography of Lenin I'd read once--especially the parts where the professional revolutionaries went about raising money for the revolution. Shoot, they'd do anything: prostitution, embezzlement, theft, extortion, fraud, robbery and, of course, murder. Stalin himself was involved in an armed robbery in which the automobile he rode in wrecked and almost killed him. More interesting than that, though, involved situations in which beautiful Bolshevik women and handsome and witty Bolshevik men attached themselves and then married elderly, crippled, homely and embittered rich people. The spouses, of course, were quickly dispatched and, since the Bolsheviks were the sole inheritors, the money could go straight towards buying guns, arms and coal.

That last part really made sense: Because you're a Bolshevik, you're trying to help the powerless, and helping the powerless is a good thing. But because certain powerless people (lonely, infirm, sick in the head, on death's doorstep, in physical pain, etc, etc) have money, well, why not go ahead and rape them and rape them good? After all, isn't gaining power actually gaining power in the name of peace? And isn't peace a refusal to do physical violence? Emotional, psychological, economic, social violence and coercion--they don't count. As long as you don't physically hurt somebody, it's peace, dude. So there was a contradiction in just about everything the revolutionaries were doing. They were hurting and really working over powerless people and they were doing physical violence, as well as calling all the multifarious levels of violence they were utilizing...peace.

So in the dream, I had my eye out for all that stuff.

But there was a strange twist in my dream. For some reason, all the shenanigans and plots engendered by these so-called professional revolutionaries from Bolshevik Russia rang hollow and vain. Most of them were trying to gain control of really important things like poetry readings, art galleries and tabloid television news exclusives. Since they were trying to build a movement, they used the old carrot and stick method: reward "propitious" behavior; punish "ambiguous" or "non-revolutionary" behavior.

Of course, in 21st Century America, most of the recipients of this dumb, carrot-and-stick methodology hadn't the faintest idea what was going on. They'd simply be minding their own business when WHAM! Somebody would fuck them over. Somebody would impose on their lives. Somebody would "get" them.

Often, all this maneuvering and counter-maneuvering would take place amongst the revolutionaries themselves. They'd attack each other all the time as if they were a bunch of scorpions in a jar. In fact, the entire mission of the Bolshevik transplants looked like the demolition derby at the State Fair of Texas. Not with real cars. Bumper cars.

Imagine what that would look like: Kids everywhere, slamming into each other. What was being accomplished? Who really knows? One thing would be certain: The kids in the bumper cars would sure look happy. This demolition derby would look like the most positive and fulfilling activity on earth.

Us parents would look on at the goings on in the skating rink and chuckle to ourselves. Lookie there! That one's slamming the other! Isn't that cute?

Meanwhile, inside the rink, kids would be imagining all sorts of grandiose things: When I smash into that kid, I will have eliminated a major threat to my movement; when I let that kid go by, I will be offering him/her a place of honor within my branch of the movement or, at the very least, some sort of alliance.

In reality (at least in this dream I was having), most of the big activities were taking place in bars--where people are too drunk to be rational. Talk about a cluster-fuck. All sorts of games, and all in the name of the big revolution. Trying to pull someone into the "movement," girls would offer sex. If the "target" refused to budge or veer in the "politically correct" direction, the stick would be administered: rejection, harsh rejection. Which would be all fine and dandy except these Bolshevik bimbos were doing it to each other!

I remember telling one dream figure something I mentioned to friends in real life: "Hey. The Soviets only killed 100 million of their own people. Come on, let's give 'em another chance."

The Commie people were using all sorts of really transparent code to communicate. In fact, anyone who managed to pass English 101 in college could decipher it in a matter of minutes. But it was fun pretending with the Commie people. Some of them, for example, actually believed that like-minded people were part of some sort of Commie people hive mind. Because of the Commie people hive mind illusion--something Mark Twain coined "The Grand Illusion"--many of the Bolsheviks garnered a deluded sense of invulnerability. And that was something I wanted to promote.

"I'm an anarcho-syndicalist," one said.

"Is that so?" I replied. "I totally respect you, dude."

"We use the anarchists to tear down capitalist perversions of the truth and clear the way for us to move in," said another.

"Right on, right on," I said.

"We use the unversal language, the international language," another cried.

"Uh, like, what's this, then?" I said, shooting him the finger. "Sorry, dude. Just kidding."

What it all boiled down to in the dream is that the Bolshevik Commie people ultimately succumbed to the gaping maw of co-optation that occurs whenever the prerequisites for revolution are completely absent. Even in the dream, we didn't have a whole lot of bread lines. We didn't have secret police shooting people en masse. We didn't have big spectacles for one czar or another. And, ultimately, all the revolutionary prattle was pretty meaningless.

In fact, I got the impression that most of these so-called revolutionaries were doing it because they were bored. Some, of course, had low self-esteem and acting out like a revolutionary made them feel important, part of something important. Others, however, saw themselves standing square in the center of world events. In the dream, I took a group of Bolsheviks to the Kroger down the street. Seeing all that food, all the fresh vegetables and fruit, seeing red meat and all kinds of canned and prepackaged foods, several of the Commie people fell onto the floor and began to weep. I gave each one of them a "Rush Limbaugh" bumper sticker to take back with them in the time machine.

Then my alarm rang. I was back in the real world.
Looking around the room, I noticed no Bolsheviks or Commie people anywhere. Maybe they'd already gone back into history. Of course, they were from the early 20th Century, weren't they? What really stuck in my mind, though, was the conversation I'd had with one:

"We believe in natural law," he said.

"Which is...?"

"It's, like, when people learn to see the truth and, like, figure out that we're all together and stuff. It's like a dance, man."

"What if some dancers are better dancers than other dancers?"

"Sorry. Don't get your drift."

I said, "If some dancers are better than others, they'll eventually end up at the top of the heap. Then what? Another revolution?"

SPEAKING OF SACRIFICE, HOW ABOUT A TORNADO SANDWICH?

Sacrifice visits all our lives in many forms. One may think, for example, of Kurt Vonnegut's famous character, Billy Pilgrim, slipping in and out of time: One moment, like everyone else around him, Pilgrim is living a conventional life, with conventional mores, along conventional routes governed by conventional laws. Suddenly everything changes and Pilgrim is thrust into a sort of cosmic blender in which past, present and future all collide. He is greeted by the Transfamadorians, little aliens that look like plumber's helpers, except they have hands on the tips of the helper handles, and in the middle of the hand sits an eye. He drifts back in time when he and his fellow prisoners were held fast by the Nazis in a Dresden meat locker as Allied forces created a firestorm above them in the fiercest bombing campaign in history. He's imprisoned on the moon with the most beautiful woman on earth and is seen having sex with her inside a lunar zoo.

This, in my life at least, is called a tornado sandwich.

The year is 1987. Like old Mother Hubbard, my cupboard is bare. Nothing but spiders in the old pantry. In fact, as I stand there staring at nothing but bare shelves, I note that the only things I have to eat may indeed mix together to form a halfway palatable recipe: one envelope of powdered milk and about half a pound of white flour. Mmmmmm! Sounds good!

Add some spices, a little salt and pepper, and wow! I'm a white trash gourmet.

I get to mixing the concoction in a nice plastic bowl. The bowl is pink. It looks like a Tupperware knockoff. Using a baker's spatula, I knead the material until it is next to lumpless and then I try to form it into little patties. But that's no use. The stuff is too runny. What I have left is nothing but flavorless mush.

Oh yeah. Flavorless mush. Sounds a lot like my life. Drifting backwards in time, I stand there in the kitchen and dream of the State Fair of Texas around 1982--when a buddy and I visited the freak show. One of the famed freaks was purported to be the world's fattest woman, and from the freak show picture, one of those over-dramatized and cartoonish likenesses, she's got to be at least six or seven hundred pounds.

We threw down our dimes and ducked into the steamy tent. There was some guy sticking a six inch nail into his nostril. While most people were exclaiming things like, "What about his brain?" and "Shut up! He's got it in his sinuses!", I was thinking, "Man. I'd hate to be the one to clean the snot off that nail, dude."

When the big moment came, when the fat lady appeared, the crowd gasped. Out strode the fattest, grossest woman I've ever seen--and to make it even worse for all of us, some idiot in the freak show's corporate office had forced the poor woman to wear a teeny-weeny yellow polka dotted bikini. That was sick. I told my buddy exactly that.

The woman's skin was sallow and pale. She didn't look either healthy or happy. She looked numb. Perhaps she was on drugs. And when she plopped a humungous behind down on a simple wooden chair, the chair squealed like a kicked dog. The legs even bowed as if to break. Of course, I figured that was a calculated effect. Fingering the change in my pocket, I imagined at the time I had made a good investment in coming to see the world's fattest woman. This was priceless.

The woman held a tupperware bowl in her hand. In the bowl was some kind of mush. As the announcer talked up the audience about the woman's weight and her obvious pathological condition and the fact that she hadn't been able to hold down a conventional job for years on account of her weight, the woman would leer at the audience and slurp up white, floury mush with a wooden spoon. The spoogy stuff would drool down her chin and onto her breasts. Had I been some kind of pervert, this would have been literally sexual.

Now, in 1987, I am standing in my kitchen, looking out at Central Expressway, slurping mushy flour and milk out of a pink tupperware bowl. I am stripped to the waist. The stuff has dribbled onto my chest. The scene must be priceless. But it is the only thing I have left to eat. What else can I do but re-enact the freak show fat woman's horrific occupation right there in my kitchen?

Later that evening, an old friend stops by. He tells me, "Gordon, I know you've been having a rough time. I think you need a night out on the town."

"Great," I tell him.

"I think we ought to go down to Deep Ellum. Wanna do that?"

"Sure."

So we jump into his car and drive down to the Video Bar, a hopping nightclub in 1987-era Deep Ellum. Once there, my buddy begins buying me shots of tequilla. Naturally, having so much pride, I've neglected to tell him I haven't eaten anything but flour and milk. What my stomach is thinking as it is getting dousing after dousing of straight alcohol more than likely has something to do with priorities, something like, "Try eating first, then celebrate."

But apparently I have it backwards that night. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm pretty unresponsive. When Mary, an aspiring girlfriend, arrives, I'm not too cheerful, at least not from her viewpoint. From my viewpoint, Mary's pretty brown eyes and blonde hair are starting to blur and make tracers. But my buddy oblivously continues to buy me shots. He doesn't know I haven't eaten in days.

"I think I'm gonna dance," I slur.

"Go dance. Have a good time, Gordon."

On the dance floor, I think I am Fred Astaire, but I'm actually staggering. People are laughing at me, but I'm thinking they are laughing because I am so much fun, not because I am so drunk I look like a fool. Finally, with a flourish, I pirouette, and, like a tornado, go down to the floor. Mary and my buddy wade through the crowd to fish me out.

The next thing I know, however, is my buddy picking me up off the pavement outside: "Gordon? Gordon? What are you doing out here? You're taking up some guy's parking space!"

I awaken spread-eagled and face down in the middle of Elm Street.

Sometimes, I wonder about the fat woman at the freak show, how she actually came to that conclusion in her life. What brought her to a circus? What moment in time was so offensively bad that it looked like an opportunity to dress up in a teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini and eat floury mush in front of gawking freak show geeks? She, like me in the street that night, like Billy Pilgrim awakening in that Dresden meat locker, had been hit by a tornado sandwich.

ANOTHER SPAM SANDWICH FOR CHRIST

Perhaps this is purely metaphor. Perhaps we must take this literally--as do many who digest the words sandwiched within the floppy black leather covers of their Scofield Bibles.

Metaphorically, these words might mean anything. The objects--in this case, ionized particles flying through fiber optic tubes at the speed of light--hover before us, the subjects. Whatever rides between the two functions of this altogether rhetorical question depends upon the subjective message received, interpreted. Should the subject for any reason be impaired--by mind-changing chemicals, by mental or emotional illness, by logical misunderstanding or even by nitrates and sulfates such as found in many types of canned meat--the objective message may tend to become garbled.

Literally, however, words have one meaning. Ambiguity is therefore impossible. Although the language of Nature tends towards the uninterpretable, the language of Man is a solid thing, something to depend upon when the ambiguity of Nature becomes too much to bear.

But what about the language of God? Who interprets it? Is there an online correspondence course I can take that will enable me to interpret the Word of God?

It's Sunday morning. It could be a metaphorical Sunday morning or it could be a literal Christian Sabbath. I am sitting in the plaza of a major telecommunications corporation that may be either a metaphorical telecommunications corporation or a literal one. It is still dark outside, but darkness and the term "outside" may be ambiguous terms that could mean just about anything--though it's entirely possible it's literal, something solid. I'm pretty bummed out. Still cold, too. Of course, I really am not certain what "pretty bummed out" really means, mainly because the phrase is indeterminate and tripartate: Pretty arrives before Bummed which comes before Out. Does this mean I am beautiful, a failure and pushed out? Or is it possible that Pretty is merely a matter of surface? After all, beautiful implies depth and numinousness (or, of course, ambiguity), and if I'm literally "pretty," sitting there in the plaza of a major international telecommunications corporation at the crack of dawn, it doesn't mean I'm particularly beautiful. Since I am also "bummed," a failure, "bummed" may be an indicator of the quality of my beauty at the moment--which is, naturally, a failure. "Out" means that it shows.

Just as the sun begins to make its shy Sunday morning appearance--that could be a literal appearance or a metaphorical appearance--I notice a cheerful group of young people barreling out of a van. Signage printed on the outside of the white vehicle indicates that I am about to be greeted by the "Ironwheel Missionary Baptist Church," an entirely metaphorical group of literal Christians that tends to project a kind of group-wide insecurity in the face of ambiguity by trying to give bummed out people like me something solid. A face faces me. It is a bright, pretty face. A female face. It is dangerous downtown--that's what everybody says. But this pretty female face has come to me with a smile on it because this is a matter of faith. Confronting the "pretty bummed out" amongst us is a Christian imperative. In this case, Christ Himself appears before me in the form of a brown paper bag.

I open it. It could be a metaphor. It could be a literal pronoun refering to the last noun of the previous paragraph (and for those of you who are too dumb to be believed, that noun happens to be "bag"). But whatever the case, metaphor or literal pronoun, the brown paper bag is a sacrament. I am about to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ--which, in this case, at least once I pull open the bag's stapled lip, happens to be a Spam sandwich and a "Big K" orange drink.

"Jesus loves you," chirps the face. The face is still smiling.

"But does Jesus love Spam?" I ask.

"Sir," another man, a large and gruff spirit I immediately recognize as the supervisor of this fundamentalist youth group, interjects, "sir, I don't think they had Spam in Biblical times."

"But Christ is still alive," I argue. "The Bible says so."

"Christ is a spirit," the man tells me. "Spirits don't need food."

"Well, what about 'Food of the Gods'?" I ask. "Last time I went to Golden Corral, I told my friend, 'This is the food of the Gods!' And you know what? It was also 'All You Can Eat.' I was in Heaven. Have you ever been to Golden Corral?"

"Look," the man says. "We'd like to pray with you. Think you can handle that?"

"Sure. I don't have any problems about thanking God for stuff. At this point, mister, even Spam looks good. I'm all for Spam. Can I lead the prayer? Dear Lord," I quaver, "thank You for this Spam sandwich and this Big K Orange Drink. I was hungry and thirsty today. I think I will save the Little Debbie moonpie for lunch, so I hope You stick around for that, too, Jesus. Please protect me from the security guards at the library. I don't want to go to jail if I have to take a piss, either, so I hope you're not too embarrassed to see me holding my weiner next to a dumpster. In the Lord's name, Amen."

The pretty blonde girl blushes. Silently, the fundamentalist youth outreach group shuffles away to the next clot of people. I realize I have been difficult. Of course, I am in a difficult situation. I don't feel like being easy on other people right now. That's why I am so difficult.

This, as I have said, could be a metaphor. It could also be a literal description. Was the Spam sandwich actually the Body of Christ? If so, why was it necessary to manufacture the Body of Christ out of "pork, beef and chicken product," as it says on the can? Why did somebody think it would be reverent to scrape the skin off some dead cow's face, combine it with the ears and nostrils of a dead pig and maybe the feet of some bird and then call it The Body of Christ? And what about that Big K Orange Drink? Whose idea was it to sell "the Blood of Christ" off the shelves of K Mart? Was Jesus' blood really orange?

I'm not being facetious about any of this. When I was a child, partaking of my first Holy Communion, I remember thinking, "Man! This stuff sure doesn't taste like blood!" Actually, it was nothing more than watered down wine. It was supposed to stand for something else. The people in my Church sometimes complained loudly that the Baptists used grape juice because they were against alcohol. Some said that, historically speaking, wine was more literal as a symbol of Christ's blood (Are you following me? If not, well, try to go with me on this one, O.K.?) because people drank wine instead of water because the alcohol in wine killed bacteria. Of course, people in Biblical times didn't know that bacteria existed. Anthropoligists posit that they simply had learned from eons of experience that wine was healthier than simple muddy water.

What really plagued me about that Spam sandwich, however, is that they used pork. Jesus, after all, was a Jew, and as we all know, Jews are forbidden by Mosaic Law to eat pork. How, then, could the Body of Christ contain "pork product"? While I sincerely doubt the fundamentalist youth outreach group from Ironwheel Missionary Baptist Church had the faintest idea they were administering Holy Communion to a pretty bummed out guy at the crack of dawn of a Sunday morning, I still tend to think they should be a little more careful what they use in their ministry.

Look at me: Because I am really hungry, I am placing my lips around two cheap pieces of white bread that sandwich a huge, greasy lump of Spam. Mmmmmm. Tastes just great. No lettuce. Just a little French's Mustard.

This could be a metaphor. It could be literal. We are what we digest.

DWARF RAPES NUN, ESCAPES IN UFO

Out here on the boundaries of conventional reality, a place in which the rules seem to apply until the rules are pursued in a practical manner, upon which the so-called rules are seen to be in reality nothing but ghostly images and imaginations and even mysteries, I have only my body's rules to obey. Eat. Sleep. Defacate.

From there, however, the rules become more complicated, for while I take the usual precautions regarding the maintennance of my body, I also realize I must keep myself clean. I must do this to stave off disease. Beyond that, because cleanliness is one of the first and foremost gateways to the imaginary rules of ghostly images and mysteries, I realize as well that cleanliness touches the world in which I live: Cleanliness, then, is part of my image, the face I present to the world.

Why do I have to buy soap? Isn't soap a product? And what does soap really mean? Is a crucial aspect of my need for cleanliness a necessary function of the greater society inwhich I live? Who really knows?

I live in an urban environment. Because so many of us live in one place, I realize I can no longer depend upon myself as a mere individual to supply my body with soap--or food or shelter or even a place upon which to lay my head. Sure. That's not a really keen place in which to land--considering I really didn't ask to be born here, in this time, during this odd and often disquieting era--but there are distinct tradeoffs here. Instead of wracking my body day after day in the process of raising food for consumption; instead of literally fighting the earth, as if the earth itself were some sort of adversary, I am able to go to the grocery store. This is convenience. In fact, this nation is so overwrought with the idea of convenience that we have become slovenly, slow, spoiled and insipidly shallow. No tanks have ever rolled through our city streets. We don't know what it is to starve. We have no idea what it must have been like for the women--mothers, wives and daughters--of Soviet prison camps, waiting as many often did in campsites just outside the frozen gates of Siberian Hell.

See? I have gone from soap to the Supreme Soviet in only a few paragraphs. Perhaps this is a description of a pre-revolutionary state of mind. Perhaps this is only a description of a frame of reference in which fighting against social morays is the only way to resist a persistent emptiness that will not rest. Perhaps this is a request for real estate.

Be the judge. The jury is always hung.