THE DROOGS POSITIVELY FOREVER IN THE SUNSHINE
Got a bit of a laugh the other day when I noticed Mad Swirl's webpage is premiering its next Wednesday night Sportatorium spoken-word reading as Dr. Googily-Eyes Healing Circus & Mad Swirlin’ Medicine Show: Inciting the Rise of YES and the Fall of NO. I still keep-up with the goings on at the reading's e-page even though I do not participate, mainly because I enjoy reading an odd mashup of both beginners and some fairly experienced poets. While this mashup is only odd because the page's editor, M. H. Clay, seems to have zero understanding of what makes a poem and what does not make a poem, sometimes the rides are fun, sometimes not so fun.
I don't object, really, when younger poets, hobbyists or dilettantes get their literary hard-ons in public. I actually empathize with such folks, mainly because I spent 40 years of my life trying to be a poet. Saddening to me sometimes is that my mind was so mangled by Bipolar Disorder that writing a poem that communicates was a seldom achievement. I remember one poet commenting years ago at Chumley's, the big gathering in Deep Ellum in the early-to-mid 1990s, that I was writing what is known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and when I look back at my "grand opuses" of the time, I decide to take the compliment, mainly because my spotty poems often made little to no sense at all.
I really do not blame myself for having a scattershot mind at the time. In 1973, before the Bipolar Disorder had manifest, I was asked to audit an MFA course in poetic composition by the Dean of Liberal Arts, all because a poem I had written in high school, "The Transient", had impressed him. I was only 19 when I scored an A minus for the course--although the good grade never appeared on my transcript. After that first hard manic episode struck me like a sledgehammer in September, 1977, this after years of anxiety and phobias hinting and foreshadowing the disasters to come, confusion was a way of life until 1993. Even then, because I continued to drink out of habit (self-medication medicating what was no longer there), my recovery out of that confusion took much longer than it would had I stayed out of boozing it up and gotten serious about my life.
I remember sitting in my apartment for an entire month, summer, 1993, astounded to know silence for the first time in my life. All that racing thought had ended. I was frightened by this but also quite happy that the noise had stopped.
But let's get back to Dr. Googily-Eyes Healing Circus & Mad Swirlin’ Medicine Show: Inciting the Rise of YES and the Fall of NO.
The meeting's MC, Johnny O, has always advocated positivity and nothing but positivity in all thoughts, actions and deeds. That in itself is positively frightening, mainly because the world simply does not operate under those principles, everyone seems to know that, and yet there he is, thinking that getting wacked-out on chronic dope is going to mask what very could be Narcissistic Personality Disorder with a taint of arrested development. He has done some very negative things to people, and his "victims" sincerely think he is one of the ugliest human beings they have ever met. I think of one acquaintance, now remarried, who, while in the middle of a difficult divorce from a woman he still loved, had to endure Mr. O shagging his erstwhile wife "just because". I sincerely did not know this the afternoon Mr. O and M. H. Clay stood beneath a Denton, Texas, billboard while waiting to perform as featured guests at a local reading. Mr. O loudly complained that his wife, Lisa, was shagging a man other than Mr. O, and that this was "unfair" and "mean" and "unforgivable". Unaware of his bestial behavior, something he hides behind under the pretense that he's a "swinger", I sympathized. Until I learned the other side of the story of the former soldier who played a bit part in Operation Gulf Storm, something he holds onto as if this is the only achievement possible in the entire world.
Yep. Let's be positive about every little thing in the whole wide world. Mister Sunshine.
Depression and mental or emotional dysfunction simply doesn't play in that poetaster's Peoria. Why should it bother to play there? It's not "positive" to be stricken by a congenital illness that is physical while manifesting in terms of all kinds of emotional and mental difficulties.
I remember him kicking me out of Mad Swirl because I had posted a joke about him on another poet-hobbyist's Facebook photo panorama. The joke had to do with homosexuality and whether Mister Sunshine was "the catcher" or "the pitcher". I posted a link to Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", a seminal novel about a young boy rebelling against "phoniness" in the middle of the lead singer propositioning Mister Sunshine with a dippy smiley face winking signal, and then I smiley-face-winked back. This apparently incensed the poor sex addict. I was not "part of the club" even thought the other sex addicts had been hitting on me for several years. How many times of not responding to some woman placing her cheek on yours before she realizes, nope, she's not getting anywhere? How wrong is it to ask a woman with whom you are interested to "talk first, then maybe"?
What's really laughable about all that "swinger" garbage is that they actually believe they are shining a lamp in the "super secret underground" while the rest of the world is a very dark place. I do find this fake co-optation of The Age of Enlightenment for purposes of partying fairly amusing, and the few conversations with women who are part of the swinger scene indicated to me that a lot of emotionally-battered people have been taken-in simply because they are trying to fill-in a hole in their psyches that otherwise cannot be filled.
Let's be positive: All is not sunshine and light. I'd certainly not want to be inside of one of Mister Sunshine's psychic back rooms. Would you?
Mister Sunshine is "all about being positive" because Mister Sunshine is afraid of the darkness hiding within him.
Great dope is one way of jacking oneself into "the positive". Bob Marley advocated "the positive", something Mister Sunshine may not understand was a message of hope to several million Jamaicans living in super poverty while attending to the whims to the rich and famous in resort communities carved out of the jungle.
I never went for Pollyanna anyway. I'd grown up with all too much darkness: a childhood of familial discord, a father with serious problems, a mother yelling at the top of her lungs because she felt trapped and betrayed for years and years, a suicide, the "big secrets" the entire neighborhood knew anyway, and then having to decompress from all that tragedy while coming of age. Nope. Life was not a positive experience for me as a child. Then Bipolar Disorder was the icing on the cake. I am happy I survived.
A prominent American social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich, published a book about the nonsense of positive thinking a few years ago. "Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America" tells the story of how that stuff invaded our personal space. Oddly enough, positive thinking is a commercial invention designed to keep employees from complaining and as productive little worker bees. I remember getting the positive thinking propaganda seminars while working white-collar. I snapped to the ulterior motive almost immediately. I never thought allowing that "emotion smack" to bleed into my personal life was appropriate in the least. In the real world, "difficult" things happen, and all too often the sealing-away of "difficult" things results in physical illness. We have feelings like anger, sadness, depression, hostility and the "meh" because we need them to survive. Refusing to express "the negative" is unhealthy.
People who are afraid of their own personal darkness hide behind the "sunny side of life" because, like drug addicts and sex addicts, they are simply not brave enough to face real life.
Sure. It would be "nice" to have a non-stop peak experience from birth to death. But then what would be the point of having peak experiences at all?
Mister Sunshine refused to allow me back into the Mad Swirl readings because I had said "bad words" about him. Meanwhile, he was doing "bad things" to people. This "bad words" bit is laughable. Poetry without criticism, like life without criticism, is dull and sometimes quite criminal. This is not to say I am some sort of enforcer, but I do have the odd proclivity for telling the truth. I am an honest person. I don't pull punches. When I see something I do not like, I speak-out about it, and the brutes hiding behind positive thinking can lump it.
I don't object, really, when younger poets, hobbyists or dilettantes get their literary hard-ons in public. I actually empathize with such folks, mainly because I spent 40 years of my life trying to be a poet. Saddening to me sometimes is that my mind was so mangled by Bipolar Disorder that writing a poem that communicates was a seldom achievement. I remember one poet commenting years ago at Chumley's, the big gathering in Deep Ellum in the early-to-mid 1990s, that I was writing what is known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and when I look back at my "grand opuses" of the time, I decide to take the compliment, mainly because my spotty poems often made little to no sense at all.
I really do not blame myself for having a scattershot mind at the time. In 1973, before the Bipolar Disorder had manifest, I was asked to audit an MFA course in poetic composition by the Dean of Liberal Arts, all because a poem I had written in high school, "The Transient", had impressed him. I was only 19 when I scored an A minus for the course--although the good grade never appeared on my transcript. After that first hard manic episode struck me like a sledgehammer in September, 1977, this after years of anxiety and phobias hinting and foreshadowing the disasters to come, confusion was a way of life until 1993. Even then, because I continued to drink out of habit (self-medication medicating what was no longer there), my recovery out of that confusion took much longer than it would had I stayed out of boozing it up and gotten serious about my life.
I remember sitting in my apartment for an entire month, summer, 1993, astounded to know silence for the first time in my life. All that racing thought had ended. I was frightened by this but also quite happy that the noise had stopped.
But let's get back to Dr. Googily-Eyes Healing Circus & Mad Swirlin’ Medicine Show: Inciting the Rise of YES and the Fall of NO.
The meeting's MC, Johnny O, has always advocated positivity and nothing but positivity in all thoughts, actions and deeds. That in itself is positively frightening, mainly because the world simply does not operate under those principles, everyone seems to know that, and yet there he is, thinking that getting wacked-out on chronic dope is going to mask what very could be Narcissistic Personality Disorder with a taint of arrested development. He has done some very negative things to people, and his "victims" sincerely think he is one of the ugliest human beings they have ever met. I think of one acquaintance, now remarried, who, while in the middle of a difficult divorce from a woman he still loved, had to endure Mr. O shagging his erstwhile wife "just because". I sincerely did not know this the afternoon Mr. O and M. H. Clay stood beneath a Denton, Texas, billboard while waiting to perform as featured guests at a local reading. Mr. O loudly complained that his wife, Lisa, was shagging a man other than Mr. O, and that this was "unfair" and "mean" and "unforgivable". Unaware of his bestial behavior, something he hides behind under the pretense that he's a "swinger", I sympathized. Until I learned the other side of the story of the former soldier who played a bit part in Operation Gulf Storm, something he holds onto as if this is the only achievement possible in the entire world.
Yep. Let's be positive about every little thing in the whole wide world. Mister Sunshine.
Depression and mental or emotional dysfunction simply doesn't play in that poetaster's Peoria. Why should it bother to play there? It's not "positive" to be stricken by a congenital illness that is physical while manifesting in terms of all kinds of emotional and mental difficulties.
I remember him kicking me out of Mad Swirl because I had posted a joke about him on another poet-hobbyist's Facebook photo panorama. The joke had to do with homosexuality and whether Mister Sunshine was "the catcher" or "the pitcher". I posted a link to Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", a seminal novel about a young boy rebelling against "phoniness" in the middle of the lead singer propositioning Mister Sunshine with a dippy smiley face winking signal, and then I smiley-face-winked back. This apparently incensed the poor sex addict. I was not "part of the club" even thought the other sex addicts had been hitting on me for several years. How many times of not responding to some woman placing her cheek on yours before she realizes, nope, she's not getting anywhere? How wrong is it to ask a woman with whom you are interested to "talk first, then maybe"?
What's really laughable about all that "swinger" garbage is that they actually believe they are shining a lamp in the "super secret underground" while the rest of the world is a very dark place. I do find this fake co-optation of The Age of Enlightenment for purposes of partying fairly amusing, and the few conversations with women who are part of the swinger scene indicated to me that a lot of emotionally-battered people have been taken-in simply because they are trying to fill-in a hole in their psyches that otherwise cannot be filled.
Let's be positive: All is not sunshine and light. I'd certainly not want to be inside of one of Mister Sunshine's psychic back rooms. Would you?
Mister Sunshine is "all about being positive" because Mister Sunshine is afraid of the darkness hiding within him.
Great dope is one way of jacking oneself into "the positive". Bob Marley advocated "the positive", something Mister Sunshine may not understand was a message of hope to several million Jamaicans living in super poverty while attending to the whims to the rich and famous in resort communities carved out of the jungle.
I never went for Pollyanna anyway. I'd grown up with all too much darkness: a childhood of familial discord, a father with serious problems, a mother yelling at the top of her lungs because she felt trapped and betrayed for years and years, a suicide, the "big secrets" the entire neighborhood knew anyway, and then having to decompress from all that tragedy while coming of age. Nope. Life was not a positive experience for me as a child. Then Bipolar Disorder was the icing on the cake. I am happy I survived.
A prominent American social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich, published a book about the nonsense of positive thinking a few years ago. "Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America" tells the story of how that stuff invaded our personal space. Oddly enough, positive thinking is a commercial invention designed to keep employees from complaining and as productive little worker bees. I remember getting the positive thinking propaganda seminars while working white-collar. I snapped to the ulterior motive almost immediately. I never thought allowing that "emotion smack" to bleed into my personal life was appropriate in the least. In the real world, "difficult" things happen, and all too often the sealing-away of "difficult" things results in physical illness. We have feelings like anger, sadness, depression, hostility and the "meh" because we need them to survive. Refusing to express "the negative" is unhealthy.
People who are afraid of their own personal darkness hide behind the "sunny side of life" because, like drug addicts and sex addicts, they are simply not brave enough to face real life.
Sure. It would be "nice" to have a non-stop peak experience from birth to death. But then what would be the point of having peak experiences at all?
Mister Sunshine refused to allow me back into the Mad Swirl readings because I had said "bad words" about him. Meanwhile, he was doing "bad things" to people. This "bad words" bit is laughable. Poetry without criticism, like life without criticism, is dull and sometimes quite criminal. This is not to say I am some sort of enforcer, but I do have the odd proclivity for telling the truth. I am an honest person. I don't pull punches. When I see something I do not like, I speak-out about it, and the brutes hiding behind positive thinking can lump it.
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