HEROES ARE HARDER TO FIND THAN YOU THOUGHT

 In my last blog entry, I briefly mentioned how, in some ways, I'm a little like Lebowski, the character in the cult favorite, "The Big Lebowski".  Lebowski's the aging hippie in Los Angeles--or Lost Angeles, or even La Califusa--who gets caught in a creepy, paranoid meatgrinder involving vying forces over, well, what exactly?  

Oh right.  The "other Lebowski", a wealthy man, is trying to get kidnappers to return to him his wife.  

Likely story, right? 

After all, after getting "rednecked" by a group of powerful "paleo-conservatives" at a local newspaper over my involvement with the core of an antinuclear coalition in 1980, I sometimes laugh about it; but other times, I like to dream I was actually so important a figure that--yes!--I had to be stopped by any means possible.  The CIA.  The FBI.  The DHA.  The Secret Service.  Who else?  Savik?  The NKVD?  How about the Gestapo while we're at it--or as the nutty Representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, put it. . . 

The Gaspacho.

Yup, that's who's after me.  A vast vast conspiracy of "epic proportions" that is out to stop me--a kind of Lebowski character--from, um, what exactly?  

No!  Stop him!  

Sure.  I'm sounding facetious here.  In fact, I'm illustrating a common mentality that tends to drive many on the far-out wing we should call the rightists.  After all, no matter how wrong they are, they're right.  Right?  

Years ago, as if to illustrate this phenomenon of being so important that vast vast conspiracies are afoot to derail whatever it is the people affected by this phenomenon seem to believe they're doing, I encountered an almost perfect example of ginned-up egocentric behavior combined with magical thinking--all embodied on a poor, stressed out woman in a trailer park.  During the previous night's storm, a tree had fallen onto the roof of her already-battered trailer.  Everyone in that trailer park already seemed to be on financial white-knuckle duty.  

The friend I was assisting managed the trailer park.  We surveyed the damage, and knocked on the door to inform the woman we were going to remove the tree.  She popped out the door in her nightgown and began shouting about Bill Clinton, the philanderer.  

Bill Clinton, of course, was a commie that morning.  For some, he's always been a commie.  After all, when he was safe at Oxford, across the Atlantic Ocean in London, he came out against the Vietnam war.  That was after he'd received his deferment.  Wasn't that brave and heroic of him?  Who was going to come and get him?  Eliot Ness?  

Anyway, Bill Clinton did this, Bill Clinton did that, Bill Clinton was shagging young girls in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton was a pervert, Bill Clinton thought he could get away with the murder of Vince Foster.  The poor woman with the crushed trailer roof: truly exercised.  In need of an exorcism.  

I looked into her trailer.  A mess.  Cluttered dishes in the sink.  Rotting food on the counter.  The television blaring...you guessed it: Fox Pretend News.  Loud.  Really loud.  There was so much stimuli "noise" in that place it's not surprising the woman was on the fritz like that.  

I nudged my buddy, and said, "It's amazing how some people believe they can solve all the world's problems yet never learned to clean their rooms." 

True that.

Enter our TV heroes.  NCIS.  Olivia Benson.  Hawaii 5.0.  Chicago PD.  These heroes--your basic "studio gangsta"--easily hunts down the bad guys, and then, to make the problem go away, they shoot and kill the bad guy.  Then everyone drops in on the neighborhood bar to celebrate with beer and chuckles.

Got a problem?  Shoot it to make it go away.  Problem solved.  

This is like Pavlovian conditioning: Over and again, the formula works on the human mind.  The excitement drives up a subject's adrenaline and cortisone, and the subject's hunting instinct is alerted.  What happens to the subject's reasoning capacity.  It's shut off.  

And what replaces it?  A bestial reaction.  

That works pretty good for marketing purposes.  When the commercial arrives with pretty people, happy music and offers to make viewers happy if they only purchase a product, the reaction mechanism has completely superceded the human reasoning capacity. 

What TV does is gear you up to react to the commercial.

Then, when a mass shooter slaughters a number of people, all the marketers probably stand around the water cooler, wondering what in the devil motivates the mass shooters.  Kill the problem to make it go away, and you can have a fancy car as seen on TV. 

Punishment, followed by reward.  The manipulation of brain chemistry simply to sell stuff. 

There's more.  Viewers, who are somewhat unconscious when they are passively reacting to a television drama, tend to heroize--idolize--the characters on the TV.  Everyone's seen this.  Suddenly the character is a sought-after star.  

Be a hero like Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIA.  And you'll be sought after and venerated.  

Commercial America has managed to inadvertently generate an army of reactionaries.  Fox Pretent News is taking full advantage of that.  And the hero / patriot / waving flag vibe is helping those propagandists mislead millions.  

Four hundred years ago, an empiricist and social and political philosopher, John Locke, observed that reaction is essentially passive.  And that a reactive human is like a billiard ball that does not move until it is hit by and active object or force. 

Passively watching television, the active force is altering viewer brain chemistry.  An apparently "highly sought-after meat robot" is contemplating some "shoot it to make the problem go away".  

Altered brain chemistry?  Mind-changing chemistry?  Why does this seem familiar? 

Of course.  Drug addiction.  Illegal drugs.  Heck, dude, you've got to be some kind of hero to "risk your life" by going to a dealer and getting some black market ganga or coke.  Yup.  Your adrenaline and cortisone levels are up, and there you are, approaching the dealer's house in your nice car, ready for the payoff: a rigged dopamine high, courtesy of the ganga.  

You've had a problem, and in a non-violent way, you've reacted to it, and are shooting it to make the problem go away.  Reactive like a bitch.

It could be--no one really knows this for certain--that drug addiction is actually an adjunct to the brain chemistry manipulation involved in television advertising.  It could be, that if you are now having to really get ginned up to get those rushes, you've got to resort to something more powerful: meth, coke, pot.  

More reactive behavior in other words.  

Back to that boring cafeteria scene from 1980, it's easy for me to see from over 40 years later that I had been accosted by self-aggrandizing and exceptionally paranoid "heroes".  I was "the commie we've been waiting for".  Questions--just like on TV.  I don't know if I passed the test.  Probably not.  At 25, I was about as politically conscious as a garden slug.  A Lebowski in the making. 

Lots of people believe they're lost in a wasteland where no one cares.  But the TV set demonstrates to them, or so they think, that they can be heroes.  They can defend themselves against the alienation.  And they're continually conditioned to take a nihilistic stance against the government.  But who really did whatever it is to them? 

Easy.  Capitalism, that big, vast force out there that exercises indifference and obliviousness so well most of us have come to believe this is normal. 

What does the store want for you?  All it cares about is whether or not it can use you in an exchange.  Your identity?  Your desires as a human being? Your interests?  Anything not carefully molded by the economic exchange is a matter of indifference to them. 

That goes for employees too.  Employees are only wanted for what they can do for the company or the owner.  A life?  On your own time, please.  

My own time?  To do what? 

To watch the "shoot the problem to make it go away" circus on the proverbial 57 channels and nothing on.  

That's right.  Shotgun Willie is sitting in his underwear.  Even though we know that "red headed stranger" is something that lots of low class men possess.  Think about it.  Really.  

How to get out of that sordid condition?  The TV says, "React.  Go for broke.  Be a hero."

And hence, no matter what bar you go to, there's always a Great Big Hero there to "enforce order" in the bar scene.  

If he's really good at it, the little hero isn't a buzzkill. Clint Eastwood, the proverbial maverick, is a reactionary meat robot.

TO BE A REVOLUTIONARY BY DEFAULT

 The last time I was in San Francisco. . .  How's that for a start?  

In August, 2001, I landed in Oakland just as an Oakland A's baseball game crowd was hitting BART.  Quite a greeting.  To watch the young boys posture, all tough and stuff, as some of the office workers returning to SF blithely scowled and then grinned over it, was to see an untypical San Francisco of my imagination.  What is that SF of the imagination?  How real is that?  We go right under the Bay, and into the unexpected, right?  That excursion through a tunnel had me almost holding my breath: to ponder the BART rail train streaking under untold tons of seawater. . .  

I'd always been a little amused that many in San Francisco call their home SF.  As a clerk in the public library, I'd think "San Francisco" at times when shelving the science fiction--or SF, our abbreviation for the genre.  It was likely no coincidence that the Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner, a long-standing science fiction fan, had been so impressed by the 1969 moon landing that he decided to write a "science fiction symphony" that became his first solo recording, "Blows Against The Empire".  It's a favorite of mine.  As is "Sunfighter", a duo with his then-wife Grace Slick.  

We hear about San Franciso quite a bit these days, not by those who extol its "hippie-dippie" past so much as by those denizens of the libertarian fruitcake brigade who like to masquerade as "conservatives" while whacking at anyone and everyone they decide is disagreeable.  Like the "Leftists" who somehow "control California" with wicked commie ways.  

Or something.  Who knows what those bozos think?  I get the strong impression they don't think nearly as much as they want the entire world--from Shanghai to Sheboygan--to think they think.  Reason?  More like appetite.  They should publish "Reason" under that as a new title. 

Once in the city proper, I made my way to the world-famous YMCA, the very location reputed to have been the inspiration for the famed Village People song.  That was interesting.  The room I shared with some guy who apparently decided to room with friends in the city was smaller than the walk-in closet at my apartment here in Dallas.  But the window at the hallway's end offered a great view of Telegraph Avenue.  

The next morning is when the revolutionary fireworks began.  I was there for a NASNA conference--North American Street Newspaper Association--a worldwide annual event with editors from homelessness advocacy newspapers from the US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland and Australia.  Quite a bunch.  

At the New School, on Mission, we had a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee and then broke into interest groups.  I chose "street poetry".  Only a few years before, I'd won a spot on the Dallas slam team that was to go to nationals.  I had some real "cred".  And after the instruction and input from the various gathered poets, Tiny Grey, the editor of a nationally-known street newspaper, asked us if we wanted to read a poem for a recording the paper was going to issue.  I raised my hand. . . 

. . . and shook the room with a thunderous rendition of a slam piece, Armchair Revolutionary (Don't Forget Your Remote Control).  I'd learned to shout.  I'd learned to read it really fast.  But, unlike many slam poets, I chose all kinds of surreal and absurd images: street warfare as a "giant morphine worm crawls up from the bottom of the world. . . ".  Fun, eh?  Sure.  Tiny stood impressed.  

Soon word got out about my poetry chops, and this is when the San Francisco Media Alliance invited me to read at a poetry reading devoted to homeless poets.  With chalupas (or something nifty like chalupas) as dinner, we listened as local SF poet after another gave performances. The room of around 300 people seemed pretty happy with everything--so I opted for a sort of comedy piece the local poetry community in Dallas seemed to enjoy a great deal: a monologue about a boy (me?) abusing a Ken doll by pulling off and then putting on his head, over and over again.  Yeah, the crowd laughed.  Others seemed lost in thought. 

That's when a sort of hippie woman with longish grey hair and granny glasses approached me to say, That is SO TRUE...."     

What?

She then gave me a little spiel about how men are forced into constraining social roles by commercial society: the John Wayne, the Big Daddy-O, the superb businessman, the competent take-over guy, the soldier, the sporty drinker, blah, blah, blah.  I agreed with her.  Even if that was only a minor facet of what I'd intended.  Mainly, I'd wanted to simply goof off on the page.  

Suddenly, I was a revolutionary by default. 

This is what happens when you've been going through life relatively unconscious, only to slip into a role all-too-naturally.  I've always been rebellious.  I've always spoken truth to power.  I've always enjoyed tormenting bullies and "alpha males" for being such bullet-heads.  

The alpha male.  That's a bit of social Darwinist bowdlerization.  Apparently, because wolf packs mythically sport an "alpha wolf" that dominates all the other wolves, these numbskulls who like to dominate others and throw their weight around like Rambo or Clint Eastwood or Han Solo or Dede Ramone have copped the moniker to bestow it on themselves.  As if it's "meaningful".  It isn't. 

Wolfpacks are families.  The father, supposedly the "alpha male", allows his boys to do the killing as he sits back.  The "alpha male" is a myth tailor-made for little boys with big egos.

Oh yeah.  The warrior.  The enforcer.  Ever been in a social circle where "the enforcer" is in charge?  Always has to be in charge.  It's hilarious to watch.

Being in charge is quite important to commercialized mentalities.  After all, capitalism, by and large, is amplified by patriarchal idiocy: the Daddy taking care of all the little children, while the ladies do "women's work".  One Big Daddy game is to make other males to "the women's work".  It makes the Big Daddy feel big.  

Hence, when people like feminists or "wokeists" challenge those myths, capitalists go bonkers.  Their BS is being undermined.  Feminism is seen by many frauds who call themselves "conservatives" as "revolutionaries" and even "socialists".  

What did the feminists do?  

The feminists dissented against the underpinnings of a power structure that is overly dependent on the status quo, that's what. 

If you dissent against those Monkey Men, you're automatically "socialistic".  While that's simple scapegoating, part of a fictional reality that is the summen bonum of reactionaryism, it's one of those totalitarian, either--or go-to positions: Either you're totally one of us--or you're totally a commie!

Like, totally, dude.  

That's extremism.  See?  There are only two (2) extremes from which to choose: "the good guys" or "the socialist masses".  

Revolutionary by default.  

The only way I can figure any of this as even close to being anything more than a mere rationalization is like this: 

The threatened bourgeoisie (the business community) has been forced to conduct a sort of retrograde neo-colonialism against those of us who happen to like, say, democracy more than we like capitalism.  Hence, we are "the native peoples" who must be "civilized" into the bourgeois mentality in one grand "civilizing mission" to bring us out of "the heart of darkness".  

Those goofs.  Paranoid to the core.  Like the mythical "alpha wolf", these guys can't stand up all by themselves without someone somewhere with which to compare themselves.  

Watch them.  Rather than revolutionaries by default, they're The Grand Comedians Of Unconsciousness.  

Way back at the dawn of some real darkness called the Reagan era, I had an encounter with some of the neo-Nazis, as we called them, at a local daily newspaper.  Someone at the paper had let it out that I was a member of an anti-nuclear group called the Comanche Peak Life Force.  I didn't like nuclear waste.  But the paranoids at the newspaper, bigwigs all, decided I could be a commie--or a Liberal.  Which is commie, only spelled with an L.  

I was brought into a demure (boring) cafeteria--where the grandees and high muckety mucks came to "visit" me.  All kinds of questions.  What do I think of socialism?  What did I think of the Sixties antiwar movement?  Are you protesting the United States government's nuclear power?  On and on.  

Tiresome.  Paranoia is tiresome.  I mean, what if I was all these things?  What kind of damage could I do?  Whatever, as I served as a book reviewer (I was 25), the paper gave me books about John Reed of "Reds" movie fame.  Or Abbie Hoffman, Sixties antiwar activist.  I did get a little paranoid.  I guess they wanted me to "recant" in print.  

The Abbie Hoffman review I wrote was utterly redone by the books editor--who had me "say" that Abbie Hoffman was second-hand news.  Actually, I'd liked the book.  I was sympathetic to Hoffman's refusal to accept obliviousness as the solution to the world's problems.  

Yes.  I again was a revolutionary by default.  

Sooner or later, simply because you're an individual who likes to be upfront and honest with people, you finally "fall into line" and become what "they" want you to be: a revolutionary.  Look.  I'm just a sort of "recovering hippie", a little like Lebowski of movie fame.  There's a school of thought that "Lebowski" was an allusion to Charles Bukowski--and there might be meat on that bone.  

Whatever.  Those of us who are simply living authentically and without pretense sometimes fall into miasmas of "conservative" freak shows where the word paranoia seems to rhyme with ideological jihad.

Yes, we are all under the gun of libertarian jihad.  They like pretending to be conservatives who "honor tradition".  The problem is that the tradition they honor either never existed or happens to be called Feudalism.  

They're the real subversives.  They think democracy is oppressive and in the way.  In the way?  Of what?  

Their need to surround themselves with more money.

These subversives are, you guessed it, revolutionaries by default.  The dummies are always so so noble. . . 

YES, THE ZOO IS COMING FOR YOU

 More on zoos.  Yep.  More disgusting news on zoos.  

This entry has nothing to do, really, with the social phenomenon of "getting pegged by people who demand you stay pegged".  You know how that goes: You do a thing, and no matter who you really are, you're going to be nailed, literally crucified, by that thing you did.  You could be a saint, but that thing.  Always that thing you did.  Do you remember that thing you did?  That was uncool.  

Wait.  Maybe this blog entry has everything to do with getting pegged.  Readers will have to decide.  As if readers don't always decide.  Yes, readers always decide.  

I'm not sure when the Zooing Of America began.  What I remember wondering about when I first began to ponder this as a possibility--maybe a probability--I was living on the cusp of what is sometimes labeled "the end of the Sixties".  

That happened in the Seventies by the way.  Yes, the Sixties is the only decade in the history of Time that lasted around 14 years.  

At the end of the Sixties, or so it goes, plenty of commercial world consternation had begun to culminate in a variety of strategies to prevent something like a revolutionary counterculture from ever again emerging.  Or so it seemed to me.  In 1973 or so, disco for example began to dominate pop culture.  While this type of music, a cousin to funk, became popular because it was expressly danceable in an American Bandstand kind of way, commercial radio began replacing good old rock with this pabulum.  At first, some disco was pretty good.  Then it sank into a sort of "bargain bin counterculture".  And there in the record store bargain bins you could find all the disco you ever wanted.  

A disco album.  For thirty-nine cents.  

Looking back from this 2022 point in time, I recall there was a lot of talk in the counterculture about bringing out one's inner animal.  Much of this had to do with the writings of Herbert Marcuse, a Frankfurt School denizen of what has come to be called "Critical Theory".  In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse suggested that capitalism was substituting consumer culture for what he labeled authentic culture.  In art and music, for example, if the creativity was directed towards creating what the Marxists labeled "use value", or value that is labeled "beautiful" or "preferable" for what it does to human beings who respond to it, this was "authentic culture".  But if an artist or musician created solely to accomplish success in terms of "exchange value" (or $$$), it was a "false culture" that tended to become homogenized, and boring, something that created somnambulism in society.  

I'll buy that.  

The idea surrounding creating a more authentic culture was to defy the commercial laws of exchange value, and more importantly, to defy what commercialism and consumer culture do to their subjects--mainly by becoming more in touch with the authentic human hidden under all that artificiality.  

To my thinking, there seemed to be a caveat: What if this social somnambulism was advantageous to the overhyped "revolution"?  What if these "super-secret Liberal commie socialist revolutionaries" wanted a Sleeping America?  

Enter disco.  

That's when I noticed a distinct change in how FM rock radio began to manifest on the stereo systems of the poor, victimized-by-conservatism, bellybutton of the military-industrial complex known as Dallas, Texas.  

It was around 1974 or so.  On the radio, Led Zeppelin's famous song, "Stairway To Heaven", was winding up to that dramatic conclusion.  Then something horrific occurred before the word "Heaven" could sneak out of Robert Plant's mouth: 

"And she's buying...the stairway...to KZEW!"

What???

This new rock station had broken into the song to give its station identification.  Yes, home for the weekend after being away at college, I was introduced, for the first time, to The Zoo.  

The inner animal was getting shoved into a commercialized cage.

This inner animal, apparently, was itself a threat to capitalist subversion of representative government.  

Sure I was paranoid.  First disco.  And then "The Zooing Of America".  The American Dream--in a cage.  

Anyone who was actually alive, and not asleep, during that period knows that a big controversy seemed to be centered on the difference between music-as-entertainment and music-as-art.  This was definitely a Marcusian contest.  Pink Floyd, welcoming us to "the machine".  That's almost lifted from One Dimensional Man.  The split between art music and sleazy pop widened and continued to widen throughout the decade.  

Punk?  Definitely shut out of Eighties rock radio.  Instead, we got zooed.  Classic rock.  Ad Infinitum.  How many more times were we going to have to endure Styx or Billy Thorpe's "Children Of The Sun", or the strange phenomenon of heavy metal hair bands? 

Tell me: Who started the inanity of "the culture wars"?  

OK.  Forward in time, 1985, my friends and I, all of us stoned and drunk half the time, observed the onslaught of madness and stupidity here in Dallas.  Saint Ronnie Reagan was riding high like the Marlboro Man on TV.  Conservatism--or what is supposed to pass for it--was getting grabby.  Apparently, all this time, Liberals were actually "commies".  Who knew? 

Only the paranoids on the right knew it, right?  Right. 

Right on, rightists. . . 

One summer night, my friends John and Ray invited me to a house party.  Their house?  Nestled in the suburban highlands of North Dallas.  A quiet neighborhood of housewives and engineers.  Something special was going to be happening.  "We're inviting a band to play," Ray chirped.

NO!  Where? 

"It'll be OK.  They're going to set up in the living room."

Soon, when the band arrived, I couldn't help but notice the members were long-haired members of a typical Eighties heavy metal hair band.  Oh yeah.  This was gonna be good.

"Gordon, I'd like to introduce you to Allies!"

Sure enough, while Allies began to play, everyone at the party was either in the backyard or waiting to see what was certainly going to develop. 

After about a song-and-a-half, the Dallas Police arrived, cuffed Allies, and shipped them off to jail for disturbing the peace.

Peace, man. The police--arresting their allies.  Right here in ultra-conservative "Reagan Country". 

Not long after, as public countercultural consternation over the classic rock hegemony on FM radio began to peak.  I'll never forget the night a KZEW disc jockey showed up at a Butthole Surfers concert at Deep Ellum's Theater Gallery.  There he was, big man on campus, complete with a little Zoo leather jacket.  

What happened?  The crowd tossed beer at him until, drenched in lager, he abandoned the zoo.  "The Circus Animals' Desertion".  Yeats wrote that.  

WATCHING THE WHEELS MEANS I'M NOT UNDER THEM

Absolutely on a whim, I decided to return to this blog after five+ years. I decided I have tales still to tell, and while I've sometimes used this site as a means of blowing off steam, now that the steam is completely blown off, it's probably somewhat safer in terms of exhibiting my stories, to excise some of the hurt, and return to what I most desire to remember. I have almost too many stories to tell, and most of them are stories I believe should never be missed. By anyone. 

 *** 

 I've been living in a state of relative solitude for quite some time. I actually relish this. I've never been too prone to loneliness, at least when I'm free of the Bipolar 1 mung, and I've been careful more than ever these last five years to learn about that disorder, and learn to identify dangerous trends in my thinking and affect that could point me in a direction not preferable to, well, much of anything or anyone.

 One of the biggest examples of mental or emotional progress has been my discovery of a tendency I'd long entertained under the misapprehension that what I was feeling--powerfully numinous, almost antagonistic discomfort and euphoria blending into a sort of sphynx. 

 Most often, I'd meet a woman who, from any objective standpoint, signaled her emotional unavailability. For puzzling reasons, despite the rejecting gestures and signals, I'd nevertheless attach myself, then obsess, then ultimately get irritated and angry at the "target woman". 

 Now I've come to realize this is an unconscious pattern I've been condemned to repeat, likely since infancy.

I'd already known about the emotional unavailability of my mother. That unavailability wasn't intentional. My mother had many problems in her world that were inevitably going to preoccupy her around the time I was born: Her father had fallen into a stroke-related coma and remained a vegetable in an iron lung for 10 years, thus draining my mother's family fortune. Her sister had endured a series of nervous breakdowns, was suspected of being schizophrenic, and thus was interred in the New Mexico State Hospital for the Insane.

 Then, her mother came down with cancer. Add to that my father's drinking and possible infidelity, and my poor mother was practically anorexic simply from imprisoning stress when I was an infant. 

 "We knew you would likely be hurt by my divided attention," my mother told me several years ago, "but we didn't know what we could do." 

 She and my father were often called away to New Mexico, leaving me with a series of babysitters. Add to that my mother's relative shut down on an emotional level (she was often overwhelmed and depressed), and I was left in a situation where I needed love, knew I needed love, and even imagined I was loved when it was clear the affection was oddly absent, even in times when my mother was physically present. 

 Not long ago, I came across a photograph taken in the park near Denver's Sloan Lake. I remember this day. I was very small. The now almost ancient photo from 1955 or 1956 portrays me atop my mother's shoulders.

The sheer bliss on my infant face, when I peered into that photograph, made me sad. I was blissful because--at last, I was being loved by my mother. 

 That wasn't always the case. One time, when I was confined to a playpen, as my mother napped, I became so enraged I reached for and grasped a table clock and hurled it at her, hitting her. 

 There. I was trying to enforce what I knew had to be wrong. How could I have understood? 

 But there I was, atop my mother's shoulders, my beatific smile almost religious in its dimensions. Numinousness. Magic. The belief I had somehow pleased her enough to have been "rewarded" with what, under normal circumstances, simply is. 

 This is what I'd learned love is. 

 Hence, when I needed love, I'd find an unhealthy or dysfunctional attachment, and repeat the approach-avoidance numinousness, and this would eventually end in a blow up or a breakdown. 

 So. What's the change? 

 Now I know what that powerful numinousness means when it comes upon me. Insight. Now I can choose to draw back and reconnoiter the proverbial "lay of the land", detach, and then decide to cool off. 

 That to me signals some progress on a perplexing and often humiliating pattern I've endured for many years.

 This is one of the upsides of having the downside of an emotional disorder: You're forced to learn about yourself more so than the average individual ever will. Which is good for a writer. 

 I've begun to observe that, oftentimes, those who have known insanity actually come to understand sanity better than do the sane.

After all, we get an objective viewpoint out of a very bad deal. With long solitude, I've also noticed my propensity to become irritated has diminished considerably. If I drink too much coffee or become emotionally overextended, I am learning how to simply move away from any at-hand task and simply relax awhile. 

 Best of all, being away from the dysfunctionality of my addict-alcoholic running buddy base, something I left in 2014, has shown me a wonderful panorama of the bar scene and why it always confounded me. I never needed the withdrawal inherent in mind-changing chemistry. And to think some of that involves a pretense of euphoria that feels almost like being more intimately connected than one is. 

 So that's the overview. I'm not always this serious. In fact, I almost never am.

 One thing I find interesting is how, in social situations, I'm known to be funny, sometimes outrageous and irreverent, and somewhat of a cut-up. Those who only know me on that level don't have the slightest idea I read difficult books up to four hours a day. I don't know if that knowledge would scare those who view me as if I'm a movie under critique or not.

I ain't no Richard Burton.

QUITE UNLIKE A ROLLING STONE

 Sometimes, as many of us no doubt realize, a poetry reading can be lousy, boring, monotonic, and even exasperating.  

Especially if you're stoned.  More so if you're drunk.  

Oddly, however, those of us who dare to sit quietly in a room as someone pours his (or her) heart into what he (or she) finds so important that simply expressing it in solitude simply cannot complete the circle whereby a poet communicates to an audience, sometimes endure mumbles, monotone, obtuseness and symbolism so private it's challenging to decode on the fly--simply because that someone is either essential to us or prominent.  

In my case one sticky night long ago, there was nothing else to do.  

I won't name the poet.  He seemed to be a nice man.  I didn't quite "get" his poetry at the time, and yet, he also seemed to be getting quite a bit of local acclaim, something I found to be somewhat undeserving.  But who am I?  At the time, and somewhat even today, I'm simply another poet, someone who, while I've published a number of poems in reliable and respected reviews and journals, I'm no great shakes.  

I ran with a rough crowd back then too.  We were ornery punk rockers, disruptive, irreverent, oftentimes and purposely obnoxious--especially in challenging institutions: art, culture, music, even literature.  Why not?  I was 30, living with a sort of misbegotten childhood in my history.  I was making up for lost time. 

Actually, I have no defense.  That's my defense: My defense is no defense.  This tactic seems to be quite popular here in 2022 sedition and politics.  

The room inside the eternally pompous building called The Institute Of Humanities And Culture, a nice antique home in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas, was muggy.  Like a wish to become an aquarium, a wish almost ready to become true.  

The kingfish arrived before us, leaned on the podium--and began to drone.  Had he droned any louder, he could have come off as a sort of kamikaze attack.  Even if some of his friends treated him as if he was Bob Dylan.

I don't really get the droning.  I've seen this before.  Is droning a gesture?  Is it designed to cue the audience into the concept that the poems being droned are exceptionally private, delicate beasts that deserve near-whispers, groans, and mumbles?  Is the meant to resemble human thought in itself?  

I'll never figure out droning a poem in polite company.  

As I'd been drinking before I'd even entered the room, it would have been impossible to "catch the drift" involved in gesturing what a drone means.  I highly doubt I could have contemplated much of anything delicate.  My sensitivity had been shut off.  This is what alcohol often does: flatten the affect, allow the instincts to rise through the screen of inhibition.  

Rather than laugh, as the formidable poet droned into infinity, I decided on a gesture of my own: Every time he'd begin a new poem, I'd get up, scooch through the aisle and pour myself some more red wine.  

Seemed funny at the time.  

I'd get up as if on cue.  Some tittered.  A couple sighed in consternation.  I was violating something.  Perhaps reverence itself was at stake.  Sure.  I was impolite, impolitic.  But this was ridiculous.  Lifting up a poor purveyor of spoken poetry seemed inimical to the art.  Could it have been that an audience member sat highly disappointed that his or her prejudices regarding poets had been verified after really trying to get with the program of supporting spoken literature?  

Yawn.  With each glass of wine, I got a little looser in the head.  Worse, I'd taken a powerful antihistamine before I'd come to the reading.  Soon, I began to feel sick.  So I got up and left--in the middle of a poem.  

Like the so-called "conservatives" in the US House here in 2022, I was "sending a message".  As that'd teach anyone anything.  

Outside, in the fresh, garden-scented air of the big city, I decided to walk home.  I lived only a couple of miles away.  That would probably clear my head a little.  I was sure of it.  

I did fine for the first quarter of a mile.  Then I slowed.  Ahead of me, in the incandescent half-light of a shopping center sat "the mission": a set of large granite globes construction workers obviously planned to erect onto pedestals as part of the redesign project then in action on the center.  There they stood--giant granite billiard balls on a flat, oblong rectangle reminiscent of a pool table.  

Oh boy.  Time for a pool game.  

I was drunk.  And the antihistamine was not mixing well with the red wine.  Nevertheless, I pushed at great effort one of the large granite boulders across the lot.  It made a large clack against another.  Yeah!  A pool shark has escaped a lousy drone of a poetry reading. 

I pushed another, and another.  Enthusiastically, I pushed a third one especially hard--and not only did it hit the curb--which served as a bumper--it leap over the curb, down a steep grassy incline, and rolled down the street.  

Thank God no cars were coming up that hill.  

This is when I ran.  I wanted to scram--fast.  But as I neared the bottom of the hill where the large granite globe stood, I heard a crackling bark as a man through a megaphone commanded me to stop.  I'd been caught.  

When I turned around, a truckload of yellow-helmeted construction workers were angrily waiting for me.  

"You're gonna have to push that boulder back up the hill, man." 

Right.  And one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I tried.  Honest.  But I couldn't budge it.  One worker leapt off the bed of the pickup to help me.  We even counted 3, 2, 1--then pushed.  

The boulder, with us groaning, moved slowly up the hill.  My pushing partner was really concentrating on muscling the thing up the hill--which was steep.  

That's when I turned and ran.  In fact, I ran all the way back to my apartment.  I've never felt so exhilarated. Best fun ever.  Even if I was a chicken.  Then I called all my friends.  

The next day, a friend and I returned to the pool game.  Yes, the boulder was still there.  All one ton of it.  

Today, the boulders, which stood on their pedestals for quite some time.  The shopping center, a luxury spot with high-end retailers and eateries, changed its style again.  Poetry's changed too.  I don't hear much about that poet who droned that night.  But every time I hear Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone", I think about playing pool and listening to the blues droning on some faraway AM station way out in the country.  

Earlier, in passing, I mentioned politics.  Today, with powerful economic coercion, forces outside the political process actively push reactionaries as if reaction--which does not act, but only moves when pushed by an active force--is a big granite pool ball.  

Sometimes, like those boulders, life in all sorts of relations, including politics, just clicks.  Otherwise, if you're passive, well, you just drone.  There are many drones in the world of spoken word--and just as many droners--and in politics.  And kamikazes; plenty of those in both too.  And the fact that, even though some click, the art of not clicking seems to be quite sublime but also common. Perhaps the click never lasts.  But the non-click or the anti-click?  

That lasts forever.