Faceshaker

THE DOG WAS TELLING DILBERT WHAT TO DO, DUDE

2006-08-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

In headier days, I used to indulge myself in private pity-fests for some of my co-workers. These were the folks who had managed to get themselves into highly specialized, and even more highly paid, jobs or even professions that took up almost all their waking days. Something seemed missing from their lives. I could tell just by looking at the expressions on their faces. My heart would bleed for them, and sometimes my visible suffering almost cost me my job.

For example, I once worked in a position in which I had both the freedom and the permission to actually read a book on the job–as I waited for $400-an-hour lawyers or their diligent paralegals to get Fed-X packages to me to process and ship. Eyebrows would raise whenever I was caught reading something along the lines of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man or C. Wright Mills’ White Collar.

I’d get comments, too: "What are you wasting your time on junk like that?" they’d ask.

Sometimes, I’d come off with a sanctimonious and sarcastic quip like, "An idle mind is the devil’s workshop." It would get a laugh. But nothing would really change.

Of course, the only ideas raised by these perplexing exchanges seemed to be my own. Why, for example, are these people paid so much more than I am, I’d ask myself, when it’s obvious the only things they seem to know have something to do with making money or accomplishing the tasks related to their employment? Shouldn’t it be the ones who actually have lives of their own who get paid more? Why should people be paid small fortunes if they don’t have lives to spend them on?

Some of these people sported huge mansions in Lakewood or on Swiss Avenue. But they didn’t spend any time in them except when they were asleep. I wondered: Why are these folks spending millions on what amount to "crash pads" when they could spend about $500 a month on a cheap motel room on Harry Hines and then donate the rest to a worthwhile charity like the SPCA–where the big money could actually do some good in giving dogs the homes they deserve?

I’m not kidding. I actually thought these things. I was young and innocent. Slowly, however, I realized that, at least from the outside looking in, big corporations seem to hold employees who have undeveloped personal lives at a premium. It took me awhile to find out why.

For the answers, let’s flash forward about five years. After the short tribulation of a stint of unemployment in the mid-1990s, I’d landed a temporary job as a courier for the executive offices of one of America’s largest and most prestigious accounting firms. All I had to do, really, was walk around–delivering faxes and documents, and copying important papers. But remember? I’d been reading all sorts of wild-eyed books, and my eyes were open, the scales had fallen off them, and I couldn’t help but look at what I was seeing with eyes that were all my own. In a bush-league way, I was a little like the Biblical Joseph wandering the Pharaoh’s home offices.

This extremely indulgently decorated space housed this accounting firm’s international consultancy training center. Hundreds of entry-level accounting consultants from around the world had been gathered to be trained in the ways and means of financial advice-giving. Yet I noticed something odd about these youngish employees. Paid high salaries nevertheless, and dressed like clothes horses, these people didn’t seem to know who they were.

I remember a telling incident when I happened upon a consultant-trainee who was smiling at the Dilbert cartoon on his daily calendar.

"Must be funny," I said.

With a perplexed expression, he turned and stared into my eyes. "I don’t get this stuff," he said. "I mean, I got this calendar as a gift, but most of the time, these cartoons kind of escape me. Like, why’s this guy talking to a dog? What’s that supposed to mean?"

To be honest, this guy was being honest. He didn’t have a clue. Neither did I. How on earth, in other words, could a simple cartoon about working in the white collar world be so hard for this guy to fathom? After all, he was being paid $80,000 a year and was hence better than me. Regardless, he was pretending to be amused!

Really freaked out, I held my breath for at least a week before I asked my immediate supervisor, one of the chief executive’s managerial assistants, about this. "Oh, you see a lot of that around here," she said. "Our human resources department actually looks for prospective consultants who haven’t fully matured as people. A lot of these people are exceptionally easy to mold into the corporate mind-set. They’re a lot easier to train. A lot of corporate molding has to do with teaching people what to think."

Oh. So that was it. One short conversation explained a lot of things. It explained, for one, why so many of these consultancy trainees based their status as individuals on the quality of their clothing or the cut of their hair or the images they projected. It explained, too, why London’s Economist magazine had labeled this firm’s staff "androids." They seemed cut from the same cloth, die-stamped, brainwashed, under the thumb of The Man.

These aren’t comforting recollections for a man who values his ability to think for himself, but recently The Dallas Morning News featured opinions posited by a Baylor University dean, Thomas S. Hibbs, that bemoaned the dearth of "humanizing education" in our nation’s institutions of higher learning. I couldn’t have agreed more with the man’s arguments, but I also couldn’t have helped but remember my experiences in the white collar world.

When it comes down to the bottom dollar, an education that liberates the mind could also endanger the hierarchy of rules and values that drives Big Business in America. If too many people start to think about what they’re participating in, Big Business could suffer. Politics as we know it could suffer. The status quo could suffer. It’s much better in the long run for Big Business to continue to hire people who have learned in college how to do a job but have not learned to think about what that job means in the real world. Thank God we’re safe. Thank God we've got Big Business to take care of us.

WACKADOO-DOO

2006-03-30T09:19:00.000-08:00

Recently, I found myself chafing in a room full of local poets, listening to poet after poet broadcasting his or her sexual conquests to a bar full of relatively unconscious ears. I wasn't innocent to these goings-on. In the colloquialism of these strange times of literary exhibitionism, such ramblings aren't called rants. Instead, some call them "brags." It's pretty basic, really. When a poet brags, a poet, like a bird in a tree, is establishing territory, breaking in turf, warning off potential rivals in a game of survival-of-the-fittest that is so obvious to me that, half the time at least, I simply manage to forget about it. Lest we all forget, the major imperative for most poets is to "score": Find women, prove to rivals that said rival's sexual potency is less alluring than that of onself.

One poet, a friend of mine, has an annoying habit: He'll succeed in a half-baked sexual conquest--making out like a high-school boy in the parking lot of a barroom dive, whistling out a kiss when a train impedes automotive progress in the middle of a drunken drive homeward--and then he'll broadcast the entire scenario on his blog. The intent is simplistic: He's trying to create an image for himself. Inside, he's a man who's found plenty of compromise in his life to conquer--but he'll have none of that, won't deal with any of it, is content to rebel, rebel, and rebel until, someday, he'll be a white-haired rebel, stunned he's gone nowhere in his life. He may be immodest to a fault, but everyone's been so compassionate to him, he's been badly hurt by a marriage that imploded, is never ashamed to show it, and if any of his antics serve him well, we're happy for him. If he could spell, it might help. If he's ever bothered to read Strunk & Whites "The Elements of Style" or, God forbid, leafed through the Chicago Manual of Style, he certainly hasn't shown it. Though we do note here he believes spelling and punctuation is irrelevant. I hope his spelling and punctuation in bed is better than it is in his testimonies of bed. He even uses Latin phrases to introduce his blog, but he doesn't know any Latin, really; he can barely speak English. We know his short string of sexual conquest is really about his ego--trying to shore up his faulty self-image--and we usually give him a break. But how do the women who've been subjected to what amounts to a network simulcast of his kiss-and-tell routine feel about this? They probably like it--as long as he doesn't mention their names. If I was a woman and some guy wrote about me in lurid detail--the size of my tits, the texture of my skin, how I groaned when he shoved his big hand between my legs--I think I'd blanch. Regardless, we have to examine his audience. They're really not that sophisticated. That sort of exhibitionism in the name of false wisdom and ramshackle poetry is probably a fashion statement that turns some floozies on. Those of us who write simple lyrics about love, expressions of love, for some reason, sometimes end up branded as "dirty old men." What's that all about? Probably more simple posturing.

"One would not mistake true tenderness," the pre-revolutionary Russian poet, the young, mysterious and beautiful Anna Akhmatova, thinking perhaps of the more obvious aspects of tender-trap posturing from a suitor thinking his not-so-sincere advances were subtle and could be mistaken for meaningful, wrote in 1913.

"With anything else, and it is quiet.

In vain you carefully wrap

My shoulders and breast in furs.

And in vain you utter respectful words

About the first love.

How well I know those persistent,

Insatiable glances of yours!"

Consequently, and I was telling a friend all about this one afternoon, the exhibitionism--the old spread-eagled display! display! in the jungleland of a barroom alcove--of for all intents and purposes a silver-back gorilla (I say this affectionately) has made me re-examine my own erotic poetry. I've written plenty of it: But I'm a little old school about my sentiments. A little like the ancient metaphysical poets, I believe that the most important experiences, especially those in the erotic arena, are best expressed by indirection: You make metaphors of the experiences, you stab at the meat, so to speak, obliquely, or, when the experience seems especially sacred, maintain your silence before the eyes of the world. The friend to whom I was speaking, by the way, is quite a gentleman in this respect: He doesn't kiss and tell. His sexual experiences with women--one woman in particular--he keeps a private matter. It's not that he's particularly concerned about embarrassing the woman--she's probably beyond embarrassment about her sex life anyway--it's that he sees erotic experience as a strictly private thing, something best left to the erotic experience itself. He never brags about how he shagged this woman, or teased that woman; no, he keeps his mouth shut. He's quite successful with his women.

"Man, I just think all that exhibitionistic stuff is so ridiculous," I told my friend.

"He's just a boy," my friend replied. "He's living in the way-back machine. Probably got shoved back into the high school hallways of his mind when his wife left him."

"Yeah," I replied. "He's like a big, giant bird: CHIRP!"

"Women would have to be utter fools to fall for that sort of thing. He thinks he's being so subtle."

"CHIRP! CHIRP-CHIRP!"

"By the way," I concluded, "how is she? I really worry about her sometimes. It really hurt when I realized our friendship had hit a dead-end. I'd call her to talk sometimes, she'd pull this dumb game one of her friends taught her and simply not call me back, so I quit calling her. I thought we were way beyond game-playing."

"Well, she's fine," he said. "I think she's really been working too much. Not making enough money either. She had to move--did you know that?"

"Yeah. I found that out by accident. I was trying to get hold of Joey one night and called her old telephone number. Discovered she'd moved. I'm sure she's not particularly happy about being forced to move from her favorite neighborhood to a place far north of where she was. When I called her, she sounded like she was miles away, a little girl really unhappy about certain developments. I felt like just fathering her. Yeah, she's got that hard exterior, but deep inside she's a sensitive and loving woman. But I'm sure you know that."

But I've managed to diverge from my commentary about sexual exhibitionism on the internet, now haven't I? Anyway, after that short conversation, I decided that I, too, could take my sexual conquests, recent and otherwise, and broadcast them to the world--you know, just to improve my "rep," whatever that's supposed to mean. It was quite a laugh-fest when I scrawled a particularly graphic episode of sexual licence, but it turned out fairly well. I wrote my other friend, the great big romeo, thought I'd ask for a little advice on the poem, considering he likes to style himself "the greatest poet of his generation." I thought I could follow in your footsteps, I wrote, or something along those lines, and here's a poem I wrote. Let me know what you think.

Huh? He never responded.

In fact, though the comment and the poem were posted by me on his blog, he, for one reason or another, decided it was perhaps too threatening to his own "rep" to even post it as a comment to one of his blog entries. I started laughing when I discovered his telling omission. I just couldn't help it. After all, I was writing to the great "expert." I was coming to the poetry-god on my knees. What did I get for my little prayer to Don Juan?

He ignored my little CHIRP. How friendly is that?

Well. I've got to respond in some way. I thought I'd use my blog to broadcast this testimony of one of my finest moments with a woman. I'm certain it will accomplish absolutely nothing--poetry is a useless contrivance anyway--but I hope readers who stumble upon this message in a bottle enjoy what they see.

OLDER WOMAN WITH LINCOLN

I'm twenty-five all over again

slim as a silvery new buck knife.

It's Christmas Eve, alone with mom

and her English teacher friend

floating in my childhood home

like three olives in a cocktail

five minutes to the clock chime

watching her friend's restless legs

their nylon sheen shining

as she squeezes her fine thighs

and she's watching me too.

She's suddenly divorced, mom says

too drunk to steer that big car.

Will you drive her home? I'll follow

in the station wagon. Let's get

her home. The woman inclines

to breathe deeply, chest expanding

pressing her girlish breasts hard

against her blouse. She glares

black pupils large in the dim room

small teeth appearing--to bite

her lower lip. You can drive me

can't you? Rising to take her hand

help her rise from her place

I feel her grasp my middle finger

as she collapses against me.

In the cold, the Lincoln starts

me telling her I like the sound of it

when she flattens against my body--

biting my breast? I titter a little

when she tightens her mouth again

slips her hand onto my crotch

and whispers, Merry Christmas.

Driving her home too slowly

I sing a soft carol to the woman

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

as she laughs as I pull inside

a parking spot too tight for Mark V's.

I tell my mom, I'm going to make

certain she's comfortable--be outside

in a moment--as I turn the key

of a deadbolt apartment door lock.

I'm twenty-five, driving a Lincoln

pushing a comely middle-aged woman

against the front door to her home

listening to her yowl like a wildcat

as she perches herself on my shoes

her dress rumpling as I pull it up

and rip a hole in her pantie-hose crotch

my mother waiting in the parking lot

waiting for Santa Claus to come.

O God of Sex! Goddesses of the Erotic! Little muses everywhere! I'm such a man! Applaud to me, admire me from afar, send gestures and smiles to me from your seat in the audience. Oooooh...sooooo...dangerous....! Remember, though: The next one could be about you. And this was such a long, long, long, long poem....And Christi? Sorry about the pantie-hose. Did the excitement you needed after your divorce merit the cost? Mmmmmm...so expensive...so rich...so smooth...tawny...wet nylon...the surface of a deep lake...dappled with rain in the spring...little heart....

COMMERCIAL INTERRUPTION: WELCOME AMERICA AND ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA

2006-03-29T14:25:00.000-08:00

If you need weather information--faceshaker's daily complaint and associated day poems--please feel welcome to go to www.myspace.com/faceshaker for updated reports. Here you will find up-to-date commentary designed to combat the unnecessary narcissim, billious and overblown egotism and self-regarding, pretentiously false wisdom in the blogosphere. Take down as follows:

"The walls were covered with paintings that must have looked very strange to the public, and with sentences no less strange. 'I like watching children die'--that line from Mayakovsky's early, prerevolutionary poem--was on the wall in order to shock those who entered...No one talked art here, there were no discussions, no heart searchings: those present were divided into actors and spectators. The audience consisted of the remnants of the bourgeoisie--profiteers, writers, philistines in search of entertainment...David Burlyuk would mount the platform, his face heavily powdered, lorgnette in hand, and recite: 'I like pregnant men.'"

--Ilya Ehrenburg
commenting on
her experiences
at Moscow's Stray Dog
1920

OH, WELL...BACK TO THE STUPID REVOLUTION

2006-03-26T23:30:00.000-08:00

When you come to the devastated village, and it's like a life-saving dream, one of those quasi-nightmares that ushers up from unconsciousness like a dark angel or some kind of saving grace, for the first time you realize that, yes, this is the Third World. All your life, you’ve heard of that horrific place of frustrating sorrows and mind-bending poverty. Of course, in your own life, you've seen both frustrating sorrow and mind-bending poverty, but this is the real thing. It's not a dream. Now you see it, the Third World, for the first time. Why, on this prison planet of good and bad, rich and poor, entitled and disenfranchised, does this place exist?

Here in the Third World, where it’s India or Pakistan or Kenya or Bali any other easily mis-pronounceable nations that don't make the news briefs ever and all the time, every day, a plague of insects has decimated family life, destroyed the livelihoods of men, annihilated the playgrounds of children. Fire ants, millions upon millions of them, scour the bare, moon-like ground. Your mission? Exterminate. Disallow insects from bonding, from creating any semblance of even the barest of inhuman relation, break it down, remove the debris, plant seeds, hand out the hoes, dig wells and lay new foundations. Scour the sacred homes that have persisted since the ancient of days, clean the lowly cupboards of the poor, release the pantries of the inhuman parasite, flush out the baths, even the turn the mattresses of the sadly broken bedsteads–turn them all over, spray down the insects until they kick their feet toward heaven, high as the mites in a marijuana patch, keep your eyes peeled for the bugs.

This place was once like a cantaloupe: Rich farmland, brimming with life and bees humming, flowers blooming, yellow in the wild fields, the muskrats crawling. Now it’s dead, victim of an all-too-human battlefield of concepts, strategies, tactics and, of course, the dupes, the angry, the hungry and the used. The abstract against the real.

First came the disease: Conjured in the deep basements of some Socialist or Fascist demon, men and women were precluded from the essential relation, the act of love itself, the moment when man and woman, it is said, experience God untrammelled by the petty illusions and dogma, and suddenly it was a fearful thing, to hold one another, to reap the fields of the orgasm. Men died by the thousands, women bore diseased children, and of course the farmland--especially here in the Third World--went fallow under the sun until the plague's true children, anger and frustration, became kings and queens, hateful tyrants, and the gangs of survivors took up arms against one another in the name, oddly, of freedom, revolution, safety from the proverbial slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, all of them sowed so silently and hurtfully by men with agendas.

You are a social worker with no social connections. You've come with insecticide. You've come to remove the dictatorship of disease, to bring the hope--at least--of freedom to the suffering, the blind and the hopelessly grieved. But what can you do? The once grassy world is now nothing but a world of stones. The fire ants are everywhere on the most lowly of fruit. See it? It lies there on the broken clods, split in half, fireants crawling and feeding on the division like a metaphor. Yes, men are divided against themselves and against one another while in the more fruitful nations, men and women are clamoring against the war to which you cannot relate, mere pawns, you sometimes think.

You move the man away from the colloidal suspension of the boundaries they've made. He's dying. Hungry. How many days will he live? Yet the children of your country are aghast, it seems, against their own poverty, against the policies of a government they only pretend to understand. In a different reality, you remove the man's mattress from its pinons and spray the insecticide. You're almost in a panic. Because there are so many bugs. You'd like to kill them one by one. But you can't. In the distance, while you cannot see them, gangs of hungry humans, stoked up on the political excuses when it was always a social thing, a disease, a parasite, a horrific and ugly conspiracy bred by men and women so selfish they cannot comprehend the humanity of the dupes upon which they depend. They sit in the boardrooms, they listen to the parades enacted in their names, they sleep silently and quietly, huge pictures of their faces scapegoat stopgaps for a real dream.

In America, they're talking in the underground of moving to the small towns, of taking the dissatisfaction and steering it into political action. But they don't seem to know anything about the evil that has been bred in the name of something far beyond what they think they know. They know nothing of the starving men brought into antagonism against the evils they've been told have been brought against them. They know nothing of the animosity sewn, nothing of the hurt, the anger, the hatred. Instead, they're told of a better world, a good place in which man and man live in harmony in an almost spiritual communion with the land. But it's a lie. You know that.

And you've felt it yourself: The fire ants, taking advantage of all you have been, your property, your livelihood, your reputation, your hopes, your need to be loved--preying upon your inefficiencies, even your poverty. You've been crushed in a dozen one-way tickets to nowhere, pushed down by ignorant societies of dupes and idiots, antagonized when you were poor and alienated. Yes, you've walked the streets, slept in the parking garages, you've smelled the stench of 300 homeless bodies cringing in their sleep. And yes, you've seen the fire ants, changing faces, places, spaces. They do not belong in your world, yet still they come.

Spray, you tell yourself. Kill each one. Remove the anger and the hatred and sew understanding. Someday, you hope, there will be freedom from those for whom feeding on decay is like the nectar of God. Until that day arrives, your job is hopeless. How is it that spokespeople for a world communion would proclaim such beauty when it's such ugliness they sew? Why so many ignorant accepting such hypocrisy? You feel so unholy sometimes. It's not easy freeing people from the socialized hatred--the one-on-one displacement, the severing of ties, the men crying in their rooms from loneliness--brought down from above so seemingly nebulous it's almost incredulous to accept. How could men and women cry, "Peace! Peace!" when it's discord they command? The insecticide. Kill each bug. The ghost of its bonding must not survive.

Well, call it the Peace Corps. Call it a United Nations assignment. Call it NGO. Call it faith-based. But in Iraq, where the intention of fire ants has reached a critical mass, the armies of your nation are facing fire, and no matter what you do, it's called unholy, against the will of God. Red-checkers: Where was the Marxist mudrassa?

You remember the time you needed love just as the face of a man on television, his son blown to bits in the falsely-used name of Allah. You felt broken, your children in your hands. You were alone, scarfing through garbage on the back streets in the richest nation on earth. All you believed you needed at the time was to be held, to be called to be human again, and yet, for some strange reason, all your hopes were abandoned by people who, it seemed, came from nowhere. So strange who the freedom-bringers were. So strange to not be utilized for the anger that could be focused, but fed, clothed, housed and taught to feel again beyond the survial mode and the callow glance. At that time, of course, being an innocent to the socialization of an idiot's dream, you didn't know none of this had been planned. But the petty men who you knew were planning against this freedom upon which you learned to base your life, did you see them sneer at you when you didn't seem to listen or take-to-heart the numerous rejections and dismisals? Yes, indeed it was one-on-one: one person at a time, broken, pieced back together until each one became, it seemed, a machine of hatred, a tool of contempt. How could you have caught yourself in time?

To put you to sit alone in your room. To place alcohol before you. Yes, that was the plan. If you didn't join, then you'd be put into destroying yourself. In such a world, how could you find your center?

Now you are here: The Third World. This is the harvest of the plans of petty men, men who have nothing to do with capitalism or the mercantile aspiration. How clearly you see their facade, their fakery, their ugliness all couched in idealism and hope and faith. What hateful hypocrites. You bend to salve the wounds of the men those people used.

O, never listen to the paranoid dreams of early Spring.

THE NON-RETURNABLE TELEPHONE CALL TO HELL

2006-03-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

And now I understand:

You leave with everything.

You leave with everything I am.

Memories?

--Courtney Love--to Kurt Cobain

Interesting fact: When my mother was a little girl, she fell into a well. Heavy boards fell around her like dangerous bombs. All she had been doing when she fell through rotten wood, she says, was chasing a beautiful tan cottontail through the high grass. As she recalls this traumatic event, she says she called and called and called. All she had to hold on to was a slick, mossy, metal pole. The water was cold, she tells me. I think she was six years old. I don't have any complete connection to this to recall, however. All I remember is being a small child at the swimming pool of the Bear Creek Country Club in Denver, Colorado, swimming into the deep end as a six-year-old myself, interesting coincidence, calling for my mother--look at me! I'm a dolphin!--the overly thin woman in the pink plastic bathing cap and the rose-colored one-piece smiling a tentative, somewhat shut-down smile as she watched me from the shore: To this day, she is afraid of water. Even putting her head under the surface, I can only imagine, is enough to bring her back into that sad old well on property that is now the Philmont Boy Scout Camp in northern New Mexico. I've never known her to take so much as a bath, possibly because showers apparently seem so much safer to her.

Luckily, as my mother hovered in dark water close to drowning, someone heard her. It was a farmhand of my grandfather's, probably one of the Navajo Indians who had long before befriended the Las Vegas, New Mexico family. Isn't it strange how often small children are so lucky like this? Someone answered her calls. Within the short space of a few moments--I can only imagine the panic my mother felt, her hands slipping against the rough but mossy stone walls of that well--a hardy New Mexico farmhand, good and strong, rushed to a nearby toolshed, fetched a tough rope, returned to the scene of the accident and slowly raised my mother from possible doom. She remembers: She had gotten so cold in the mountain well her body temperature had plummeted. She shivered in the man's arms as he raced to the nearby ranch house, covered her with heavy wool blankets and prayed.

She recalls that as she called, her voice had weakened. Her throat had filled with water. Would I have begun to panic in such a situation? Being as she was only a small girl, she held on as tightly as she could. When she tells this story today, something she politely avoids, she remembers the air rushing out of her because help had arrived.

I bring all this up from the bottom of a well because I have a problem with communication myself. It's as deep as that well, too, and no matter how intently I've tried working it out in my mind, the problem persists to this day. Yes, I've felt that same panic. I've called out to people many times, my voice somehow weakened, my message never comprehended outside the silly fears and indignancy of the modern day world of Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid.

Help, as I said, hauled my mother on horseback to the ranch house. She coughed up well water, she says. But she lived, just as she's lived with enough tragedy to send anyone less strong straight into bedlam and the madhouse. Perhaps this gives me courage: Your own mother as your greatest hero. And some nights, when it all gets too much to take, when the pain I'm given sends my head under water, when I cough it up, remembering here for convenience a girl I once loved who ended a horrible addiction with the experience she laughingly called "choking up charcoal" in the Parkland Emergency Intensive Care Unit after a lackadasical overdose on a combination of heroin, cocaine and ecstacy, older pain emerges. I have to be brave when this happens. I've got to remember the courage of my mother, drowning, a six-year-old in a New Mexico mountain well.

Here, we flash forward many years, moving from the early years of the Great Depression to the fearful days of the Days of Rage: Vietnam War protesters bombing the United States Capital, Black Panthers murdering their own, soldiers gunning down students at Kent State University in Ohio. Actually, I'm not sure when what I'm trying to cough up really began. All I really remember is that, from a very early age, I was quite aware that my father, a big loving man, often didn't come home from work in the evening. All I really knew is that I'd panic: My mother in tears, pacing the floor, calling and calling my father's office, slapping the dinner onto his plate, covering it with tin foil and slamming it into the oven. Where was he? God only knows. Sometimes, he didn't come home for days; other times he'd call from jail; once the Dallas Police discovered him naked and unconscious in a stranger's house, and how he got in there no one really said they knew; other times he'd return late--two or three in the morning--so drunk you could smell him the instant he hit the front door. But before that--there's where the trouble for me began.

You know, your father, especially when you're a small child, is like a god to you. You listen to whatever he says: If he curses, you learn to use that word; if he slaps your mother, you unconsciously decide that "this is love," and possibly a generational cycle of abuse either begins or continues; if he hugs you when you've been good, you remember that. You pick up on it all. And so my father sometimes didn't come home. I'd lay there in my bunk bed in a panic. Why didn't he return? Where was he? Why doesn't he love me enough to come home from work? What have I done wrong? Sometimes, I'd be so crazy with panic and anxiety I'd not sleep--something unhealthy for a growing kid. Other times I'd feel my head spin as if I was hurtling through space. One of my earliest memories of coming into consciousness of the meaning of all this is a mental picture of me, 10 years old, a cold January, standing against the metal door of White Rock Elementary, waiting for the door to open. I hadn't slept all night. I'd listened to the fights, the shouting, the hateful and angry talk. Black circles had grown around my eyes, and the kids called me racoon boy. I hated being alive at that moment. And the door? It was closed, steel, red steel and cold. I remember shivering. Would someone ever open it and let me into the warmth of the school? But even there, I couldn't concentrate: I was in trouble with the teachers and the principal because my reading comprehension had dropped significantly in the space of only three months. All because my father hadn't returned.

But I couldn't say that to him. I probably would have been told to go to my room. In fact, there was a code of silence in our family; although we later learned that the entire neighborhood could hear the raging fights, we presented a picture of a pretty family--good kids, kids who went to church, kids who worked to keep their grades up, no matter what happened.

As I became a teenager, and those hormones began kicking in, the family discord of which I speak here escalated. I can't help but believe that my sexual awakening, a powerful force, somehow rhymed a discordant rhyme with the discord in the house. It's such a confusing time to be sure. Young girls were visiting all the time, yet sometimes I was so depressed I simply couldn't respond to the good intentions abounding in the house and on the front steps. What was in my mind? The arguments sometimes became actual fights. My sister would scream, cowering upon the pretty bed in her room like some queen in a fortress under attack, all in her room, hysterical, crying, "Shut up! Shut up!" I'd try to protect her, but I too was frightened. And worse, my father began talking of suicide. He began letting me down, disappointing me, promising me things and then breaking the promises, working hard, I later understood, to make me hate him--because when the bullet hit the bone, he seemed to be thinking, he wanted to insulate me just a little.

Eventually, that bullet rang out through the Flagpole Hill area neighborhood. I was 16--sweet 16. I can still hear the ambulances racing through the neighborhood like a mystery as I sat in my high school mathematics course that morning. I remember looking at the clock: It was eleven in the morning, a Tuesday.

I won't go into the grevious details. Suffice it to say that I'd been pushed deep into a well of blackness. After my father took his own life on September 29, 1970, I remember waiting for him to come home--just as I had for years. The pattern had been set. Sometimes I'd even call my father's former office, listening to the telephone ring and ring. Would he come home? Would he return when I called to him? For years, I'd listen for the car to come up the street--late at night, complete silence, the nearby horses in a neighborhood boarding stable kicking their stalls, stuck in the middle of bad dreams of confinement. And I'd wait for him. This was only part of grief, I know now. But at the time it seemed both so real and so unreal.

What was the result, the practical result, of this? If a friend was coming by, I'd expect that person to be at my door either before or exactly on time. If that didn't happen--and often it didn't--I'd have a panic attack. My skin would blanch. I'd begin to shake. Sometimes, I'd be so upset I couldn't sleep for a couple of days. And if I ever called someone, and if that person, for whatever reason, didn't return my telephone call, I'd go crazy. And this has never really left me. And let me tell you: I hate telephone message machines. I need the human voice, the vox humana of living experience. Of course, the panic I used to feel has reduced its intensity as I've learned its causes, but it's never really left me.

Two years ago, I talked to a young boy who claimed Courtney Love had somehow murdered the generally-acclaimed Seattle martyr and songwriter Kurt Cobain. She was a bitch, she said. She drove him to do it. What a loud-mouthed bitch. But I think I understand the panic that comes when someone you love has become so alienated it's impossible to reach him. What panic did Courtney Love feel in the months, weeks, days before Cobain propped a shotgun against his head and pulled the trigger? How hard had she tried to reach the unreachable?

I remember a series of telephone calls I made in panic several years ago: A woman had abandoned me, had begun to avoid me, all because I'd told her I had "special feelings" for her. I had no money that summer afternoon, only a few dollars. And I didn't have a telephone either. But I remember marching to a nearby pay telephone to call and call and call--just as my mother had called when she held on for her life in a deep and cold well. And I was in a well, too. I'd get the telephone message, beg the woman to pick up her telephone, then I'd panic, I'd scream, just like the screams in my childhood household. Finally, I'd go home and cry.

It got me into a lot of trouble. The woman accused me of stalking her. It's amazing of the prejudice humans perpetrate in the name of ignorance and the lack of care thereof. So many people in this world, claiming they care, yet not caring. What is wrong with the picture? I had nothing to take to heart but imperfect information. All I really wanted was to understand why she wasn't coming around me anymore. It's completely illogical, I know, but this was a little like my father not coming around anymore--an unconscious association of sorrowful and panicky proportions. But I got to be treated like a criminal for something I couldn't understand yet. What could have been done? I really don't know, but I don't trust people who claim to be compassionate or keenly aware of social justice when they've never done anything in their personal lives to prove it.

I know nobody cares about this. These are private thoughts: Me, coughing up charcoal. Some woman somewhere, wearing yellow ribbons, looking away from me. And I'm sitting in a room, alone, thinking about Courtney Love and her great big bad rap. She's heard the phone call. She's tried to return the message so many times. The non-returnable telephone call from Hell, even now, raises its head from that well--and I believe in generational memory--and yet I'm calling, I'm calling, calling.

REPAIRING THE BROKEN CONNECTION

2006-03-23T17:11:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, I asked myself a serious question: What on earth is romantic love? Many times, like most men I suppose, I've merely shrugged off the quandary, thinking, I'm not certain what it is, exactly, but I'll know it when I see it. But this time, lying in bed, way past two a.m., entirely alone, too, staring at the patterns of shadow and light on my dark bedroom wall, I came to a few conclusions about something about which we usually dismiss. Funny, too: Not a tinge of sadness sat upon my heart in how I thought. Rather, I felt joy.

When I was really young, I remember making for myself a secret place. I'd already been to plenty of places that had impressed me--Red Rocks, Colorado; the top of a huge mesa in New Mexico where Navajo shamans sang to the sun and sky; the big boulder from which Boulder, Colorado was named--but this was nothing so dramatic. It was merely a soft spot in some pine needles in the middle of a huge virgin forest in East Texas. How did I find it? How did it become so special? Actually, after walking for three or so hours, I'd picked out a nice Loblolly Pine, placed my head against its trunk and fell asleep. I suppose I was really tired.

When I woke up, I placed a rock next to the tree--to mark it. This wasn't a special rock; no, simply a piece of magnetite iron I pulled from a nearby creek bed: sandy and red and most likely ancient. What made it mean something to me was the thought that accompanied my finding it: I was thinking about that tree, that good sleep, and wanted to honor both. I think most people would be afraid to sleep alone in the woods.

But I also wanted to find that tree again.

Time after time, then, I visited that pine. As I walked, I'd usually find a rock or two, remember what I'd been thinking about when I'd found them, and slowly I built a mound of stones, unobtrusive stones, next to the pine where I'd taken a nap once. Call me silly if you want: You would have had to have been there, completely there in my mind, merely to understand my sentiment.

Eventually, this spot--a place I imagined no one could find, one with a memorial of sorts that remained intact--became my secret place. It was like that old hole in the fence almost all children imagined was the gateway to some kind of magical place. Although no man can completely possess anything, this place was my place. I invested all the sacredness I could hold there. When rejected by a girl who was dating a basketball player at the time--but who also understood by my voice when I called her that I was scared to death to ask her out, and consequently let me take her out--I remember visiting that place. When I failed a test, I went there. In fact, whenever I needed to remember that there is a place somewhere where I felt a connection, a peaceful, simple feeling, I went there. It wasn't any big deal. I'd always been a bit like that anyway.

Eventually, I met a young girl. She was the world champion strut twirler, an olympic quality athlete who jogged five miles a day and could spin a silver baton so fast you couldn't see it, but I retained my sense of humor. We fell in love. To say the least, that hurt plenty: I'm not sure everyone feels love the way I do, but I felt almost torn into two pieces. Perhaps I merely felt inadequate to engage such a superior being, though she wanted to bear my children, silly me. One part of me, at least when I was alone, literally longed to be with her every moment. Of course, that wasn't possible. I spent a thousand mythically sleepless nights in longing for her. Yet the other part, that part of me that dwelled in the merciless fright of a man in love, wanted to run. The only way I found the two peacefully coexisted was when I was with that girl. When I was certain I loved her, I showed her my secret place.

It's because we carry this place with us wherever we go. No one can really go there; no one can take it away. Only we ourselves can lose that place. And if its real-world embodiment, that tree, in that old forest, still exists, I could find it today, although it's been more than thirty years. Some people hear this place whenever they hear a certain churchbell ring. Others hear it in a particular song. For some, it's a touch--the fur of a dog, perhaps; the rememberance of a kiss or how a hand felt. And I suppose that, as I lay there in my bed, remembering a little pile of rocks in the woods, I'd been granted access to it once again. I wish I was as eloquent now as I believed I was that night. But it slips away and even seems somewhat meaningless the farther I travel away from that place in my soul, or heart, or head. I knew a woman once who believed that place was in the body. I believe her.

Not long ago, I don't think I could have entered that place without some residual pain. I'd allowed a huge callous of sorts to surround it--partially to protect it, partially to forget it. Maybe the night I remembered it with all my emotions, the crack in this broken cup had miraculously healed.

For example, I remember coming near that secret place in my heart. It was early one morning. A bunch of us were clowning around in a stand of trees. I put my arm around a young woman special to me when my eye fell upon a rock next to a tree. I remember laughing under my breath because I'd remembered other rocks piled in another place.

"What's so funny?"

"Rock," I said.

She giggled. "I need a rock, " she said.

Yeah. It could have been a flirtatious remark. But I was also feeling pain. I wasn't too responsive at that time to flirt about much of anything. I was merely another dead angel on the ground. My heart was the rock I coveted. I was bitter and holy and the absurdly invented constellations I'd pointed out to her the night before were borne to my place of private mystery with bitterness and insecurity. I clasped her shoulder and smiled.

"There it is."

For some, these rocks are milestones. For others, they're millstones. For the best of us, they're a little bit of both. Why? Because we carry them with us everywhere we go. Because we are responsible for them, and must care for them. There are those who never learn to relate to themselves in such a way. For me, I use it as my measure. If I can feel comfortable to the degree that I can contact that place inside me, then a situation, mysterious to my understanding, becomes at least a little easier to comprehend. And when situations breed chaos, when people let me down, I can remember it, too, try to return to it if I can, and if anything else, I can honor it in some secret way. And when I share it, and when it's also shared, perhaps then is where romantic love begins.

It's funny. As I finished that last sentence, a group of young people knocked at my door and told me about some kind of teenager's alcohol abuse program. What could I do but give them a dollar? You know, make a tiny difference in a life, help pay for a phone bill or the rent, make life a little more comfortable for someone somewhere trying to make a difference for someone somewhere? Special places begin in unseemly events. Even a silly old dollar can become a sacred stone that, when it's pitched into the pool of chaos, sends out ripples. Romantic love is like that: a small thing, maybe a rock, holds your spirit, and you don't dare let it loose without the faith that comes from your good, special, secretive place. Even my password on MySpace.com is a sacred stone that tells volumes about me and hearts that never asked for more.

O.K. MOTORHEAD

2006-03-22T02:02:00.000-08:00

Come on: I'm the sensitive type.

Yes, it's a come-on; I know that; but it's also the best I've got right now. Sure, my motor-mounts might not be what they used to be. Hell, sometimes they're a little too springy. Other times, they creak, but at least that creaking's sexy. I'll tell you one thing, though, and it's truer than anything I've ever said before. I'm a Mercedes in a roomful of Fords over at the State Fair of Texas Automotive Building. We're talking 20th Century German engineering: One devil of a lot smoother than that 1972 Pontiac DeVille you've been driving.

You know who you are. Everybody's been talking about that shit-brown jalopy that looks like it's been skinned. We see it everywhere: Over at the 7-11, when you're buying all sorts of fast food: potato chips, taquitos, sometimes even pumpkin seeds. And over at the bar where you hang out: slurping one freaking cheap beer after another. Then you're over at the Temple of Lost Discipline, angling for nuns and fun. It's Saturday night and Sunday morning all over again--and again and again and again and again. The operative term here is "repair": If you can find a good mechanic, we've heard you deliver time after time to whichever ear you can get to listen, you're going to get the bastard home. And home? What's that? Home seems to have something to do with shortcuts on transcendence. You've got to hot-wire the system--that's what we think--and if you can get the right wires under the steering wheel crossed, the blasted thing's going to start again. But where's it all going?

You with that bumper sticker on the rear window where everybody can see: LORD, PROTECT US FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS. But who's the Lord here? Lord Montbatten, famous British military expert? Maybe Lord Jim, novelist Joseph Conrad's famous failure on the road to self-redemption? Possibly one of the guys from P-funk? Man! We could go on all night about this one.

You know what? I'm afraid to let you drive me. All my real friends have been warning me for two weeks straight. Hell, you're not listening, are you? Push my pedal and the car doesn't slouch forward, it glides. Even the slightest press sends it into motion as surely as the moon moves in its orbit. And when you're out on the road--rolling up Interstate 30, for example--when you hit those Department of Transportation hair-pins, I'm going to shift from one lane to another like magic. While yours is going to move as a matter of sheer force. And the gas coming out the rear end? Non-existent in my case. But in yours--or, I might say, out of your case--it's a blossom of billowing soot and the kind of smell you'd expect on the road to Midlothian, where those huge refineries are.

My upholstery is smooth and well-tended. Yours seems to have a number of unseemly springs poking through, something that could damage just about any driver's ass. Your skin looks post-steroidal: enough welts to make your hood look like either a chronic acne survivor or the champion of the last big hailstorm. Strictly Earl Shieb. And the trunk? What've you got rolling around back there? The gas station attendant? A head of three-week-old organic lettuce? Possibly your brain. What's up with that?

I know, I know: You try to clean the big old baby up sometimes. Sometimes, when you're not pre-occupied with the latest episode of Digimon, you'll even go out and shine it. But this is mainly for display. You want people to know you're shining that body. Ostentatiousness in the singles lane. People are supposed to feel sorry for you, pummelling a rusted cab with a ragged dishrag for almost 15 whole minutes. Poor, pray tell, needs a new vehicle. But that's the whole point: The more beat-up it all seems, the better you believe in your chances with the neighbors, strangers and yes, especially strangers, the ones who least expect the truth behind the image. It's kind of like a pity-fuck, that vehicle of yours. Crushingly heavy. Lot's of complaining. A case of the shakes. A professionalized study in victimology. The lost chapter of Moby Dick, moving down the freeway in a giant blatfest. Obnoxious noises coming from just about everywhere imaginable. It's one big, silverbacked grunt, threatening people in the other lane, and sometimes it refuses to start at all, mainly because the engine's flooded with gasoline.

So don't even try getting near this one. I don't like my door scraped in the parking lot either. Like I said, the kind of car you drive represents, to put it into modern-day lingo, the kind of person you are. You might tell yourself, "This is only for a while, until I get on my feet," but we know the story. We've seen it a thousand million times. The old project, sitting right there in the driveway, positioned so it can catch the sun just right. People drive by it and stare and stare. But this one at least runs most of the time. This one doesn't require all that grease and special sauce in the old tank. It's been well taken care of. It might have a few marks on it, a little storm damage and all that rot, but it's a beauty. And, like I said, it's a smooth ride that requires a smooth rider. Too much on the gas or the brakes and you might ruin it.

Excuse me while I kiss the sky. Smooooooth moooooving steel--vegetable lover....

WELCOME TO THE HOUSEHOLD, ESMERALDA!

2006-03-21T20:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes life gets more real all the time.

Take plants as an example: I have a specific thing about plants. I might only have a few, I'm not the sort who has a yen to turn my apartment into a greenhouse, but many people have only two or three children, and nobody makes value judgments about their "kid's thumb" or anything like that. I've known people who literally swim in their own personal rainforest, and for them this is a penchant that can only be described as "vegetative machismo." For me, however, there's nothing macho about my love for greenery. Many people have love for a different kind of greenery: some call it green, others imbue their love with terms like "economics." Still others have a love for what they dub "green." But we'll not get into that at this time.

Suffice it to say that I'm one of those people who likes to mythologize about the consciousness of plants. Nothing's proven, but I too suspect the world of fauna is besotten with consciousness. It might not be the same kind of consciousness we as humans enjoy, but it's consciousness just the same, and for that alone, it should be respected. Moreover, I also believe that the consciousness of plants deeply resides in symbiotic relationship with our own consciousness. The ancients believed this, and though they've been wrong on many points, I suspect they're right on the money on that belief.

Once, I remember seeing a magazine supplement photograph of a prominent Dallas-area poet. He was holding onto the bark of a tree and telling the reporter something about life on Mars. He was greeted in public as being some kind of eccentric, mainly because mainstream journalists really can't comprehend the mind of a poet no matter how hard they try, but I also couldn't help but wonder if he, too, holds a deep and soulful respect for the amplifying power of the vegetative world?

At that time, I was, for all intents and purposes, a mystic. I had a mystical understanding of things that often went beyond the boundaries of rational logic. Sometimes my ideas worked; most of the time they remained, and were later proven to be, fantasies. But after seeing that photograph, I began to go outside my apartment and place my hand on the bark of the huge pecan rising high above the patio. Was it my imagination? Or did I feel a kind of energy pulsing into me? Strangely, I do remember, I did feel restored, enervated, almost reclaimed. After that point, I began to contemplate the tree, enjoy its leaves, watch as it went into winter dormancy. I'd water it, too, sometimes even going so far as to turn up my stereo so the tree could "hear" the music of Mozart.

Go ahead. Laugh at that last statement: That plants respond to certain types of music is an established scientific fact. Scientists have utilized EEG--electroencephalograph, the same machine that follows human and animal brain waves--to track a plant's nervous trajectory. They learned that plants, just like humans, respond to calming, soothing music differently than they would to agitating, relentless music. And, of course, everybody's heard the story about the scientist who tried eating a salad in the room he was conducting an EEG experiment on a plant. He'd take a bite and the EEG's graph would go wild: Apparently, the plant "understood" that a "murder" of its kind was in progress. I suppose the same thing could be said for Mozart: If you tried "eating" one of his girlfriends in front of him, he'd go wild and start writing for Megadeath--200 years before the advent of thrash metal. Maybe Motorhead. Yeah. Motorhead sounds better here.

I've got a close friend who has a huge lizard he named Tree. Tree's got a cage full of branches, and Tree will freeze on the branches and actually turn the same color and take the same patterning of the branches. Hence, the name, Tree. But what if Tree was doing something more than simply camoflaging himself? What if he was communing with the vegetative world? What if this was part of his feeding program, something we just don't know about? My friend used to ask those questions himself. Of course, this same friend had a huge parrot he'd named Bird. Go figure.

But we're getting off the point. Everyone has had the distinct experience that the trees were communicating, right? I remember standing in a grove of Juniper trees and listening to the breeze stroke their branches as they bobbed slowly up and down. I felt as if I was in the center of a conclave of philosophers. The sense I had was of utter peace. The Juniper Conclave, as it came to be called in my imagination, asked me to join in, but I didn't have anything profound to say. But it takes years to understand the language of philosophy. It takes years to comprehend the concepts. Why shouldn't it take years to reach a stage of consciousness development that enables us to speak with the most populous form of life on the planet? What else are those plants doing? Just standing there?

The huge Mulberry outside my window is perhaps the most accomplished visual artist I've ever known. That old Mulberry makes shadow drawings on my wall that dwarf the accomplishments of Picasso, and Picasso is hard to beat.

Consequently, although I've never revealed this before--that's right, you saw it here first!--I consider the houseplants I for which I care sentient beings. This, as I said, may merely be imaginary, but it does help me to cultivate (interesting word, eh?) a clearer understanding of my sense of floral husbandry. It's easier to think about caring for a sentient being than it is to care for an inantimate object. It would be interesting to see what would happen were the majority of men in this world to take this axiom to heart when dealing with their wives and lovers.

Yes, I talk to my plants.

In fact, I name them. When my mother gave me a huge ivy for my front window, I immediately began to feel love for the creature, and almost automatically, I named the ivy, well, Planty. Planty obviously likes to be looked at: Planty's a little vain. But whenever I'm in the same room as Planty's domain, I do glance at her quite a bit. Yes, I've wallowed in the Land of Planty many times.

In my bedroom, I have an airplane plant. Actually, there are several individual plants gathered together in a huge pot beside my bed. What to call them? It's easy! I named them The Wright Brothers. Get it? Airplane plant. In other words, I named this one after the place the Wright Brothers first built the plane that conquered Kitty Hawk.

One clipping fell off the huge ivy in my front room. I had a really hard time getting it to grow: Now she's a hydrophonic. I call her Sorrow. She's always wallowing in her tears. So to speak.

Finally, last week, I was at my area Whole Foods Groceries, happy to discover beautiful Aloe Veras on sale for only $5.95. I snatched up what seemed to me the happiest one and got it home. The name was simple: Esmeralda. Kind of a secret name, the sort of "pet" name we writers use for things like pens or special coffee mugs. Taking it into my bathroom, where I have a great, sunny window-ledge, I positioned Esmeralda in such a way that this sweet, bracingly green beauty could get the "rain" it needs: Whenever I take a shower, whenever I am cleansing my body and washing away all the soot and smog of daily life in the urban environment, when I'm clearing out all the day's tensions with happy wallops of spray, the succulent Esmeralda gets a light sprinkling of splashing, shooting liquid. And wow! Is she ever happy!

Still the question begs: What sort of music do Esmeralda and I listen to when we're sharing conscious space together? I did think of Mozart--mainly because that's what some experts believe nurtures newborn babies best. But Esmeralda is no babe in the woods. She's a full grown woman, and I have heard her roar. Laughing a little at myself, then, musing over the hippy-dippy quality of my least-shared personal lives, I decided I wanted Esmeralda to be nurtured on a healthy diet of really supercalifragilistic hippy music: The Mamas and Papas, It's A Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane. After a good, nourishing shower, I imagine Esmeralda is quite happy listening to "Dedicated To The One I Love," and "White Bird" and "Won't You Try (Saturday Afternoon)?"

The succulent name of Esmeralda the Aloe Vera may be a bit difficult to say repeatedly and as fast as possible, but it seems to have stuck to her. And while I am online--online is like a huge plant with root systems and stems and branches and even trunks spanning everywhere on earth and even into space--I would like to use the energy of light and electricity to welcome Esmeralda the Aloe Vera to the household.

Sure. Soon my friends will comment: Say "Hello" to Esmeralda. I'll tell them this: Gladly. I'll spill a little on her for you.

"SOLITUDE STANDING": THE SELF-INTERVIEW

2006-03-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

Q--It's raining today. Dallas has been in one of the longest, most severe droughts since the 1950s. But we're glad you were able to make it to this interview. How are you today? To put it into the words of Tom Waits, what's your emotional weather report?

A--Emotional weather reports? That's quite an old cliche, don't you think? But it's true--to a certain extent. Our hearts speak to us in moods. Scientists have recently discovered, for instance, that the solar plexus, a knot of nerves located just above the heart, is a center of neural activity second only to the brain. Sometimes, I suspect it's even more important. Yet we live in a "brainy" time. The scientific rationalism of Newton and Bacon has reached what may be its apex. Our legal system, for example, is based upon reason. In fact, almost every aspect of our lives is consumed by reason, despite the insistence of some, especially feminists, that are advocating at least a partial return to what could be termed "unreason." I agree with these people. So many powerful human beings on this earth have completely disconnected themselves from mood. The power of instinct, it's sometimes believed, has been pushed into abeyance. I'm often a moody person. But the rain doesn't affect me that much. In fact, I really love the rain. Last night, at five a.m., thunder awakened me, and in my bed I literally tingled. Thunder is perhaps my favorite sound. Not that I really thunder that much. I remember my mother telling me that thunder was the sound of angels bowling in Heaven. I like to tell myself that thunder is the heartbeat of the Universal Mind, and I was alone with that heartbeat last night. BOOM! it said. But I could only peep my tiny human peep. I've been thinking about that today--how all our human concerns are so small in comparison with thunder.

Q--So. We start out this interview talking about the weather.

A--I had an epiphany six months ago. A friend of mine has a twice-yearly campout on his family's land outside of Hico, a tiny town on the cusp of Texas hill country. As the sunset was beginning, a number of us drug our lawn chairs to the edge of a cliff to watch. That glowing orb, cherry red, electrocuted the surrounding high clouds as it slowly dipped below the distant horizon. Beautiful enough. But what struck me was this huge cottonwood tree across the valley from us. It rose above the cedar bush and scrub, and its silver leaves, shining and reflecting the dying light, quivered in the wind. You had to be really still to even notice it. For me, the quivering leaves were a kind of vespers song. Celebrating the end of a day. How long had this been happening? How long had that tree been displaying its reverence with no one to notice? Of course, unlike us, the cottonwood cannot move. So what's its purpose? Yet, for some unknown reason, it was as if I had been chosen to witness this beautiful and intimate expression of the cottonwood. Perhaps that sounds silly. Back at the campground, it seemed as if the big goal of my friends was to get as messed up as humanly possible. At the campfire, I asked myself: What is it these people are chasing? The answer was resounding: Connection. These people, all of them lovely human beings, are desperately attempting to re-connect to Nature. And I'd been doing it too--for too long a time. I can't let myself forget that I live in a huge urban area. There's something like six million people all jammed together in a space a hundred miles from end to end. Nature has been pushed below the surface--except for parks. It's easy, then, for us to forget our emotional weather, so to speak. Did you hear that? It just thundered.

Q--How did this experience connect with your poetry?

A--Oh, that's easy! For several years, I've been writing about the distortions we experience as human creatures who have changed our environment to the point that our animal nature is opposed to our supposedly civilized nature. I don't care if you're the President of the United States, you're still an animal. You've got an animal experience that has been repressed. A lot of what happens in a white-collar business environment has something to do with learning to repress our animal natures according to various measures of decorum. Years ago, as a legal assistant at the largest law firm in the State of Texas, I participated in the largest Federal Trade Commission-related lawsuit in American history. I worked twelve-hours-a-day, I made plenty of money--pulling in something like $4,000 a month, a huge sum to a man who's lived his life in what used to be called voluntary simplicity--but in the end, although "our" firm won in a settlement, we managed to bankrupt the plaintiff, and two days before Christmas, 10,000 employees of the plaintiff's company suddenly were laid off. I felt horrible to be party to that. So I asked my supervisor what I should do to cope with it. She told me that I had to learn to become callous to the effects of my actions. I couldn't do that. The executive lawyers, of course, were operating according to their animal instincts, but they also had a lot of rationalizations they employed to justify their behavior. See? These are the distortions we create for ourselves because we've forced our animal natures out of the picture.

Recently, then, I've realized I need to restore my own connection to my animal nature. I've got to learn to listen all over again. As a poet, I've always fiercely defended my emotional vulnerability. But as we age, this vulnerability sometimes becomes more precarious--due to the school of hard knocks, that course regimen you just can't audit. Consequently, I've been watching clouds. I know that sounds stupid, but it's good therapy. As a kid I used to sit in this huge Elm tree in Denver, Colorado, watching billows of huge clouds pour over Mount Evans. Sometimes I wouldn't even come down for dinner. Perhaps I'm trying to reconnect to that child. And today, it's raining. How does the rain itself feel? What is its consciousness? Several supposedly renegade scientists are telling us that water does have a consciousness. I don't see why not. So how does the rain feel today? Silver. Rain today is silver. It's been relegated to second place behind all the gold in Dallas. But I also love silver. Silver is the shine in a woman's eyes. Silver is glare on glass. Silver has so many moods. I don't think I'm big enough to choose the mood of the rain today. I can only look on and enjoy it talking to me.

Q--This sounds a lot like Eastern Mysticism.

A--No. Not at all. Eastern Mysticism is like any other religion. I've got a couple of friends, both of them poets, who are Buddhists. One night, I sat in the back seat of a car, listening to them as if I was a child listening to my parents argue about the relative merits of Catholicism versus Episcopalianism. The one thing they agreed upon was that the Tibetan Buddhists have it all wrong. Christ! So what did we have there that night? A couple of Southern Baptist Buddhists? Saying that the Methodist Buddhists are dumb? Sure sounded like it to me. An old friend of mine called that behavior "dogma doo doo." But what I'm saying has more to do with ethology--the social behavior of animals. In Iraq, for example, we've got "dogma doo doo" turning into a civil war because the Southern Baptist Shiites are angry at the Cumberland Baptist Sunis and the Methodist Kurds. But this "dogma doo doo" is one of the distortions we encounter when we form civilizations. Civilization contains plenty of prerequisites in its gift-pack: We agree to certain rules in order to preserve domestic order. We've got traffic lights we agree to utilize in order to keep traffic from turning into chaos. The distortion arrives when we take this stuff on and let it consume us. And believe me: I've been consumed.

Q--How is that? Please explain yourself.

A--Oh, all these petty human concerns. We're concerned about money for one thing. We've let money consume us when money should be nothing more than a tool. And even standards of beauty--we let them consume us and drown out our ability to connect to one another. Sometimes we even let human-borne standards of beauty define us. If you're beautiful the way a model on television is beautiful then you're somehow more human than the rest of humanity. We let ideology consume us. I don't care if you're left or right, if you're following the rules of ideology, you're political beliefs are consuming you. That's what I'm trying to free myself of right now.

Q--And your poetry?

A--I've decided to return to a simpler, more embracing poetry. I've decided to cut it out with all the fancy footwork. I've been reading a biography of Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova, and her concepts of writing simple lines about simple human matters, describing simply the simple scenes of domestic life is something I think I can utilize in my poetry. I do have to divine where my animal nature comes into play there. And this can be difficult. This, as I've said, is merely an extension of what I've been thinking about for years. I'm not being anti-social however. I find nothing wrong with civilized society except insofar as it is consuming us. Technology is taking us over. It's like the movie, "I Robot." But...as you can see...we're utilizing technology right here. Yet think of how many people let this mere tool consume them. It's horrible.

Well, I think the rain is letting up a little. I've spoken my piece. One thing more, though. When you begin to re-connect with your animal nature, it's funny, but people begin to see you differently. You're out of synch with all their unconscious beliefs. Sometimes, such people find themselves even threatened by what they almost but not quite perceive about you. I think it's necessary to be charitable towards them. You know: humor them. But it is difficult sometimes. I don't think I'll ever be where I want to be with this, and I'm definitely not special by any means. But I am solitary.

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE OLD TV DOWN

2006-03-15T10:38:00.000-08:00

I'm not all that certain where I was. Most likely, I was sitting in a bar, mainly because this was the 1980s, and at that time I was still in the throes of trying to master that game. It's really a fairly easy game--at least for normal people. If you'll pardon me for a moment, let me explain this, I think the rest of this long-winded whine will make a little more sense than it did when it was happening to me.

You see, I think too much. My mind is in the "on" position almost all the time. Sometimes, even when I struggle with the switch, I can't get the thing to go into the "off" position. Going to the maintennance department, otherwise known as the psychotherapist's office, hasn't really done much good. It's entirely possible I got a lemon at the brain factory, but there's a strict non-return policy on the mind you get at The Birth Store. And I'm thinking all sorts of things: From the aesthetic dynamics of structuralism all the way to "How do I look right now?" all this stuff just swirls in my head like a cross between a tornado and a flushing toilet bowl. Early on, I learned that if I got drunk enough, my head would turn off.

Where's the advantage in that? Is it relaxation? Or is it so I can get in touch with pre-rational modes of thinking? You know what I'm talking about: Instinct.

Actually, although those two reasons amount to part of the equation of turning off one's mind, there's another, far more encompassing reason involved, one necessary for the self-perpetuation of the race. Not just the white race. Not simply the black one either. The human race. You see, we've managed by natural selection to make our brains so powerful that our brains have become obsticles to our ability to mate. In other words, when we're controlled by our brains, we lose touch with our bodies. And our bodies speak. Most of the time, we don't know how to listen.

People go to bars where the music is so loud no one can talk, and many if not most imbibe massive quantities of alcohol, stuff that atrophies the rational centers of the brain. You can't think straight anymore, and you can't talk. What else can you rely upon if you can't rely upon your pre-rational communication? This is where the human mating ritual begins and resides. It's just below the surface of all that mental chatter. And when we turn off the mental chatter we can relate to the animal inside us. When we mate, by the way, people speak in gestures. The slightest movement can have powerful communicative force. And if you're busy thinking about it, you can't get real.

Consequently, a lot of people are out getting drunk so they can get back into touch with all that stuff. It's so sad we don't know we're doing this. All those people just trying to shut it down and give it a rest. And I was sitting in a bar, too, that night, the music wasn't so loud I couldn't hear myself talking and arguing over nothing, and I was really pretty unhappy with the whole picture, mainly because I hadn't been able to meet anyone that night. In fact, I was honestly down about myself and the chances I had of ever perpetuating, to put this into rock bottom realities, my particular corner of the species. I'd bellied up to the bar many times like this, and for me at least, finally bellying up to the bar was a gesture that I'd just decided to give it up for the night and crash the computer. I pulled into that hardscrabble harbor like an old clunker going at the dock lopsided. That's when I got into the weirdest conversation.

There's this guy sitting next to me. He didn't seem strange at all. In fact, he looked as normal as anyone. But he had something important to tell me. He kept glancing at me as he slumped there on his stool. He'd eye me, sip a beer, murmer something to himself and then look around.

"I see you're not getting any," he growled. His voice was a crunch--victim of too many cheap cigarettes and the house whiskey.

"Nope," I said. I was trying to keep my game face. "Most of these women are all about money anyway. I think most of the women in Dallas are all about money. If you don't smell like money, you're never gonna get any."

I tried laughing, but it suddenly became obvious that the old guy sitting next to me would have nothing of my faux good spirits.

"Naw, it doesn't have anything to do with money, man," he snarled. "It does have everything to do with television, though."

"What? Did you say 'television'?"

"That's right, bud. Television. Your cereberal screen. And their cereberal screens. You might not be on the same channel as some of them chicks, man."

"Well, I don't know what channel they're on. I think I've tried every channel I know. No luck tonight."

"They could be on The Shopping Channel," he said. This was matter of fact. His tone of voice concealed no hint of humor.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think I get you," I said. "QVC."

"QVC. You know that's right. How come you're not selling?"

"What? Cheap jewelry?"

This time the guy laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh, but I could see he could relate. But what he said next perplexed me. "No. Wristwatches."

"What?"

"It's all a matter of timing, man."

"Yeah?'

"It's kinda like dancing. Either you're in the rhythm of the moment, or you're not."

"I see what you're saying," I said. But I was lying. I didn't have the faintest idea what he meant. "It seems like my timing has something to do with being able to talk to people. If I can't talk, I can't communicate."

"You're part of the TV nation, that's all. You're letting words and images get in your way. You gotta get beyond that. Wanna 'nother drink, man?"

So he bought me a beer. "Let me tell 'ya something," he chimed in. "Some of us really got it bad, man. We just can't shut it off. That's why I do hallucinogens. There's no better way on earth to get the old head to buzz off than dropping a little acid."

"You on it right now?"

"Naw," he said. "I'm in recovery. I got past the old brain a bunch of years ago. Had fun doin' it too. Mind if I tell you a story? O.K. This didn't happen all that long ago. I think it was the late seventies. Doesn't really matter. Anyway, I used to be part of the Weather Underground. You know who they were? Those were the folks who got tired of Vietnam so bad that they started blowing up buildings because they was bringin' the war back home. Bring it all back home. That was the motto. Back then, in the late seventies, us in the revolution had kind of run out of steam. Most of the folks went back to normal living when the war ended, and we discovered that the ones up for a real revolution were fewer in number than we'd anticipated. Besides, things were really changing. We'd had high hopes when we'd started, but, well, The Man. The Man--he was a lot bigger than we thought. In fact, The Man was just too big. We couldn't even take a piece outta The Man. So us folks was pretty down. Shoot. It was like the world had turned into this giant Quaalude. You ever take those?"

"I did once," I said. "I haven't seen much of it around. Last time I saw any Quays was when the B-52s came into town in '81. A bunch of artist buddies and I went to see them out at the Wintergarden Ballroom. Everybody did Quays but me. All the rest of the people in the Wintergarden were pogoing--you know, that dance where people hop up and down? But my artist buddies were all just standing around, looking at their feet. It was hysterical."

"Why didn't you do any?"

"Ah, they wouldn't let me. They said I was down enough already. Said the whole deal was a gesture of support for my down-ness. Kind of a joke, I guess."

"You probably didn't need it," the guy said.

"Anyway, like Quaalude," he added. "Back in those days, everybody was going straight for the TV tube, man. And there we were, still trying to get real. You got me? Anyway, we decided to punk out as they say. We were fed up. TV this, TV that. So we had us a little acid party. Turned out the lights, put on the Jefferson Airplane, dropped some purple microdot and did one for the Revolution."

"How'd it work out for you?"

"Hell, man. We was watching the TV with the sound down when one of my buddies came out of the back room with a bunch of squirt guns. He gave one to each of us and said, 'See that candle on top of the TV? That's the Revolution. Fire at will!' So we had us a real fire fight, right there in this guy's living room. It didn't take more than five minutes. But we got that candle out, man. Pretty funny, eh? The weird thing was, man, was that the wax from that candle dripped down into the guts of the TV and blew the sucker out. Right there in front of us. We'd been aiming to kill the Revolution with squirt guns and ended up killin' what the Revolution was trying to destroy! Ain't that something?"

"What about turning off your brain and stuff? I'm not sure what you're trying to say to me."

"Yeah, it was easy. You see, what you're trying to do is to turn off your head, right? But before you can really be a revolutionary, you gotta turn it on, right? You gotta learn how to get real, right? So when you turn off your head, you're turning off the TV, right? You're going blank. So my advice to you is this: Quit fighting. Just go with it. If you wanna turn off the TV, well turn it off. No use fucking up a nice machine just because you don't like what it's saying. Got me? Just get real. My advice to you is this: The bar we're in is on TV. In fact, it is the TV. You might be in the wrong place at the right time. Got it?"

To be perfectly honest, I don't think I did have it. A bunch of guys attacking a candle that supposedly represented the Revolution--with a bunch of squirt guns. And they end up shorting out the TV? What's that gotta do with learning to run on instinct?

I never saw that guy again. Things have changed a lot since then. In the 1980s, I never really got the hang of the bar scene. I eventually decided it just wasn't my trip--to put it into the lingo of the 1960s. My strong suit was talking, conversing, connecting with people. It's funny: When I think about it, when I talk, my instincts kick in, and I'm usually out of trouble. These days, when I pass that old bar--and it's still a popular hangout in Deep Ellum--I look into the window at all those people desperately trying to turn off, tune out, whatever. Looking through the window is like watching television.

Picture me passing that bar: The Revolution will not be televised. Definitely not in my house.

TEENAGED TERRORISTS AND CBS REPORTER LARA LOGAN ARE ALL ABOUT ME--REALLY

2006-03-12T17:15:00.000-08:00

There have been times in recent years when I've wanted to blow up refrigerators just because I want to express my disdain for the corporatocracy that holds us all hostage. Mainly, all I really want to do is get laid. I mean, look at me: I don't want to be friends, I really think the idea of liking anybody has no utility, insofar as it tends to be about them and not about me, and I'm all about me, all the time. Yet I really just can't get over my confusion about what constitutes love and what constitutes lust. Connection is the operative word here: Since I don't have the faintest idea what a wholesome connection entails, I want to destroy the entire world. I want to see buildings crumple mainly because the builders never bothered to connect to what's all about me, which of course, is me--what I'm all about.

Doubtless the two driving forces in my life--wanting to destroy the worldwide foundations of capitalism and wanting to satisfy various and sundry animal dictates of self-perpetuation--are interconnected. But I'm so close to the damage they're both doing to my thinking that I don't seem to have gotten the news yet. I'm so far from conscious understanding of these harrying compulsions, and how they feed upon one another, in fact, that I'm a complete blank regarding them. I mean, I've got nothing here.

Look: Even the news of the world doesn't seem to clue me into what I'm doing to myself. Some nights, I'll sit in front of the CBS Evening News, of all things, and the obviousness of these determinations weighs in nightly, full force and free of charge, like a nude sumo smack-down in a muddy pen that somehow resembles my mind. In one corner stand any number of Islamist fundamentalist terrorists. I can't help but laugh at them. Those guys have all kinds of zealous proscriptions against sexual licentiousness suppressing their normal instincts that it's no wonder they're out to kill people all the time. They can't sleep with women at will. They can't even look at a woman. The religious machinery under-girding everything they know is so tyrannical the more powerful ones even force women to wear full body suits that conceal all vestiges of femininity--and it's all because of a facade: They've been conditioned since childhood to believe that being open about their sexual needs and behavior is blasphemy against Allah. Worse, their ability to reason has been so atrophied by constant bombardments of religious propaganda they can't even see that the whole thing is social control relegated into the hands of mullahs--who themselves are more interested in power than in the happiness of others. The women who step out of bounds are usually kidnapped, raped and killed. The upshot is that these guys are so sexually frustrated they'll do just about anything to get their hands on those 70 virgins the mullahs promise them if they'll martyr themselves for the cause. This is a major strategy behind the tactics of world terrorism. You'll have do die before you'll get laid.

But there's a strange set of connections between the terrorists and I that I don't usually like to look into here. Like me, the terrorists I see on television want to destroy the foundations of world capitalism. Like me, like I just said, they're walking tangles of sexual frustration. Like me, they don't like what's happening to the world. Like me, they have a distinctly theological understanding of the world--even if their understanding, like mine, tends toward the superficial and half-baked. Like me, they generally see the superciliousness of capitalistic existence eroding what is sacred in the world. And I want things the way they were when I was a child, when I didn't have any responsibility; they want things the way they were in the 8th Century. We're a match made in Allah's Heaven. But since I've market profiled myself as a "pacifist," the only way terrorism can help me is in helping me to view myself as superior to those who kill people. If you don't like that, or embarrass me with any of these contradictions when I'm trying to score over at the club, I'll kick your fucking little ass.

In the other corner of this giant mud wrestling free-for-all of the hell-bent and half-baked inside my head, stands, well, Lara Logan, CBS Mideast correspondent. I'm smacking my lips just thinking of her. She looks pert in a Kevlar vest. I'd like to do her while she's wearing one. Why? Walking down the proverbial Arab Street, Lara Logan is literally a walking advertisement for sex. I've never seen hips that just cry out to be stroked as do those of Lara Logan. Even the Iraqi teenagers curiously following Logan and her camera crew take note of it: Watch them and notice where their eyes go. Of course, CBS News' executive producer, Leslie Moonves, is quite aware of this: If it bleeds, it leads, but sex sells just as well. And since the CBS News Division has been in a ratings trough for several years, especially in that all-important, 18-25-year-old male age grouping, it's only logical that one good way to get the attention of testosterone-driven males who haven't yet learned to take the reins of their own sexuality is to relish news clips with sexy mamas like Lara Logan. All the female correspondents for CBS are hotties. Those girls wading in the waters of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, rubber boots up to their crotches, compete glowingly with online porno photos of leather-clad dominatrices straddling motorcycles in viscious-looking boots, the obligatory police caps cocked flirtatively on their frizzy blond hairdos. But all Lara Logan really needs is a pair of tan, brushed corduroy jeans. She could destroy the world with the slightest roll of the tongue out the corner of those pink lips. Oh, man!

"Man" definitely is the operative word here: The violence on CBS Evening News pumps up my adrenaline, then Lara Logan fulfils me as the testosterone rush rewards my viewing. Sex and violence. I feel so tough when I watch the CBS Evening News. I could just crush skulls. It's a wonder the U.S. Army hasn't picked up on what's happening on CBS. A recruitment commercial right after a Lara Logan report could work miracles. I'd join up in a second just to get close to her. You know: be her bodyguard.

It's not that I don't see CBS Evening News is manipulating me. But, just as I'm completely privy to what Islamist mullahs are doing the the brains of impressionable 13-yeaar-olds, I'm above all that subliminal seduction crap that's gotten so popular on network television. Naturally, because I'm a debonair intellectual who likes to slum in bars frequented by lower-class college students and blue-collar workers, I feel quite superior to both CBS tactics to get me to watch and to Islamist fundamentalist zealots who are blowing up villages, water pipelines and even children. They're all just so below me: CBS Evening News, the college students, the blue collars and the zealots. See how this works? If I really push myself, I can make myself feel superior to anything on earth! Which is the point when everything on earth is all about you. But it's not all about you at all. It's all about me.

I even might have remarked on the spur of the moment that those 13-year-old dudes--every single one of them--are sexually frustrated. It doesn't matter to me that their lives are hand-to-mouth existences. Or that they're simply young boys who are feeling all sorts of bad chemicals coursing through their pre-adult bodies. They must be desperate. I'm not nearly as desperate as they are, but it's convenient to paint myself as a victim--mainly because it gets female sympathy. There's no better way on earth to get an air-headed woman's attention than to cry and whine in public. And I like air-headed women the best. The ones who can think for themselves are too dangerous for narcissists like me to handle. That's why I go places where the dumb ones congregate.

But what's unusual here about the superiority I'm copping whenever I see the zealots in action (the ones on television) is that I just can't see my own perceptions of the world mirrored in their actions. I don't quite know why this is. I might jabber this about "we're all one" on one little ball of dirt in the middle of vast space, I might yammer about my feelings, but I don't make the connection between myself and 13-year-old terrorists. This lens of self-superiority directed at 13-year-old boys who strap bombs to their waists and turn Israeli discotheques into disco infernos hides the facts surrounding my own, similar "disdain" of the greater world around me. It's nothing more than an unconscious means of repressing my own passive experience of aggression. That's right. I'll admit it. You saw it first here: I'm passive-aggressive. Keep quiet and passive about it or I'll kick your ass.

Passive-aggressive? You see, I've got a lot of stuff in my life that makes me feel powerless. I don't feel nearly as important as the image I want people to see. Most of the time I don't even know myself how unimportant I feel. If my head was nothing but a ball of skin, there'd be this huge callous wrapped tightly around my self-image, a kind of armor designed to keep out any messages to the contrary of what I want to project to others: mainly those dumb-head bitches I want to screw me. In other words, I'm running on ego. Narcissists can't run on anything else.

And because of that repressed sense of powerlessness I work so hard to hide, I get angry when CBS Evening News manipulates me. I don't like the fact a television image of a war correspondent like Lara Logan has the ability to give me a "woody." Apparently, despite my knowledge of this whole machine of manipulation, my animal instincts just...don't...care. And that gets me hot and bothered. After all, my reason is supposed to have made me impervious to that kind of stuff. But it hasn't, I feel powerless against the instincts I haven't learned to live with, and want to bash heads when it's really my instincts I'd like to bang. Strangely, because of that, I'm also a victim: this buildup of aggression tends to manifest itself in out-of-control sexual urges. Kind of like a Nazi soldier who gets aroused when he's bayoneting an innocent bystander to the blitzkrieg. And that also pisses me off.

Consequently, whenever I watch the news, I get pretty angry. I do take note that 13-year-old Islamist martyrs have been unjustifiably exploited by powerful people interested in their lost lives only so far as death tends to score points for the cause, and I don't like it. But I really don't like being exploited by CBS Evening News for the sake of ratings. How on earth am I supposed to get to Lara Logan anyway? She's got a ring the size of Rikers Island on her left hand. Probably married to one of the men who know how to make realistic connection to the world, one of the guys who exploit people who can't make that kind of connection. Why are the people running the networks being so callow towards my inability to control my animal instincts? Oh, it's all about money. And I don't have much of that. Which, of course, pisses me off.

Sometimes I wonder if I couldn't be taught to make wholesome connections with the world--with human beings instead of objects of self-satisfaction or self-inflation, with human beings instead of projections of my repressed aggression, with human beings instead of this fantasy of a worldwide conspiracy to make mutts like me buy things. But to do that, I'd have to let go of my massive ego. Right now, that ego is about the size of the Astrodome in Houston. I hate to admit it, but my ego's bigger than my wiener. Besides, if I was to let go of that ego, I'd have to admit defeats in my immediate life: All the stuff I avoid through the distraction of conspiracy theories and continual whining about justice--a concept absolutely beyond my comprehension.

The other night, I was watching Lara Logan report from Baghdad. Her hair wisped into her face, she brushed it gently from her green eyes, and then she unconsciously smiled. Unconsciously. Sitting there, watching the television, I myself felt a deep connection to Lara Logan. Something happened. Maybe it was "a moment." I caught myself smiling back at her.

We all know that the corporatocracy designs to rob the human individual of mental telepathy. Lara Logan would be ashamed to admit she felt something herself. Perhaps she pictured me in her mind when I smiled: This huge, goofy guy sitting there in his mom's house eating a fast-food burrito (Monterrey jack cheese), smiling at what, from here on out, will be termed "his latest bitch."

Lara Logan: You smiled. It was all about me. Everything is all about me. And since your smile, about me, indicated that you indeed saw my telepathically-projected image in your mind as you broad-casted live from Baghdad, I am once again a hero. That's right. I'm heroic. So you've been tagged: You're my bitch, Lara Logan.

And that's the way it is.

A FINGER IN THE WAZOO FOR THE REVOLUTION!!!

2006-02-08T17:41:00.000-08:00

Here it comes again. The revolution. Wake me up when it's over.

Spit out your coffee. Gag not simply one maggot, but an entire civilization of them. Cry into your hands. Look forlornly at the television set as agitated people in the Middle East gear up for the Revolution of the People, Phase II, sponsored by Daiwoo! For this is the revolution, it's coming back, right here to your home town, and if you thought Pancho Villa was dumb, you ought to take a look at the goons coming up the block. They're the best whiners in the area, hand picked by the previous generation of whiners, and they've been hiding out. Speaking in whispers. Keeping a low profile. Sitting in the back of the room. Got it paired down to the core revolutionary cells. Using the "Great Negro Telephone." Don't laugh; this is important! You can go ahead and laugh at the urban cowboys who wear black hats and drive huge pick-ups with monster wheels. And you can laugh at the fundamentalist minions who try so hard to be touchy-feely as they talk about the Rapture. Those folks might be copping feelings of importance that come from being a part of something big, but the Something Big they're part of is dwarfed by the Something Big of the revolution, because the Something Big isn't only big, its FREAKING UNDERGROUND! And there are people in the world who have to go underground to feel important. They don't like the government, they don't like the corporations that are eating the government alive, they don't like Christian fundamentalism, they don't like Islamism, they don't pretend to know anything at all about the supposedly former Soviet Union, and they don't like emo music--whatever that's supposed to be. When you ask them what it is they do like, they'll look at you and blubber something about Noam Chomsky...because Noam Chomsky was some book they tried really hard to read, can't remember the title, dude, but it was a really hard book....

Yes, if books are "hard" it means they're probably true. After all, who'd bother to write a "hard" book if it wasn't true? Would a liar do that? Would a liar come up with this "alternate view of American history in Central and Latin America," for instance, simply because he was trying to, like, do something? Besides, the present role of the revolution in the capitalist-pig countries is to run interference in a big distracting effort and--of course!--buy Chinese goods! Noam Chomsky is their godhead.

So you're sitting around, minding your own affairs, trying to get a little happiness out of your life, reading a book about the post-Bolshevik poet and widowed revolutionary sweetheart Anna Akhmatova, and trying to decode a little Pasternak on the side, given he wrote literally about "lilacs" when everybody from the GPU on down knew he was using some kind of "code" his fellow dissidents could crack in an instant, when you're hit hard by some kind of INCOMING. It seems they're organizing for the Big Revolution, although nobody really knows who "they" are, and those people don't like the Bush Administration, those people don't like the War in Iraq, those people don't like America bullying everybody else, those people don't like spending cuts for the rich, those people don't like all this money going to some strange organization everybody refers to as "the military/industrial complex," although you've searched the web for hours and hours, never once finding even one picture of the organization's headquarters....shoot, man, it's a conspiracy!

But the INCOMING, in many past INCOMING conversations like the INCOMING one you'd like to duck, insists that, though taxpayer money goes to this complex, the complex never spends any of the money after the manufacture of Daisy Cutters and Microwave Crowd Dispersing Beams, mainly because, although the complex employs millions of people, those people apparently never need food or shelter or cars or even summer vacations. How do you know the INCOMING says this? You've met the INCOMING many times. The INCOMING wears many faces. In science fiction terminology, the INCOMING is a shape-shifter. Whatever the single issue of the moment is, you'll soon find the INCOMING sucking on it like a greasy piece of raw chicken. And the INCOMING is convinced in a fundamentalist Christian kind of conviction that the ALL SEEING EYE OF THE INCOMING never lies.

And there you are, in a coffee bar, listening to soft music, reading the newspaper whenever you get tired of reading about Akhmatova and five thousand starving women standing in silent protest outside Levchenko Prison where their lovers and husbands and children are imprisoned, when the INCOMING bursts through the door like a bad idea: You are expected to either join the revolution or the INCOMING is going to do what the INCOMING can do to destroy your happiness. Right now! If this means silencing you, lying about you to your friends, putting you to perpetual sleep from sheer boredom, the INCOMING infers, it means that, well, that's what we gotta do, dude, if we wanna keep this revolutionary cell going. And you're the target. Why? Who else, dude?

Huh?

This is happening everywhere! They're marching forward--like horses! Clip-clop! Clip-clop! From Sheboygan, Wisconsin all the way to Frogcrotch, Georgia! Clip-clop!

We gotta alternative press to provide cover for us when the revolution starts, says the INCOMING. We gotta couple radio stations so we can, like, keep up communication when the Man tries to shut us out. We had CNN, too, says the INCOMING--until Jane Fonda defected and became a Christian. But that could be a signal! We're too low on the curve to know for sure, says the INCOMING. We gotta keep the poetry readings pure, too, dude. No ideological backsliding! Who cares if nobody listens! That's not the point! Dude! This is, like, it, dude. And we've got to infiltrate, infiltrate, infiltrate! Just like the capitalist-pig people sell, sell, sell! Besides, there's lots of beer and pot! Our revolutionary sweethearts will even fuck you if you go in the right direction! Otherwise, they'll tease you until you're forced to make your bed in lieu of the real thing!

Will we have coffee after the Revolution? No, says the INCOMING. Coffee has been America's means of exploiting the peasantry of half a dozen Central American nations for over a hundred years, man. Don't you read Noam Chompsky? Chompsky? you ask. That's right dude. Chompsky. Chompsky says that by freeing the Latin American peasantry from the quotidian, like, task of picking little red berries off these evergreen bushes in the jungle, dude, those dudes will be able to go to the University of Nebraska. Or something like that. Hey! Don't look at me like that, dude! I forgot to bring my notes on the subject.

So what'll we do about coffee? Pick the beans ourselves?

The INCOMING says this: When the Revolution comes the proletariat, knowing it is the duty of the proletariat to provide liquid stimulation, dude, for the rest of the proletariat, or something, the proletariat will be happy to pick little red berries off those bushes, dude.

What if the proletariat wants to go--as one big communal unit--to The University of Nebraska? Will the El Supremo or the Generalissimo or whoever have to pick his own coffee beans?

Dude! That'll never happen! You've gotta get back into reality, dude! The genius of the proletariat will develop sophisticated machinery to pick those little red beans off the big green bushes! This is love, dude! Love will make the red beans fall off the branches automatically!

Dude, I say, I'm so sick of hearing the word "dude" I'm just about to join the revolution so I can kill those freakazoids who say "dude" all the time.

But dude is like "comrade" dude!

But what about this Chompsky dude? Wasn't he an award-winning linguist? Seems like I read a book of his--something about how the U.S. mainstream press is more interesting in protecting the state than it is in telling the frigging truth! Man! What a bunch of hypocrites! Don't they know that journalists are supposed to be objective? Who cares about the state when the truth is at stake? Isn't journalism all about the absolute truth? Dude! It's not about how we measure truth! The truth is absolute to us, dude, and the truth is always measured from where we hold the frigging ruler! Got it dude? We're the ones who hold the ruler! Who cares about protecting the state when the truth is...well, fill in the blank: 1) People in the Third World are eating their hearts out because they can't afford iPods; 2) They've got to be eating their hearts out because their standards of living a bountiful life apparently don't fit what we're seeing suggested to us on shows like Entertainment Tonight!; 3) Man! If I had to eat rice and fish all the time, I'd want to go out and kill everybody!

The INCOMING goes to the coffee shop barrista (CLUE: Latino terminology for Dude! Rhymes with "sandalista") and orders a "Chocolate Suicide Double-Mousse With Cookie Dough Cheese Cake." No, says the INCOMING, make it two. I'm hungry! Dude! Ain't everybody hungry for something?

The INCOMING turns to you and hisses: SHHHHHHHHHH, dude! This is top secret information! We're being fattened up for the kill, dude! You wanna be on the wrong side of that or what?

Oh well. So the INCOMING and I had gotten down the the so-called brass tacks of postmodern deconstructionism and the rise of the philistine culture (NOTE: New Left code word for backing the Palestinians as a single issue group). Dude, from here on out, was to replace "comrade" as a supposedly subtle means of identifying the revolutionary backbone from the rest of the population, most of whom, it was suggested, tend to wear golf shirts and cotton dockers, or wear pink pastels and dye their hair either blonde or red--depending on what Vogue Magazine says is the raddest. Dude. The uniform of the dudes, by the way, has to consist of just about anything one can buy at the thrift store, mainly because those clothes are used and the profits cannot be used to contribute to the riches of the huge corporate manufacturing and distribution networks that feed off the labor of thousands. Can one wear used cotton dockers?

Thus sayeth the INCOMING: Dude, only if you're going undercover or something. Our fearless leader, dude, in case you haven't met him, wears used cotton dockers because it's hard to find used bluejeans that'll fit a dude with an ass wider than the axel-width of an 18-wheeler. Most of the time, dude, dude-chicks use those to make purses and crap.

Then the INCOMING and I got down to the conspiracy theories. 1) PROXY WAR--Everybody knows, dude, that religion is the opiate of the people, dude. So it's been a long-standing strategy of us dudes to cause political and cultural friction in the Middle East, arm the dupes, get them into a fight with the ruling capitalist-pig powers, and then stand back and watch the cat-fight. But isn't that exploiting people? I ask. No, dude! Those Islamists are opiated! We don't want to waste the dudes by going to war with the capitalist-pig people of the world! What'cha think we are, dude? Idiots? 2) WEARING OUT THE ENEMY--By making the capitalist-pig peoples wear themselves out fighting opiated zealots in the Middle East, us dudes will be enriching ourselves off bootleg DVDs and knock-off designer clothes, dude! Ever wonder why us dudes are spending seventy percent of our gross national product on building weapons? Dude, because when the time's ready, we'll be able to go in and kick us some capitalist ass, that's why! 3) THE RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION IS PRECURSOR TO THE POLITICAL ONE--Dude, everybody knows Pat Robertson is a dupe, dude! He's pushed everybody to the right! That's where us dudes want them! But it'll be easy to push those people into a political opposition once they've become poor and desperate enough! That way, we'll have opioids of our own to fight our revolution for us, dude! Besides, we have the alternative press! They're our secret weapon!

Huh?

WHAT'S IT LIKE TO NOT BE A MUTANT?

2006-01-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

You know, I really hate it that everybody I seem to know is a mutant these days. It's really gotten to be a burn, you know, especially since several of the people I've encountered have this X-Ray laser vision they use to cook with. I don't even have a microwave.

Which naturally means I'm a loser. Though I feel like a retard. Yes, a retard in that every single person on earth--from the President of the United States who can lie with impunity and get away with it because his telepathic powers allow him to subconsciously convince millions that he's just brimming with integrity, to the almost tiny little man somewhere in a Chinese rice paddy who concentrates on his growing crop and causes it to grow more quickly--everyone has some kind of power but me.

That trick of the President's is a pretty good one, and it shows his ambition. It takes a lot of verve just to try and see if your mental abilities are strong enough to convince 59 million otherwise normally superpowered human beings to vote for you. Especially since you screwed up your entire first term, with no help from those super powers, you'd think there wouldn't be telepathy strong enough in this world to accomplish that feat, but mutants being mutants are apt to go to almost ridiculous lengths to display to themselves that the ego's gentle nudgings are in fact true and somehow part of their superpowered character. Heck, if the President hadn't had that other group of mutants to save his Presidency, mutants with the power to intimidate with a smile that emerges out of one side of an otherwise growling face, mutants with Loki-like cleverness, mutants with powerful and superhuman weapons and zombies at beck and call, we probably would have voted him out. But you know what? It's also entirely possible the President, knowing his "other" mental powers, the ones that help superhuman humans to commonsensically reason, just weren't up to snuff and that he'd bitten off more than he could chew by opting for a job bigger than he was, simply used his well-hidden mental abilities to "compel" a group of superhuman punks from the Middle East to commandeer airplanes and speed them into the World Trade Center. Think of all the mutants who died. Think of the losers like me who died, too.

Doubtless, you superhuman readers out there have already sniffed up a whiff of jealousy with your superhuman whiffer-sniffers and sense the resentment of a total loser coming straight from my room into your superhuman temples of doom. Don't worry: It's not some special power. At least I don't think I have some kind of latent superpower to make people feel cynical, at least not that I've discovered yet. Still, I like to identify with that skinny Chinese man. He's got it down, superhuman brothers and sisters. He uses his powers so gracefully, and he doesn't have to adorn himself with the superhuman costumery of his American collegues. That's part of his schtick as a superhero. He's not out to impress anybody, but impresses everybody. He just looks out at his field and convinces his plants to grow a little more quickly. He certainly doesn't try to pull the same trick on his finances. And maybe he could. If so, the fact he just doesn't look at a Chinese Yen and make it grow into unimaginable proportions is probably testament to his wisdoem: He knows how to use his super powers. He doesn't try to use them on his kids either. Like any good father, he probably values the time he gets to spend raising them too much to try to hot wire the situation and make them grow up too fast. I wish I could be like him. I think I'd make my hair grow faster.

Shoot. I'm completely powerless. I can't even dash cigarette ashes in my ashtray without getting them all over the floor. That really sucks. I sit in the dark and you know what? It's dark. I can't see through any kind of darkness. I go for a walk and it actually takes time to get around the block. I've never been able to speed anywhere instantaneously. Can't even multitask. I guess I'm a loser. Not fit to be fed.

You know, earlier I referred to my condition of powerlessness--or, let's just call it superpowerlessness--as akin to being a retard. That was a mistake. It's common with me. Since I'm so powerless, I'm constantly on the lookout for someone less powerful than I am. I've really got a lot of contempt. Man, if you're a retard, and if you're trying to read this, despite all the big words I think I'm utilizing well because it makes me feel like someone superhuman, or at least more superhuman than the people who can't read so well, like retards, well, I'm really sorry about that. I should have said something like, "Sometimes I feel like a mentally disabled person with an intelligence quotient lower than 60." Still too many syllables. Sounded way too politically correct, too. Who talks like that? Even if we think that way, we never say it. Because we think we're so super-powerful, we simply assume that the other superhumans just understand it. Political correctness doesn't play too well in Superpowerlessnessville anyway. That ain't a town anywhere on the map, and that's why it's called Superpowerlessnessville, and that's why superpowerlessness as a matter of political correctness doesn't play all that well in Superpowerlessnessville. Nobody likes people bending their words way around the subject simply to help point out that you and the rest of the inhabitants of Superpowerlessnessville, the town the superpowerful have come to save, are actually superpowerless.

And besides, and this is what really shames me, retarded people are well known for being super-strong. Get one of those folks mad at you and you'd better get out of the way because if they decide to hit you, you're going to remember it. Often, those among the superhuman who have deigned to work with the retarded have to be exceptionally well-trained in the use of their super powers. Especially when the retarded get older and, for some reason, more likely to get explosive on a whim (and please don't get me started on the obvious comparisons to the President), well, many superhuman care-workers have to have training in karate, tai kwan do and other of the superhuman martial arts.

Martial arts. I tried that when I was a just another superpowerless teenager, when all the other kids on the block were discovering their super powers. It was like Christmastime on that block. Girls discovering they could freeze a boy in his tracks with just one look. Boys who discovered that their superhuman skills in throwing a ball through either a hoop or over the heads of other superhumans was a superhuman power in itself that lent them superhuman rewards like college scholarships, hot dates with superhuman beauties and even special perks delivered them under the table. None of that did much good for me, nor did karate classes. Even the mental discipline involved in karate was a futile exercise. After all, why even bother to hone your body into a superb fighting machine when everyone around you is invulnerable? Why even think about developing excellent abilities to relax in an instant, like a Zen Master, when relaxation gets you nowhere in this world where the superpowerful are everywhere?

I suppose martial arts works for some. Take Chuck Norris. He's a short little runt. He probably grew up with an inferiority complex among dozens of superhuman humans. One day, he got to reading his Justice League of America comic book and found those ads for Charles Atlas strength training in the back. Some of us are old enough to remember those: That lame picture of that guy getting sand kicked in his face by a beefcake dude while he's trying to impress some babe on the beach. Has that ever happened to you? Probably not. You're all-powerful. Even though I don't have the ability to see for thousands of miles, I think I can still see it in your eyes that you've never had sand kicked in your face the way I have. Anyway, I bet Chuck Norris, 13-year-old wimp, saw that ad and decided to change his life. I might be short, he thought, but I can compensate. I might not be a superhuman, but I can fake it. The funny thing was, he met a group of superhumans in Hollywood who all had the power to bestow superhuman powers on losers like Chuck Norris. He became superhuman by the graces of the superhuman. I've never met one of the superhumans who gave Chuck his superhuman powers. O.K. Maybe I have. They just never let on because they didn't like me all that much.

How on earth is a guy supposed to compensate for his own superpowerlessness when everyone around him is endowed with all sorts of super powers? Everywhere you look, the superhumans rule with their superhuman powers, and the list of those powers is almost endless. Absolute masculinity. The ability to become the center of the universe at will. The power that allows some superhumans to just look at another and instantly become superior to them. Others look at strangers and, even if the strangers are superhuman, they're suddenly sheared of all their powers. The superhuman women all have irresistable beauty. Ultra-grace. Those are only a few powers, all of them the super powers I just don't possess. I have none of those. Most of those superhuman powers are beyond my comprehension. In this world of superhumans, sometimes I just don't know who I am.

I do share a small circle of friends who found each other because we didn't have any super powers. Like the people on the television show, Mutant X, superhumans had been experimenting on each of us for a long time. One had been subjected to the superhuman power to alienate by dozens upon dozens of superhumans who concentrated all their power on her. She was almost dead by the time us superpowerless humans found her. Our leader had been terminated by a group of superpowerful businesspeople. He said the experience of being subjected to the superpowerful effects of this strange "termination" thing was excruciating. We believe him. Since not one of us has even one single vestage of a superpower, we've gathered together for our mutual protection against the throttling assaults of the superpowerful world of the superpowerfully endowed.

We live in a hole in the ground. Since we're so superpowerfully superpowerless, we really couldn't do a whole lot better. Together in our hole in the ground, we look out upon the world and try to think of ways we can help the superpowerful feel even more superpowerful than they already are. Actually, we don't have a whole lot of choice. We could spit on the ground in front of most of those superpowerful folks and they'd use their superpowers to transform the gesture into "food" or "manna" or "ambrosia" given by the super-superpowerful gods to help them become even more superpowerful. Gawd. We're just a bunch of losers. Most of the time, we find ways to intervene in the lives of the superpowerful, mainly assisting them in their superpowerfulness. Sometimes we simply let them help us: This reinforces their superpowerful self-esteem. It makes them feel superpowerfully good, for if there's one thing the superpowerful have on us superpowerfully superpowerless losers is that the superpowerful have an almost cosmic power of feeling superpowerfully good all the time.

Sometimes, us of the superpowerless set sit around and watch televison. Television is a device designed by the superpowerful that helps them feel superpowerful all the time. Everyone on televison is so superpowerfully beautiful that the superpowerful who are also superpowerfully beautiful get a superpowerful reinforcement that tells them, yes, you were born in the right place, you superpowerfully beautiful person! Thank God you're alive!

The television has a different effect on the superpowerless. We sit there in the darkness, knowing that the unearthly blue rays of the machine are ensuring we never develop any latent superpowers. One girl, who has oftentimes said that her superpower is superpowerful ugliness, sometimes sits and looks at the television with a blank face. Even when the television turns off, a little bit of that blank face remains. But regardless of all that, we superpowerless people do what we can to keep up our spirits. We often cheer for the superpowerful of the world. When the superpowerfully rich on television say something superpowerfully funny, we laugh our puny little superpowerless laughs.

You know, I've been sitting around, looking at this dingy place in which I try to live and I've realized something superpowerlessly important: I don't even know how to tell a story. This isn't really going anywhere. I'm sitting in a dark room, typing. I can't type very well, either. I peck out the words with my middle finger. When I told my superpowerful psychoanalyst that, he mused that my use of the middle finger to type out everything I am saying could be a Freudian Slip: I'm shooting the world the finger. And it's true: Sometimes I'd really like to do that. But how? Even when I was at work one day, I thought I'd impress the superpowerful person in the cubicle next to mine with my superior (or so I thought) ability to type with only one finger on each hand. She wasn't impressed. She sped up her own typing until I couldn't even see her fingers moving. I don't know what she was doing, really. Whatever it was, it couldn't have made much sense to me, a superpowerless being. Her super powers, aside from being able to type super-fast a number of superior collections of numbers I can't even comprehend, also has something to do with the ability to put everybody else down. That's part of her job.

Like the boob I am, I sometimes think about the President. He has a lot of super powers. In addition to his telepathic powers of persuasion, he has the ability to mutate into the stupidest person on the earth...something obviously designed to fool everyone. How else could it be? He's the President! How could the President be stupid? This is called psychological judo. He throws everybody--even the superpowerful--off with how stupid he seems when he turns on his super-stupidity. Then they feel sorry for him and vote because the superpowerful democratic impulse means looking out for the nobodies in the world. And since the President has the superpower that allows him to seem like a nobody better than any superhuman human on the earth, he won the election. All he had to do was act stupid. Need evidence? As the days ticked off to Election Day, 2004, the President became stupider and stupider. By Election Eve, he'd made Koko the Gorilla look like a genius. That's a super power I can only say I admire.

Some of my superpowerless friends kid me by insisting that my super power is the ability to become a super-victim at any instant. They tell me that my ability to make people feel ashamed because of their superiority is almost legendary. And my ability to make people feel guilty? They say it's just amazing. Maybe I'm just feeling smaller than they are.

Which could be a super power. Except I can never hide. If I was truly getting smaller, I'd be able to disappear. Which is often how I feel around all these super-powerful beings. Just take a look at the Vice President. He exudes an intimidating aura of superhuman arrogance--definitely a super power. I've seen arrogant people wither everyone around the the powers he utilizes. Why do the superhuman utilize powers so dangerous? Because they can. But I can't do those things. I don't try to use my powers of arrogance to accomplish anything, mainly because I really don't feel all that arrogant. What's there to feel arrogant about?

It's also interesting to note that, like the television, the superhumans in charge of the world have also developed amazing technologies designed to make them feel even more superhuman than they really are. They drive superhuman cars and they price them at superhuman prices. One afternoon, I was walking with my typical superpowerless shuffle, and zap! A superhuman, driving a superhuman SUV at a superhuman speed. She had this look on her face: Everybody, look at me, I'm a superhuman, and I'm in control.

It was obvious: The woman had the superhuman power to drive at superhuman speeds and maintain a superhuman control over everything within her superhuman vision. Most admirably, she had the superhuman power to keep the police from finding out. How do they do that?

So here's a picture of me for you superhumans to take to bed with you: I'm five foot four inches tall. I weigh one hundred and ninety five pounds. Fully clothed, I look like a stuffed hamster. I'm almost bald. My face is so fat it looks like a deformed pound cake. I've got eyeglasses wrapped around my face (there's no other way to describe this) and the frames I found in a fifty-cent bin at a flea market. No matter how I try, I just can't get away from shirts that make me look like Charlie Brown. And everyone around me, including you? Six foot six inches. Solid steel. So handsome they make women swoon on sight. In possession of the ability to have sex at will. Able to drink massive amounts of liquor in a single sitting. Perspicuousness to the vanishing point in the ability to understand football. Able to burst into flame at the slightest provocation.

This disparity between the superpowerful and the underendowed is maddening. Oh. I know. That's obvious. Why did I write it?

And I can't disappear. I stick out in a room. I don't know how many times I've tried to go to fashionable bars or nice restaurants, only to discover that if I have any super power at all it is the ability to stand out like a broken cup on a tableful of expensive china. Don't feel hurt, they say. They don't know what it's like to be unpowerful in a world full of supermen. And that's another super power those men have: The ability to never feel pain. The super power of never having to cry. The super power of never having to hide under the covers on Monday morning. Although I have met many of the superhuman race of America, I have never known one. I've passed the superhuman dozens of times--or rather they've passed me--yet they are perplexingly out of reach and unknowable.

I heard on the news once about a revolution instigated by the superpowerless. Not surprisingly, they lost. What made them think they'd win? I think I'd rather sit around and moon over superhuman women.

Some superhuman women have distinct abilities to make the superpowerless completely disappear. Some are empowered to inflict sharp pains in the chest. Others create intense anxiety. How do they do these things? One of their superpowers is that they can make the superpowerless sit around and moon over them so easily that they don't even have to think about it. Some of us superpowerless men have become so desperate that we're actually afraid to moon over superpowerful women. Instead, we moon over superpowerless women. The superpowerful among us who see that spectacle call us superpowerless men saints. We know they're laughing at us. It doesn't make us feel good at all.

Once, I was looking at my cat. My cat was looking at me. He had the most quizzical expression his face. Maybe I was anthropromorphizing, but I'm almost certain he was trying to understand how I'd just made that can of tuna appear. For an instant, I felt superhuman. Of course, my only reference point was my cat. Then, to my consternation, I learned that my cat is much better at sex and romance than I am. My cat doesn't even have to use the internet. He doesn't need cologne or money or machismo or any of the other things required by superhuman women. I felt like envying my cat. Instead, I killed him.

THE PRESIDENT NEEDS AN ATOMIC WEDGIE!

2006-01-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

Baby, so what if I'm on the run? Is that what this is? I'm sending you this letter to a place no one other than you will ever find it: my blog.

What's it like to be an "unofficial fugitive"? You'd probably laugh in my face if you could only be near me. Just get a job, get it back together. If you could look into my eyes, if I could feel you kneading the shoulders of my dusty jacket with your warm palms the way you used to do and stare into me, if dreams such as these, dreams that sustain me as I sleep in parks and filch my meals from dumpsters behind fast food restaurants (at least the ones that haven't been locked to keep "my kind" from consuming what is meant to be discarded, wasted), I'm not certain I could tell you fully how empty this "unofficial punishment" in 21st Century America can become. Is this what it's called? I really don't know what the Hell happened. Still, I've thought of you many times. Sometimes, when I'm curled into the contours of a ditch I've found, a low place in the ground that will shield me from the cold night wind and the curious eyes of the happenstance observer, I'll hug my own shoulders, just the way we've seen in so many silly movies. I'll hug my shoulders, imagining I'm back home again.

Sometimes I get so sad. Wouldn't you? I suppose we'd both agree I'd taken liberties with my life, liberties based upon contempt of what I'd seen. I've probably been foolish. A little like an over-curious cat. But how else could I have done what I did without getting punched out while being told what I'd done wasn't really all that bad? Doubtless, my friends think I was an idiot for doing this stuff. A can of spray paint, a sense that I could make something happen and use truly radical tactics, that I thought I could do so much better for the world than the pointless proliferation of "tagging" here in Dallas, and now I've seen my life literally ruptured open--how long has it been? Two months? Please don't tell me it's been longer than that. I feel like a complete idiot, and I probably am. How embarrassed should I be when I walk into the library, as I did only moments ago, limp to the men's room to wash my face and find that tear streaks like little rivers have carved themselves into the grime on my face? Have you ever cried and not known you were crying? How many streets full of downtown workers have I walked, how many faces have peered into mine, how many people have seen those rivulets and found them indecipherable? Love, I'm not mentioning this to upset you. But my hands are shaking.

Remember how it all started out as an ornery joke? We were laughing at the stupid graffiti "tags" some kid had deposited on the doorway to the studio. You told me you'd seen kids in big baggy pants running down the streets before this happened, many times you said, and that it was funny to see these kids holding their crotches as they tried to run away from another "mission" as if they were big heroes. You sarcastically said "Steve McQueen. 'The Great Escape.'" Yet I was still angry about it. I'd already painted a nice stenciled logo of our studio's address on the old steel door. Now it had been obscured by a wild scribble. What on earth was it supposed to mean?

"I think it's supposed to mean, 'Yo! I was here!'"

And here's the part where my contempt entered the scene. "You'd think that if those kids went out and spent--what is it? Three dollars for a can of spray paint? That they'd make it count. Know what I'm saying? You'd think they'd have a real public message or something. As it stands, only a few kids even know what those scribbles mean."

"Oh, you know how kids are," you told me. "They're trying to figure out how they stand in the world. If they mark turf with spray paint, their friends apparently understand something we just don't get."

"Well, why leave this 'turf deal' completely private? Why not let the entire world know how you feel?"

You said: "Maybe keeping that stuff private is one of those gesture-deals. Maybe it's a way of saying, 'This is private. You just don't get it. Because you're not part of this deal. You know? You're not in on it. Private speech right there in public."

"Fo' shizzle," I said. "Yo, gotta take a pizzle, word up, dude." We were both laughing as I closed the restroom door. I guess we could say I marked my territory in the toilet bowl. Nothing surprising about that.

All my life, I'd been interested in graffiti. It had begun, really, I think, long before my junior high buddies wrote GORDON SUCKS in blue paint on the curb facing my house. Yeah, I was in on that one. It was hilarious. Hilarious to stand there and watch my mother discombobulate, burst into spontaneous combustion. GORDON! WHO DID THAT! THAT'S DISGUSTING! TELL ME! WHO DID IT?

What I'm saying is that I understood what you'd said about kids trying to find their place in the world. My friends and I were too. We felt pretty powerless. We didn't have any money, and what we did have we spent on Slurpees and Justice League of America comic books. We always had to ask for permission to do anything. If we wanted to go to Pizza Hut, our seemingly insatable desires were usually subject to the whims of our parents' appetites. We couldn't figure out how to make girls like us. We couldn't even figure out if they liked us. When my buddy, Bobby, wrote that on the curb, he didn't really mean it in a literal way, he was only doing something he knew would anger my parents, and that was part of the joke.

Years later, I remember reading a magazine article about Barbara Krueger, a New York artist who expressed her fascination with public expression with fanciful and often politically-charged messages on billboards and on the posters she posted all over the city. Other graffiti expressions met my attention by serendipity: The time I saw the huge, Spanish language graffiti that spanned nearly a block of cinder block wall in a Chilean city during the Pinochet takeover. In block letters, stark against the white cement, a huge sign proclaimed Salvadore Allende the true leader of the Chilean people. The message, being officially illicit, but also perfectly readable, commanded both attention and a nearly visceral reaction within me. In fact, I remember it: I felt awe. Awe. As in fear of the awesome and mysterious.

Of course, some of the taggings I'd seen bordered on beauty. Most of them didn't. Some were merely silly scribbles, obviously rendered on the run, sprayed onto walls and windows in a hurry, something done in light of the always surprising appearance of the police. What if, I thought, what if I disdained that example--sophisticated in its own political way--and opted for something more public, more welcoming, and more alarming. Yes, secretly, I began to muse over what it would mean to area businesses if someone in Dallas, Texas, a conservative city that is expressly concerned with how its public image plays in the minds of outsiders in particular, if someone here followed the example of Chilean graffiti artists: Broad, block letters proclaiming bold messages that dared unwitting citizens to think for a change.

Speak truth to power, I thought. What an arcane concept in today's mass media. What the saying should say is that we must speak truth to power as long as we don't move that power to anger. Newspapers like to purport a sheen of this democracy-old dictum, but they only speak truth to the powers that aren't advertising within their pages. Some newspapers are so cowardly that their publishers are afraid to speak the truth because Big Business will be offended. Since the federal government doesn't underwrite a newspaper's advertising, the government is a convenient target, especially when the so-called corporate media is looking for scapegoats. Since the implicit upshot of today's neoconservative movement is to reduce the government's power while increasing our dependence upon the business sector, it only stands to reason that a newspaper controlled by and allied with corporate interests is going to attack the only institution that tries to slow the otherwise unimpeded growth of savage capitalism. What if those taggers used their tool to explicit political effect? SCREW ABSTINENCE ADVOCATES...IN THE ASS!!! is one of the examples I facetiously conjured as I sat one morning and drank my coffee. QUIT TEACHING WHITE MAN'S WAYS IF THE WHITE MAN WON'T LET US IN!!! is another. MURDER THE MEN WHO PAY US TO WORK IN GREASE PITS FOR MINIMUM WAGE!!! I thought of dozens of intimidating slogans a 14-year-old tagger could use to push his world into a little controversy.

I thought it was so silly and so self indulgent that kids, under relatively little danger, refused to take real risks when Latin American kids their age more than likely risked their lives scrawling huge messages along walls and on the sides of buildings. That self-indulgence, I think, is one measure of how complacent Americans have become. The old Chinese saying that provided leaders sage advice regarding population control was apt: Empty their minds and fill their bellies. Exactly. Think of some of the garbage the local news feeds us.

As I write this, I'm beginning to notice that the graffiti is indeed becoming a little clearer. Someone in Dallas is scrawling the word "revolt" on newsstands and on bus shelters across the city. Most people are probably too oblivious to even notice. Others are too arrogant to take the sentiment as a serious one. But what if the sentiment was more clear than a hastily written imperative? What if someone asked serious questions?

I remember my first Chilean graffiti: Late at night, I quietly spirited myself on to Highland Park's Drexel Drive, found a shadowy area at street-side and wrote these conspicuous words right on the pavement: DOES DICK CHENEY REALLY NEED TO LIVE IN A HOUSE THIS BIG? The words, huge and ghostly in the darkness, shouted a question a lot of people ask themselves all the time. The newspapers wouldn't touch that question with a frog gig. Reporters are far more afraid of reprisals, imagined or otherwise, than they're even aware of. They always try to report with a manner patently non-offensive. Still, they seem to venerate Thomas Paine, a renegade journalist who wrote seriously offensive things about the imperial regime of his day.

As days went on (and I never told you this until the police came calling, something for which I'm terribly sorry, love), I emboldened. From the wall of a heavily-trafficked street corner's retail shop, politically incendiary graffiti shouted one morning as well-off commuters travelled to work: REFUSE TO WORK UNTIL YOUR BOSS GIVES HALF HIS SALARY TO THE POOR!!!

Another sign--WHY DO THE DALLAS POLICE CARE MORE ABOUT MONEY THAN JUSTICE???--lined the parking garage outside the city's Lew Sterrit Justice Center.

OBEDIENCE IS POTTY-TRAINING FOR SLEEPWALKERS!!! BREAK THE BIGGEST RULES YOU CAN FIND!!!

DON'T BOTHER SMASHING THE STATE!!! IGNORE IT INSTEAD!!!

GET YOUR TAX MONEY BACK!!! VANDALIZE AMERICAN AIRLINES ARENA!!!

In restrooms, along retaining walls, on curb sides, on traffic signs, I began a quiet but effective graffiti campaign. DOES ALL THAT MONEY MAKE YOUR SHIT SMELL ANY BETTER???
appeared in the restrooms of a major Dallas law firm. And this one: WHY'S THE EXECUTIVE BATHROOM GOT A KEY??? AFRAID THE MAIL CLERK WILL SEE HOW LITTLE YOUR DICK IS??? And finally this: THE PROLETARIAT'S GONNA REACH OUT OF THIS TOILET AND PULL YOUR ASS IN!!!

Sure. These were ridiculous little slogans. Part of my intention was to be funny and shocking at the same time. Apparently, it began to work.

First, I noticed that some penny-anny little news columnist expressed public indignation over "some of the offensive messages appearing across the city." Almost all the letters that appeared in the newspaper backed her up. So I called the newspaper. "Did anyone write to support whoever is writing this stuff?"

"Oh, sure. We get crackpots all the time. Some of the letters are really angry," the person in the paper's letters department said. "A couple were quite trenchant, but we couldn't use them."

Translation? Defense of public statement that doesn't support officially sanctioned opinion is to be quashed. Newspaper publishers, I supposed, a little wistfully too, just didn't want anyone getting the idea that anyone--anyone at all--actually agreed with the person the newspaper had described as "a vandal." Agreement with controversial issues tends to spread when people learn they're not the only ones who are thinking the shocking messages are closer to the truth than some of the pablum that passes for opinion in America. Publishers, of course, wouldn't want to have it documented that they supported "illegal expression" by even printing so much as a letter to the editor in favor of it. They don't want it on record that a lot of people, as I learned for myself, agreed with my big words.

Retail owners angrily painted over and had the messages professionally erased. EAT MORE PORK!!! BE SURE TO TAKE THE APPLE OUT OF THE PRESIDENT'S MOUTH BEFORE YOU DIG IN!!! was a sign near my grocery store. I asked a customer what he thought of it. "You know that's right!" he said.

So what I was learning was that there was indeed spirited public sentiment in Dallas that was silent. Why is it silent? Why does the official sentiment deny the people its voice? I could have asked so many questions of so many people. Then the police showed up, broke down the studio door, tore the place up. Totally ridiculous. We weren't home, but the instant I saw the police car lights flashing outside the door whenever it was we got home, I drove by and told you everything.

Crazy isn't it baby? Running from the threat of being silenced, but not directly so, don't you think? With all the hassles the Fed put you through, I don't blame you for wanting me out of your life and out of the house. I've been hiding--if that's what you can call this--for a long time. We know the drill: The police questioned my employer about my political affiliations, asked my boss if I'd ever given anyone an indication that I sympathized with terrorists. What else could my boss do? I was summarily fired. Why should any employer put up with F.B.I. visits when a thousand capable people stand waiting to fill the job left by the termination of a "troublemaker"? Then, when strange things began happening on-line, I learned with the help of a friend of some expertise that my computer postings had been hacked. And read. But why? There wasn't a goddamn thing I'd ever said to anybody that was even halfway incriminating. And you? You were taken to your office's human resources department for questioning that had nothing to do with your job. The F.B.I. agent who visited you right there in front of your supervisors cited Homeland Security as one of the reasons for "the trouble." I don't blame you for being pissed off that your boss wrote you up for the hassles. This isn't supposed to be any big deal. I've only got a felony warrant for my arrest--I know that--but things got way too frightening for me. I start having "credit problems" due to "computer errors" and it's hard as Hell to clear them up. You know the details. I don't have to go into literally everything here. Sure. I know I broke anti-vandalism laws with my graffiti campaign. But not everyone gets a visit from the F.B.I. for allegedly painting graffiti on retail building walls. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt anybody but the Dallas, Texas branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And how on earth did those folks find me in the first place? The only thing I can think of is that the new traffic monitoring cameras might have caught me or that some forensics expert peeled my fingerprints off a wall. Maybe some "alert citizen" watched me hit a wall and then get back in the car. The whole thing sounds like overly exaggerated precautions to me. People write on walls all the time. Most of the time the subject matter is pornographic or scatalogical. It wasn't the act of vandalism that has caused all this trouble, that pushed me out of my relationship, my home, my job and all my chances to just get it back together. No, it was the political content, the inflammatory message, the public disturbance, the waste of time collecting forensic evidence by a law enforcement agency reflecting "a certain touchiness" in regard to public speech deemed either unreasonable or inappropriate. But who was drawing the line? I simply don't know. When we started getting threatening telephone calls, we had to change telephone numbers. But the calls kept coming. It seems so stupid. I was afraid, and I still am afraid, we'd get hurt. You'd think we were living in Bulgaria, and that the winter clouds were as gray as how people in the Soviet republic probably felt, but this was in the broad light of the Texas summer. The attempts to silence us were not nearly as self-indulgent as my attempts at being some kind of tabloid-level hero. That's why I'm sorry. That's why I'm writing you. Please respond.

And maybe I am crazy. All this "coincidental activity" can be so nebulous you don't know if you're paranoid or if something's really going on behind the scenes. It's a little like my anti-war friend who had the City of Dallas anti-gang unit create an uproar at his Mesquite home--Mesquite? That's not part of the City of Dallas--because they suspected, they said, his son in the "deffamation" (their words) of a dumpster with a paint pen. He says he knows it had something to do with his anti-war, anti-Bush Administration activities. All I ever did was test the limits of free speech. All kinds of goons were all over us both. All I ever did was follow the lead of some anonymous Latin American graffiti artist who was angry that the Fascist coup of Augusto Pinochet, with the help of the C.I.A. and Henry Kissinger, had overthrown the threatening Socialist government of Salvadore Allende.

HEY! MISTER ILLUMINATI DUDE! YOU'RE FREAKIN' TOAST!

2006-01-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

Look. Mister Illuminati dude, I know you're reading this. You read everything. I'm not sure how you read everything, but you're so powerful that you're capable of doing stuff I can't even imagine. That's why you control the entire world. You've got so much money, Mister Illuminati dude, that you've got a huge basement beneath your cliffside mansion, and its walls are made of rocks like Batman's bat-cave, and inside that huge basement, you've got a computer system that makes the U.S. government's Carnivore spy system look like some kind of tinker-toy replica. Every time your name comes up, Mister Illuminati dude, you log onto some kind of uber-site and read what people are saying about you. That sucks, dude. You're gonna stop reading my e-mails or I'm going to hunt you down and pop you in the face. O.K.? Got me?

Right now, you and your friends are huddled around some kind of huge computer screen. All of you are wearing those dumb-ass Druid robes, and like those rich idiots in Stanley Kubrick's movie "Eyes Wide Shut," you've got these dimestore masks on so nobody else in the room really knows who any of you freakazoids are. What's the matter? You insecure or something? And, just because you're really powerful, you need little reminders of your powerfulness standing around. Those reminders, I don't need to say, take the form of these really tall, naked fashion models who, for some reason or another, became prostitutes when you pulled some lever somewhere in your Illuminati bat cave and magically made their international super model careers take a mysterious dive. Is that the only way you can get laid, Mister Illuminati dude? What's the matter with you? You think all your toys make you better than me?

So what if you're reading my blog? Who really cares? You're supposed to be reading it, dumb ass, because I've addressed it to you! What are you? Some kind of mental midget? This is freakin' public information. Even the peons of the world can read this crap! So don't go thinking your so special just because you've got to go way deep down inside the earth into your Illuminati bat cave just to use an overpriced uber computer just to read this. Sure. You might have a lot of money, you might even control the U.S. Federal Reserve system, but that doesn't mean I couldn't kick your little bird-butt if I found you.

I heard all about your little parties in Davos, Switzerland. Who'd wanna go to one of those stuff shirt wing-dings anyway? The Black Sea might be losing its entire population of Sturgeon due to illegal fishing, but lookie there! You've got a mound of black belugia caviar as heaping tall as the Big Rock Candy Mountain sitting right in front of your little fat face. Eating fancy crackers you can't get at the 7/11? Big freakin' deal! What's that make you? A man?

Sorry, Mister Illuminati dude. Not a chance. You'd need a lot more than freaking fish eggs to make you a man. You need mansions all over the globe to make you a man. You need stretch limosines with blacked-out windows to make you a man. You need big yachts, you need specially-tailored clothing, you need stemware, you need rare orchids in your underground greenhouse. Even with all that, Mister Illuminati dude, from what I've heard your penis is still only three inches long. And that's when it's erect! Erect? Forget what that means? It's been a long time since your entire body told you that you were a man, hasn't it?

You're not a man, Mister Illuminati dude, you're a Giant Baby. You're a Giant Baby just like the one that scientists have hidden in the basement of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas, right beneath the emergency room where John F. Kennedy was declared dead. Strange coincidence that you're one of those? Strange that you'd have ordered this cloning experiment--a Giant Baby, Mister Illuminati dude, floating in a giant transparent tub of chemicals--for your self gratification beneath the emergency room cum monument to one of your greatest achievements: the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

Whoo boy! So you got some dude killed! Lucky Luciano did that a thousand times. He didn't have to get the C.I.A. involved, and he didn't have to pay Castro, he didn't have to go through all sorts of red tape, and he didn't have to pay off the Dallas Police Department just to kill some dude, Mister Illuminati dude. All he did was rip out a revolver and pull the trigger. Is that so hard? How much money did you spend on the assassination anyway? Fifty bizzilion dollars? Hell, Mister Illuminati dude, I could have bought a pellet gun at Wall Mart and gotten it done a lot simpler than you did, well couldn't I? I could have used a $1.39 vegetable knife I bought at Kroger. And you're a bigger man than I am?

Who in the creeps do you think you are, Mister Illuminati dude? So freaking what if you can manipulate all the world's money markets with the flip of a finger. With the flip of a finger, I can tell you exactly what I think of you, Mister Illuminati dude.

Apparently you're not doing such a bang-up job of controlling the world either, Mister Illuminati dude. People are multiplying like rabbits. Hell, even some dumb cattle rancher out there in Frogcrotch, Texas can keep his herd under control better than you've done. And he could feed his cattle better than you feed yours, Mister Illuminati dude. At this point, two-thirds of the entire world's population is living off a dollar a day. And you know what? They might not have a custom Bang and Olfson satellite stereo system the size of a thimble sitting on their bedroom table, and they might not even have a bedroom table or even a bedroom, but I'll bet they're just as happy as you are, you miserable little loser. Besides, since you consider all that money you've got piled up in the closet a sure sign of your power, and that it's also a form of insurance that you'll keep your power that you've somehow instituted a top secret strategy of making about four freaking billion people live off a buck a day (talk about insulating yourself from criticism or anyone hedging your turf, dude!), why haven't you defeated Death yet? That's right, you puny, pathetic little loser! You're gonna die! Sooner or later, you're gonna wake up one morning and your face is going to be covered with welts. You might think that you've gotten them because you were allergic to the make-up you put on for the little dramatic presentation over at Bohemian Grove last week, but your doctor's gonna tell you it's cancer!

What you think of that, Mister Illuminati dude? Who'd want you to live forever anyway? You're nothing but a drag on the entire human race! Your mother'd probably want to shit on your head for all the ugly things you've done in the name of power, so why don't you go ahead and soak it, because as it is, Mister Illuminati dude, nobody really wants to look at either your head or your face. That's why you're wearing that mask, isn't it?

Mister Illuminati dude, you're ashamed of yourself. You think the mask is symbollic of working behind the scenes. But the only reason you work behind the scenes in the first place is because you're uglier than a mole on the ass of a rat, that's why. The girls you pay to sleep with you all know it, and they have to take heroin because they can't take it. They have to get up close to what really amounts to a huge turd hanging off the top of what resembles a human neck!

Way to go, Mister Illuminati dude! Ever since that time one of the Big Kids on the playground pulled your pants down and slimed you with pond scum, you've wanted revenge. Well it hasn't worked out so well has it? Look at all the resources you need simply to keep yourself from having to face the truth. You'd probably have done better signing up for a visit with Doctor Phil on TV.

THE CAT IS THE TOTAL GENIUS NOBODY UNDERSTANDS

2005-08-31T13:05:00.000-07:00

So what? I'm a cat. I've never really paid much attention to myself--at least not until yesterday. Now I'm suddenly quite conscious of who and what I am, cognizant nearly to a fault regarding my appearance and, of course, sentient. That's correct. I'm sentient. I am as self-reflective as any human being.

This morning, I looked into the mirror. Long gone were those sophomoric days of spotting a "cat" in the mirror, thinking that the "cat" was some sort of rival for my territory and then attacking the "cat" only to discover I was being confronted paw-to-paw, tooth-for-tooth, body slam to body slam by a "cat" as slick as glass. Stupid me. All those times I thought my reflection was something other than a reflection.

Watching television, I couldn't help but wonder how many humans never get as far as I have in the comprehension that the reflection they see in the mirror isn't some other person. But I've encountered a number of humans who see someone in the mirror who has little to do with who they really are. Anorexics are a good example because they always see a fat person in the mirror, even if they're actually 81 pounds, more bones than skin. This problem of seeing someone other than who you really are whenever you look in the mirror goes a lot deeper than merely misapprehension of physical attributes. Some women see a glamor queen like Jackie Collins when in reality they're closer in appearance and mental mien to the white trash they sometimes ridicule. Men usually see someone who's got a lot in common with Clint Eastwood or Walker, Texas Ranger, when they're really just another pointless boob who happened to catch their ideal image in the mirror. Actually, the reflection's we see aren't even us, they're glass cohabiting with light, but we're getting way too philosophical here. The point I'm trying to make is that commercial television plays off this natural human tendency. We see heroes; we think we are heroes. We see vixens and seductresses; we think we are vixens and seductresses. No wonder people who are poor, or both poor and non-white have trouble with "white man's culture": TV always portrays them as homeless or drug users or petty criminals or illegal immigrants or people who can barely speak English. That's disgusting. But what do I know? I'm only a cat.

What's really funny, however, is that my name's Narcissus. When I looked up the name in Encarta, I discovered that I am named after a Greek myth told eons ago to children in danger of becoming enamored with themselves. Narcissus discovers his reflection in the mirror and falls in love with it. Eventually, he gets up the nerve to kiss the beautiful male in front of him, falls into the pond and drowns. Such are the dangers of being Narcissistic. We tend to fall in love with our reflections because we are not sophisticated enough to ignore ourselves. Looking at the lists of thousands of bloggers who suffer from narcissistic tendencies, I must admit I'm having trouble falling in love with myself simply because I already know I'm more sophisticated than those folks. And, hell: I'm a freaking cat.

I was reading some dork's blog the other day, and the dork was ranting about the political situation in America. His real name was Darrell Smith or Missoula Falls, Montana. But his blogger name? Sexwithcaptainamerica. He'd posted one of those "glamour shots" photos of himself in which he was stretching his abs in dramatic lighting. I'm willing to bet a week's worth of cat chow that old Darrell Smith of Missoula Falls, Montana thought his ridiculous photo of himself was an accurate representation of his "inner self." When I looked at him again, glaring as he was from some small-town photographic studio, I almost coughed up a hairball. Here's a short excerpt from his latest blog entry:

"Cum w/me 2 the REAL Amurca! The one that's morrally cerupt! Present George W. Butch cain't hold th line longer! If'n he wuz 2 die, you'd not be the happpy 1!"

So, like a curious cat, I decided to examine the true life of Mr. Darrell Smith of Missoula Falls, Montana. You'd think cats aren't smart enough to surf the web, but then you've also been amazed when you read those charming news stories about the cat that called 911 and saved its owner's life. You've probably had personal experience of cats knocking on the front door of a friend's home, or have heard of cats even opening doors. This should lead you to suspect that cats, being the most superb hunters in the animal kingdom, are quite observant. And you'd be right in that suspicion. I'd watched my human attendant (we don't call those folks "owners") many times. I've almost memorized how to get onto the Internet. If a freaking cat can do this, why is it so many humans think their computer skills make them superior to other humans? Man! What a strange race you are!

Turns out Mr. Darrell Smith of Missoula Falls, Montana actually lives in this place called the Char-Bo-Nay Trailer Park. Char-Bo-Nay actually has a web site. What you'll see is a photograph of a fairly average trailer park, but it's oddly labeled as "Luxury Living In Big Sky Country!" If you look closely at the photograph, you'll see that whoever photographed the park didn't bother to pick up the litter you'll see speckling the gutters and yards like flecks of dirty snow. Right behind the owner of the park, Mrs. Melva Thompson, you'll even be able to spot a huge paper cup. It's overturned in what I took to be Mrs. Thompson's, the owner's, yard. Man! It must be quite a luxury to just up and throw trash in somebodies yard! It must be quite luxurious to walk to the front door of your trailer and scan a panorama of litter-strewn streets and yards.

Here's another quote from Darrell: "Them white trash mutherfuckers ain't got no considorations for them other peoples noplace! Them idgits shoulda been put in death camps down in Mexico!"

Being a cat, I've got to let you know I'm finicky. Finicky means being picky or selective or discriminating. When Morris the Cat acted finicky on TV in the 1970s, Morris wouldn't eat certain types of food because they supposedly weren't up to his standards. Morris' voice was intended to be a dead giveaway: That afficianado tone-of-voice was literally sticky with culture and affectation. It was funny to listen to Morris talk because Morris was only a cat. Anyway, I've got to admit that I really am finicky. I'm quite quick to make distinctions between one thing and another, and moreover, I'm also quick to draw value judgements based on the distinctions I make. So...when I began to count the number of spelling errors on the website for the Char-Bo-Nay Trailer Park (they totaled 23), I suspected that whoever put it together had certain qualities: First of all, it was possible they just couldn't spell. Secondly, it's probable they either don't know how to use their computer's spell-check programming. Third, it's also probable they're too lazy to use the dictionary. It's also possible they don't know they're misspelling certain words. It could be the website "designer" (a high-falutin designation intended to give a typist a sense of undeserved dignity in a world in which dignity is hard to come by) doesn't own a dictionary. But all those possibilities assume the best. Could be the web designer isn't well educated enough to know how to spell words correctly. Could be the web designer has a low intelligence quotient. It could be the web designer, a person who "designs" web sites, doesn't know how to type. Or, and this is giving the web designer a lot of slack, it's also possible that the web designer misspelled 23 words as a way of providing web surfers a sense of the local color only Char-Bo-Nay Trailer Park can provide.

Remember the movie, "Pee Wee's Big Adventure"? At one point, when Pee Wee Herman is showing off on his bicycle, he has a wreck. Standing up and dusting himself off, Pee Wee glares at the camera and hisses, "I meant to do that."

That's the usual response when people who have misspelled a word, and feel some kind of shame over having it pointed out to them, use to invoke some kind of generally-accepted poetic license when what they're really trying to do is protect themselves from criticism they're afraid will make them feel even more stupid than they already think they are.

Anyway, the Char-Bo-Nay Trailer Park indicates this: NO TRASHIN' NO PUBLIC SEX OR DRINKIN' OR DRUGGIN' OR FIGHTIN' ON THE FRONT YARDS!

I guess that this means that I, Narcissus, a mere cat, won't be able to use the front yard of Char-
Bo-Nay Trailer Park as a restroom, nor will I be able to have that rough, snorting sex I like to have when I'm not in the cat house. I won't be able to lap a single drop of malt liquor from one of the 40-ounces I imagine are going to be strewn practically everywhere, and catnip's out of the question. And if I'm merely trying to defend my turf from an interloping rival, I won't be able to squeal and scratch, even if it's only my instinct to do so. Sounds like Char-Bo-Nay's a great place for a cat.

Not to be too disappointed, however. Since I saw all that litter scattered all over the Char-Bo-Nay promotional photograph, I decided I could take the presence of trash all over Mrs. Thompson's front yard as a gesture indicating she really doesn't mean it about the trashing, public sex, drinking, drug abuse or violence at Char-Bo-Nay. We'll just turn our heads the other way, Mrs. Thompson's trashy gesture tells me. And that's great! This is where Darrell, vociferous defender of American moral values, actually lives!

A slightly more intensive investigation into Darrell Smith's credit and legal portfolio's was revealing. Darrell Smith, according to his public credit rating, can't even get a WalMart credit card because he's repeatedly committed to making payments on the following: His car, his wife's car, his television set, his personal computer and even the trailer house in which he lives. Because he's got a poor credit rating, I can only assume he hasn't had the money he needs to live the life he wants to lead. That's not uncommon in America, and it also indicates that Darrell, among millions like him, is under great marketing pressure. He's continually being shown that "successful" people have certain things, and because he wants to be seen as "successful," he buys on credit, only to default for any number of possible reasons. Is this a behavioral sign that points to clues surrounding the character of Darrell Smith of Missoula Falls, Montana?

Maybe poor Darrell isn't as Captain America-esque as he wants people to think he is in his blog name. Isn't Captain America supposed to be strong? Able to resist adversity? Isn't he supposed to be able to do the right thing no matter how hard it is? I'll bet that if Captain America owed WalMart five hundred bucks on a wide screen TV, he'd tell himself he'd made an agreement to act in good faith and that he'd be doing himself a grave injustice if he didn't fulfill the promise he'd made. Heck, man! Captain America's only a comic character.

But Darrell's real profile--quite different, you may imagine, from his blogger profile--gets worse. In fact, it's almost shocking. Darrell, the defender of the morality of America, has been pulled over and even jailed five times--five times!--on drunken driving charges. What does this say about his character? Sure. Though I'm a cat, I'm still smart enough to know that alcohol abuse isn't a character problem as much as it's a disease, but still: Don't you think Darrell would have admitted he had a problem with drinking and driving the first time he spent the night in jail? If Darrell had as much character as he wants people to think he has, he'd have been quick to amend his behavior. Apparently, Darrell hasn't "hit bottom" yet.

Darrell's alcohol abuse may point to other problems related to his character: Because he's being besieged by marketing ploys that demand that unless he becomes tall, well-dressed, rich, sophisticated and a lady killer who happens to listen to techno music he doesn't even know exists outside of a Lexus commercial, Darrell's trying to check out of a serious disparity between two alleged realities: his quotidian life and the one he sees on TV. Man! You get sucked into that one and you're in trouble.

Need evidence from the cat world? I can't remember how old I was, but we were all watching Animal Planet one night. Like any cat, I'd just eaten dinner and was feeling comfortable. Sitting in front of the TV as a cat's gesture indicating that my human attendant's attention and concentrational focus belongs to me, was part of my "turf," and that my human attendant's tendency to focus instead on the TV was a violation, I found myself sucked into televised "reality." Call it a frailty, call it my instincts, but when I heard birds singing in a televised jungle setting, something in me literally "went ape." I, too, began to focus, quite intently, on the TV screen. My hackles began to raise. Whiskers twitched. I felt I was about to pounce. It was irresistable. My hunter's instincts had been triggered by the TV.

Then, beyond my comprehension, the TV image shifted from birds singing in the jungle to a lion sitting on an African plain. In a sudden camera close-up, the lion loudly roared. Yeow! I freaked! Next thing I know, I was in the next room, quivering under the bed.

Well, I bet the same thing happens to Darrell. He sees images on the TV that catalyze his hunter-gatherer instincts and he feels compelled either to try to buy his way into televised paradise or he recoils into insecurity and fear and begins drinking. Maybe the drinking gives him a sense of paradise, the fast-food kind.

According to information I culled from the web, Darrell's been unemployed for nearly two and a half years. He lives in Missoula Falls, Montana. I'd bet that's not exactly a hotbed of employment opportunities. He's probably felt a lot of anxiety. He probably thinks the world's out to get him. Is it a conspiracy? Who knows? Some people might laugh at Darrell because he's been unemployed for so long. Darrell probably knows that, too. He's more than likely quite sensitive to the possibility of ridicule, mainly because he's ridiculed plenty of people for being unemployed, or being crippled or being drunk or being divorced. Now that the tables seem to be turned, Darrell feels threatened by the possibility he'd be ridiculed for being on the dole. Besides, he thinks that unemployment is a character problem. He feels bad about himself. He worries that there's something wrong with him, and he's trying in a number of ways to accommodate all his fears. That's probably why Darrell's self-image is so out of whack. He's suffering from ego inflation: He's so pumped up over himself because that's the only way he can maintain. In fact, he's so pumped up over himself that he thinks he's got the answers to America's problems.

Darrell Smith of Missoula Falls, Montana, probably goes ballistic over all the social and political problems he doesn't have to do much about: Abortion's easy because all you have to do is stand around in front of an abortion clinic and express with your presence dissatisfaction; gay marriage is simple mainly because you don't know anybody who's gay, hence you're distant from the realities of that situation and can stand around and complain while doing absolutely nothing about anything and then make yourself feel morally superior because of "your stand" on gay marriage; the government is always a convenient target because the government, not Darrell Smith of Missoula Falls, Montana, is the root of all evil.

Darrell has never voted in his life. He's like the kid who's standing outside the circle of all the "popular kids" at recess and calling them "poo poo heads." Good job, Darrell. You're just fucking great.

Anyway, I'm only a cat. I've got my own problems. I shouldn't be sitting here preening my own self image by criticizing the human race. Sometimes I smell bad. Sometimes my breath could fell a horse.

STORY OF THE INVENTOR OF THE PEDAL-DRIVEN VIKING SHIP

2005-05-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

I used to be a poet for the feudal entity called Gardere. But then I fell in love with a princess, and because my lord was also smitten with her, I was banished, sent to a faraway place, ostensibly as an envoy to a group of barbarians. I voyaged far, through deserts so hot I thought at times my tongue would simply spring swollenly out of my mouth; across vast plains inhabited by nomads who ate nothing but grass; and through dense forests so deep and dark I often sensed no end to them. Finally, I reached my destination: a simple Viking ship tied to a tallow on a shallow river. Where was I? According to my guide, I was in the middle of the territory of the Tartars. But why?

Ah, that was nothing anyone could tell me. For, you see, the lord who vanquished me had hoped to lead me to my immediate death. Yes, under the umbrella of some sort of "secret mission" to the peoples of the Kingdom of Prester John, murder was the real reason. Now I was lost, a simple man in a typical Arabic tunic (black) being looked upon by fierce Viking warlords and all their minions. Before my eyes, a Christian missionary was murdered, impaled, left to die on the tip of a 12 foot sharpened stick, various wolves and other beasts licking the blood from its stalk as the corpse swelled and rotted in the sun.

But this is how life was like in those bygone days before civilized man: Feudal lords, barbaric warlords, missions to nowhere and the virtuous impaled.

At that time, of course, I was riding a bicycle. It was my only means of transportation. The Viking warlords, many of whom had never seen such transportation before, scoffed and spat in my face, calling my humble machine "a dog."

"Your dog can run"

"Can your dog run faster than a spear?"

Needless to say, my lowly bicycle was no match for their myriad horsepowered BMWs and Jaguars. The only way I could compete with the Vikings was in the realm of maneuverability: I could pop a wheelie at will and, given a good start and perhaps a push, I could literally leap over a BMW, moving or not. For some reason, this impressed my bloodthirsty captors. But, as is usual for the bloodthirsty amongst us, being impressed is for sissies. Bloodthisty don't like their kindred to know they're impressed by anything. Hence, most of these bloodthirsty captors expressed being impressed by ridiculing me. Such is life, such is war, such is luck.

Subject to ridicule once more, then, I found myself at the bottom of a brand-new pecking order based on horsepower and machinery. And insecurity masquerading as blonde-haired machismo. Whereas before I had struggled along the muddy floor of a Baghdad bureaucracy Byzantine in character and in influence, now I had to compete mano-a-mano in a system of airheadedness unmatched since the days of the Hells Angels. Which is something I thought about. When they asked me the name of my tribe, I responded with the first thing to come to mind:

"Heaven's Devils."

"Wha...?"

"Kind of like Hell's Angels," I'd answer. "Like that--only more dangerous."

Usually, those Viking airheads, macho or not, just weren't up to snuff in the Arabic department. They didn't understand me.

"Bah, bah, bah!" one kept saying. Others would laugh. Soon, I was getting "baaed" all the time. So much so that Bah became my name.

"Hey Bah! Get me some grog!"

"Bah! Come clean my toenails!"

You! Bah! Wanna get laid, ass virgin?"

Endless days I spent trying to learn the gutteral language of the Viking warlords. Of course, much of what I did learn was coarse indeed, but slowly and surely, I gained an understanding of their ruthless language, and with that understanding I learned I was in a hopeless situation. You see, these were vanquished poets also. Viking poets. Viking poets who liked...ice cream?

Yes. Ice cream. One time, after whipping up a batch (you see, I'd found a niche in the pecking order when I invented a way to use my peddling skills to make ice cream...linking up the chain to a sprocket attached to the ice cream machine's workings...well, you get the idea...), one said, "Bah! Let's go to Sweeden! I hear there are some really mean Morlocks up there that are screwing around with one of our villages."

"What?"

"I say, Bah, these Morlock creatures are invincible, they're vampires and they're meaner than your grandmother the day she discovered she had PMN for the first time."

"What's PMS?"

"You stupid Bah. PMS? That's simple. Pre. Morlock. Syndrome. You idiot."

So we got onto the Viking ship. Not to be forced to the bottom of the Viking pecking order again, I unhooked my sprocket system from the ice cream machine and hooked it up onto the ship. Our ship was the first pedal-driven Viking ship in the entire Norse empire. It was at this point, during a storm, that somebody, I think it was Erik, maybe Uruk, possibly Eruk, could be Erur--who knows? Anyway they accused me of stealing an entire Antonio Banderas movie. This idgit said I'd made this whole thing up and this thing was nothing more than another movie rip-off. That's when I woke up. I was crying. Something had broken the window and snow was falling onto my pillow. Worse, I wasn't an Arab anymore. I was simply me.

A CRIMINALIZED SENSITIVE AMONG THE NUMBSKULL CLASSES

2004-10-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

Living out here in the Texas flatlands, a place where high elevations, both physical and spiritual, are rare and far between, those whose only crime consists in being somewhat sensitive (or delicate) often find themselves virtually jailed by flat milleux. You are definitely one of those. It shouldn't seem strange to you, then, to find yourself riding in the back of a large truck, rolling down Singleton Boulevard, far out in impoverished West Dallas, a convict among convicts, literally chained to the bed of the proverbial lorry.

You really don't feel at home there in the back of the truck. Sure, the wind blowing what remains of your hair is bracing and cool (it being Autumn), but what is this context in which you find yourself? All around you, bumping and bouncing in the back of the flatbed, are ruffians, hoodlums, convicts, transients, mendicants and drug addicts. The contrast between yourself and these odd men couldn't be greater: As you sit there, watching the hardscrabble landscape swim by as you pass old tire shops, battered restaurants and pasteboard houses, the men around you are hooting at various women, many of whom are standing on streetcorners, waving back. Moreover, as you contemplate the beauty of the scene, taking note of the earthy details of an almost forbidden landscape and trying to fit it into some understanding of the world, the men around you seem to be thinking in terms of lust, of wanting out of all this, of wanting to rebel against anything and everything.

Strangely, the guards riding in the cab of the truck are taking the entire group of you to some sort of art project.

"Today, you're gonna be artists. Hear?"

You definitely do hear the guards. They're laughing. But what are they laughing at? Are they scoffing at you and your inadvertent compatriots as all of you, guards and prisoners together, try to parse exactly how being a criminal and an artist are going to mesh today? Or are they making sport of this torture du jour? Art. As torture. What on earth is going on here?

Everybody within this scene looks roughed up: The man chained to your wrist has multiple scars on his wrists--as if he's tried to commit suicide dozens of times. His three-day stubble makes his face look dirty, just as does the windburn and the implicit ruddiness of his complexion. His voice is rough and gravelly. His hair, streaked with gray, reminds you of a drunkard's bedhead. But, like you, he wears the institutional orange jumpsuit that indicates prisoners are being transported across Dallas, the International City, for some sort of mission of pure drudgery.

Is art drudgery? Apparently it is for these prisoners. As for you, well, you're almost looking forward to this "field trip" to some sort of art center where, for once, you'll be able to represent your more sublime instincts to strangers. Perhaps, you're thinking, one of these strangers will see you for who you really are, not merely a prisoner, not merely some sort of criminal, not a run-of-the-mill hoodlum whose idea of art is a shoot-em-up B-movie along the lines of a Quentin Tarrentino knock-off.

Of course, this situation itself is a kind of Quentin Tarrentino knock-off. All the elements are there: Do art and beauty hide like butterflies in cocoons of criminality and violence? Is this the beauty of the underclass that you, caught like a fly in amber, also get to view from a position of relative mental distance?

The truck slows, pulls to the left of the road and rolls across a dirt drive to the so-called destination. But this isn't an art center. It's not even a community center. No. Rather, it's an auto parts store. What? You're going to be expressing yourself artistically in an auto parts store?

You're pulled outside your initial amazement at this unexpected turn of events because the guard in the passenger seat has pulled out a large shotgun and is watching your group of prisoners closely as his partner unchains the chain gang from the truck.

"Ya'll better not try nothin' or you'll get some of this, ya hear?"

Then he laughs. "Ya'll's gonna be artists! Stupid mutherfuckers!"

You bow your head and acquiesce. Inwardly, you're pleased. As your leg-ironed feet clank in rhythm with the others in line, the entrance to the auto parts store opens. It looks a lot like Dallas' famed Deep Ellum "arts district". The building itself is weathered and stained by decades of misuse.

You file into the room, where, to your surprise, you see several beautiful women, all of them car parts clerks, and they're all watching with some interest this line of criminals moving to a table where a number of cheap art supplies are piled. Two women, in particular, strike your interest. They look like simple girls, but also worldly women; girls with very little formal education, and of that, even less of it education of quality. It's obvious they're coarse and a little wild, but at this point in your life, who really cares? They're women, and you haven't been in this close proximity to women, much less beautiful women, in quite some time. You decide you're going to use your sensitivity to impress them.

"You all here," grunts a guard. "You all here are here to make posters inviting people to this here auto parts store. You are going to make signs that are gonna greet customers and stuff like that. We're not gonna do any funny stuff or anything. No smart alecs or we could shoot you right here. You hear that? We want you to mention this here 'Criminal artists of Dallas program' thing. There's your crayons so have at it!"

The other guard then proceeds to unlock each of you from the chains. One of the women moves from behind the counter and locks the front door. It doesn't matter, apparently, about lost business for the auto parts store. What matters more than anything is that you not escape from the auto parts store.

Quietly, and somewhat warily, you slowly walk to the table and take a black marker, a green marker and a yellow marker. Strange. You have unconsciously selected three colors that indicate exactly how you're feeling at this moment: black for the grief of a prisoner, yellow for the fear you must be feeling deep down, and of course, envy for those in the world who are truly free. Your heart hurts at this acknowledgment. Then, you take a relatively unwrinkled piece of manilla paper, the type of paper you once used in elementary school. This, too, seems ironic. You, a great artist? Using the cheapest institutional paper? How on earth can you preserve a great work of art on paper that will surely crumble in a decade or two? Are you
taking this joke too seriously?

You're being treated like a child. You don't like being treated like a child.

Nevertheless, you take marker in hand and begin to draw. Slowly, surely, a beautiful design begins to shape itself on the cheap paper. The design is angular and a little lopsided. Still, there is an almost unearthly beauty to it. In fact, you like what you've done. That's when you notice one of the women looking at you. Knowing you're being watched, you begin to make flourishes with the marker--like a burlesque of an artist's movements. The woman, however, shows no recognition of what you're doing--even though you're making a show for her. You glance at her. She's still looking--sure she is--but you get the impression she doesn't really see what you're doing. What on earth is she thinking about? Lunch?

Finally, you take your "work" in hand and stride over to the counter. "What do you think of this," you ask the woman. "Do you like it?"

"It's O.K.," she sighs.

"Is this what you want?"

"I guess."

"What does it make you feel?"

"Oh...I dunno...."

You don't know about any of the other prisoners, but the woman's comments--or lack of commentary--hurts you. In fact, it's torture. You wanted her attention, and now that she's passively shrugged you off, you want her attention even more. Looking at the prisoner next to you, you see his so-called artwork: It's scribbled with a plain old red pen, and in almost rudimentary handwriting, it says, "CUM ON TO DAVE'S AUTOPARTS STOR BE-CAUSE THIS MEAN YOU TOO!"

A total work of genius. Bastard can't even spell.

Unfortunately for you, the girl whose attention you want, sees the sign and says, "That's purty cute!" This disgusts you. It's not cute. It's inane. As a sign, it wouldn't work because the lettering is so faint you'd have to get so close to it that you'd already have entered the premises of the auto parts store to have noticed it. There's no artifice, there's no artfulness, there's no practical value, and it's meaningless. But the girl behind the counter thinks it's cute? What on earth does she value here?

"What's so cute about that guy's stuff?" you ask her. You're trying to be polite, but years of formal education and, well, "book-learning" are turning your social effort into a parody of itself. "What's so cute about that thing?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"Well, it reminds me of, well, I don't know...."

The woman obviously has no taste. She wouldn't know art if art itself came up behind her and screamed, "LOOK AT ME! I'M ART! WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT! ART! I'M ART!"

You look across the room, working on tables crowded with dusty auto parts, convicts are scrawling childish and often inane signs that have little or nothing to do with art as you know it on the planet Earth. Most of the "art" you're seeing looks like garage sale signage: A couple of stick figures here, a lumpy looking face there. No sense of perspective, a complete absense of proportion, and worst of all, absolute ignorance of the concept of meaning in art. These are naifs. No, it's worse than that. As far as culture is concerned, they're retards. That's probably why they're in jail. They have no cultural understanding, no comprehension regarding how the human individual fits within his or her requisite culture. They are nothing more than bundles of nerves that respond to hunger, lust, danger and rage. In other words, they're children, big, mean, illiterate children.

All this time, you've been trying to be polite to the children around you--that's what you're thinking. But now it's apparent: This is your death, this is where it all ends. Your drawing, all of the spirit that went into it, the passion, the symbolism of the colorations, the shadings, the angles, the almost palpable meaning of imprisonment all caught up in the abstract, means absolutely nothing to the girl. How can it be? How could it have come to this?

Finally, you can take it no longer. Angrily, you turn your drawing upside down, and begin a completely new rendition. This time, you make crude scrawls that, in a matter of moments, congeal into a hastily rendered impression of a curvaceous woman. She has big tits. She's got big eyes that are surrounded by green eyeshade. She looks a little like the girl behind the counter.

Above this almost despicable image, you scrawl out a kind of laundry list:

UP FOR: HELPING MURDERERS GET STRAIGHT

IN FOR: BEING TOO CUTE TOO BELIEVED

WHERE AT: DAVE'S AUTO PARTS PLANT

REASON TO: COME LOOK AT CRIMINAL DALLAS ARTISTS

DATE OF TIME: AT SATURDAY'S UNTIL CLOSED

***COME IN CUTIE PIE***

***I THANK YOUR CUTE***

***X X X O O O X X X***

Finished with the so-called work of art, you hold it up to the girl. She smiles at you. Brushes her hair behind her ear. She's showing you she hears you. She's connecting with you.

"That's cute, mister," she says. "What's your name?"

WATCHING ALL THE TELEVISED BODIES, BODIES WITHOUT THE HUMAN SMELL

2004-09-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

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!

2004-09-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

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?

2004-09-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

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

2004-09-20T22:43:00.000-07:00

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

2004-09-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

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?

2004-09-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

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

2004-09-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

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

2004-09-09T21:14:00.000-07:00

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.