Just a Thought

Ahhhh...back to reality. I can't help but wonder if ther country is going to have a brown out before we fall (or slide as the case may be) over the "Fecal" cliff in a few days since our elected officials have already exhibited what their brain matter consists of...just a thought.

Naughty X-Mas Cookies

Those Cookies are at it again thanks to the Swedish company Pipparkakan for making some naughty cutters. They say 'How about serving breakfast in bed with hot Kama Sutra toast or why not invite friends over for a lovely brunch with enticing fried eggs? We honor out gingerbread pigs and goats, but now they are finally here, the gingerbread cutters that make the Christmas tree rise and the candles glow.' http://www.pipparkakan.se/PIPPARKAKAN.html

About Swinging

Here's an interesting article from Yahoo News of all places that might shed a little light on this subject for you: Swinging Happens: Call it wife-swapping, call it creepy, but no matter what you call it, there’s no denying this alternative lifestyle is on the upswing. http://www.youbeauty.com/relationships/swinging-happens-2

I’LL SECOND THAT EMOTION

I had begun to start writing this several days ago…and then something happened that should never have happened. The emotions I was going to talk about evaporated into a cliché. Needless to say my thought process, along with the world around me, changed and not in a good way, the humor I had hoped to bring to this little rant immediately disappeared and may never return again in the future. As the story unfolded, through every available news source, we would learn twenty-eight people died in all. Twenty of them children between six and seven years old, seven adults tried to protect them from one lone gunman who, in the end, took his own life… but, everyone knows all about this by now. I won’t bore you with a re-hash of it all. As is usually the case when things like this happen (all too frequently these days it seems) heartfelt condolences and decries about how senseless (and preventable) these tragedies are begin to pour out from all corners of the globe pointing fingers in every direction in an effort to exorcise…what? We, as a society, have short memories when it comes to genuine human interaction. The bodies of the lost are barely cold and eulogized yet every numb nut out there breaks out their soapbox and proclaims “We need to (Insert the half baked plan of your choice here) right now!” not really having thought anything completely through. We heartlessly disrespect the fallen and the grief of their families in an effort to grab attention for our own misguided cause at their expense. We do this knowing full well deep inside…we won’t remember anyone’s names a week from now! The only ones who will are the families who will live with this loss for the rest of their lives. Sadly, by then, there will be another tragedy to bring fresh fodder to the non-discussion. The left will still be blaming EVERYONE and want all of the guns no matter how ludicrous a possibility that would be. The survivalists (a mixed bag of political beliefs) will still be worrying they’re going to be used as “scapegoats” for everything that happens while they practice shooting and blowing shit up in the middle of nowhere. The right will still be hiding behind the Bible and their NRA contributions. The NRA will still be largely silent and stand behind their antiquated slogans and bumper stickers. Their slogan “Guns don’t kill people, People kill people” is absolutely true. Minimizing the guns is only a small fraction of the issue. Better background checks, tighter control of gun sales (to include those by the Government), better mental health care, better education, better ways to resolve conflicts need to be taught and discussed. We need to figure out a way to get back to being HUMAN. We need to re-learn how not to be knee-jerk reactionary lemmings and seek understanding and common ground again. It wasn’t all that long ago we were on the path to get there…then, somehow, we took that left turn in Albuquerque Bugs Bunny warned us about. The solution…as it always has been, is somewhere in the middle right next to the donuts on the conference table nobody is willing to sit down at. It’s time we actually did.

PARALLEL LIVES

Mike finally has woken from the stupor of the past twenty-four hours. He had been painting and binging until he could no longer maintain consciousness and now finds himself within reach of the bed he never made it to on the floor looking and smelling like shit. He sits up and collects his thoughts as the rumbling in his stomach loudly announces how empty it is and glances around the space he calls home to see the empty bottles and discarded fast food wrappers and bags while he visually verifies what little he has is still there and hasn’t gone “missing” while he was passed out. This is hardly the life he was supposed to have. He was a graduate of a prestigious art school who blew the doors off the competition while he was there wining award after award…along with one other person…unfortunately. Across town Mike’s twin brother Matt, also an artist who went to the same school, has just come back from a last minute run to the deli not too far from where his brother lives for some items needed before guests arrive later in the evening for a “post-gallery party” with some friends after the opening of his one man show at a nearby gallery. His wife Cheryl is in the shower beginning her preparation for the evening’s festivities as Matt unloads his bags and begins prepping the food and chilling the wine, caviar and cooked shrimp. Mike makes himself presentable as best he can. He’s hungry, dirty, broke and in need of more alcohol but he knows what he must do to get what he needs so out the door and into the night he goes. He’s not proud of what he’s about to subject himself to but in his mind he justifies it all with a “You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do to survive.” thought in his head. He makes his way down the street and passes the deli, that unbeknownst to him his brother had been at a short time earlier, and looks in to see the cases of meat, fish and cheese all brightly lit up with cured meats and sausages hanging above them. The walls of the small store were filled with fresh breads and specialty foods and wine. The bins filled with olives and pickles of all types…just like they’ve always been even when Mike and Matt were small boys and they would go there with their parents or grandparents. Mike doesn’t go in. He can’t afford anything in there right now and he’s too big to get away with snagging a pickle like he did years ago so he continues on down the street and around the corner in silence. Where he is going poses more danger to him than stealing a pickle. Matt wanders in to the bedroom to check on Cheryl’s progress and change himself. He sees her chosen outfit lying on the bed. A clingy sheer backless black dress with rhinestone accents and a pair of black platform pumps…that’s all she’ll be wearing and she’ll stun the world in it again. He takes his clothes off and heads into the bathroom for a shower and sees his wife standing in front of the mirror putting her makeup on wearing nothing but a thin gold waist chain around her hips highlighting her athletic frame. Matt steps up behind her and kisses her on the neck as their eyes meet seductively in the mirror and his hands lightly stroke her sides. A gasp and a shudder emit from her as she reaches for the counter in an effort to maintain her balance while her lipstick bounces into the sink with a clatter. Cheryl turns and puts her hands on Matt’s shoulders as he raises her petite body up slightly and sits her on the counter. Mike has made his way further into the darkness encountering few people in the process. The ones he does see are of “questionable” purpose on this street. Matt has stepped closer into Cheryl and gently begins to slide his cock into her, freshly shaven, pussy as he continues to kiss her neck avoiding mussing up her fresh makeup. There is still more to do and people to see and play with later. It would be in poor taste to start out with that “freshly fucked” look right from the get-go. As Mike passes an alleyway a middle aged man in a football jersey approaches him. Mike had expected to be approached by someone but not this balding, chubby, average looking person who looks very out of place outside of the suburban neighborhood where he must live. Mike is offered fifty dollars to give the man a blowjob. Mike counters with “make it a hundred and you can have more than a blowjob.” Which the man quickly agrees to and hands Mike the money as they step into the alley. He puts the money in his pocket, unzips his pants and leans into a trash bin for support. The stench is overwhelming but he does everything he can to block the whole thing out of his mind as the man’s meat finds its way up Mike’s ass. The pleasure Matt is finding inside Cheryl has become intoxicating and the pace of their fucking is increasing with each thrust. Mike’s “patron” has begun to grunt and pick up speed causing Mike to do the same while reaching down and grab his own cock and begin to frantically stroke it. Matt and Cheryl’s breathing has become hard and animal like. So has Mike’s over on the other side of the city. At the same time Mike and Matt let out a loud scream that is part orgasm, part anguish and somewhere over the city the two screams meet and mesh sounding as one before fading into the night sky. Matt gently kisses his wife as he jumps into the shower to quickly clean up and get dressed. They don’t want to be late for the opening. There are deals to be made and playmates still to enjoy. Mike looks around to see his benefactor has disappeared back into the shadows from where he came as Mike fished around in the trash bin to find something to clean himself up with before re-doing his pants. He makes his way back up the street to the deli only to find it closed. He remembered his brother’s opening is tonight and boards a bus for the hour or so trip to the gallery. “There’s always food and booze at those.” He thinks to himself as he sat there in the silence of the nearly empty bus. Matt and Cheryl waste no time in making the rounds and glad-handing the guests upon their arrival. Everyone is in a sexy and festive mood so the drinks and conversation flow quickly and freely. In what seemed to be a blink of an eye it is decided to take the party home for more food, drink and “intimate” fun. The crowd pours out of the gallery and off to Matt and Cheryl’s. A short time later Mike gets off the bus and walks the two blocks to the gallery only to find it closed. He looks through the window to see the thirty or so paintings his brother had shown that night. All neatly hung with the small title and price cards affixed to the wall next to them. Many had the magic red dot on them signifying they had been sold that night. Mike smiled a weak smile as he wished it were his stuff not his brother’s. He dejectedly turns and heads back towards the bus stop. His footsteps echo loudly down the vacant street as he plans his next destination. Somewhere out there is a hamburger and a beer with his name on it. He’ll eat and stock up on liquid supplies and return to his place to paint some more and, hopefully, get something to come out right. Matt will be engulfed in a sea of passionate flesh for the remainder of the evening. Tomorrow morning he’ll go to the gallery and collect his check for the works sold tonight. He’ll then return home and begin to work on a new series. Both he and his brother will be looking for that all elusive “new edge” to make their work continue to be relevant. One or the other may succeed. Maybe they both will or maybe they’ll both fail. When the sun comes up in the morning it will be a new day filled with opportunity. It remains to be seen who takes advantage of it.

MAKING THE TURN PART II

MAKING THE TURN PART II Thank-you for the private thoughts and questions with all of the “what if’s” and “what about’s” in them…all valid questions. Some of them, I must confess, were unjustly omitted from Part I so I will attempt to answer those questions here............ or not. Either way I sit here with my cup of green tea and bowl of soup ready to tackle the issues. Not everything that happened this year has been horrible, many things have simply gotten to the point they can no longer be ignored. As repulsed as I am with “Reality TV” it has illustrated some positive issues this year like the fact that the Arts are a much needed aspect of our lives that needs to be promoted and encouraged more. This needs to be done not only as a society globally but as a species specifically. Shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” and, begrudgingly, “Dancing with the Stars” has gotten us to renew our interest in that Art form again. “American Idol”, “X-Factor”, and “The Voice” has re-acquainted us with different musical styles and regardless of whether you went to PS25, Compton Junior High or Julliard, Rap may have finally seen its day and be forced to evolve into something other than angry bad poetry. It has also illustrated the language issues we’ve faced this year. People have lost the ability to speak, read or write without using some form of technological shorthand. Spelling, complete sentences or thoughts are lost on people these days (and God help us if they don’t have Spell check…not that they ever take the time to use it.). It only takes one episode of watching “Jersey Shore” to validate that English has become a lost language and common sense plus social etiquette haven’t been taught or promoted since the sixties. Watch any episode of “The Real Housewives of…” wherever and it sadly illustrates you can buy new body parts for every inch of you except a brain and a personality. As I stop and take a sip of my green tea I can remember when, not all that long ago, we could sit down with a cup of tea or coffee, a good book, have music calmly, quietly play in the background and maybe converse with the people around me and absorb the world at a leisurely pace. Now it’s Mocafrapahalfcaf gobbledygook at five bucks a pop with a Kindle or smart phone and the incessant thumpa-thumpa-buzz-buzz-click-click serenade of the “real world” at an impatiently breakneck speed…really? Literature has become formulaic and/or squealed to death. Nobody seems to know what good literature is this day…but they can smell a movie deal on the horizon as easily as yesterday’s fried fish dinner. It’s no wonder that, as much as I really like and admire the guy on a variety of levels, it appalls me that Stan Lee has become to be revered as some sort of literary and cinematic genius the past couple of years and this year has been no exception. Fine Art and Photography has become somewhat of a mixed bag this year. It was a banner year for auction houses to sell these works at record prices yet galleries have struggled to stay afloat (literally in New York…but that’s another issue). Some exciting things have come out of artists worldwide this year but the “Art World” in general is nervous about what the future brings and where to go next. Museum attendance is down. In an effort to find out why they’ve done survey after survey after survey only to discover they spend too much money doing surveys. New York was “shocked” because the Reality TV show “Gallery Girls” was ignored off the tube so they reacted like typical New Yorkers and renewed the show for another season and insisted we should all watch “this important show” because it’s as important as “Project Runway” (another show only an egotistical New Yorker could love). Speaking of New York…were you as fascinated as I was about the swift disaster response after “Super Storm Sandy”? They were re-building before the storm was actually over and every entertainment bozo with even a remote connection to the area was contributing money and doing “relief fund” shows for the area almost immediately. I found that to be a far cry from how New Orleans was handled during Katrina…and people say money doesn’t talk. Fashion comes and fashion goes but this year they seemed to have accidentally gotten real. You’re always going to find outlandish designs during fashion week, its tradition…much like Congress saying one thing and doing something else. There are always retro styles revisited or “re-interpreted” (another way of saying “I have nothing new to add”) but this year a lot of designers seemed to be creating things for different age brackets. They’re not trying to make a forty year old woman dress like an anorexic eighteen year old and they’re seemingly trying to help men embrace their age…not their shoe size. I hope the trend continues. Food has come to the forefront this year. People are trying to eat healthier and smarter. Some with more success than others but people are trying. I discovered I can’t eat food from certain fast food places no matter how “healthy” they make the food, I still get sick. Because of this, like many people these days, I’ve become very particular about what, where and how I eat. In some ways it has spawned a sort of culinary snobbery I hope doesn’t last long. It hasn’t gone to the extreme some have gone to but it has come close at times. What I have learned this year is “Be healthy, but be smart”. I refuse to spend twelve dollars for a wedge of cheese because it says “Imported” on it when I can buy the same thing for about four dollars. They both still smell like an old gym shoe so why pay extra for the privilege. I know someone who pays an obscene amount of money for olives with the pits still in them from a specialty store when the can go to the local store and buy “pitted” olives of equal (or better and fresher) quality for half the price at the “olive bar” there. Diet and exercise have found a purpose this year and I hope it continues from now on. It’s become more than embarrassing to be the fattest and dumbest society in the world. Some things didn’t change this year. Julian Assange is still alive and under house arrest in England. He wants the world to feel sorry for him now because he may have some terminal medical issue or another. I seldom, if ever, say things like this but…it couldn’t happen to a better person and I hope he goes quickly. We found out (once again) that the people we entrust to protect our interests around the world and gather information to do so are incompetent at it and can’t keep their dicks I their pants or their hands out of the cookie jars. This year people have grown tired of hearing denials, half truths, misquotes, accusations, false promises and backstabbing…around the dinner table. It got worse this year because it was an election year. That’s behind us now and we must get back to finding honest answers to our questions and solve our problems…not just talk about them. It’s time to take a step back and seek the truth in everything, maybe make a concession or two and figure out how to get along with each other again. An early Happy New Year from me to and yours.

MAKING THE TURN

About this time every year I find myself reflecting on what, if anything, has transpired in my life over the past twelve months that may be worth noting. It almost always is a mixed bag of good and bad with a little bit of delusional thrown in just to see if anyone was really paying attention. Depending on how long it takes me to collect my thoughts and write all of this down there will still be six to eight weeks left (or less) before the end of the year to seriously screw everything up more than it already might be yet…so have no fear, there’s still a chance it could get even stranger than what I’ve already observed. Life is a personal issue for me on many levels (I know that sounds like a ridiculous statement but bear with me…It’ll get even more ridiculous before it makes sense) so what affects me isn’t always what seemingly affects you but… January has been a problematic month for me. Since 2004 or 5 it’s always been like Jacob Marley making a late arrival to tell me a couple of those Christmas ghosts that came to visit me got part of the story wrong. “What they really meant to tell you was…” as my health became the colorful train wreck it is today. From 2006 on January seemed to ring in the beginning for the first of several visits to the hospital for the remainder of that year. 2012 got an early jump on the process and landed me there on the 1st barely after the clock struck twelve on NYE. (In preparation I’ve created a series of cute clown paintings to decorate my private room with for the upcoming year.) Because of all this my Holiday card list has grown exponentially…mostly to people with initials behind their last names with heartfelt notes inside like “Thanks for keeping me alive for another year. Nobody seems to know why you do that…but thanks anyway”. With all of this time recovering from whatever “malady of the day” I’m recovering from at that moment I’ve become something of a media expert and can confidently report…not much has changed this year. In fact, very little has changed in the past several decades. The Big 3 is now the Big4 and none of the networks have done anything innovative. Medical shows are still medical shows that magically find the cure (most of the time) for whatever disease nobody’s ever heard of within the last seven minutes of each episode. Cop shows are still cop shows. It’s still Dragnet but with better acting and cooler technology to help them obtain “the facts” and they all have some acronym attached to their title to make them sound somewhat “original”. Speaking of “original” everything has become “Reality TV” and everyone has become obsessed with watching other people’s dysfunctional lives as they fight, crawl through garbage, prepare for Armageddon, treat each other rudely and cruelly or publicly embarrass ourselves so everyone else can all feel better about their own fucked up lives. Soap operas…sadly; still exist because of this too. Game shows have become a strong indicator as to how badly our education system has decayed over the last half century. Sitcoms are still sitcoms and just as stupid as they’ve always been. They’re still slightly above reality shows but not by much. They use smashed up caricatures of what we all have become instead of the “real” thing…(Sorry Honey Boo-Boo, you’re not real and I hope your idiot parents use some of that money to set up a trust fund for your therapy later in life). The hottest “new” sitcom is a regurgitation of the “Honeymooners” with the new twist being the male lead is a cop instead of a bus driver. Cable networks are the big winners as far as creativity goes, part of that has to do with their ability to minimize interference from advertisers and censors but it’s far from a perfect world too yet it’s still closer. The down side is there’s only so many channels available on hospital TV’s. The movie industry has become a joke…especially this year. Very few really good, creative movies come out these days. There aren’t that many good writers out there anymore. The few that do are quickly marginalized if they don’t turn big numbers on the first weekend they’re out, marketed very little and budgeted even less. If they made less than fifty million on the first weekend you’ll probably be able to find them at your local Red Box on Tuesday and, probably, the $5 bin at Wal-Mart the following weekend. The money and marketing go to recycled ideas that weren’t that good thirty years ago and aren’t any better now or big screen comic books for people who stopped actually reading when they were ten and became full time video gamers’. All it takes to get “green lighted” these days is to know some thumb sucker with arthritic thumbs and a freshly inked diploma who owes you a favor from school. The very same people who create “eco-war” themed movies with a D&D feel that “everyone” understands. Yep…those people. They can’t seem to get their Red Bull/ Rockstar/Monster cans to the trash bin (much less a “recycle” one.) but it’s fun to pretend life would be better because they’re “above it all” so they don’t recycle and they would survive a post-apocalyptic world without electricity or batteries to let them Tweet OMG to their “BFF’s” from their newest generation smart phone because they can wield a sword (in their minds). Maybe that’s why what little hair I have left on my body began to stand up when I recently read they’re talking about making a sequel to “Casablanca” after all of these years. This brings me back to society in general this year. Society…now there’s an antiquated, over-used word if I’ve ever heard one. We have no society anymore. We have no common goal or purpose. We HAVE NO COMMUNITY anymore! It’s me against you, I’m right and you’re not! And it affects every aspect of our lives and has corrupted every fiber of it. Our politicians, financial institutions and religious leaders have consistently betrayed us and we’ve passively accepted it hoping things would get better soon. They don’t. Then we get a moment of false anger so we began to demand “transparency” about everything yet are not as willing to be forthcoming about our own agenda’s and beliefs in return. Greed is good…lying is even better! It’s become “normal” for us to blame someone or something else for our sorry lot in life rather than accept responsibility for our own actions and do something about it. It’s someone else’s job to do it for me. This year I have tried very hard not to fall into that trap. I’ve succeeded better at it this year than others…but perfection still eludes me. Café Society is rapidly disappearing around the world. Leisurely meals with fresh ingredients are being replaced by stuffing a fast food something or another in our faces on our way to the next destination and then chastise the establishments for making us fat and not being “healthy” enough. No one has any concept of what healthy really is anymore. Unless it comes from a specialty store of some kind and costs twice as much as a comparable product…it can’t possibly be healthy… is the world’s way of thinking these days. The only saving grace, lately, is the word “local” has taken on a new importance as has the word “seasonal”. This is largely due to the number of people these days that are paid to hang out in those places and write about them or talk about them on TV. Café’s, Coffee Shops, Wine Bars and Restaurants…all of which once used to be convivial gathering places filled with lively conversations and open exchanges of ideas are little more than “libraries” with over priced food and drink suffocating in silence while their patrons “communicate” through “Social Media” on some form of electronic device. Where else can you observe fifteen people sitting at a table saying nothing to each other, frantically “texting”, Tweeting or otherwise making zero human contact of any kind other than the occasional chuckle and nudge out of several of them? I’ve grown weary of going to theaters, movies or other social outlets because it’s not worth my time and money to be forced to have my experience compete with people’s rude smart phone activities. I get enough of that aggravation at home for free. Most of us all wear cookie cutter clothes, drive cookie cutter cars, live in cookie cutter houses so why not think, act and communicate in a cookie cutter way right? The Government hasn’t helped society this year either (not that they ever really have). In efforts to “balance the budget” the first thing they all do is attempt to eliminate anything that references to or has the word “social” in it. If they can’t succeed in eliminating something all together they float the idea of “privatization” around which is political shorthand for saying “OK…we’ve fucked it up about as much as we can so we’re going to give it back to you and let you deal with it. When it all goes down the toilet we’ll look like hero’s and say it was all your fault to begin with, but we still expect you to keep on paying taxes.” And to add insult to injury “We’re also going to make you get health insurance you can’t afford and won’t cover anything and also going to fine you if you don’t.” If they don’t get the deal they want they threaten to stop Social Security and “entitlement” payments until they get it. They NEVER threaten to not pay themselves…hmmm. They’re too afraid to look for the monster in their own closets; they want us to pay them not to. As an example: I’ve had a long standing battle with the IRS. They have insisted I owe them an extremely nominal sum of money I don’t owe them (somewhere, barely, in the very low four figure area). Since they NEVER make a mistake the burden of proof is on me and I’m considered guilty until proven otherwise which runs contrary to the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights but that’s not my issue here. To date they have spent 163% more money trying to get me to pay what I don’t owe (and I have proven I don’t owe several times) during this whole process than I presumably owed them. It isn’t just $600.00 hammers and $28.00 boxes of paperclips that have broken our economy and our society… It’s gross mismanagement across the board. The Government bemoans our loss of educational superiority on one hand and dismantles the education system on the other. They reduce the National Endowment for the Arts to token contributions while eliminating ALL arts programs in the schools in favor of teaching kids how to text faster. Little Johnnie and Suzie can’t read, write or think…but they can push buttons really fast and build bombs out of common household products while exhibiting “anti-social” behavior. The Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei is still a prisoner in his own home and his own country for speaking out against his government and we as a “society” do nothing. The Dalai Lama is still in exile and we as a “society” continue to do nothing… but we’re starting to learn Chinese. Imelda Marcos was caught trying to sell a Monet (one of a hundred and fifty master paintings she and her hubby purchased with our money and claimed not to have any idea what happened to them) because she needs a new pair of shoes. We probably won’t do much there either. It gets in the way of our own self absorbed greediness. Maybe we should eliminate Kindergarten and save a few bucks. Ask anyone who barely went beyond high school, they know more than anyone else on the planet (even though they haven’t opened a book since the sixth grade). They’ll be only too happy to tell you why the Universe hangs on their every word. They’re cute or good looking and can ask “Do you want fries with that?” in three languages. So education clearly isn’t necessary to begin with. There’s not going to be much of a country to run pretty soon anyways. The Lifestyle I live in took a, much needed, hit this year too. On every forum of every site out there self-serving postings asking “Is swinging dying?” or some other atrocious title began to appear on a daily basis. The simple answer was “NO”. It just got tired of its own self-possessed foolishness. In past year or so the vast majority of new people succeeded in regulating the “fun” right out of it and it finally came back to bite them in the ass. It used to be you’d meet people in some fashion or another, have a lovely conversation and then if everyone clicked…you’d take things to another level or two. Then, somehow, it became a job interview. Questionnaires would be exchanged via e-mail followed, in some cases, by a FEDEX package containing a forty-two page booklet spelling out their likes, dislikes, when, where and how they will or won’t do something, food allergies, musical tastes and so on along with a pre-paid lab form for blood tests before the appointed meeting…and then they’d sit there and wonder why it didn’t feel “spontaneous”. Add to this so many getting into this as more a potential income stream hosting parties and events etc. than actually wanting to simply be part of it all…things have changed considerably. This too, one hopes, shall pass…yet again. I’m making the turn and heading towards home to the New Year. I can see it on the horizon. Many great people have been lost this year and, in all probability, more will be gone next year. My plans are to paint more paintings, write more books, piss more people off on blogs and not be one of those that are “no longer with us” and try to actually fix something this time. What might be your plans?

CONFESSIONS OF A TALKING MIME

Talk about a paradox (Enter a musical interlude from “Pirates of Penzance” here). Mime’s are supposed to be (usually) silent actors mimicking the life, fantasy (or drug induced stupor), social change and politics of the world around them with a gesture and rarely saying a word... if at all. Silent satirists who illustrate what they (and everyone else) sees, thinks and feels but can’t find the words (or guts) to say anything about, some are funny, some are heart wrenching, many are just plain silly or stupid. Sometimes they might lend themselves as the straight man to the Court Jester in a subtle “gotcha” moment (If you happened to be in France or the early Greek Senate). I’ve been known to sit quietly and observe what’s going on around me tucking the experiences into my over filled filing cabinet of a brain or writing them down in my journal, which is the safer of the two “ brains” these days but let’s be honest here…I’m rarely silent. I’m the distant, sometimes (OK many times) arrogant, seemingly aloof, person who when asked a direct question will give you a direct answer regardless of how offensive it may be to the inquisitor but rarely offer an opinion out of the blue to hear the sound of my own voice. A voice I’m not overly fond of. My voice has been compared to Morgan Freeman…on helium. This would, one may think, make for a potentially good recipe as a mime…but let’s examine this all a little further. Yoda decided to “retire” having grown weary of carrying the multitude of things required of me to venture out into the world. That and some of his antics have made him “Persona Non Grata” in many places these days. So I have been in search of a new muse to blame for some of my own foibles and have been auditioning several of late. Every time I go to a doctor these days a new malady is discovered followed by new tests and then referrals to yet another person with initials behind their last name. More tests are done, surgery options to, hopefully, correct whatever the problem is gets discussed and then a new brace of some kind is added to the offended body part. I am becoming Iron Man one piece at a time. I wear more body armor to bed or walk in than most SWAT teams and NFL linemen wear all day. Consequently Iron Man was my first thought. Tony Stark and I have a lot in common (minus the money, cars, house, hair etc.) but Stark likes to blow his own horn as much as possible. I’m not wired that way and don’t (or won’t) blow anything (or anyone) so it’s not a perfect fit…so the search continued. Recently Wendi and I went in search for a Halloween costume for me to wear at an upcoming event we host. I’ve often been reminded that I bear a frighteningly familial similarity to “Uncle Fester” so that might be the perfect costume to obtain. After all of the blank stares and the “Who?” questions from the young sales staff when I couldn’t find one in any of the places…I gave up. I decided to just go as myself, which according to my wife is scary enough. I have, of late, grown fond of French Sailor Shirts. Those horizontal striped, boat necked, three-quarter or long sleeved things that just scream comfort for me. So I put one of those and a pair of black slacks on, fished one of eight or ten beret’s I have (I’ve got just as many hats as I do shoes…which is more than most women so that’s a lot) and we headed out the door. Many people thought I was wearing a “French Artist” costume…I was too embarrassed to say it wasn’t. One person looked at me and started laughing and said all I needed was white face and suspenders (which I do have…don’t ask…some parts of the eighties never seem to go away) and I could have been a mime. The light went on in my head. “HMMMMMMMMM…a Talking Mime…I can say all kinds of bombastic shit and blame it on the white faced guy…I think I like this idea!” I thought to myself. So RIP Yoda…the evil Mime is on its way here.

A CHANGE IN SEASONS

Fall is just moments away. A spring and summer have drifted away while everyone pointed fingers at each other blaming the other person for the debacle their lives have been the past few years and yet no one is willing to accept responsibility for themselves or their own actions. Everything is generally prefaced with some form of “If only”. My life (as you well know by now) took a drastic change as the clock was chiming and the New Year was being rung in. I’d barely had the chance to make one of those obligatory “Out with the Old, In with the New” statements many feel the need to make at times like that but it became painfully apparent things were about to be different without saying much of anything. That statement quickly ceased to be a cliché and turned into an all too real mantra, the effects of which I’m still learning to deal with each and every day. “Out with the Old, In with the New” has resonated in every aspect of our lives this year because of the surreal political and economic climate that grinds on without a plausible solution to anything. Regardless of who gets elected everything will still be doomed to fail because we lack a backbone to make any hard choices. The people we elect have too many IOU’s out there to really change anything and have less of a backbone than we do. No matter what side of the fence you stand on you want the other guy to give up more than you yourself are willing to give up and have become willing to lie, cheat and steal to get what you want while trotting out words like “honest” and “honorable” to use as your shield and if that doesn’t work you invoke the name of God. People have been lying to each other and themselves for so long they no longer know what is and isn’t true. Whatever is wrong with their life…it’s someone else’s fault and they’re going to continue to lie to everyone (especially themselves) until they find out who the culprit is that makes their life so miserable looking for anything at all that might be considered a clue (except a mirror) so they can point a finger in some other direction and say “See! It wasn’t me!” even though they’re clearly implicated in the wrongful deed from the beginning more often than not. The relationships they have are forged by fantasy, half-truths and are fleeting at best. They always have one foot out the door in case they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They want people to blow sunshine up their ass and tell them they’re special until they do get found out and when the rift finally happens…again…it’s always the other persons fault. So they begin searching out new victims to replace the old ones while desperately attempting to maintain their popularity. The down side is they don’t know who they are and have no clue what they’re actually looking for. It’s a rarity to have a relationship with someone who knows you warts and all and still willing to stand beside you no matter what. As you might imagine I have few of such relationships that deep these days. The people closest to me and I trust the most can be counted on two hands…minus a finger or two. My wife is certainly on the top of that list. I don’t have the memory or the patience to cultivate that many relationships and my bluntness (and sometimes arrogance) tends to scare many away…besides, as my eldest daughter recently pointed out, I have a tendency to throw everyone under the bus sooner or later. I have many friends, lovers and acquaintances that I deeply respect and admire on many levels but, as much as I care about them, it’s unlikely we could all agree on where to eat for lunch much less accomplish anything important and my frustration would only get the better of me. The year is almost three quarters gone. “The Winter of Our Discontent” is quickly closing in upon us. We have choices to make soon and not just at the polling booth. We’ve betrayed ourselves long enough. I have no desire to become just another character in a John Steinbeck novel anymore. I have learned much about myself this year. My collection of people with a bunch of initials behind their last names grows daily. I write this after just learning I have arthritis in both hands and Carpal Tunnel from my left wrist to my elbow…yet here I sit writing, ignoring the pain, and knowing I may have yet another surgery in my future. Before long they’ll be taping paint brushes in my hands the way they did Monet late in his life so he (and I) could keep painting. I haven’t given up on myself or the human race yet so many seem to have done just that. It’s time for a change. We really do need one…a real one this time.

MISSING THE BEAT

I make no bones about my lack of musical ability. I, regretfully, embrace it. I can tell you what I do and don’t like musically and am willing to listen to pretty much everything at least once to see if it falls into my parameters of acceptance. Much of what I do like may surprise many of you, but then again… Who really gives a shit? This moment of mental masturbation has little (although some in the broad scheme of things it does) to do with where I’m heading with this. This little trip down memory lane kinda starts with the “Beat Generation”. If you’re under fifty years old you probably have no clue who they were or what they were about. They weren’t the cartoonish images most remember from books, TV and movies or the stories in LIFE and LOOK magazines. Maynard G. Krebs was the comic relief to validate Dobie Gillis’ All American values system regardless of how transparent it really was not a real example of a “Beatnick”. He was more the “Slacker” of that generation. The men of the “Beat Generation” didn’t all have goatees, sunglasses and wear black turtleneck sweaters and berets. The women didn’t dance spastically around in black leotards to bad jazz riffs snapping their fingers while someone stood on a stage and spouted complete gibberish to the music and proclaim it was poetry for the beaten down masses (thus the name…they were tired, they were beat). Some of that did happen but there was more going on than that back then. Many of those antics would reappear at times as society grew (pun intended) and would be regarded as “original”. The “Beats” promoted free thinking, changed censorship laws regarding literature and the arts in general, opened doors to embrace your sexuality whether you be gay, bi or straight, explored eastern religions and philosophies of all types, experimented with drugs, distrusted the government (so were regarded as “communists” by mainstream America) and considered everyone equal regardless of race or religion. All of which would be adopted by the “counter culture” a few years later. It didn’t take long for the Beats to (like the “Punks” a few generations later) realize you can’t be miserable and unhappy forever…besides, the drug choices were getting larger and they were becoming unexpectedly…happy. So they moved a short distance around the corner to the Haight-Ashbury area of the same city, San Francisco. They grew their hair out, wore bright colored clothes, still danced spastically like the white Protestants they really were and recited bad poetry to a variety of music. More religions were embraced, saving the Environment was important and the music was as varied and eclectic as we were becoming. We wanted to “Buy the World a Coke” and live in Peace and Harmony never for a moment realizing we were being led down a material path driven by our own ego and consumerism. Places like Chess King happily sold us “Sonny and Cher” fake fur vests for $60.00 at a time when you could buy Levi’s for between eight and twelve bucks at The GAP and we wanted everything we could get our hands on never realizing how out of touch we were becoming. One morning we wake up, and to our surprise, the hero’s of the anti-war movement had become stock brokers. The musical icons we loved had become corporations for tax purposes and had employees to pay health benefits to. The rest have died from using too many “recreational” drugs. Without missing a beat we discard our circus clothes and our “natural” look then bought “preppie clothes” and cases of hairspray. We join the “Young (enter the political party or religion of your choice here)” and convince ourselves we’re making a difference while getting hammered at Happy Hour with our other equally mindless “friends” or we joined “Hair” bands. We “help” the environment by kinasorta recycling and buying “organic” produce. We don’t grow anything anymore…we don’t have the time. The “Punk” movement comes and goes quickly leaving it largely where it started in a disenfranchised New York City filled with many of the first casualties of the AIDS/HIV epidemic. Anger is replaced by Apathy and we all feign shock and disbelief when Andy Warhol gets shot and accidentally exposes how corporate the art world really is and Rock Hudson “comes out” about being gay and having AIDS. John Lennon gets killed a short time later and gets elevated to the God he never was but people use as an excuse to get drunk for weeks on end after that. People begin to think that having a white ring of powder around your nostril is a fashion statement. The odd gyrations thought to be dancing a few years earlier are little more than moving in place fearing someone might look at us and think us “not normal”. The all encompassing euphoria shared in our youth has been replaced by a “rabid attack dog” mentality ready to berate, belittle and, in some cases, kill anyone who doesn’t agree with our views or moral beliefs. We really can’t dance to such a cadence…march mindlessly…maybe. We avoid politics wherever and whenever possible. There are a few that ONLY talk about the subject and do so poorly. Many of the very same people pay way too much for a photo op with no one of any importance outside of their own little world. The $4.99 Blue Plate Special at Joe’s Diner with meatloaf, mushroom gravy and mixed vegetables is now Terrine of Beef with Wild Mushroom Compote and Seasonal Vegetables at $1000.00 a plate in some gaudy ballroom. In return you get the photo, a bullshit promise and little else. Rappers descended out of the heavens one day spouting angry inaudible “poetry” over someone else’s music and proclaimed “original”. It quickly became the deadliest musical genre concocted by man. I know many people think that people with bad grammar, attitudes and clothing choices should be cleaned from the gene poll but I’m sure there are better ways than shooting them and anyone else in a close proximity. In typical evolutionary style the former criminals are now business moguls who happily take our money from us and we feel honored to let them do it. Why else would we spend $200.00 on a pair of jeans that look like shit on us but we feel so elitist in doing it? Stupidity must have a bigger pocketbook than one might imagine. These days we want to be around “real” people like ourselves. The sad part is…we have no clue who we are anymore. Still we feel comfortable being with people who go to the same plastic surgeons, get the same Botox treatments, go to the same gyms and stand next to the same equipment, shop at Needless Mark-up or other trendy places like them and drive the same leased vehicles to the same cookie cutter McMansions every night. No one talks about anything anymore other than themselves and how wonderful they are, what they do for a living or what they saw on the Food Network the other night. Anything deeper than that they’re lost and don’t know what to say. I’m tired, I’m beat. I want a reality in my life that makes sense and isn’t going to turn out to be just another mirage. Change is good. Life always changes. Having to do so because it all was a lie or a marketing strategy is disturbing. Somehow in the timeframe of the last three quarters of a century (give or take) we’ve lost the beat. I, for one, want it back.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMM

Have you ever woken up some morning humming a melody in your head that you can’t place? To make it worse you can remember the hook line and closing line but not all of the lyrics? I did this the other morning and went through every resource I could think of (and a few I hadn’t thought of before) and couldn’t find ONE reference for it. I found an odd word or two but not the whole phrase much less a similar tune. It seems, for the moment, the song has yet to be written and this disturbs me on a number of levels. It’s a little too sappy and “touchy-feely” to have come from my heretic brain. Am I doomed to show up on the talk show circuit blubbering about how I “found” myself one morning because of this stupid melody? (Hang on I have Oprah and Dr. Phil holding on both lines…) Anyone who knows me is painfully aware that I am no musician of any kind. I have been prevented by law from singing in several states, counties and cities or doing anything else remotely “musical”. Karaoke bars in the places without such a legal obstacle have been known to duct tape my mouth shut save a small slit for a straw so I can drink myself under the table with the rest of them. I have close friends who are professional musicians, songwriters and instrument makers who won’t let me anywhere near their equipment fearing I may dispatch irreparable harm to those things and render them useless junk…so where the hell did this song come from?! I have no unrequited love or relationships I wish had happened differently to lament. I tell my wife several times a day I love her and mean it without getting poetic about it. She’d think I’d been replaced by an alien for doing something that romantic even though I do love her that much. Besides, if I did it would be about as short and as caustic a poem as “Howl” was for Allen Ginsburg. If I wrote a song about her she’d either die laughing or finally get me that monogrammed straight jacket I’ve had my eye on for a while…either way it would somehow be a fitting gesture. I’m too old to be a rapper. I have no anarchistic agenda to promote or scream incoherently about at the top of my lungs, clubs have no stages big enough to hold a band anymore and the few who do have a pole in the middle of it these days…yet I can’t seem to get this song out of my head. My only fear about the tune is that I find out somewhere along the way that it isn’t original at all it was written by David Cassidy or someone like him of that period of time. That would suck in ways one could not imagine…no matter how medicated one got. What a world.

TRAVELS WITH YODA PART VII

Did you ever see that movie, more than a few years back, called Disney’s “The Kid” with Bruce Willis? For those of you who didn’t the brief summary is this. Willis plays a guy who is an “image consultant” who helps celebrities and other famous people repair their damaged images and he’s very good at it and made the big bucks for doing it. Over the course of a couple of evenings he sees some kid lurking about his house. When he tries to approach the kid one evening the boy runs away leaving behind a toy plane like Willis used to have when he was a boy about that age. The next morning Willis finds the boy inside his house rummaging around looking for his plane. It doesn’t take the two long to figure out that Willis is looking at himself at the age of eight or nine and both become dejected. The “boy” was everything Willis had spent his life trying to distance himself from. The boy was HUGELY disappointed to discover what he will become when he reaches Willis’ age and to top it off Willis didn’t become a pilot like the kid had hoped he would when he was an adult. This leads the two of them on a time warp/odyssey adventure to figure out how and why the “kid” suddenly appeared on his doorstep NOW and during which Willis has to re-live some of his less than pleasant moments growing up none of which seem to be the “key” for why all of this is happening (or are they?). In typical Disney fashion though it all ties together neatly at the end but I won’t tell you how it all plays out in case you actually want to watch it. Yesterday I had a similar moment and it sent a small shiver up my spine (proof I actually have a spine for all those doubters out there… and it’s bulletproof). Wendi, Yoda (actually Mr. Messenger Bag this time….I had a busy schedule) and I made various stops around the valley in search of confirmation that YES, I am still alive and NO, I am not certifiably crazy…yet. I’ve gotten to where I find perverse humor in listening to my doctor’s bicker amongst themselves about what I do and don’t actually have. It’s sort of a more expensive version of the “my dog’s bigger than your dog” we used to play as kids but instead of dogs its degrees. In any event…I found us all sitting in the lobby of my shrinks office waiting to get my meds twisted sideways for the month. We were sitting and having a fun conversation with a group of people about the wonders of “soul food” (one of my favorite types of food) and the grief they were giving to a relative who had just gotten here from Cuba and had yet to experience those delicacies when out of nowhere an office manager appears and lectured us all about having too much fun and being too loud and we needed to knock it off…apparently humor in a shrinks office is not allowed…it might lead to something healthy I guess. But that’s not where I was headed in this little rant anyways so... I had my back facing the “Magic Door” people go in and out of for their appointments to be cured of whatever mental midgetry they have been diagnosed as having. During all of the culinary good times conversation we were having a young boy of about eight or so came out from his appointment with his mother in tow and headed towards the door. I only caught him from behind and didn’t see his face. From the back he looked a lot like me at that age but, what caught my eye were his braces on his legs and the way he walked and I found myself going back in time myself. I don’t really remember how long I wore braces but I don’t think it was a terribly long time. I’m pretty sure I was out of them before Kindergarten or, at least, during that time. I remember mine were wood and leather with sheepskin padding. This kid’s were fiberglass with a camouflage print and nylon straps…very cool. I don’t know how long he’s been wearing them but it seems longer than I had to wear mine. He walked with a slight limp like I do and held one arm in a, somewhat, effeminate way in order to feel balanced when he walks (no doubt more so when he’s tired or physically fatigued). A trait that will cause many people to mistakenly assume he’s gay most or all of his life regardless of whether he really is or isn’t. Times have most definitely changed. When I was young my parents and our doctors were obsessed with having their children be as “normal” as possible to the public at large as quickly as possible. We were raised under the same expectations as everyone else was in the “real world” …just at an unnecessarily accelerated speed. In many ways we were driven harder to excel and be the best at whatever we did as well. Mediocrity or “average” was unacceptable and looked at with disgust. You couldn’t really hide my brother’s deafness but everyone did as best they could to ignore it. Many thought he just talked funny. My sister and I had our own crosses to bear in much more subtle ways it would seem to the outside world but the expectations were there none the less. “Normal” these days seems to come in a shiny new package with a see-through window for the whole world to look at what’s inside. “Transparency” is the new buzzword. Disabilities are now a fashion accessory to be displayed proudly in designer colors and patterns. Have a hangnail? Get a “Disabled” thingy for your car, I have one…and it embarrasses the hell out of me I need it! I saw that boy walking out that door into the heat and I couldn’t help but wonder why he was there. Was he there to learn how to cope with his disability and the cards dealt to him or was he there so they could make him feel better about having to try and lead a “normal” life after being told he couldn’t do this, that and the other thing from pretty much the day he was born when he kept falling down a lot? Are they medicating him into being normal or simply trying to dull his pain? Part of me wanted to walk out after him and say “Hey kid…I’ve been there and it’s going to be OK. Trust yourself NOW and you’ll be amazed at how well things come out for you by the time you get to my age.” But I’m not sure he’d really believe me nor would he have any reason to…no plane. I’m not even allowed to drive much less fly a plane, but I do have a collection of cool canes.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JOURNAL AND A DIARY I find it interesting what people have to say or ask about some of the things I write in my postings. Some are genuine and some…not so much. Regardless of that the responses generally come in the form of a private e-mail these days rather than a public statement or question and some simply wait until they see me personally, either way it’s all good for me. There is very little in the way of a common connection for all of the statements and questions except for possibly one or two things. Many start out with something like “I’ve known you since DIRT was invented but I didn’t know (FILL IN THE BLANK HERE) about you…” which is only partly true. Very few still living have known me all of my life and even members of my own family haven’t really known me well (more on that later) during that period of time. The vast majority of you never even set eyes on me until 1968 or after that. I often get some version of “I knew you painted, drew, took pictures (whatever) but didn’t know you wrote” or “had Cerebral Palsy” etc. Similarly to the AMEX Black Card…anonymity has its privileges. Sometimes the things people don’t know about you allow you to stay under the radar and lead a normal life without someone feeling sorry for you unnecessarily and the writing can be judged on its own merits not because I would incorrectly be perceived as a “handicapped” person, which leads me to the title of this little trip down memory lane (or what there is left of it.) Someone has recently asked me (more than once) when did I start writing. The simple quick answer is…as soon as I learned how to write. I won the first of many writing contests in the second grade when I took State. I have since written articles and stories for more than two dozen publications and spoken or lectured at more places than I can imagine at one point or another in my life and I have two books still battling to get published as we speak. Like so many of us I started out with one of those spiral bound notebooks we always bought a bunch of at “Back to School” time or those black and white speckled “Composition” notebooks and kept them in the back of my binder to make notes about things that interested me and I didn’t want to forget or just wanted to find out more about. I would doodle from time to time about things that may or may not become a full on drawing or painting later and so on. Every now and then I would jot down the germ of an idea for a class project I was (more or less) supposed to be working on. I’ll confess right here and now…I seldom wrote anything to completion until no more than forty-eight hours before it was due, I liked the pressure…I know, I’m a sick fuck. (The fact that I never got anything less than a B is more embarrassing than ego boost…believe me) I continued on that way until college where, for some unknown reason, I felt the need to minimize what I carried around. So I went to an 8.5 X 5.5 version of the notebooks I had been using but still filled them with the random shit I always wrote. They were then (and still are), by definition, journals. I wouldn’t write a “diary” until several years later when I was going through my divorce with my first wife and there are major differences between “journals” and “Diaries”. Let me explain: A Diary is little more than a Stone Age Facebook . You’re likely to record such Earth shattering experiences as “Had a Chef Salad at Village Inn for lunch today…Yummy!” or fill it with teenage angst (regardless of our age) or outrage, not to mention semi-humorous social commentary. Something like “I saw Johnny kissing Sissy under the bleachers today, what a laugh!” or “I wasn’t allowed to go to the movies with Tommy because Mom & Dad said I was too young ”. As we grow older you write about how you weren’t allowed into the VIP section of some bar or nightclub last night even though you were the best looking person in the place, bought all the trendy drinks to the point you puked your guts out the next morning or…well…you get the picture In a Journal you’re more likely to record things like “I was driving down PCH through Big Sur yesterday and I stopped along the east side of the road where a great restaurant called Christina Mulevey’s used to be years ago. It’s, literally, just a stone’s throw down the hill from Henry Miller’s property up there on Partington Ridge Rd. I remember having a Chef Salad there a century ago with my parents on our way to…I don’t remember now where we were headed.” Or “I saw John kissing his secretary Sissy in the stairwell today again. I was amazed at how far down her pants his hands were this time.” The rest you can figure out for yourself. Journals help you remember whatever it is you want to remember. Diaries help you vent and discard certain thoughts, deeds and actions then forget them. Blogs, these days, can be a little of both with the boundaries severely blurred and not necessarily by intent. In so many ways we have blurred the edges of every aspect of our life. People do things like humorously refer to some quote they heard in life out of context and not give it a second thought. Things like “Banned in Boston” and yet if you ask them if you liked William S. Burroughs writing they wouldn’t know who you were talking about much less why his book “Naked Lunch” was banned in Boston in 1959 that lead to several obscenity trials for a variety of writers (including Henry Miller) who’s books had been published all over the world for years but couldn’t be published or read in the U.S. until the early sixties when they fought the laws that limited their freedom of speech (gee…where have I heard that recently?). Many of us can’t spell anymore we mis-quote, plagiarize and pontificate about things very few really have a handle on to begin with. Our perception of beauty is based on how much plastic is installed yet we demand people be “real”. We watch reality TV to laugh at how pathetic other people’s lives are and then are the first to raise our hands when they want to do a show about the life you yourself lead thinking no one will laugh at you because you’re different. Trust me I know…riding the short bus doesn’t make you special or different and ego doesn’t compensate for any of that either. In the “Indiana Jones” series of movies Indy was always pulling out his Journal to refer to something or add to it. It was weathered, beaten and had little snippets of things stuffed into it. No matter where he was in the world he had his Journal. I have such journals. I have a shelf or two of them and sometimes, when the opportunity presents itself, I still utilize the information they contain. I also have some diaries as well, almost all of which are still packed away in the deepest confines of a storage shed right now. One day when I have the chance (finally) I will burn the diaries up in a “Bonfire of the Vanities” moment. No one needs to read them anymore…even me. The journals I will keep. The majority of the ones from my youth have long ago been deposited in a landfill somewhere but the ones that do exist still I will keep. Someday there may be a great story to tell from them all but probably not by me. Now I’ve filled in some of the blanks you’ve had good, bad or indifferent. Anything else?

TRUISMS FOR THE 21st CENTURY…SO FAR

TRUISMS FOR THE 21st CENTURY…SO FAR No one is going to offer you a recording contract when you’re singing karaoke so you might as well stop looking for them to show up and buy you a drink when you’re done. (Along the same vein…the more you drink the worse you sound but…the audience starts to look better.) Ripping off of or sampling part or all of someone else’s music is not original or creative thinking. You shouldn’t be paid millions of dollars and get product endorsements for doing so instead you should be made to go back to school and learn how to do it for yourself. That favorite pair of shoes you think you look amazing in…don’t exactly go with everything you own or wear nor are they appropriate for every occasion. We’ve been called “Ugly Americans” worldwide for decades for a reason and believe me…it isn’t because they’re jealous of us. The same can be said for art too. That “Warholesque” screen print of the Mona Lisa still won’t be worth the paper it was printed on ten years from now. Art galleries will still be filled with discarded garbage from the street at obscene prices because “After all Dahling…it is New York garbage!”, “Terminator 28, The Rise of the Flesh Eating Microchip” won’t be a blockbuster and recycled TV shows won’t be watched because no one really cares “Who gave J.R. the enema?” this time around. Aspiring to advance in the ranks of any political party or association can only be accomplished in one way now…pressing the “Down” button to prove how low you’d be willing to compromise yourself to get “up” there. “Outsourcing” has already had a few unexpected benefits (If you want to call it that). The North Koreans now print OUR money faster, better and cheaper than we do here in the states and spend it in ways we can’t even imagine yet. And in typical government fashion the U.S. feigns shock and surprise but do little else. I wouldn’t be surprised that secret negotiations are underway to buy our own money from them and close the Mints and lay off more people. The “War on Drugs” will take on a decided turn nobody will expect in this century. With all of the apathy in the United States and elsewhere in the world China will become the dominant country so everyone will be learning Chinese. Before long and as we learn time and time again the Chinese don’t play fair and don’t like competition. The Central and South American Drug Cartels are unlikely to be willing to become subservient to an new intolerant Master after decades of buying off their current one so the Hispanic race will become the “New Jew” of this century and be eradicated from the face of this planet regardless of how remotely many might have been involved in that trade, leaving large chunks of the earth uninhabited once again. Guilt by association will once again be your death sentence. Just think…every environmentalists dream, the rainforests to return to what they once were…and genocide as the fertilizer. Hardly worth the price is it? These are the things I see becoming all too true all too soon. I have no doubt you can easily see other things if you stop and think about it for a moment. What say you friend?

THE OLD MAN AND THE “ME”

First let me tell you right up front this is not a rant on the dynamics between my father and I while I was growing up so don’t expect any juicy tidbits about anything like that. In fact my father doesn’t factor in to this subject at all. Nor is it some sort of analogous nod to Hemingway and his book or the fact that from time to time I have looked (and acted) similarly to him at various stages in my life. When I stay at the El Tovar hotel on the south rim of the Grand Canyon I don’t stay in his old suite and park myself on the balcony and shout drunken obscenities to the tourists below while I bang away on my laptop instead of a typewriter when I’m there. Freud is barely a part of the conversation too even though the “Father of Psychoanalysis” was, by profession, a neurologist and renowned researcher in Cerebral Palsy and probably knew more about me then than I do right now. Unfortunately I don’t have any significant “Oedipal” issues worthy of bringing him to the party for. Somehow though all of these people and issues mean nothing on their own but collectively…they’ve started me to wonder more than a little bit lately about a vast library of things that have hit me in the face over the past few months. I’m too young to be old and too lucid to be feeble but many would like to treat me that way in spite of those facts. I’m old enough to know that wisdom is not necessarily knowledge but knowledge is needed to create wisdom. Looking and acting younger in order to be considered “relevant” has never been a dance I’ve felt compelled to learn. It’s not that I can’t, don’t or won’t embrace new things it’s just that I’m at that point in life where I feel I’ve earned the right to be extremely selective about who and what I allow into my life. I have no need to gain favor with anyone…they need to gain mine and that includes lovers as well. Unfortunately for all concerned I have probably forgotten more sexual techniques and etiquette than most have or will ever have learned and along with that some bridges I wish I hadn’t burned when I had the opportunity to do so. In many ways this probably makes me a social antique…so be it. A typical night out for “adults” these days is to go out to a futuristic train wreck of a nightclub or “retro” bar and drink Red Bull and Vodka with frozen “tapas” while they smoke their electronic cigarettes. They sit there in their uncomfortable chairs in their uncomfortable circus clothes and text each other because the music is so loud they can’t talk to one another about how much they PAID to get VIP treatment and where they’re going for their next “Exclusive” trip. Please…you’re kidding right? That isn’t being social that’s pathetic posturing with make-believe food and drink at the Mad Hatter’s table. The “Old Man” you see smiles knowingly while the “ME” inside laughs hysterically at all of the bad acting. Speaking of acting…thanks to the education world our children no longer know how to be creative. Kids have been taught to do little more than text (an antiquated method of communication) while they’re driving and die much sooner on their way to the only job they’re qualified to do these days…working in the drive-thru window at a fast food place or being a pseudo-computer geek wearing a red or blue polo shirt. The few that survive major in “Communications” in college and take jobs in the Media Industry through their Fraternity and Sorority brother’s and sister’s who aren’t really qualified but have great ideas. They want to resurrect all of the really bad movies they grew up with and see if they can make them even worse with “hot” new actors their own age. They don’t know how to write so that’s all they can think of to do. Life needs to stop imitating art…or art needs to stop imitating life…whichever the case may be. People used to read to learn and/or escape from real life for a while and connect with a different point of view. These days it’s unnecessary expose’s on somebody or war, murder and deceit masquerading as a medieval theme park. Movies try and outdo each other on how violent they can be compared to the world outside the theater until some dumb fuck who fails a test and decides to make the inside of the theater all too real as a way to get their fifteen minutes of fame. The sad part is that I can say with some certainty there are at least a dozen idiots out there planning to one up the carnage because they’re not smart enough to come up with anything original yet they want their moment in the spotlight. The “Old Man” you see on the outside cries knowingly because he’s seen it happen before. The “ME” inside cries even harder because he knows this will all come true yet again. When people in my generation came around we were the “Us” generation, an all inclusive “change the World” generation that quietly morphed into the “Us…Against Them” generation when yuppiedom sang its siren call, it didn’t take long for us to abandon our principles. Our children were the “Me” generation with a giant sense of entitlement and a self-absorbed, lazy sense of importance. When you asked them to clean something they looked around for their imaginary maid and regardless of whether they graduated or not from college they expected to be paid more than we were paid at that moment from the get-go. What makes it worse is we condoned it and blew “happy smoke” up their asses. Then along came the Gen-X,Y and Z slackers who can’t keep their clothes up, have no money or ambition but they do have thousands of dollars of tattoo’s and body piercings on them (I wonder how that happened and who paid for it?). What’s next…the “aMoEba” generation? Admittedly the gene pool needs cleaning but… Our parents didn’t fuck up everything that’s happening today…we did. Between our greed and apathy we let all of this happen while hoping someone else will pick up the pieces. Then we dropped the ball by not teaching them to pick up anything or giving them the tools to do so and those generations are teaching our grandchildren (and possibly great-grandchildren) to give it all away without a second thought…it might interfere with their video game playing. The “Old Man” everyone sees is tired, upset and disgusted with everything around him. The “ME” inside is finally mad enough to make a change. The question is where to start.

PLAYING DEAD

At some point in everyone’s childhood (at least in mine) we found ourselves wondering what it must feel like to be dead. Sometimes it was brought on by an unexpected death in the family or a close friend. Sometimes it was just kids being curious about the universe around us. We’d lie down (if we weren’t in bed already), close our eyes and hold our breath and take note of the sensations. Depending on the person we’d startle ourselves back to reality or simply open our eyes with a “that was interesting” thought. If you’re male within a certain age you probably grew up playing some sort of “War” game outside where you had to count to ten or twenty if you got “killed” before you could come back to life and begin playing again. We couldn’t “reboot” the video game and begin anew back then. As we grew older we may have had to do something similar during our military training or paintball games. In any event we all got pretty good at “playing dead” by the time we got to adulthood. So much so that parts of us were dead (or at least incapable of living). By that time we no longer knew who we were, what we were doing or where we were going. We were young enough and arrogant enough to try and convince ourselves and the world at large we were smarter than anyone else on the planet and had a better idea of what to do and when, where and how to do it. I have yet to meet someone who would stand there and say “Yep…I’m as dumb as a fence post but I plan on continuing to learn what I don’t know the rest of my life.” More often than not it is always “You’re telling me something I already know. Why are you wasting my time?” and more often than not…it’s from someone younger than I am who comes from one of those generations where nothing useful was taught because it was all cut out of the budget and fewer than any other generations before or after them graduated from high school…much less college. This in no way suggests older is better or smarter. When Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Paul Allen were in their teens and early twenties they were well on their way to changing the world as we knew it. Coincidentally they happen to be my age now (RIP Steve). The difference between them and the vast majority of young people today is they remain curious and are always looking for that next new innovation, the BIG PICTURE and the small details. Young people today are content to let someone else come up with it, stand in line to buy it first and then proclaim they’ve known all about it “forever” and how they can do even more things faster without having to get up off of the couch. All of this stuff designed to make life quicker and easier has enabled them, and the rest of the world at large, to be supersonic multi-taskers. What used to take a person a forty hour week to do can now be done in ten minutes. Rather than have more time to live and enjoy life we’re working twice as long and hard to keep up with the information flow…never mind the fact they need fewer of us to do this these days. Vacation days and weekends are scrutinized and used as a reason for getting rid of you if the opportunity presents itself because “you’re just not giving it your all anymore”. It’s no wonder that “Zombies” are a cult phenomenon these days. The entire workforce of the world is inhabited by the walking dead. They don’t think, they don’t feel and it doesn’t matter if a limb falls off…you don’t have health coverage for it anymore anyhow. We’ve all been programmed to “Play Dead” until you actually do die because there’s no retirement benefits either. Nobody is going to fix any of this for us either. The “Government” is broken at all levels and incapable of fixing itself much less us, they can’t even provide us with an honest accounting of where the money comes from and goes to. Neither political party is in any position either…that would require them to give things up that are near and dear to them like money and power. This in no way suggests we revolt and attempt to overthrow everything. There’s enough stupidity going on in this country without adding to it and we’ve become our own worst problem in this respect and others. We’ve played dead for so long we wouldn’t know where to start without hurting ourselves more than we already have by our years of complacency. Maybe we should instead sue the Governments and make them give back all of the money we’ve given them over the years (with interest) and gotten little in return for it except for more demands for more money because a few people are expecting seven figure bonuses at the end of this year for mishandling our money once again. This game is over and I think it’s time for me to come back to life again… sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…

TRAVELS WITH YODA PART VI

TRAVELS WITH YODA PART VI So far it’s been a busy summer for Yoda and me. We’ve been doing what other aging “Rock Stars” do this time of year and have been doing a “tour” of sorts. We titled our little summer adventure the “Too Young for Social Security and Medicare, Not Blind or Messed-up Enough for Disability” tour. (The logistics and putting all of that on a T-shirt was a nightmare.) We’re a little more “bare bones” than the other tours. We don’t have semi’s full of equipment and “roadies” to schlep everything to all of the Indian Casino’s, Branson and the “One Night Only” shows in Vegas and Reno lounges the way the other people do but we still have our followers. In years past we had our share of groupies asking us to sign all sorts of body parts. These days we still have our groupies. A few still want to date Yoda and the rest of them still want my autograph…albeit on a medical form to remove or fix something on or in my body. It used to be a turn-on to have a woman request I take off my clothes, it would lead me to believe we were heading in an interesting direction. Now when I hear that all I feel is dread wondering what sinister plan is up their sleeve… or worse. It would suffice to say we’ve been on the road a lot lately and haven’t had the opportunity to check in as much as we would have liked to. Yoda has already grown tired of doing parlor tricks for people like levitating vehicles and such. Every waiting room looks just like the other ones for me now. Even the people somehow all look the same. The only saving grace is we haven’t had the stage rushed by a bunch of Q-tips in vintage rock t-shirts wanting to throw their DEPENDS up to us… I’d never be able to sleep again if they did. Everyone still dances around flicking their Bic’s which, strangely enough hasn’t stood the test of time as well as we might have thought. Since way back then fire codes have gotten stricter and equipment has gotten more sensitive so the occasional unexpected shower happens now and then. The bill for trashing a waiting room is a lot more than a hotel room back then too. The dance moves we thought were so cool back then look a little spastic in this day and age and could cause you to get an unexpected new med (and quite possibly a new ensemble) when you finally see the doctor. We seldom encounter the paparazzi these days. We leave most of the photo shooting to the X-ray technicians as a general rule. Other than that unfortunate night when Yoda had one too many margarita’s and did his light saber act naked we’ve been forced to pose for a camera phone or two but that’s been just about it. The tour is far from over for the summer so be on the lookout for us at a hospital or medical center near you soon.

UNFORTUNATE CLOTHES

We all have them; you know the ones, purchased on an impulse thinking it was the greatest thing you’ve ever seen or it might get you through those “in between sizes” times. Some of them you actually did wear…once. Somehow or another they all quietly (and sometimes magically) and quickly found their way back to the deepest, darkest, corners of your least used closet hoping they will somehow disintegrate and disappear without ever actually touching them again and have to admit you really bought them in the first place. Women are usually the actively guilty party to this fashion travesty in their attempts to show up their friends and social contacts while men tend to come by it a little more unconsciously. If it’s clean (and sometimes not so clean) and within a certain color spectrum they’ll wear something until it rots off of their bodies. Styles are a secondary thought. If that style looked great on them thirty years ago…it should still look great on them today is the male general rule of thumb. The only reason a man changes his hair style throughout his life is because he ends up with less and less of it each year and you can, unfortunately, pretty accurately guess a man’s age by the amount of hair product he does (or doesn’t) use. This is also why “then and now” photos are so deceptively easy to figure out. Women agonize for hours over their choices trying desperately to convince themselves they’re being daring, cutting edge, possibly even sexy. “Do I even have someplace to go where I can wear this?” is a common thought that passes through their minds as they try to decide about their choices. Men, on the other hand, walk into a store and grab the first familiar thing they see in a size and color they can live with and are back out the door in less than fifteen minutes. Only patterns occasionally throw them a curve…not that they care. Women will probably only see it for the first time when the men are getting ready to go somewhere. “It was on sale.” Will be their defense mantra should their purchase be questioned as some sort of absolution from any perceived fashion faux pas and consider the conversation done and over with. Women will proudly model their purchases hoping for positive affirmation to their bold choices only to get something like “Don’t you have three other things exactly like that only in different colors?” as his eyes return to the TV. The exception to this is lingerie…as long as it’s not playoff time or a bowl game is on then all bets are off until halftime. Making an extreme change requires a courage most don’t posses as well as financial flexibility the majority of us simply don’t have these days not to mention a stylist or qualified expert (that isn’t a relative) to bounce your ideas off of. With that said, most of us tend to tweak our appearance in drips and drabs as the opportunities present themselves which leads us back to our stash of unfortunate clothes. I can sympathize and emphasize with the women more than the men in this area. I have already more than once admitted I have more shoes than most women and pretty much every man I know. My clothes are vast no different from scrutiny yet still carefully organized by size, color, fabric, season and occasion. It is not likely you’ll catch me showing up at your kid’s wedding in a pair of Dockers, shirt and tie with a jacket emblazoned in the colors and logos of my favorite sports team. Needless to say I have made some very unfortunate clothing purchases along the way from obtaining these items from time to time would have to load up several bags of hideous garments and drive to a Goodwill, St. Vincent’s, or other thrift shop clear on the opposite side of the valley to donate them and give myself some assurance I won’t likely encounter someone wearing any of those things a few weeks later. I realize what that makes me sound like but my brain can only take so much abuse these days. Part of me is proud for doing this and knowing someone will get some use out of my crazed purchases. Part of me sometimes wishes I had shredded them into rags and dispose of them piecemeal as I use them to clean stuff and leave no trace of the crime. Let’s face it…I don’t know what the shit I was thinking when I bought some of that stuff, but it seemed so right at the time (Note to self: No more Margarita’s while shopping.) All I know for sure is I have helped create a world of sadly dressed people and I should feel ashamed of myself. For all of the times I have advised people to put their best foot forward style wise in public and social gatherings I have enabled people to do just the opposite. So from today on that stops and I promise to be a more responsible contributor to the world at large. That’s only fair…right?

TIME TO MAKE A CHANGE PART II

It took me a few more days to digest the response from my previous post than I thought it might. All I can say is…WOW. It illustrated many things to me that I have, no doubt, reason to comment on further at a later date. This little rant is neither the right time nor format to address those things without more thought first so forgive me in advance for that. While I’m at it, thank-you in advance for the many private notes for and against what I said and a special thanks to the crazy few who actually posted their opinions publicly. Your opinions were well received and respected…I’m not so sure Part II will get the same treatment. On that note, let’s begin. Some of you got the revised posting which included the third philosopher that was also an integral part of the forming of this country and some didn’t. Regardless of that fact his input is a very important aspect of Part II and needs to be discussed further. His name was John Locke and his philosophical beliefs were either quoted verbatim or paraphrased throughout the Declaration of Independence. Phrases like “…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” along with his beliefs on religion. Religion has been a sticking point in this country for as far back as anyone can remember. It has been incorrectly bandied about by the religious right that this is a “Christian country, founded by Christian principles”, a statement that only faintly rings true. Yes, the founding fathers were largely Christian, but they were also the offspring of people who came here in part to be free of being told how to practice their religion. The Colonies and townships were formed largely by what a person chose to believe religiously as much as economic considerations. Therefore the forefathers were very sensitive to religious diversity and embraced it and included it in the Declaration of Independence. It wasn’t intended to be “Christian Only” it just happened at the time they were the majority religion here but were smart enough to see far enough down the road and include EVERY RELIGION directly or indirectly. John Locke had taught them to be forward thinking in these issues nearly a hundred years before this country was formed. Locke believed a country was made stronger if it allowed for religious and intellectual diversity to freely flourish and interact in a “humanist” manner doing what’s best for everyone. History had repeatedly shown him (and us) that having one dominant religion was foolish and extremely short-sighted. Locke, writing his Letters Concerning Toleration (1689–92) in the aftermath of the European wars of religion, formulated a classic reasoning for religious tolerance. Three arguments are central: (1) Earthly judges, the state in particular, and human beings generally, cannot dependably evaluate the truth-claims of competing religious standpoints; (2) Even if they could, enforcing a single "true religion" would not have the desired effect, because belief cannot be compelled by violence; (3) Coercing religious uniformity would lead to more social disorder than allowing diversity. In spite of the best of intentions by those who came before us we have lost our way. Hate and dissent have given way to rational thought. We spend more time arguing over who’s “family values” are the correct ones, who’s religion should be taught in schools (if any) or whether or not we’d prefer a Mormon, a Muslim or a candidate of unknown religious affiliation for President or City Councilman. God help us all if they’re single, divorced, gay, lesbian or have purple polka dots. That’s a can of worms that may take generations to unravel. Never mind if they can actually do the job…they have to be like us. I’ve said before, I don’t care what religion you are. Believe what you want to believe…just don’t expect me to politely stand there and listen to you explain your beliefs to me or condone you wearing it on your sleeve. I really don’t give a shit. It that helps you sleep at night, good for you, there are meds for that these days. What’s really important to me is…if our neighbor is in need of help…will you stand next to me and have their back or are the differences to great to overcome?