March in Like a Lion
Warning: Heated Rant. To Avoid Caustic Dread, Scoot Down to Bottom of Page and Link to My Painting Exhibition
This March came in rough for me. The full moon last Saturday was precursor to a low down, surly grump crash that dropped me hard. I hit bottom. And, as usual, I decided to blame the devil for being bad. Futility on steroids, but practiced by a will stronger than any man drug. I must warn you that this week’s writing is moody, judgemental, immature, angry, self-righteous, false and true. It can’t be helped. The past two nights I’ve gone to bed thinking I’ll change up the theme in the morning. Too dreary. Too political. Political writing and art are for fools who don’t get paid doing politics. The pundits at least get to buy cars and corn flakes no matter what policies are debated to derange society further. No one wants to read Ron Throop vitriol. And yet the sun rises and the will refuses to break. I get my coffee, read the news, and wonder, “Where is everybody?” “How can they let this go?” “Oh Hell, express the pain anyway!”
I have a theory. The United States superpower is breaking down. It was inevitable after Hiroshima, the fire bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, the ditches of My Lai and the like. The dominant nation gets to write the history and spread the politics. America won the great wars and its owners got to pick the propaganda good and the propaganda bad. No different than if the Axis Powers were victorious. After an alternate end to World War II, I’d own a chopstick drawer, and Germany would have long ago carpet-bombed Mexico City back to the stone age. Likewise, there would be no Jewish, disabled, black, brown, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, communist, or any kind socialist people left to talk to. Back in the present reality we are Nazi light—segregationist attorney generals and police pepper spraying anyone that says “Bad police!”.
As citizens we’ve been served an official and social brainwashing for 75 years. Consumerism fed us opium burgers and dopamine cakes to fatten up on laze-about tribalism. Talk politics set within very specific boundaries. You’re either for transgender or against. Pro gun or anti gun. Green New Deal good, grunt. Green New Deal bad, grunt grunt. But talk about life and death, e.g., infant mortality and cluster bombs, and you’re too far left, right, above, or below—just another radical to discount and then go shopping online to kill the coronavirus. Both tribes have gotten egregiously angry at being the richest nation on earth.
And what are the tribes angry about? Approximately eight wedges each in shallow pies labeled “Donald Trump” and “Liberal Elitism”. While we gobble up tribal desserts, our rogue government is free to starve and bomb Yemeni kids to ensure more legs and arms being sawed off by billionaire Saudi psychopaths. Half the country erroneously split on issues of gun violence, abortion, black and blue lives matter, Facebook® censorship, taxes, white nationalism, racism, sexism, legalized pot, fossil fuels, big trucks, electric cars, mask wearing, wiping our asses with masks… Just pick your tribe and follow. Textbook social psychology for the macrocosm. Wear your team t-shirt, “Black is the New Black”, or “I Made a Liberal Cry Today”. Yet when it’s time to chip in for monthly foreign bombings, we’re all in this together as one nation, under smog, indivisible, with craft beer and war crimes for all.
The poetry of vicariously violent imbeciles.
See? The March lion roars.
I did not feel my life threatened today. Very good, for me. And for people who look and live like me—the shades of middle class who can afford potato chips and furnace repair on the same day. Unfortunately, boredom tempts the fortunate to search for problems that don’t exist within their safety sphere. Right winger Fred delivers pizzas to supplement his Ford 350® pick up truck habit and hates the illegals for making him do it. Liberal Rita is feeling the COVID pinch and can barely afford to tip 15% at brunch these days. She could strangle all those Trumpers for hating illegals. And George Floyd, whether it was a new pick up truck or brunch identifying his day, woke up late last May and got his neck pressed until he was dead. He suffered. Lots of people suffer this way every day in wedge issue America. Thousands of people die, or fear death prematurely, because they don’t have access to health care, equal education and equal safety. The only domestic issue there has ever been is equality for all, and it never shows up in the polls. We play newspaper politics, and let the bad guys and the New York Times® distribute the pie. The “qualified” people, lawyers on TV, get to arrange society for us. We pick our pie and talk, talk, talk like mad to divide it up unequally. Some march for this, others rally for that, but no talker releases his own power hold to give to those who have less.
I see the enemy. It’s persistence has made the U.S. middle class the weakest citizens on earth. A superpower that can’t even feed and house its people is pathetic. But we must admit that it has total control over us now. It has broken our evolution. We are timid and helpless. Any “boo” will frighten us. Those who can afford rent and car payments lock their minds into the fear they’ll lose the rent and car payment if they dare make a stir. We pretend alongside the enemy, that we live in a rational and fair constitutional republic. We don’t. We take what we can get and bow our heads to power. When a kid shoots and kills his friends in high school, some of us get out in the streets and protest. It feels good. We’re proud we did our part. We stop for coffee at a local roaster. The next day and every day, a black kid gets shot for walking to the store for ice cream.
Who do we hold accountable?
Never ourselves. It’s the GOP or the NRA or the lazy Congressman. Sometimes it really is these things, but no times do we bring abusive power to its knees, as we should. That would be unseemly at a time when it’s the other guy who’s unhinged, not me. Meanwhile, while receiving everything necessary (and keeping the lot to ourselves), the middle class can’t even achieve Medicare for All which would prevent the premature death of 45,000 Americans each year. Yes, that means a whole lotta poor people die at the hands of the “woke” population pretending to give a damn. I’ve talked with woke middle classers who actually think Medicare for All is a bad idea. Oops, there goes another poor baby. Was she from the city or rural Kentucky? It matters because sometimes poor kids live to be 18, and we simply can’t afford another vote for Hilbush Clintrumpden.
So who is the enemy?
I say 100 billionaires, 50 CEOs and boards of directors, the U.S. Constitution, propaganda and the Pentagon. Prove me wrong, please, and I’ll buy you an ice cream. A yummy pint is always safe to obtain where I live in the middle class.
Ani Difranco with Serpentine. A must listen.
What is Syria?
Syria is a country located along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s bordered by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon. Historically the area was known as the Levant, a term coined from the Italian language meaning “rising”, as the sun rises in the east. 14th century Italian traders on the Mediterranean used it to define places of interest by Italian commerce. East of Venice was good business. Silk and spices didn’t grow on Italian trees.
Syria has a diverse population, a veritable crock pot of ethnicities and religions. Arabs comprise the largest ethnic group, and Sunni Islam is the main religion practiced. Most Syrians share Semitic language and culture roots with other peoples in the Middle East, such as Iranians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Algerians, and Israelis. “Semitic” is an outdated term, first coined in the 1770s by German scholars thinking Germanically at a German university. These days the word is used mainly for propaganda purposes inside the label “Anti-semitic” or “Against Judaism and Jewish persons”. So if you don’t like the Israeli military blowing the intestines out of children in Palestine, the propaganda machine is there to declare your protest “anti-semitic”. More on Israel in a bit.
The Syrian geography is not so diverse. The western Coastal Mountain Range runs parallel to the Mediterranean. The Syrian desert covers a huge swath of the southeast. Along the southwestern border with Lebanon runs the Jabal al-Druze mountain range. The largest body of water, Lake Assad, is a man-made reservoir created by damming the Euphrates in 1973. Three-quarters of the country is semi-arid. A quarter of the land is arable, with approximately 4% dedicated to agriculture. Just three percent of Syria is forested.
The Republic of Syria was born on October 24, 1945 when it became a finding member of the United Nations. Unfortunately occupying French forces did not want to leave immediately, and said so with some western power shenanigans (typically involving the indiscriminate bombing of civilians). In 1950 the Second Republic of Syria was formed after signing a new constitution.
Today Syria is a unitary state with the Ba'ath Party in power. Bashar al-Assad has been President since 2000. In 2011 his government cracked down on Arab Spring protestors which escalated into civil war and international war by proxy. “Civil War” means young people out of power die for old people in power. “By proxy” means United States, Russian, Iranian and Israeli power bases drop bombs on children playing in parks, after making a damn good effort first at starving them to death with economic sanctions.
Syria’s main exports are pure olive oil, spice seeds, and mixed nuts. It’s main imports are broadcasting equipment and rolled tobacco. Total Syrian GDP is one third of Jeff Bezos’ bank account. “Jeff Bezos” is a man on planet earth whose grotesque wealth could be confiscated by a just species (obsolete) and redistributed to Syria to end their forever war. I believe populations that can safely afford toothpaste and olive oil, gradually lose interest in bloody conflict, even if retribution was once hot on the plate. Comfort cools an angry mind. Perhaps desire for revenge on foreign enemies plays out a bit longer. But that’s a price I’m willing to pay as an American who funds the indiscriminate bombing of happy children in play parks. To end perpetual violence, I’m willing to sacrifice Jeff Bezos’ life and limbs and bring a lasting peace to the war torn nation. Just drop his waving legs and arms and a hundred billion dollars in cash over central Syria and observe the flowering peace. Robust economies cut through hate and anger like room temperature butter.
This is a brief overview of my two hour study on Syria. It is brief because it is ignorant. I just wanted to gather enough factual minutiae to form a non-threatening opinion about subjects of international interest which, according to official U.S. propaganda, should never be of concern to peasants.
But they are for me. Often to the point of maniacal distraction.
Last week, Joe Biden, the kinder, gentler U.S. bombing President, continued Trump and Obama’s fun time murder spree in Syria. He ordered seven 500 lb. bombs dropped on some buildings with people inside, killing 22. (In this case, “killing” is a euphemism for shrapnel shredding to bloody pieces all living things within 2400 square meters of detonation per bomb). In free lands outside of Oceania, these games are called war crimes, and punishable by imprisonment and execution. In the un-United States, crimes are waived by rich people influencing government and media, and poor people allowing it to happen. By “poor” I mean anyone who has not had a non-propaganda lunch with aforementioned Jeff Bezos, previous CEO of Amazon.com and owner of several impoverished nations if his deranged dic-pic mind wished for it to be so.
Also in recent Middle East dictator news, the United States outdated, illegal and serially creepy spy apparatus declared Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman guilty of ordering the dismemberment of a Washington Post® journalist back in 2018. Why bother? Since World War II the United States government officially believes that dictatorships make the best allies when helping to terrorize populations of everyday people. Joe Biden and his government refused to officially condemn the Saudi crown. In fact, kinder, gentler Joe called up the King himself to ask if it was okay to even talk about the Prince’s dead eye look and blood lust psychosis.
The King said no, it’s not okay. So Joe, (like Donald, like Barack, like George, like Bill, like George Sr., like Ronald, like Jimmy, like Gerald, like Richard, like Lyndon, like John, like Dwight, like Harry, like Franklin), closed his eyes and said “Your Majesty”. Then bowed to the great king who adores his people so much that he treats them like innocent toilet bowl water. Sometimes the King persuades some fanatics to fly commercial airplanes into buildings, and then watch while official U.S. power does absolutely nothing about it.
On bombing Syria days like these, the U.S. public is retold the official U.S. story of “Good Dictator, Bad Dictator”, written and produced by our national monsters in power. If Big Oil and Israel says the killer is a good dictator, our home autocrats treat him kindly in the press, support his local murder habit, and sell him bigger and better war machines to help his pee-pee grow. If Big Oil and Israel says the killer is a bad dictator, then our autocrats switch on the propaganda machine at home, continue to enable his homegrown murder habit, and bomb the be-jesus out of his subjects already terrorized to the hilt.
I’ve kept an active peasant’s interest in the Middle East ever since George Bush Senior publicly killed his first Iraqi baby on TV one cold February night back in 1991. I jumped out of my chair and figuratively shot the messenger Dan Rather into the stratosphere. It took all of my young hope and newly acquired parental responsibility not to retaliate by either running amok upon my government or expressing intense feelings of powerlessness with a final act of self-immolation. I’ve felt a low discordant hum in my solar plexus ever since. You can imagine its many undulations over the years with frequent bombings ordered by U.S. Presidents. Each one has mocked the Golden Rule to the point that I have become a highly sensitive enemy of United States power systems.
I know who the real effective, official killers are in America. At the top is Joe Biden al-Assad. Last year it was Donald Trump Al Saud. I believe anyone affiliated to these killer cowards by money, are followers and enablers of despots. Sadly, that means all of us who pay taxes.
My sensitive solar plexus informs me that U.S. policy in the Middle East boils down to two issues: Oil and Israel. And sometimes when I get really low and think on the reality of how ignorant and afraid our nation is, I lean more towards the state of Israel being the sole cause of so much Middle Eastern woe and worry.
Israel is a faux-religious autocratic theocracy claiming to be a democratic state. Like the United States government (a pretend-secular oligarchic autocracy), it terrorizes the people it occupies (Palestinians, Iraqis). Unfortunately for the world, Israel has developed a “secret” arsenal of nuclear weapons (about 90 at last count), and, (as my solar plexus informs me) is privately determined to use them on its enemies (Iran, Syria, and any large group of people with a collective conscience who openly detest and protest the arrogance of its government and military).
Israel has complicated U.S. Middle eastern relationships dramatically. With the advent of nuclear capabilities, young Israel got old power really fast. As a result, United States foreign policy in the Middle East is all about making Israel’s enemies its enemies too. Oil won’t flow if Israel takes its faux-religious psychosis to mass annihilation levels of stupidity. Oil can’t move after humanity on earth becomes radiated bone dust.
The tail is wagging the dog.
If Israel doesn’t like the Syrian government, then the U.S. must help destabilize Syria. As long as King Saud and his rowdy bunch of Sunni mama’s boys claim to dislike Iran, then Israel gives the green light to Washington to trade at leisure with the killer psychopaths in Riyadh. After Israel became an Apartheid state to oppress Palestinians, it instructed the U.S. government to propagandize to its citizens about the evils of being Arab and poor.
My solar plexus has persuaded the rest of me to believe this gut instinct about U.S.-Israeli relations. Post World War I Euro-American arrogance created a monster.
So the Syrian, Iranian, Egyptian, Libyan, Palestinian, and of course Iraqi people suffer dearly for Israeli-U.S. political hegemony. The majority U.S. population could care less until the chickens come home to roost, and then just look at all those porches with flags made in China waving so much made up anger to make the poets puke.
Just ask yourself the following: Was I born to pay for the death of families in the Middle East?
Meditate on this, please. We only have one life to live, and the circle continues. I think it’s righteous to admit that we are cowards to our own government. People should fear authoritarians with highly sophisticated weapons of control. They do real nasty things to children all over the world—starve them, disease them, bomb them. Our autocrats impoverish the needy at home by taking the money and running to other countries with it. Billions to the Israeli military is zero toward the health and wellness of Americans.
Most of us can’t stop paying our taxes because the apparatus won’t allow it. Our money is taken from our paychecks, literally picked from our pockets before we can touch it. I understand the impossibilities of financial protest of a rogue government that legally steals our labor to fund atrocities worldwide. There isn’t a revolution coming in the nuclear age. Power will always reign. But you should at least find the time to meditate on the power no one can take from you.
Meditate on this, please. Ask yourself your own made up koans. Or mine. “How can I save a Palestinian life inside my own head?” is a good one to start. Challenge your neighbor with another. “What is the sound of one Syrian bullet hole flapping?” Ask your best friend, “Where does this dollar go to execute babies in Baghdad?”. The more we protest outside our own heads, the more humane we become. I’m just starting to get this. And I want to share this knowledge with you because I want a better world.
And I know you do too because you’re a human being.
This week the new U.S. President ordered the deaths of 22 Syrians. On that same day 2,176 Americans died of coronavirus. Hospitals still can’t get enough N95 masks. 30 million Americans are at risk of eviction. Kids out of school. Octogenarians traveling 150 miles for their first COVID vaccination. Then he called the King of Saudi Arabia to apologize for all the bad press his putrid son is getting.
Joe Biden. Donald Trump. These poor, tired old men, the killers. We are leaderless in a superpower. We have been so since George Washington whipped and beat his slaves to the ground.
Please find time to meditate on corrupt power. Let’s turn off our stupid surface politics and start pointing the finger at what monsters really look like.
An American Koan (rated R for “Too Raunchy for Ron”)
From Fish Are Very Capable of Destroying the World. Just Don’t Tell Them, Okay?
(Second printing out in April, 2021)
We are alive, fully alive, but separate, a billion separate parts of nothing. Literature is not real. We are fake even when writing the truth from our hearts. Is there something important to say? Where? Out of his mouth? No. We laugh at him. We distrust him, or we don’t receive a cent from him to help us pay the phone bill. Old forms of non-communication betwixt nitwits.
The genius and his telephone:
“Watson, can you hear me?”
“Yes Mr. Bell,” says Watson. “ I can hear you.”
“Good show Watson! Is there anything else you wish to say?”
“No, Mr. Bell.”
“Right then. So long.”
“Good bye.”
“Good bye.”
“See you.”
“Yes. See you later Watson.”
“Wait. Mr. Bell...”
“Yes Watson?”
“Mr. Bell, who’s going to pay for the bill?”
“Watson, can you hear me?”
“Yes I ca—”
“Watson... I believe we are breaking up...”
Humor is real. A smile is a true and pure expression. But I cannot even say “smile” comfortably in public. I want to box my ears for being so sensitive to these degenerate hoodlums. America is a young civilization. Wide open and wild. Good for an insane vacation. But it is not home. It could never be home; not like an ancient, slow village in Italy is home, or a rubber tire hut rolled upon the banks of the Ganges. There is home in that poverty. I am certain of this. Many families and friends living and working together toward the final goal of death. Meaningful death. Something you have a right to after a meaningful life. Many Indians work for vegetables to ingest enough nutrients before they die, meaningfully. In the average Indian home a jar of Helmann’s® mayonaisse gets licked out clean long before the most ambitious can afford to even dream about owning a refrigerator. Everything I write is wrong and uncomfortable. For me and for you.
Why do you have this book in America? Burn it. But first, finish the embarrassing thing you were doing, or dreaming, or hoping you could do when no one was looking. Then burn it. I want to make you laugh. But you won’t laugh from any place in New York State. Unless you’re crazy like me, and itching to laugh at anything. Anyway, laugh or no laugh, I don’t expect to be read by more than six or seven people, which gives me quite a delicious feeling of freedom to write whatever I like.
Last Tuesday we met the nicest man in Cato, NY. He was giving a demonstration to our children on the maple syruping process. A tall and soft spoken man. And rich. He called it a sugar shack, but it was made of all new materials and he confessed the stainless steel evaporators cost him thousands. He was so nice. Gentle, soft spoken, polite, kind. The entire woods was strung with miles of plastic blue veins, sucking sap from skinny, malnourished trees. Ten thousand dollars worth of tubing. Business. Another nice man ruined. He said that he boils sap to get enough money to buy corn seeds. His full time occupation is selling cow sperm out of a truck, farm to farm. The children got a dish of vanilla ice cream with maple syrup drizzled over the top. Yum.
Today I got another rejection letter from a literary agency. A form letter. Of course I already knew they don’t represent horror authors, or poets, or political thinkers. I might be too literary, or impossible to market. Either way, the four hours I spent gathering and writing the materials they requested didn’t matter a bit to them. It was a gamble. I am a gamble. Living is a gamble. Everyone hates the month of March. Not because it is a gamble. Yet that has got to be the greatest reason of all to hate it. Or at least fear it.
Maybe I am a seasonal author. Maybe I write from the influence of the angle of the earth’s axis. Less light, more write. It is an earth we live on, correct? Verdad? “Truth?” in French, German, Taiwanese, Icelandic, Dog, and Swahili... Language is so piss poor everywhere. This is earth, correct? A round-shaped mass, suspended in space? One of an infinite number of tiny balls whipping around its very own, personal, lonely, perishable source of blazing heat and energy in eternity, almost for an eternity. Teensy, teensy tiny, still plenty of room for as many warm viles of cow sperm necessary for a man to make a good living.
Sex, fear and humor make up the language that sells., at least within earth’s finite atmosphere, the only place in the space of God where purchasing happens. They are real, true physical animal actions—born at the beginning of time before the Pinkertons and Flaptats were sucked down into the inferno of the earth’s core.
Pregnant, unintelligible American koans. Gurgling drownings of sex, fear and humor. Sexy, horrific, and funny Zen with attitude. Not only the death of university poetry, but the death of universities and poets as well. This book is a new poem, far superior in its worthlessness to the dreamy mouse farts that get published. Not literary. But not meant to be so bad, either. Spiritually worth exactly one hot momma cow’s ass less than a race car driver writing love poems to heavenly angels.
Koans are Japanese. The Japanese language was created one day when a Mongolian prince toe-nailed tacks to the sides of a poor, old fisherman’s face. The Mongolian prince was an anomaly made by his father and a very surprised wild mare. Tell me what it means to be an American, and you’ve unleashed my irrepressible desire to father all of your children.
More koans. The Zen people swear that they’re not gnostic. Yet I think at last count, seven hundred and eighty-two thousand, four hundred and twenty-one books have been published explaining Zen to Americans. Therefore Zen is gnostic, and for you irreligious, non-literary types, gnostic means never having to utter that word to a child whom you love.
Don’t think that I intend to waste your time and money for the rest of the book. I want to walk more often in the woods. I want not to be so careful with what I say. I want to be proud of what I do. Especially when I do nothing at all. Thirty years ago I sat on a rotted stump in the forest and wrote my best work ever. Exactly one snowshoe rabbit and an owl read it. Ten years later, when I was fifteen, I shot the same soaring owl out of the sky and rammed the ski of my snowmobile up the little rabbit’s great great great great grandchild’s ass and killed him.
So koans don’t make any sense. Neither does selling cow sperm. Good sense is not having the intent to pour milk on corn flakes. The nice man in Cato provides a service. At least he did, until he died. Koans provide a service too, but they turn perfectly sane individuals into wood choppers. Too many men carrying around sharp axes, and soon there won’t be anymore sugar maples. No syrup. No business. No oxygen. Humans need oxygen to live. Therefore not only are koans anti-developmentory, they also intend to kill. Unprogressive. Digressive. Tree-killers. Very bad.
The only thing I am good at is the love for my daughters, Rachelle and Jane. They are twelve and one year old, respectively. This afternoon, the ground was warm, the grass almost green. I don’t think I scratched the flakes off my head once—Ah the spring! We, the family and the dog, played in the backyard. I looked at Rachelle, and the atmosphere she stood within—all was so utterly beautiful that I won’t dare kill the moment with words. You have smelled the smell I smelled today. You know that first warm afternoon in March when all the timid people open their doors and take that first glad step outside after a long winter of duck and dodge the darkness of cold. The first new day. We almost dig to China for to prove there is green life beneath the dead layer of last year. That smell filled my nostrils while a warm breeze blew, and the clouds were dark and full of heavy water. Rachelle gave us a dry run of her haiku presentation. She doesn’t need anymore practice. It was perfect because she is so careful. For ten minutes Marie and I listened to her voice in the wind from the porch steps. I don’t know how the moment affected Marie. Myself I thought of everything that matters. Everything. In ten minutes. I can do that.
Maybe I am Japanese. I’m thinking flowers. I hyper-respect my elders. I could start building my tomb anytime. I am nothing, but not too nothing to be below Hindu. I see poetry everywhere. I hear music. An outward expression of one of my good moods goes off like a Mt. Fuji erupting in reverse. I am forgetting to write about sex, fear and humor.
To expose all is impossible. Privacy is legion of our lives. Today I got to thinking about perfection and perversion. How can anyone who feels write about sex? It’s one of those “do” things. We pick our noses, we wipe our asses, we jerk off and fingerfuck like drunken clowns. We fuck and flush the toilet, and bash baseball bats against soft skulls, catch bullets in the nuts, get our nuts sucked off, our boobies sucked, by babies and big cocksuckers. We say cock and chicken, skin cattle, wipe the blood on our trousers, and then tuck our daughters in bed at night under clean and pressed sheets. This is a sick society. Of course it is. Write about sex ... Why? Is it the truth? Is it? Did I say tit? Oh I’d like to put my hand on your tit, please. Has anyone felt deeply today? I like to make love to my wife. It feels good. I don’t like giving myself an enema, but the doctor says rub your cock up and down her back and squirt sperm in her eye. Roll over. Say “I love you so much, let’s raise children to be depraved like us.”
Why does the author write fuck when it’s never fuck really? Fear is expressed as language butchered without an attempt at poetry. That’s a good koan. “What the fuck is fuck?” It’s a word used in anger, not a knee pressed up against her crotch, or hair flown back, or prison riots, or that gnostic tight wire wise guys use to cut into the necks of their friends. That’s fear. Movie fear. The Titanic sinking in the frozen ocean. You’re treading water, growing old, and fearing yourself to death. Or why don’t you wonder if there’s a man in town who kills people for pay? Sure, you’re safe at check-out, or while pumping gas. Then you drive off into a bumper accident and swear at the other guy for being so stupid. Turn your face from him for a second... Suddenly, “Oops!” Your neck is bleeding. He’s kicking you down to the ground. Now you’re bent over a guardrail on the freeway getting your bare ass pressed by a greaseball, mafioso scum nut living out his insane dream of the movies.
There. Have you enjoyed my small contribution to the voluminous package of sex-in-the-pants? American sex isn’t real until it ends with a good, sound thrashing, whipping, slapping, shooting, howling “blow-me-up,” or “blow me to a coma”. Then the hero and the heroine hold hands while they walk away from the burning building. If the author be so talented that he can mix into the scene pedophilia by a horny priest, so it’s impossible to tell who’s fucking or cutting or praying to get cut or fucked... Then Hollywood buys the movie rights, and another writer gets noticed and cared for.
Good. Let him go. The less people sharing my point-of-view the better. I would like sex to be something we do. Just something we do. We do-do but never explain in detail the asswipe, thank God! Sex will enter into my bedroom. It will come when it’s in the mood. Hopefully it’s in the mood many more nights until death does us part. But that’s where it stays, and you’re not invited in. Nor will I allow it an exit through the written word. Keep your de Sades, your Millers and Jongs, read them often, watch TV, go to the movies, watch your neighbor’s bathroom window, buy a house and rent to college girls buy a tiny camera, dress up as a water man, put the camera where you want it, surf the Internet, phone to Australia, watch naked teens, curious and lonely, lift their butts up and down on stuffed teddy bears, buy a van, buy candy, drive slow around the neighborhood whistling for kids... Perversion is not a result of sexual loneliness. No. We see sex more often than we do trees. But it’s other people’s sex. All over the world it could be something we just do, and it is, sometimes... But most times it’s just other people’s sex. Children are fearless and fuckless in their writing and speaking and dreaming. Your innocent children are fearless, most articulate, and fuckless. They dream of boys or girls, and friends, and being cool, and there’s music playing in the background always. Anything that the children are not directly responsible for is dead or dying. This instant, hundreds of millions of people are groaning and belching their last breaths.
This means you.
And me.
Advice?
Read and write and speak what you would want your granddaughter to hear. Read and write and speak what you would do with her, or to her, or for her. Read about a zoo. Write about monkeys and elephants. Don’t talk about the angel dust dirtball taking tickets at the circus turnstile. He doesn’t go home thinking up new angels for your children. If an author gives you fuck and fear, and your eyes ingest it for pleasure, then you die. There is an equation for life. Love your wife, feed your children, face your mortal insanity exactly how you face the cat after he’s been fed, and so appears to be non-threatening.
After her presentation tomorrow, Rachelle is going to a sleep over birthday party at the clubhouse. There’s a rose I bought for her, standing in a glass of water beside me. She needs it for tomorrow’s lecture. She will wear the kimono she cut and sewed herself. She will begin:
Tea is boiling
Wind whistles by our window
The sun is shining
Purity exists. In a tree, a rabbit, my children. Rachelle likes Bert the farmer boy. She hopes to get a kiss from him before her fourteenth birthday. When I was sixteen I kissed a fourteen year old girl. She confided to a mutual friend that that was all I was going to do to her. I was afraid, terrified under the pressure to push our delicate relationship to the next level. To take that drastic step—to touch her breasts. We’d lay on the side of the tracks kissing for an hour until the saliva was so sloppy that our faces slid up and down, back and forth. The next weekend she left me lying on the dew covered grass of a cool October night, to climb through my friend’s window and have sex with him.
It’s not sex for Rachelle. It is love. It’s always love and Hollywood should explode for the neurosis-osmosis game it plays on our brains. One minute life is shown to be beautiful and pure and golden. Wheat waves. Children run. The right happens. Era after era of good feelings. Suddenly a robot from outer space lands in a Nebraskan cornfield, and vows to cut all the people in half. The next night the same actor who played the robot the night before is now a homicidal maniac being hunted down by a black cop who was the black conductor riding the golden train though paradise the week prior. Everyone knows this, but nobody cares. The black guy can play an Irish-Catholic priest next week and the week after that, a Swedish Santa Claus.
Anyway, for Rachelle it’s not sex, but it will be one day, and I wish for her the sanity to never make out with a Hollywood fiend. Presently sex is not a thoroughbred, not new jeans, not lip gloss, not even the farmer boy Bert. Sex loses all of its potential air time to her era of good feelings, which is the time allotted to anything she is thinking at any given moment. A second ago there was the jump over two foot rails. Sixteen nanoseconds later, an early summer twilight walking through a fair with Bert, holding hands for the first time. It happened to you, girl and boy. It happened, and it was never meant to end. It isn’t a dream, nostalgia, happy memory, yesterday. It’s now. It exists although wrapped up tightly in a million layers of suffocating cellophane. You took the roll out of the drawer to wrap up each different occasion when the original child got hoodwinked. The night you actually cared if the salmon was covered and put away in the fridge. A layer. The first time you made love not under duress, and yet, not really wanting to have it either. A layer. The time you got upset over anything unrelated to potential physical or mental injury to you or one of your precious loved ones. A very thick layer of several thousand wrappings!
Layers and layers for liars and thieves. The suffocation of our birthright. Whose fault? Who cares? There is not enough time to care. No extra time anyway. Outer space is infinite. Inner space is likewise. Think of your death. Okay stop thinking about that and get down to this business of why you are here. Finished? You better have thought of something because that’s all the time we have. Now go work and play until you die. Now that you know how silly you looked before reading my American koan, giggle, and then go work recklessly because there’s no extra time to acquire the knowledge that “being an adult” is three words and words were made by adults, and most adults are dead or dying already—although that might not spark a true pants-peeing laughing fit, it could very well mean saving you from a pattern of dying which refuses to accept cheap decaled mirrors hanging on the wall of the balloon and dart game wagon, nor clowns, nor looking cool, nor holding hands while the sun goes down without the thought of tomorrow ever getting in the way.
Impressions. Everything impressed upon us. But rarely like small birds alighting on our finger tips. More like an electronic trash compactor. Once the door is closed and the machine switched on, we can kiss our sweeter hopes and dreams goodbye. I said that purity exists. I meant it. I believe in purity. It is my faith in children and all other living things. All other living things. Purity is the truth of all other living things and children. Children are not any particular age. Children are responsible at every age. A toddler will know that she is responsible for the cat’s tail. A thirty-two year old child is responsible for the toddler and the cat’s tail, and the sixty-four year old child, a responsibility-in-reverse, in the end, not even responsible for the cat’s tail, absolutely capable of being pure in its ending.
The oldest truth: Nobody knows. So no more watching other people fuck. You know it’s boring. Start telling the truth to yourself. Like you did before you were born, after you were born, and up until whatever age you realized it might behoove you to tell the truth, for once, even if you never receive your little toy for being so good.
If you made it this far, (and if I know me, you’re a rare one Miss or Mister), then mosey on over to my political painting exhibition. It’s an eye opener! And closer!
Thank you. I promise next week will be full of Spring thoughts, half moons and daffodils.
Ron