Tag Archives: culture

What is a bull worth?

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If I had served under President Obama (pun fully intended),  I would want to kill myself, too.  The guy’s a plague on all our houses — a disgrace to the uniform, worse than Bill Clinton, hardly better than Jimmy Carter, less of a fop than Teddy Roosevelt, better suited to improving Tiger Woods’ golf game than running a country.  Quit like an honourable man and feel free to tell us anything you want after that.

I have waited so long to share all these thoughts and feelings that I have heard and read from my father, mother and friends on the right.  Thanks, Barack, for giving me the opportunity to say these things.  May you enjoy your retirement as soon as possible.  Clinton might still have a law office in Harlem (with a spare bed to share with you and his interns; cigars not allowed anymore, of course) if you feel compelled to provide community service for which you were so well trained and, word has it, might have stuck to one job and excelled at it.

Pope Francis has the right idea — we are all the 99% relatively poor — let us use some of the funny money floating around in the funny money economy and serve the poor rather than pander to the rich folk like Obama and his Chicago gang of thugs.

Sweet dreams, dearies.  Don’t forget to look out for bedbugs — their bite is much more vicious.

Humbled

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A shoutout to Reverend Tom today for a good message.

The pastor at my hometown church, the man who dropped everything at all hours of the day and night to be with my family a year ago as my father lay dying, had a few good words to say during Mother’s Day, the last day of the Easter season in the Christian religion tradition.

In reference to the Bible passage that Tom called the “high priest” prayer by Jesus, the 17th section of the book of John, a set of tales told in sequence by a good storyteller, a personal witness of the events, per tradition, Tom said that we should commit to prayer before taking action, just like a Sunday service is itself a continuous prayer — children’s choir, hymnal songs, sermons, prayers, etc. —  in preparation for the rest of the week ahead.

And, as Jesus said, our goal, he prayed, is that we might be one, a species in unity like Jesus was united to God, his father.

Despite our differences.

Unity in Christ is bigger than our differences, in other words.

Unity, not uniform behaviour/looks, in seeking the love of Jesus and our expressi0n of unity through charity.

Ultimately, the question is not that or how we disagree in our forms of prayers and understanding of the words given to us, but on what unity in Christ we agree to share with others.

We are tiny specks, children of the universe, who rarely grasp the intricacies of life, from the interaction of sets of states of energy at subsubsubatomic levels, to daily social problems and solutions, to connections at time scales of galactic levels.

We are, however, members of the same species, regardless of subcultures, belief sets, clothing choices or musical preferences.

Let us treat each other as if we live on the same planet.

I, for one, seek out the best ideas and practices within our species to move us out of the doldrums — away from the tautological chaos (making fun of our seriousness when misplaced), toward the application of useful chaos (where theory meets practicality) — and into the later decades of this century with one word on our lips — success.

Actions speak louder than words.

Thanks, Tom.  Your words today have moved me to action, humbling me out of my selfish, temporary depression, realising even the tiniest speck, me, has a place with all the others to make a worthwhile difference, especially when we work together as one in pursuit of unified motives, allowing subcultures to contribute at their own pace and own voice.

Regulatory news

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The government announced new plans today to ban all home/office cleaning products — disinfectants, toilet bowl cleaners, insecticides, herbicides, dishwashing detergent, clothes washing soap/powder, floor waxes, fly/wasp traps, facial/skin cleansers, baby wipes and more on a list of over 1 million products — in an attempt to eliminate autism within one generation.

Businesses across a wide range of industries have threatened to sue the government.

People with no incidences of autism in their families have filed complaints, saying they have used cleaning products judiciously and will continue to do so.

Religious leaders have praised the government’s general intent and offered holy water as a safe alternative to concerned parents.

Survival of the fittest…

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…or the most economically viable, whichever is most interesting.

A young man in his mid-30s told me that getting tattoos is addictive.  Yes, it hurts but that’s part of the attraction.

A bus driver who takes a bus down a neighbourhood lane at 45-50 MPH in a posted 25 MPH zone is attracted to keeping a job and delivering students on time.

Both are risk takers.

Sitting here and typing sentences is risk-free.  How the words and sentences are arranged, then posted onto the Internet for reading on the World Wide Web of interfaces has a higher risk.

Hypertext transfer protocol.

How many of us pay attention to our methods of communication?

Are they pain-free? Risk-free?

  • Shouting across the street to a neighbour.
  • Tapping a code on a downspout to a friend in a flat three floors up.
  • Spray-painting a message on a freeway bridge.
  • Sending a letter in the mail.
  • Satellite signals.
  • Words “carved” in the foam of a head of beer.
  • Written in ink on the back of a bus seat.
  • Missiles launched across geopolitical borders.

Should the risks you take cost you more to participate in a society with low risk takers?

Fast/bad bus drivers, for instance — how many buses have recording devices that monitor not only the behaviour of the students but also the driving habits of the person behind the wheel, matching GPS data to posted speed limits to the speed of the bus at the time, stopping distance/slowing speed to intersections, how many times the driver has to take eyes off the road, etc.?

Do people with tattoos have a higher rate of communicable disease infection than non-tattooed people?  Higher rate of addiction to destructive behaviour?

Do bloggers take more or less risk than people who do not blog?

Is there a correlation between being a team player and survival of the fittest?

Can you be one and not the other, yet the most economically viable person on the planet?

Up next

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Up next, entertainment news…

In a recent off-camera, post-interview, ad hoc hominem about his career, Will Smith admitted his dream would be to remake “Six Degrees of Separation” with his son and introduce the ultimate taboo, a “banned in 100 countries” topic into mainstream cinema.

Upon hinting of this, the ultraconservative watchdogs of mass media added “After Earth” and any other film starring Will Smith to its boycott list without caring what the films are about, even if they’ll be more cotton-candy sequels quickly forgotten by absent-minded filmgoers who can’t tell you the plot of the last movie they just watched five minutes ago, let alone who starred in them.

Up next, a review of the animated short film about a young child chained to a table making New Balance shoes just so a comedy troupe can make fun of the people who buy them without knowing they’re directly funding child enslavement, entitled, “Atlas shrugs at his weight on the New Balance scales.”

Up next, down the elevator to the NeXT computer museum…where a computerised labyrinth traps the human population and manipulates their lives for our entertainment news “up next” segments.

The Map! The Map!

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Guinevere wants me to write about her.

Other characters wait their turn.

Words fail me today, my fast-food-sized menu of a vocabulary and grammaticalarianiamistically-challenged phrases.

The hallowed echoes of a hollow hall, where eight enthusiastic faces sang dressed in black not madrigals, regaled us with their ringing voices last night.

The sanctuary of church has only one purpose for me — meditation upon the infinite.

How you anthropomorphise the infinite is your concern, not mine.

Rather, your concern interferes with my meditation.

A cathedral ceiling should reflect the echoes of pipe organs and windpipes.

Sermons are for those without a voice of their own.

Church was once the social sewing machine that stitched subcultures together at the family and community levels.

Now that recorded music and other aspects of church life are available on a pick-and-choose-at-your-convenience at your local convenience store where wafers (leavened and unblessed) meet your bodily needs, the reasons that some went to church are met away from the edifice.

My thoughts are my sanctuary, my heaven and hell.  An author is quoted as saying, “You don’t have a soul.  You are a soul. You have a body.,” allegedly C.S. Lewis the entertainer.

Last night, the Huntsville Collegium Musicum invited the community to hear early choral music in Covenant Presbyterian Church at 7:30 p.m., an invitation I found at 6:30 p.m. while looking online at al.com for events to attend and get me out of a house whose cathedral ceiling echoed with the sounds of recorded television shows.

Grumpily, my wife agreed to go with me, sans (le) dîner.

Happily, I drove her there.

The program consisted of religious and secular music.

There were no church social calendar announcements, no children’s Bible lesson, no Karaoke Jesus, no cappuccino and Christ, and no sermon.

It was heaven on Earth!

I closed my eyes and felt the soundwaves bounce against me (my wife saw colours and emotions dancing when her eyes were closed).

I opened my eyes and watched the physical manifestation of  joy on the singers’ faces flow through their bodies and out of their mouths which changed shape to shape musical notes and sung words.

This is the one and only purpose for a church.  All the rest — the Sunday school lessons, the social outreach, the weekend retreats — has no meaning to me.

[Except for the one small detail that my wife of 26+ years I met at summer camp (Holston Presbytery Camp in Banner Elk, NC) when we were 12 years old so, yeah, I owe a debt of gratitude to the whole social environment of religion (co-ed summer campers in the woods reading the Bible and sharing sleeping bags?  how disgraceful!) that put us two together (but don’t worry, Church Lady, we didn’t kiss until after my wife turned 19).]

After my wife and I ate at a VERY LOUD restaurant called Drake’s, which killed any reverent mood we were in but filled our bellies, we returned home, suffered through many a lame skit on SNL for a few good laughs and turned on the main computer in the living room to play early choral music and listen to the echoes bouncing off the cathedral ceiling.

Some of my neighbours still get up on Sunday mornings to gather socially at whatever version of church they prefer.

This here, in front of a computer screen, is my church, the litanies composed in my thoughts rolled out in the holy text of a limited vocabulary, my wife sleeping with our cats at the other end of our country cabin of a house in the woods, within miles of native American burial mounds and hallowed cemeteries.

To last night’s singers, I salute you.

You make the long, lonely, expensive trip to celestial bodies worth the effort.

Which reminds me, if killing eliminating others cleanses my soul, what am I going to do if I’m the only living soul on Mars whose zest for living — his savoir–faire, his je ne sais quoi, his fly in the coffee of his petit dejeuner — is so strong that snuffing out Earth-based lifeforms will be his only salvation?

Will you survive to read the next blog entry?

And if you do, will you serve as a humorous aside, hero amidst tragedy, lone wolf , space pioneer, Bright, ascetic, or salt of the earth?

Shhhh!

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A reader asked what’s my secret to a wonderful life.

Well, I don’t know the reader’s secret to a wonderful life.

What I learned from my guru, and has worked for me, is this: whenever you feel down in the dumps, depressed or suicidal, order a few killings eliminations terminations radical shifts in the state of living of sets of states of energy to cheer you up; nothing like the comparative misery of others to pull you right back up out of the doldrums and give you great candidates for this year’s Darwin Awards.

In that category, mobile phone texting while driving people nuts (i.e., over the edge of sanity/safety) is our best invention yet — between distracted driving, road rage and internalized anger turned to angst/depression/suicide, the entertaining death rate rivals austerity measures for producing humorous material.

What’s next?

The worshippers of the god of Tragicomedy are dying to find out.

The god is getting bored.

The next fun surprise is just around the corner.

Yesterday’s Today is Tomorrow

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For a brief moment, I was a kid again.

Yesterday, in preparation for watching a film at the cinema about a cartoon character known as Iron Man, I scrolled through websites detailing a few storylines that encompass worlds and universes in one comic book series or another.

Although I was never geeky enough to keep track of comic drawing styles, character bios or inside jokes, I knew enough about the fantasy lives of fellow classmates who did that I could briefly carry on a conversation with those who read not only comic books and watched Saturday morning cartoons but who also consumed novelisations and books containing specifications of spaceships, weaponry and superhero powers.

A few of them transitioned to board games like Dungeons & Dragons — I detailed those people in a previous novel or blog entry and won’t repeat myself here — because fantasy and science fiction computer games didn’t exist, unless you can stretch your imagination and say that Pong was a game between gods sending universes back and forth across matter/antimatter timelines.

For the most part, our schoolyard games were either cowboy-and-Indian or space cowboy-vs-evil alien shoot ’em ups and chases.

2001: A Space Odyssey was released when we were too young to care and Star Wars arrived in our high school years when most of us already had well-established hobbies to occupy our thoughts.  Star Trek was an after-school show that, along with Batman and Wild Wild West, captured the attention of the average nerd in our early teens.

Now that I’m a middle-aged white guy who’s more likely to die of suicide than a car wreck, I can either further regress into a childhood I never really had or I can progress into an elderly adult I haven’t yet been, avoiding the mental illness pitfalls that lead to premature death.

To end today’s blog entry, I’ll provide an untraceable source of a quote by a semi-famous author:

“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours,
Henry Charles Bukowski”