Category Archives: shards

April 21, 2019 · 6:02 pm

onward christian soldiers

Onward Christian Soldiers

Insights and expletives. Strange twists of thought. The cup they never take away, stuck to your face like a harelip. Christianity ended with the crucifixion.

Let’s put an end to this love business said the Romans. Nail the carpenter to a cross and co-opt his spiel. It may take a few centuries to feed all the true believers to the lions, but the Emperor’s Think Tank says that if it’s played right, this love thing can be reduced to a string of pop songs.

The Empire will morph into The One True Church, and Rome will still be ours long after the Barbarians have come and gone. Along the way there’ll be spice wars and crusades, witch hunts and Inquisitions, splinter groups with names like Baptists, Presbyterians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons.

There’ll be holy wars.

 

***

So, they had a little history behind them when recently some well-heeled Christians drifted into town from the East Coast and bought both downtown movie theaters, turning them into Christian nerve centers. Then they build a six-plex on the edge of town where it’s not uncommon for six crapola movies to run simultaneously, a deluge of gratuitous violence, sordid Hollywood sex, and grotesque stabs at humor, while out in the spacious high-ceilinged lobby stands a large wooden cross anchored to a buckboard wagon.

Paying customers don’t seem to notice. They queue up for tubs of hot-buttered popcorn and giant plastic cups of Coke, and–ticket in hand–enter the holy of holies.

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April 19, 2019 · 6:54 am

outsmarting the system

Outsmarting the System

 

For three years they monitored his on-line activity. The raid was swift and clockwork coordinated, but when they kicked the door in the stale air of a long-closed house wafted out. They entered with their weapons drawn, agency SOP.

Everything was coated in dust. All the appliances were disconnected and the refrigerator door was ajar. They went from room to room calling “Clear!” and located the computer up and running in the pantry, linked to an array of devices. Even as they looked on, three emails came in and after a pause and some humming from the devices, one message got deleted and programmed responses were sent out to the other two.

They contacted headquarters and were told to track him down thru his cell phone, but when they found the phone it was taped under the passenger seat of his neighbor’s car.

There was a message in pencil on a 3×5 card wrapped around the phone with a thick blue rubber band. “There are many more of us,” it read.

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April 16, 2019 · 7:37 am

written on the birth of my great grandson

Written on the Birth of My Great Grandson

 

The moon struggles for position in the windy sky, and the wild mice scurry thru the fertile fields. The clock sweeps the remains of my life into a tidy offering to the eternal mystery, and the mystery offers new life in return.

Now I ease into the Grand Acceptance that takes me on its knee and says, “And there you are once more, little Johnny Jump-up, won’t you dance for us?”

And I’m back in the old Irishman’s living room filled with soldier sons home from the war and their girl friends and wives, my wise Irish/Indian grandmother looking on with great love as they gather round and clap their hands and stomp their feet while I dance my young heart out to McNamara’s Band, a scratchy recording played on a Victor-Victrola.

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April 15, 2019 · 1:55 pm

on the other hand

On the Other Hand

 

On the one hand you’ve got Ruthie the Duck Lady, on the other David Foster Wallace, both dead, Ruthie by attrition, Wallace by suicide.

What Ruthie had instead of talent and good fortune was a bathtub full of ducks, and from the time she was a small child in a cold-water flat in the French Quarter she played out her duck hand to the end, parading through the Quarter dressed like an angel and charging tourists who took pictures of her with her ducks, right on through her teens into adulthood and then into old age,a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, unable to read or write or do the simplest math. She survived on the kindness of strangers.

David Foster Wallace was more complex than Ruthie, but without her unwavering focus. He was a genius who wrote and had many books published; he was well-off and famous. But he put a noose around his neck and ended it all at age 46. I don’t have the scales to weigh that decision.

Ruthie the Duck Lady in one hand, David Foster Wallace in the other, there’s something there that begs for understanding, something that leaves me uneasy and makes me look inward where what I see are dark virgin forests that I’ve never set foot in.

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April 13, 2019 · 6:44 pm

mr. know it all

Mr. Know It All (the story of an obscure Albanian poet)

 

When he hit New York and stopped writing couplets, they told him he’d gone over to blank verse. He gave them a blank stare. He didn’t know what they meant. He was afraid it had something to do with politics.

When after a brief period of notoriety he got down on his luck, they declared him a street poet. He wrapped himself in newspaper and rolled away from them in his refrigerator crate down by the docks–they were beginning to wear on his nerves.

In the middle of a comeback he began writing novels, and they said he’d evolved into realism. And when his prose erupted into a jungle of wild images they drew parallels between his writing and that of Dick, Lovecraft and LeGuin. He said he’d never heard of these people, which alienated him from the literati. A New York critic wrote a long sarcastic essay titled “Mr. Know It All Doesn’t Know All That Much” and got it published in the Times. After that he went into a long dry spell and eventually moved back to Albania where he took up welding and began sleeping with young boys, which made him all the buzz back in New York, the young boys part.

Everyone thought that now he’d write something autobiographical and return to New York, but he didn’t, which baffled them.

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· 6:36 pm

the outskirts of town

The Outskirts of Town

 

Thirteen years ago he paid big for trying to set up house with love on the outskirts of town. For six years he’d been eating his cake that did not seem to diminish, and he thought he’d beat the game. But then she vanished in a split-second, and in that same split-second existence rejected him like a transplanted heart. For the next year, these are some of the things that hovered on the threshold of extinction:

eating, sleeping, breathing, answering the phone, doing the laundry, showing up for work. In their place came all-night walks and arms covered with cigarette burns. The turning point, which should have been the breaking point, was when he knocked on a psychiatrist’s door.

The very first session she got to the heart of the matter: he’d reached a point in the game where he was supposed to play the role of a patriarch and give back what he’d received. She made a list of the things he’d received and handed it to him along with a Zoloft prescription.

Interacting with the shrink was a turning point and not a breaking point because it drove home like a spike through the heart the horror of the world to which he was on the verge of capitulating, a world to which he’d been instinctually severing connections since childhood.

Five sessions into it he told her thanks but no thanks and here’s your Zoloft back. She shook her head. “You can’t do that,” she said. “You can’t stop taking the Zoloft. You’d be in danger of spontaneous suicide.”

“Is there any other kind?” he said, and for the first time in months he laughed, a bitter, defiant laugh, the first glimmer of hope.

“I can have you committed if I think you’re in danger of suicide,” she said, leaning toward him from behind her desk, wondering about her unpaid fee.

He stopped laughing. “You don’t want to go there,” he said. “Trust me.” He got up and walked out the door.

 

***

The rest of that year was Spartan discipline coupled with continual, ferocious acts of will. He stripped away non-essentials and exerted himself physically until there was not an ounce of fat on him. But breathing still required a conscious choice, sleep remained sporadic, and he hardly ate.

And then one day, toward the end of the year, he slept eight hours straight, was ravenous when he woke up, and his lungs sucked in air without prompting. He was back on the outskirts of town.

This is all there is.

And it is enough.

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