Category Archives: shards

sidestepping ridicule

Sidestepping Ridicule

You can live without feedback, but can you live without choice? The big questions, rolling out like a red carpet.

She loves me, she loves me not, absolutes that squeeze the life out of indifference and propel people off to war. A few cannons, a brass band and truckloads of uniforms. Shoulder arms, forward march.

The best time to learn how to accept everything is when you can’t accept anything. Accept this, like scraping barnacles from the hull of a ship, from the wide back of a whale.

What will you get if you mate a whale with an elephant? Something prehistoric? A fish with a trunk and a memory like a steel trap? A creature that longs to sprout wings? A B-52 bomber? Think twice before you sound the buzzer and blurt out your answer.

Everything I set eyes on weighs me down except small children and animals.

The big question is, if I see the cross-bred creature, will it weigh me down?

You see now how your mind must work if you expect to sidestep ridicule unscathed.

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shortcuts to nirvana

Shortcuts to Nirvana

Don’t spill the beans. Don’t piss on the evidence. Don’t take umbrage or sign petitions. Don’t come out with your hands up. Skip sex eduction.

Try climbing high in a tree and staying there. But it’s too late for that if you’re a day over seven. And if it’s too late for that, it’s too late for everything.

Her period came too late and out popped a towheaded ruffian. He went straight up a tree and wouldn’t come down. They baptized him anyhow, shot holy water up in the tree with a fire hose.

His mother declined to give him a last name. She wanted nothing to do with him. She gave him up to the forest, to the birds and the bees which she should have paid more attention to herself. She headed west for San Francisco on a Greyhound and went up in smoke this side of Omaha.

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the big disconnect

The Big Disconnect

The truth, the whole truth, nothing else. No frilly accusations, no bloated hyperbole, no toxic waste. No plea bargains or half-baked beliefs. No boy scouts sitting around a campfire harmonizing with erections. No memories, the biggest non-truth of all. Just what’s right under your nose. Which isn’t what’s under my nose, or anyone else’s. Which tells you a lot about truth.

Truth is a wordless phenomenon. A currency for deception. The stepdaughter of reality, which is the closest truth and reality come to being related.

Once all this sinks in you stop watching the news.

Once this sinks in you disconnect your computer.

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schizo

Schizo

I’ve got this friend diagnosed schizophrenic. He lives alone, drives a Volkswagen bug, has long gray hair and collects disability checks. He spent ten years in a German prison on a drug bust and twenty in American prisons for a string of nickel-and-dime drunken infractions. He’s 55 and spent 30 of those years behind bars.

He talks non-stop free association that makes Neal Cassady look tongue-tied, 80% of it pure poetry, 10% deep-welled insight, the rest free radical stuff, all of it knitted together with a total-recall memory.

“People are afraid of me,” he said the other night when he was leaving my place. “People won’t talk to me. People are afraid to touch me. I don’t know what it feels like to be touched.”

I put my arms around him and held him tight, and when I turned him loose again, he had tears in his eyes.

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making barrels

Making Barrels

Balancing the books. Catching the crooks. Resurrecting the old ways, rolling the bad guys out of town in a barrel spiked on the inside, bringing about an upsurge in puncture wounds not covered by Medicare, you pay out of your own pocket once you cross-plane the grain, you pay thru the nose. Pump them full of grain alcohol and drive them straight into rehab, a boost to the substance-abuse industry.

This kind of action makes for heartening headlines, the bad guys bite the dust and employment soars, America’s men return to the work place making spiked barrels, their women stay home making babies, popping them out like toast, golden brown babies ready to butter. But wait, golden brown is a problem, so is red and black. What have our women been up to while their men grind it out in the marketplace making barrels, getting it on with the immigrants? Well roll out the barrel then! Toss the unfaithful wenches in there with their terrorist infants. Now we’re getting down to brass tacks.

But listen, it goes deeper than Muslims, any well-educated thinking man can see that. What about low-profile Buddhists slinking around in bland acceptance, what about Roman Catholics? Just because they caved in on Latin doesn’t mean the Pope’s not a foreigner. Toss the whole lot in barrels, bigger barrels, more barrels, that’s what we need, and longer spikes. Don’t let them pass go and collect $200, have them go directly to jail and confess their sins to the tax man.

Once we’ve cleared the decks of unfaithful wives and their terrorist babies, Roman Catholics and Buddhists, things will level out. To make sure no new trouble crops up, Freedom Fighters with shrink credentials will patrol the halls of our grade schools and snatch up awkward children before they learn to write and start sending threatening emails to the President. Undercover agents will drift thru our high schools keeping an eye out for the ones who slipped thru the initial grade-school screening, and immigrants will be rounded up and disposed of.

Only then will the world see our greatness.

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reality tunnels

Reality Tunnels

for Robert Anton Wilson

One for the In Crowd that I’m looking out on…

Lenny Bruce quoted in a séance conducted in Palo Alto by some spade chick who claims she was his foot servant in the Sixth Dimension…

 

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A reality tunnel is a concept that Robert Anton Wilson got a lot of mileage out of. There’s Robert now, on video in his waning years, slouched on a couch covered with a sheet, missing half his teeth,reminiscing about Catholic school in a Brooklyn accent, sucking on a cigarette, a walker from a grim here-and-now reality off to one side.

With ten billion brain cells tossing out options non-stop, an eight-dimensional reality is as much an illusion as a three-dimensional reality, one tunnel is as good as the next.

Even Zen monks rush around like chickens with their heads cut off while preparing for a week-long sesshin.

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