The Virginia Tech Massacre
This is an incredible tragedy. Of course every feeling person’s heart goes out to the families of the students and faculty who were gunned down in this horrifying episode of sheer chaos and violence. There really isn’t much more you can say about the matter.
Playing the Blame Game
But that certainly hasn’t stopped the national media from desperately trying to turn a random event into a story. Naturally this involves finding someone to blame. Reporters are suggesting the campus security or the President of the University could’ve done more to warn students and potentially lessened the loss of life. Look, randomness can’t be predicted and insanity can’t be stopped. If a crazy person decides to shoot up a bunch of people in a public place then that’s what will happen.
Honestly I find it hopeful that this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. I have come to the conclusion that there are some people who could do a violent senseless thing and there are others who would do a violent senseless thing but luckily the two types of people rarely intersect. It is an anomaly when a personality has both the will and the wherewithal to reek such utter havoc and destruction. To me that is a small sign of a basic decency that exists.
Aside from this I am getting really nauseated by the general cries for more security. Security comes with a cost and generally the trade-off involves freedoms. I know it is natural for the family of those killed to be angry and frustrated and to want to try and place an order and a context on this sort of tragedy but that doesn’t mean the national media has to latch onto these reactions and rile up a virtual pitch-fork wielding mob calling for the blood of college administrators and campus security.
Don Imus
I feel like I should at least weigh in on this issue. I’ve been thinking a lot about the words and the reaction and for what it’s worth here’s my take. I believe in free speech and I accept capitalism as a viable driving economic force. So the firing of Don Imus alarms me for a couple of reasons. First and foremost he got fired for saying something distasteful. I could accept that if I believed that the overall market, or Imus’ audience, had abandoned the notorious radio shock-jock. But I don’t believe this is the case. I believe that there are likely a lot of faithful Imus listeners who are bitterly disappointed that they don’t get to listen to their favorite radio jock doing what he does and has done every morning for the last forty some-odd years.
So why was Imus fired? I think he was canned because the corporate sponsors didn’t want to risk tarnishing their images. This holds extremely dubious connotations. In this case the issue is racism, but if we project it is not inconceivable to foresee a future where corporate sponsors might hinge their decisions on religion, politics, or whatever the “outrage du jour” might happen to be. We already have a sickeningly limited choice of material to listen to on the “public” airwaves and if we continue to curtail it based on what corporate America is willing to sponsor then eventually there will be nothing left but Top 40 garbage and innocuous squeaky clean “Regis and Kelly” type morning show style banter. That may be fine for the swallow and smile quasi-Christian suburbanite sheep out there but for anyone with a streak of individualism or subversion this spiraling situation should leave us feeling slightly sick to our stomachs. Do I like what Imus said? No, but frankly if the corporate controlled national media hadn’t picked up on the story I never even would have heard it. I don’t listen to Don Imus and that’s my advice for anyone else who doesn’t like what he has to say. Change the station. Then let capitalism take its course.
We desperately need debate in these dangerous times. If we are constantly worried about saying the wrong things then we will never even be able to enter into these types of discussions. Free speech and a free press are the cornerstones of a free society and totalitarian regimes have always focused on controlling speech and print. So which direction are we heading in right now?
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Extruder Strikes Again
Tonight I needed to go out and so I did, I went out to a club, sort of an obscure place out on East Nord – around there anyway. The music was soothing; punk and industrial, but the most curvaceous selections from the genres. The beats made you want to dance and ooze a little while you did it. Dancing, oozing. There were men wearing tailored suits, finely cut white, yellow, beige and brown. The women were… in the shadows they were watching. Their eyes on everyone.
Abigail cornered me and yammered at me for a long while about a $4000 ambulance ride and the ‘economical DUI.’ “Shit,” she explained to me. “I could’ve gotten in my car and driven the bastard to the emergency room – even if I get pulled over and popped it’s what? $2500? The fucking ambulance was four grand! Plus the $3500 for relocating his shoulder. Four hours in the goddamned emergency room sets us back almost eight fucking grand!” I shrug, ‘what are you gonna do?’ and eventually get the hell away from her.
These scenes, they kind of get you feeling ill sometimes. But this is what I came for, the music and the atmosphere. There is hair everywhere. I am glad that it is dark in here. The room is really explosively dark and I hit my thigh on a table on the way in. But my eyes had adjusted eventually. Now it’s a faint glow against red, the silhouettes of human interaction. Drinks and smoke – gyrating bodies and strobe lights now as the dance floor erupts into a frenzy of limbs and hair-dos. The energy is infectious.
“DANCE!” “DANCE!” “DANCE!”
But I skate back to the rim of the orbit of light; the edge of the kick drum is softened just slightly. There I turn and collapse into a padded booth. Just as I manage to right myself, sit up, and make an attempt at looking reasonably sober the waitress, a shiny red sequined dress with a gal wrapped up in it, smiles and asks me if I’d like a drink. I respond in the affirmative and she seems unaffected except for something subtle in her demeanor. A reaction maybe. Louis leans over next to me and says “it’s the whole ‘need for penetration’ thing you have that gives you away.” I look straight at him as if to suggest ‘go on’ and he does. There’s no stopping Louis when he gets on a good theory. “You think you can make it appear to everyone that you’re just casually giving that young waitress a little kindly attention when you are in fact only thinking of penetrating her in some way or another. Think about it, the world is viewed in terms of penetrators and penetratees. Those who fuck and those who are fucked.
“Cause a woman who shows some sack is a woman who has balls and an effeminate man is a pussy. When something bad happens “I was fucked” and when you conquer someone “I fucked them!”
God Louis is crazy, where do they find these people? “Think about it!” he always ends up screaming at me and I always end up running away, usually stumbling to the nearest drink and trying to assimilate the bizarre sentence fragments he had just flung at me.
“GIN!” I bark at the guy behind the bar with the scissor cut and stubble. His jaw is locked and he eyes me suspiciously but doesn’t seem offended and I breathe a sigh of relief as he (finally) pours my drink. Generous on the gin and I tip accordingly. My mouth is watering now as I think of it.
God these days, these days…
A man swam the entire length of the Amazon River averaging fifty miles a day for more than nine weeks through waters infested by piranha fish and cavity invading parasites. The sheer complexity of the vision is amazing; then the follow-through and execution is just astounding. What a madman. Slovenian Martin Strel swam the entire 3,000 + miles, while dealing with, in addition to the wildlife, diarhea, delerium, and horrific second degree sunburn over the course of his 65 day epic.
Speaking on the adventure Srel had this to say: "it was the toughest expedition by far… The Amazon river has no barriers like locks, so the current is constantly flowing. I didn't expect so many whirlpools and so many currents."
Goddamnit Strel, here’s to you. I tip my glass back and let the gin run down my throat, then yell at the bartender for another one.
Abigail cornered me and yammered at me for a long while about a $4000 ambulance ride and the ‘economical DUI.’ “Shit,” she explained to me. “I could’ve gotten in my car and driven the bastard to the emergency room – even if I get pulled over and popped it’s what? $2500? The fucking ambulance was four grand! Plus the $3500 for relocating his shoulder. Four hours in the goddamned emergency room sets us back almost eight fucking grand!” I shrug, ‘what are you gonna do?’ and eventually get the hell away from her.
These scenes, they kind of get you feeling ill sometimes. But this is what I came for, the music and the atmosphere. There is hair everywhere. I am glad that it is dark in here. The room is really explosively dark and I hit my thigh on a table on the way in. But my eyes had adjusted eventually. Now it’s a faint glow against red, the silhouettes of human interaction. Drinks and smoke – gyrating bodies and strobe lights now as the dance floor erupts into a frenzy of limbs and hair-dos. The energy is infectious.
“DANCE!” “DANCE!” “DANCE!”
But I skate back to the rim of the orbit of light; the edge of the kick drum is softened just slightly. There I turn and collapse into a padded booth. Just as I manage to right myself, sit up, and make an attempt at looking reasonably sober the waitress, a shiny red sequined dress with a gal wrapped up in it, smiles and asks me if I’d like a drink. I respond in the affirmative and she seems unaffected except for something subtle in her demeanor. A reaction maybe. Louis leans over next to me and says “it’s the whole ‘need for penetration’ thing you have that gives you away.” I look straight at him as if to suggest ‘go on’ and he does. There’s no stopping Louis when he gets on a good theory. “You think you can make it appear to everyone that you’re just casually giving that young waitress a little kindly attention when you are in fact only thinking of penetrating her in some way or another. Think about it, the world is viewed in terms of penetrators and penetratees. Those who fuck and those who are fucked.
“Cause a woman who shows some sack is a woman who has balls and an effeminate man is a pussy. When something bad happens “I was fucked” and when you conquer someone “I fucked them!”
God Louis is crazy, where do they find these people? “Think about it!” he always ends up screaming at me and I always end up running away, usually stumbling to the nearest drink and trying to assimilate the bizarre sentence fragments he had just flung at me.
“GIN!” I bark at the guy behind the bar with the scissor cut and stubble. His jaw is locked and he eyes me suspiciously but doesn’t seem offended and I breathe a sigh of relief as he (finally) pours my drink. Generous on the gin and I tip accordingly. My mouth is watering now as I think of it.
God these days, these days…
A man swam the entire length of the Amazon River averaging fifty miles a day for more than nine weeks through waters infested by piranha fish and cavity invading parasites. The sheer complexity of the vision is amazing; then the follow-through and execution is just astounding. What a madman. Slovenian Martin Strel swam the entire 3,000 + miles, while dealing with, in addition to the wildlife, diarhea, delerium, and horrific second degree sunburn over the course of his 65 day epic.
Speaking on the adventure Srel had this to say: "it was the toughest expedition by far… The Amazon river has no barriers like locks, so the current is constantly flowing. I didn't expect so many whirlpools and so many currents."
Goddamnit Strel, here’s to you. I tip my glass back and let the gin run down my throat, then yell at the bartender for another one.
Perfection
“At the end of the day no one really cares what you were doing, just what you’ve done.”
- Louis T. Wermann
Sometimes writing these words is a struggle. I wish that every column I wrote was a thing of beauty, a perfect gleaming gem of insight and illumination. This is the goal I set in my mind for myself every week when I sit down in front of my computer to write this down. Of course I fall short. Perfection is only a notion – maybe an illusion. The beauty of everything we do in this life comes from the act of doing.
The last two months have put me through the emotional grinder. My words have been stifled, stymied, twisted and stuck somewhere between my brain and my sphincter. Linguistic constipation but I write anyway because the act of putting these words down on this page are soothing to me and also because I have no choice. I write. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, it just has to be. And also because I have faith that the act of writing – of writing anything, good bad, indifferent, will continue the flow of language and while I may be writing in a smelly fly-infested bog right now it will eventually, the way liquid does, seep and flow downward to something different. Writing begets writing. This column is not a single week’s worth of words but instead a living breathing flowing stream of words and so I have come to accept that there will be rough patches and soft shoulders along the road. Mixed metaphors, bad puns – there is no law against bad writing. Thank god for that.
Goddamn the notion of perfection. How many concepts have never been allowed to grow into actuality because those who thought them up could not bear the notion of imperfection? They sat instead and thought of all the reasons it would not work, of all the ways they would fail, and so, by doing nothing but thinking, they failed to do anything at all. A dying man acts. We are all dying – all the time.
My favorite writers were not afraid to make terrible writing. I read a book of Charles Bukowski’s newspaper columns that constantly listed the results of horse races; boring statistical columns that meant nothing to someone who doesn’t know the difference between a parlay and a boxed trifecta. I’ve read Henry Miller’s second novel and I’m afraid to pick up his first. I can only imagine the over-blown self-important drivel that found its way into his waste-paper baskets.
If you are brave enough to act I guarantee that you will experience failures. Things will not turn out the way you envision them in your head and in your dreams. Sometimes you will be incredibly frustrated and sometimes your efforts will end in disaster.
The Kentucky Derby
Speaking of horse racing the Kentucky Derby was run this past weekend and it was a doozy. Street Sense came from 19th in a field of 20 to take the victory by several lengths and the Queen Mum was in attendance.
The Cammies
The Cammies were also held last weekend and I have to admit I was thoroughly impressed with the whole production. The CN&R along with the Senator staff managed to pull a logistical rabbit out of a hat. The show ran smoothly and the performances were solid. Congratulations to all the winners and a special tip of the hat to Katie Perry who won for “Local Badass” and Danny Cohen who stole off into the night with the “Best Local Songwriter” award. Both were well deserved.
Paris Hilton – What the Fuck?
Here is one of the few people who can actually afford to hire a full-time driver going to jail for being caught twice driving on a suspended license. This is obvious but it is so ludicrous that I feel obligated to waste a few words on the topic. Come on! She should get time added for just being a complete asshole and they should toss her mom in as well for defending the spoiled rotten idiot.
Brutillicus Maximus
I did manage to make it to the 20th anniversary performance by Brutillicus Maximus at Lost on Main Saturday night. The show was sold out but I was fortunate enough to stumble into Claudette a.k.a. Deryl Anne decked out in a sequined and rhinestone studded evening gown and looking gorgeous. Claudette got me into the show but after several rounds of sweet liqueurs and potent cocktails I developed a bad case of the hiccups as well as incoherence and hence I had to stumble home. And so that is what I did. Sunday was not a wonderful day.
- Louis T. Wermann
Sometimes writing these words is a struggle. I wish that every column I wrote was a thing of beauty, a perfect gleaming gem of insight and illumination. This is the goal I set in my mind for myself every week when I sit down in front of my computer to write this down. Of course I fall short. Perfection is only a notion – maybe an illusion. The beauty of everything we do in this life comes from the act of doing.
The last two months have put me through the emotional grinder. My words have been stifled, stymied, twisted and stuck somewhere between my brain and my sphincter. Linguistic constipation but I write anyway because the act of putting these words down on this page are soothing to me and also because I have no choice. I write. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, it just has to be. And also because I have faith that the act of writing – of writing anything, good bad, indifferent, will continue the flow of language and while I may be writing in a smelly fly-infested bog right now it will eventually, the way liquid does, seep and flow downward to something different. Writing begets writing. This column is not a single week’s worth of words but instead a living breathing flowing stream of words and so I have come to accept that there will be rough patches and soft shoulders along the road. Mixed metaphors, bad puns – there is no law against bad writing. Thank god for that.
Goddamn the notion of perfection. How many concepts have never been allowed to grow into actuality because those who thought them up could not bear the notion of imperfection? They sat instead and thought of all the reasons it would not work, of all the ways they would fail, and so, by doing nothing but thinking, they failed to do anything at all. A dying man acts. We are all dying – all the time.
My favorite writers were not afraid to make terrible writing. I read a book of Charles Bukowski’s newspaper columns that constantly listed the results of horse races; boring statistical columns that meant nothing to someone who doesn’t know the difference between a parlay and a boxed trifecta. I’ve read Henry Miller’s second novel and I’m afraid to pick up his first. I can only imagine the over-blown self-important drivel that found its way into his waste-paper baskets.
If you are brave enough to act I guarantee that you will experience failures. Things will not turn out the way you envision them in your head and in your dreams. Sometimes you will be incredibly frustrated and sometimes your efforts will end in disaster.
The Kentucky Derby
Speaking of horse racing the Kentucky Derby was run this past weekend and it was a doozy. Street Sense came from 19th in a field of 20 to take the victory by several lengths and the Queen Mum was in attendance.
The Cammies
The Cammies were also held last weekend and I have to admit I was thoroughly impressed with the whole production. The CN&R along with the Senator staff managed to pull a logistical rabbit out of a hat. The show ran smoothly and the performances were solid. Congratulations to all the winners and a special tip of the hat to Katie Perry who won for “Local Badass” and Danny Cohen who stole off into the night with the “Best Local Songwriter” award. Both were well deserved.
Paris Hilton – What the Fuck?
Here is one of the few people who can actually afford to hire a full-time driver going to jail for being caught twice driving on a suspended license. This is obvious but it is so ludicrous that I feel obligated to waste a few words on the topic. Come on! She should get time added for just being a complete asshole and they should toss her mom in as well for defending the spoiled rotten idiot.
Brutillicus Maximus
I did manage to make it to the 20th anniversary performance by Brutillicus Maximus at Lost on Main Saturday night. The show was sold out but I was fortunate enough to stumble into Claudette a.k.a. Deryl Anne decked out in a sequined and rhinestone studded evening gown and looking gorgeous. Claudette got me into the show but after several rounds of sweet liqueurs and potent cocktails I developed a bad case of the hiccups as well as incoherence and hence I had to stumble home. And so that is what I did. Sunday was not a wonderful day.
The Lunatic is in the Yard
It is Tuesday and the moon is full. The freaks are out of the wood work. The corner market was filled with kooks and tweakers when I went to pick up a twelve pack of bottled beer for a dinner party Trish and I were hosting. The morning, as I walked the dogs before going into work, was buzzing with activity. An underlying hostility may have been subdued by the chill that had crept into the spring time air on this first day of the month of May. I overheard snippets of menacing telephone conversation: “I’m telling you I didn’t take your envelope, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then a slamming door and something falling off of the side of the shrouded house and smashing into the ground. A bone-thin middle-aged man with a graying fu-manchu style mustache zips by on a home-made gasoline powered stand-up scooter. The lady at the end of the street who used to think that the FBI had set up shop across from her is bumping hip-hop at quarter to seven in the morning. It has all the makings of a strange day.
There will be thirteen full moons this year – usually there are twelve – and two of them will be occurring this month. The second full moon in a single month is known as a “blue” moon. I’ve always liked the color blue. We have a few blue rose bushes in the yard.
The Grass is Green Enough
My family has been going through a trying time and while there have been some real tough emotions to deal with I’ve also learned a great deal. Ultimately I find myself to be utterly content with my life here in Chico. I have a nice house, a decent job, two ill-behaved but very sweet dogs, and, most importantly, a very strong and wonderful relationship with my wife. We have family and friends who have reached out when we’ve needed it and backed away when we needed space. So the grass may be greener somewhere else and that’s fine. But as far as I’m concerned the grass is green enough here. To get really green grass you have to load it up with chemical fertilizers anyways and we prefer to go organic.
Go Warriors!
By the time you read this the Golden State Warriors may have choked and been eliminated from the NBA play-offs but hopefully, and my fingers are crossed, this will not be the case. Right now as I write this the Warriors still have a couple games up on the top-seeded Mavericks and are poised to win there way into the second round of games. I’m an East Bay boy and when it comes to basketball I am a Golden State fan through and through – and basketball has always been my least favorite sport. But that may change this year. The Nascar boys ended at Talladega under caution, Barbaro’s demise has soured me on horse racing, I can’t deal with Barry Bonds and his steroid-fueled charge to the home run record, and the Raiders are, well, the Raiders. So this may just be the year of the Warrior for yours truly.
Sow What You’ll Reap
Now is the time to get your gardens tilled and planted. I spent the weekend turning over our compost pile and planting our tomatoes and peppers. This year we’re trying six different heirlooms including a green tomato, a Russian Black Krim, a tomato so sweet that it cannot be transported, as well as Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes and Early Girls just because they produce so darned fast. As for the peppers we’ve got Anchos, Jalepenos, Serranos, and Red Chiles. Trish will probably pick up a Thai Pepper eventually. They tend to produce well and dry easily also. We are so lucky to live where we have such a long growing season. My sister and her family live on the out-skirts of Burlington, Vermont, and right now they are mired in the “mud season” – a month-plus long period when the ground that was frozen completely solid thaws out. Mud.
Puzzle Piece Show
The 24 Hour Drive-By Galleries annual (bi-annual?) puzzle-piece show kicks off this upcoming weekend and the reception will be held on Friday May 18th. The shows been growing in size and spirit since its inception and I’m sure this latest installment will not disappoint. I’ve painted a little piece for this exhibit. See if you can find it amidst the artistic and visual mayhem that is this wonderful show.
There will be thirteen full moons this year – usually there are twelve – and two of them will be occurring this month. The second full moon in a single month is known as a “blue” moon. I’ve always liked the color blue. We have a few blue rose bushes in the yard.
The Grass is Green Enough
My family has been going through a trying time and while there have been some real tough emotions to deal with I’ve also learned a great deal. Ultimately I find myself to be utterly content with my life here in Chico. I have a nice house, a decent job, two ill-behaved but very sweet dogs, and, most importantly, a very strong and wonderful relationship with my wife. We have family and friends who have reached out when we’ve needed it and backed away when we needed space. So the grass may be greener somewhere else and that’s fine. But as far as I’m concerned the grass is green enough here. To get really green grass you have to load it up with chemical fertilizers anyways and we prefer to go organic.
Go Warriors!
By the time you read this the Golden State Warriors may have choked and been eliminated from the NBA play-offs but hopefully, and my fingers are crossed, this will not be the case. Right now as I write this the Warriors still have a couple games up on the top-seeded Mavericks and are poised to win there way into the second round of games. I’m an East Bay boy and when it comes to basketball I am a Golden State fan through and through – and basketball has always been my least favorite sport. But that may change this year. The Nascar boys ended at Talladega under caution, Barbaro’s demise has soured me on horse racing, I can’t deal with Barry Bonds and his steroid-fueled charge to the home run record, and the Raiders are, well, the Raiders. So this may just be the year of the Warrior for yours truly.
Sow What You’ll Reap
Now is the time to get your gardens tilled and planted. I spent the weekend turning over our compost pile and planting our tomatoes and peppers. This year we’re trying six different heirlooms including a green tomato, a Russian Black Krim, a tomato so sweet that it cannot be transported, as well as Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes and Early Girls just because they produce so darned fast. As for the peppers we’ve got Anchos, Jalepenos, Serranos, and Red Chiles. Trish will probably pick up a Thai Pepper eventually. They tend to produce well and dry easily also. We are so lucky to live where we have such a long growing season. My sister and her family live on the out-skirts of Burlington, Vermont, and right now they are mired in the “mud season” – a month-plus long period when the ground that was frozen completely solid thaws out. Mud.
Puzzle Piece Show
The 24 Hour Drive-By Galleries annual (bi-annual?) puzzle-piece show kicks off this upcoming weekend and the reception will be held on Friday May 18th. The shows been growing in size and spirit since its inception and I’m sure this latest installment will not disappoint. I’ve painted a little piece for this exhibit. See if you can find it amidst the artistic and visual mayhem that is this wonderful show.
Lessons We Are Failing to Teach
“…in giving existence, a great law had been broken, and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
“…what would I give up for love?... not my balls!”
-Jason Leigh from “My Name is Earl”
There is a reason that, as we get older, psychedelic drugs begin to lose their mystique. Eventually life gets around to handing you something mind-blowing to an extent far beyond that which any pharmacy or ethno-botanist could replicate. LSD loses its palette. Life is luminous. It is consistently incredible, sometimes to the point of terrifying.
Anyway, what made me think about this? Well all kinds of things. But I think most recently I was watching the newscast – more follow up on the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech – and there was a lot of talk about the kids who shot up Columbine High School, which was eight years ago as I write this sentence; and the feeling I got from this was that we are not teaching these young people well enough. I write this as if I am old, but I am thirty six. I have lived through the teens and twenties. We now have an epidemic of young people who are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to propagate violence. We are watching it across the world and in our own neighborhoods.
I keep watching these news reports and I keep thinking, when they flash to the killers, ‘those poor kids.’ I feel a little guilty for feeling that way but they are so young! Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do and all that shit. How can you hate a fucked up twenty-something year old? And I know this is a sentiment that will make the more hardened mob turn red with anger. Sympathy for a killer; it is a conflicted emotion. But fuck it, that’s how I feel. I don’t “blame society” but we are letting these kids down. It isn’t the government or the institutions, it’s us. Institutions are symptoms. They try and heal a wound, they can’t prevent it. This detachment; the individual gravity that we all allot to our own lives, ego, callousness. Judgment. Fuck. It all comes back around. You can’t write your way out of this dilemna. Fuck fuck fuck.
I write this column every week. I think it’s been over a year now. I don’t really know why. I enjoy it ultimately. I like seeing my words in print and I like the feedback I get from people who read those words. Right now I am trying to write the most meaningful words I can but I don’t suspect that it is really coming across that way. My words are not brilliant and beautiful and they don’t come close to matching the excitement and glory of time. I don’t have the words. I don’t have the words. I am trying so hard to explain this to you and I just don’t have the words!
Ugh. I surrender. I give up. White flag, no más. I just don’t have it in me and I apologize for that. I remember a friend of mine one time who took a big blast of nitrous while he was frying on LSD, and I saw that smile and look of total ecstasy come over his face, and then his smile straightened and eventually sagged into a frown, and then he looked at me and said: “I saw it all, I understood it all. And I was so happy. But then I tried to explain it, and I realized I could not, and then I was sad.”
People, we are all in this together. Kids if you feel sad and alienated and alone you are not! E-mail, write, reach out to somebody. Young people are detonating themselves in market-places, annihilating one another in warfare, shooting each other in alley-ways, and killing each other is schools. Something is so wrong. And we are all accountable. No one is to blame without the complicity of the other. Not in this mess.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
“…what would I give up for love?... not my balls!”
-Jason Leigh from “My Name is Earl”
There is a reason that, as we get older, psychedelic drugs begin to lose their mystique. Eventually life gets around to handing you something mind-blowing to an extent far beyond that which any pharmacy or ethno-botanist could replicate. LSD loses its palette. Life is luminous. It is consistently incredible, sometimes to the point of terrifying.
Anyway, what made me think about this? Well all kinds of things. But I think most recently I was watching the newscast – more follow up on the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech – and there was a lot of talk about the kids who shot up Columbine High School, which was eight years ago as I write this sentence; and the feeling I got from this was that we are not teaching these young people well enough. I write this as if I am old, but I am thirty six. I have lived through the teens and twenties. We now have an epidemic of young people who are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to propagate violence. We are watching it across the world and in our own neighborhoods.
I keep watching these news reports and I keep thinking, when they flash to the killers, ‘those poor kids.’ I feel a little guilty for feeling that way but they are so young! Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do and all that shit. How can you hate a fucked up twenty-something year old? And I know this is a sentiment that will make the more hardened mob turn red with anger. Sympathy for a killer; it is a conflicted emotion. But fuck it, that’s how I feel. I don’t “blame society” but we are letting these kids down. It isn’t the government or the institutions, it’s us. Institutions are symptoms. They try and heal a wound, they can’t prevent it. This detachment; the individual gravity that we all allot to our own lives, ego, callousness. Judgment. Fuck. It all comes back around. You can’t write your way out of this dilemna. Fuck fuck fuck.
I write this column every week. I think it’s been over a year now. I don’t really know why. I enjoy it ultimately. I like seeing my words in print and I like the feedback I get from people who read those words. Right now I am trying to write the most meaningful words I can but I don’t suspect that it is really coming across that way. My words are not brilliant and beautiful and they don’t come close to matching the excitement and glory of time. I don’t have the words. I don’t have the words. I am trying so hard to explain this to you and I just don’t have the words!
Ugh. I surrender. I give up. White flag, no más. I just don’t have it in me and I apologize for that. I remember a friend of mine one time who took a big blast of nitrous while he was frying on LSD, and I saw that smile and look of total ecstasy come over his face, and then his smile straightened and eventually sagged into a frown, and then he looked at me and said: “I saw it all, I understood it all. And I was so happy. But then I tried to explain it, and I realized I could not, and then I was sad.”
People, we are all in this together. Kids if you feel sad and alienated and alone you are not! E-mail, write, reach out to somebody. Young people are detonating themselves in market-places, annihilating one another in warfare, shooting each other in alley-ways, and killing each other is schools. Something is so wrong. And we are all accountable. No one is to blame without the complicity of the other. Not in this mess.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)