Ejection

The changing seasons are doing a number on me; my

knees creak, there are developing pockets of pain in my armpits, my head feels like a lump of warm wax. This is what we look forward to. Troublesome dreams relentlessly played themselves for me last night – dreams of strange communists living together in their filth and feces – huddle waist deep in the sewers and reveling in the fact that the water they drink is also the water they pass their waste into. It was a pale, underground world;

and its residents were soft and white. In another dream I played the chorus to Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” on a string-less guitar for a crowd of seated on-lookers who sang along. It was the Guns and Roses version of the song, complete with my attempts to channel the high-pitched nasal whine of Axl Rose. The guitar was amazing really – it was nothing more than a strange piece of painted plywood barely shaped like a guitar neck. By placing my fingers in the place where the chord shapes would go and strumming along the face of the wood, it would emenate a beautiful, ringing sound. It also had a strange finger of wood that was screwed onto the top of the “neck,” it served as a sort of primitive tremolo bar; but it kept getting in the way of my playing, so at some point I tried to snap it off. The screw held fast though, and so the piece ended up just sort of hanging there – but I could live with that.

Long Live Glam Rock!

Friends told me they recently took a trip down to the Sleep Train Ampitheater to watch Def Leppard, Poison, and Cheap Trick perform. I think I saw the same show, only it was fifteen or twenty years ago. I came of age in the era of glam-rock and hair metal. I am proud to say that one of the first concerts I attended was Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Poison and Jet Boy playing a Day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum in 1987. There was a thriving punk scene then too, with the Dead Kennedy’s, Agent Orange, and the like tearing it up, but my leanings were towards metal. Metallica was just coming onto the scene with a new, meaner style of music. They represented a shift away from the pretty boys in make-up playing for the ladies. Then grunge emerged and no one was allowed to smile anymore – music was serious and sad, for the depressed and the misfits. The excesses and debaucheries of the middle eighties were replaced by the addictions and disorders of the early nineties. The pendulum is always swinging: back and forth, back and forth.

Vietnam, er, I mean Afghanistan

Can you believe this? U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years now. From what I can gather, we’ll be there for at least another eight years unless we give up our constantly shifting mission and just call it a day. Back in the 1980’s – when I was listening to Motley Crue and Ratt, Afghanistan was known as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. They were stuck there in a war without end, fighting a fanatical, tribal, vengeful, vicious enemy that, it was well understood, would never give up. Our military advisors and politicians chuckled at the folly of the Soviets. Now, twenty short years later, we are in Afghanistan acting like we can positively change the attitudes of a country that has been fighting one enemy or the next for the last fifty years. Crazy – it’s absolutely insane.

Back to the Garden

My wife told me yesterday that historically, the single most important factor in determining which people are prosperous, and which people are poor, is soil quality. The reason they grow poppies in Afghanistan is because poppies grow easily in bad soil, with little water. Civilizations emerged in fertile valleys where the soil allowed people to establish a stable food source; which in turn afforded people with the luxury of time – the ability to think, write, create art, and experiment with different forms of government.

I have long thought that Genesis, particular the story of Adam and Eve, is a parable representing our emergence as humans from a hand to mouth existence, to an agriculturally based existence; and then a fracturing of that peaceable existence and a return to a more ruthless and sustenance level lifestyle. Afghanistan was once a beautiful, lush land. Its people were peaceful and scholarly. War has turned it upside down, placing the most brutal and vicious into positions of power, destroying the thoughtful, and castigating the meek. They’ve been ejected, by bombs and bullets, from the garden.

madbob@madbob.com