The Palace of the Fool

The power is back on and I am up and running. Oh man, the last few weeks have beaten me up, but what's new? So a lot has been going on as I've been lost and grieving the loss of my sweet old puppy. Apparently Haiti almost got knocked right off of the map. I am absolutely amazed at how cynically people can spin an immense tragedy. Pat Robertson has apparently come out and said that Haiti was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earth quake because the people of Haiti made a “pact with the devil.” Are you serious Pat Robertson? You really believe that nonsense?

Fear-Based Logic

I get Pat Robertson though, I understand where he is coming from. Pat Robertson is patently afraid to die. Most of us are, I suppose; but Robertson's fear of death is exaggerated and extreme. This is the basis for loads of religious fervor. You are terribly afraid of dying, and so you have to set up in your mind a reason that other people die. The logic is, that if you follow just the right path, you might be able to avoid dying. Of course, no one's managed to do it yet; but that's beside the point. People like Pat Robertson have to condemn massive tragedy as based upon wickedness, or else the Robertsons of the world would have to admit that there may not be “divine providence.” The world might just run on plain old chaos, random probability, and luck. Of course, the Robertsons of the world are incoherent anyway; they bless a child who dies and condemn a teenager. A woman who dies at 92 has lived a good life, while a man who dies in his 40's must have done something to bring about this awful, premature demise: he must've danced with the devil.

Save it Robertson, everyone gets theirs. It doesn't matter what you or Mother Teresa or Alister Crowley has to say on the matter. Truth is truth and death is inescapable.

Forgive Them, They Know Not What They Say

I had someone else tell me that the reason so many Haitians were killed in a magnitude 7.0 earth quake is because “they are dumb.” He was referring to the building codes and regulations. I wonder if he's ever given a thought as to what might happen in just about any Mid-Western town if a 7.0 earth quake were to strike. I wonder if he considered that there hadn't been a major quake in Haiti since the late 1700's.

I heard this same kind of logic applied to the people who suffered through the flooding in New Orleans after Katrina struck. I was told they were “too dumb to get out before the hurricane hit; too lazy to walk out of town.” Frankly Pat Robertson's idea makes more sense to me than this – what, an entire city, or country, is only occupied by people too dumb to make a proper building or too lazy to walk out of town in the event of a terrible flood? No, there has to be more to it than this.

I get tired of this nonsense. The simple fact is that luck plays a greater role in all of our lives than we ever give credit. Right now the weather is howling outside – out power was down for 5 hours today and many residents and businesses are still in the dark. That's nothing, a run of the mill storm; and our town and our buildings are made to weather these kinds of storms. We'll be fine. But you know the weather is changing. I don't care of you believe in global warming or not; if you don't believe in change you're a fool – it's the only thing you can count on. Things will change – temperate zones will become dramatic, where the Earth once stood still it will shake, rattle and roll.

So what are you going to do? There isn't much you can do. Wear death on your sleeve, keep it in your pocket. Let death be your companion and your advisor. Let every decision you make be tempered by the knowledge that you might not be here tomorrow. Like your grandma might have said, you could be hit by a bus. You might be sucked off to Oz in a tornado. You might be crushed under a stack of Marshall amplifiers. It doesn't matter, there isn't anything you can do about it. Don't live in fear, like Pat Robertson, and those of his ilk – always searching for the reason that other people die.

My brain's a ball of mush, but I know that Pat Robertson is an ass; and instead of looking for the reasons other people die, he ought to be wondering why he's alive. I don't mean that like it sounds, I am talking to myself as much as anyone here. What are we doing with this strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying life we have been given?

madbob@madbob.com

Chewing on God's Couch

Last Monday night I had to put my older dog Pooh Pooh, a.k.a. Gummo, a.k.a. Campeón, a.k.a. Long Dog, to sleep. The years of frenetic, constant movement had finally eroded his wheels to a point where he had a lot of trouble getting around; even standing up was hard on the old guy. It was the hardest, saddest decision I’ve ever had to make. It would have been really easy to justify keeping him around, but it would have been selfish.

His last day was a good day. We fed him a lot and loved him up. He seemed in pretty good spirits, even playing around a little bit. It was a contrast to how he’d been acting for weeks before – anxious, scared, and confused. It was good to see him having a good day, and that much harder to take him down and do what I knew had to be done.

Pooh has been with me for the better part of 12 years. He lived with me in an apartment in Los Feliz and traveled north with me when we came to Chico to live with Trish. He was a wild dog – but we didn’t know it when we adopted him. Pooh had been living as a stray dog on a nursery in Los Angeles. My room mate’s dad discovered him and learned that the people at the nursery were going to send him to the pound. We got him instead. He was mangy and frail, and completely mellow. We figured that was good, because he was going to be living in a cramped apartment with three humans. It turned out he wasn’t mellow, he was dying. We got him antibiotics and good food, and every day for the next three weeks he gained more and more energy; until finally he was running figure 8 patterns through our apartment, leaping onto the furniture, and generally resembling a Tasmanian Devil or a minor hurricane. He tore up couches (multiple), chewed shoes, hats, wallets – anything he could get his mouth on. I saw him mellow one more time after he ate a bag of weed.

When I fell in love with Trish and decided to move to Chico, my room mates were thankful that I took the dog with me. It was a good move for both of us; though Trish must certainly have had her doubts initially. One of the first things Pooh did was to dig out every single flower bed in the yard; Trish had recently fertilized them with bone meal. Then he decided to use her 10 year old Bonsai tree as a chew toy.

He never really mellowed out – though over time his mania tempered slightly. Eventually he even outgrew his chewing phase, though not before taking out the seat belts in my old station wagon. Pooh was an absolutely sensitive, loving dog. He was always looking out for us, and saved Trish’s life once when she was choking.

It was hard to see him towards the end. His back legs had become almost functionless. He’s not a dog with the ability to be still. He remained constantly in motion; he would take choppy little steps with his front legs and sort of drag his hind legs behind him. Now I am struggling to remember him when he was young, fast and spry. I was talking with a friend of mine on the phone who remembered seeing Pooh run in upper Bidwell Park. He said he had never seen a dog run so fast.

Dogs are something else. On Monday I was so sad, so disturbed by the decision we’d come to and the knowledge of what I was going to do. I was upset, and there was Pooh, sensing my emotion and coming over to comfort me. The damn dog was comforting me because I was saddened by the fact that I was going to put him down.

That trip to the vet was so hard. He must’ve been reading my vibrations, because he did not want to go in. Neither did I. I held him while they administered the lethal cocktail that took his life; and then he was gone.

I’ve been drinking wine at night and so I haven’t had a chance to dream. I want to dream – I want to see that crazy, wild dog running, playing and laughing. I don’t really think there is an afterlife, but Pooh passing makes me wish there was. I can see him up in Heaven, eating God’s shoes and tearing up his couch.

Farewell my furry friend – I miss you so much.

madbob@madbob.com

Strong Medicine

Ah back to the grind. I had a few weeks there where I was free of obligation. It's a strange feeling – one I don't often experience. Now it's time to jump start these writing reflexes and get things going one more time. Luckily, there is strong medicine for just this type of situation. So strong medicine it will be – until the scientists or the sociologists come up with something better. Maybe meditation is the key, or stretching, or masturbation without achieving ejaculation. But these are contrived, cliché, or just downright improbable feats of willpower. I won't challenge myself to that degree.

I've made no resolutions for 2010. I gave up on those a long time ago. The last resolution I did make was over a dozen years ago, when I vowed to drink more gin. That was successful – that's the benefit of setting likely goals for yourself. A self-help guru I stole some snippets from and posted on my wall says to “think win-win” and so that was a win win resolution, I managed to drink more gin and obtain a goal I had established for myself. Sometimes you have to think outside the box, and inside the bottle. Strong medicine.

Burn Ban – Framing the Debate

I get frustrated every time I hear the way the news reports the potential burn ban hear in Chico. They make it sound like its an argument between environmentalists or health advocates, and semi-rich members of the bourgeois class who simply will not do without the luxury of burning fires in their living rooms for the sheer pleasure of the combustion. We burn wood for one simple reason – because over the course of a winter, it costs about three or four times less than heating our house with gas. We're talking a savings of many hundreds of dollars, money we don't have in the first place. Yeah, I feel badly about the air pollution, but unless someone wants to supplement my gas bill, then more than likely I'm going to resist any bad on burning. This isn't an issue of freedom of expression, or the government infringing on personal liberty – it is plain and simple economics 101. Wood costs less than gas.

Plus, I can't help but think about the “not in my backyard” aspect of this argument. Here the whole community is continually talking about keeping it local, and we are surrounded by orchards and forests, and yet we're getting our heating gas piped in from God knows where; and God only knows what the people with the gas mines in their communities have to deal with, in terms of environmental contamination.

Paving the Way

Thirty year old heiress Casey Johnson passed away last Monday. She was the heiress to the Johnson and Johnson empire, and allegedly was engaged to Internet fame glutton Tila Tequila. Johnson once sited her turning down of the co-starring role in Paris Hilton's quasi-reality show “The Simple Life” as the greatest mistake of her own life. I don't mean to downplay the significance or the tragedy of Ms. Johnson's death – it's a genuine shame. There is always a tendency amongst the youth to glamorize an early death, and the older I get, the sadder I find that. I get it – when you're a certain age, you don't think you'll ever be middle-aged or older, it just doesn't make sense. I get it, but it just makes me sad, the waste of it all. I mean, if there is any reason to this chaotic, crazy existence, I can't help but think that reason has to be to clear a path, cut through some resistance, and just try and make things a little less cruel for those who follow you. We break ice with our lives – we clear detritus from old paths, or forge new ones. So live as long as you can contribute something to those who will follow; and pay attention to those who have gone before you.

Wrapping Things Up

I am currently wearing a sweet Winston Cup Racing jacket a friend of mine gave me for Christmas. It's an absolutely amazing garment. It's light-weight, but warmer than anything I own. It must be made of some crazy 70's asbestos or something. We've got the fire burning and Trish is making fettuccine Alfredo – or, I think that's the name of it. It's a new year, my fingers still seem to work, and my brain isn't any deader than it was two weeks ago. Things are looking up.

madbob@madbob.com

2010 Here We Come!

Phew. Made it through another one – not just a year, but a decade, and the first of a new millennium at that! In spite of myself, I have now seen the better part of four ten year spans come and go. Contrary to what some might tell you, I'm not convinced yet that things get any easier. Enough of that though – this is a moment of optimism and potential. A whole new span of time sits open and beckoning to us, waiting to see what we will make of it.

I limped out of that last epoch, and now it is time to regenerate the creative juices, muster energy, and move forward with decisiveness and purpose. I see 2010 as a year of bounding creativity and joy. New pathways will be opened up, different ways of thinking, the world will no longer appear in varying shades of gray, but instead in complete color saturation. Limitless opportunity will be the starting gun, and realized potential the end result, for those who don't allow themselves to be bogged down in the matrix of distraction and defeatism. I can already feel psychic muscles starting to stretch out, warm up, and relax. Smooth, confident action will get it done.

Updates...

Anyway, I don't have time for updates. Updates, it's like every single day there is a new update. How does anyone have time for it all? Do they? Does anyone update as much as we are meant to be updating? According to the powers that be? The voices that percolate from my... I feel time running out. I feel time running out as fast as I feel the need for something to happen to happen. It is a race to the finish. Either it happens, it manifests, and things go on; or it doesn't, and they don't. These are the times we live in.

I enjoy writing – but the events, and the powers that be: the politics, and the history, and the patterns I continue to expel, expunge, and expurgate – man, they start to tire me out in a serious way. The damned word processor is always trying to guess the words I intend to put down, the increments between pay-checks just get longer and longer, and no one ever complains about the diminishing quality of the writing. It makes one start to wonder. Couple that with increasing isolation, continued paranoia, and an awareness of encroaching impotence, and things start to get very disquieting. Tonight I have exercised incredible common sense, and sensibility, in realizing that more hard alcohol was probably not going to take me down the best path. Instead, I am only nursing a solid three day buzz with diluted beer, clamato juice, and hot sauce. They want me to act like the year is over, when the egg nog is still... right... there – in front of my face, and teasing me like a Moldavian mail-order bride – the kinds you can find if you know the right key words. There are no mysteries anymore – are there? God, when I was a kid, you had to practically commit a felony in order to see what a vagina looked like. I once dug up a friend's pornography – he had literally buried it underground. He showed me where he'd buried it and I dug it up with a shovel. I used to relish my bi-weekly trips to the barber because he had Playboy Magazines – airbrushed bush and not a clue what really lurked there between a woman's legs. Now the great mysteries are all a Google search away. I don't know – I was trying to keep this thing positive, but it is heading in a decidedly neutral direction.

I used to dream about things I couldn't understand. I understand a lot now – a lot more than I ever used to, back then, a million years ago. Our Declaration of Independence inscribes our inherent right to the pursuit of happiness. It represents a tectonic shift in human consciousness. But it doesn't guarantee us the right to be happy, only the right to pursue that which might make us happy – to choose, of our own volition, to follow those paths that might possibly lead us to that Shangri-La, Eden, Paradise. Our founding fathers had the wisdom to suggest to us, a few hundred years, give or take, down the road, that we might be able to manifest that world reserved for those who have passed from this life, here, in this life, while we shall live. People could only imagine a state of being we, you, I might actually live to experience. So, yeah, I guess I might have gone a little silly in the navigation there – but I think this thing is starting to turn and move in a positive direction.

madbob@madbob.com