When Chaos Ruled...

We are such fussy monkeys. We crave order so badly and we hack it out of anything we can find. We'll take knives, axes, chainsaws to wood and form it into the physical shapes of animals or humanoids. We manipulate and mash together words until we can apply an independent label to every particle and feature of the Universe around us. We are constantly developing new language; news ways of seeing and viewing and writing; new ways of perceiving the shifting energy field surrounding us. Argh it's a crazy nightmare frustration exercise – this unbridled obsession with order. Fuck it. Order is an illusion. Order is a myth. Order is only a word – meaningless beyond the context of language; and language is only a creation of our puny, frightened, human brains.

Right now we have a name, some stupid, contrived name, for every phantom that might jump out at us from the darkness. “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!?” Oh, it's just a _______.” Fill in the blank. It's just a cat, just a bat, just a rattlesnake, a Black Widow, a Brown Recluse. It's only Tuberculosis, or Influenze, AIDS, SARS...

It's all bullshit – that's the, I can't break out of this language either. But these words aren't right – they aren't even close.

Imagine when everything was an image, a blast of light and color, a sound, a feeling... Back when there were no words, when all was mystery and magic. Nothing but swirling, crashing energy. Imagine back to when chaos reined.

madbob@madbob.com

Doom Prophets and Death Cults: A Shake Down in the Halls of Love

I hate the doom prophets – the foul, stinking, carrion eaters. These people prey on a powerful human instinct and exploit it to gratify their own egos. That's my opinion anyway; but I have evidence to back up my point of view. Here it is:

Everything dies.

We all know this. Almost as soon as we are conscious, we understand that we are mortal. Ah, we don't really totally grasp it until certain periods in our lives force the reality upon us – and after that we work hard to forget it – but we know that we will die.

And we see it all around us, every day. In the course of any life we wrestle with the specter of death. We are bombarded by it. Peripherally or directly, we are all bombarded by death all day long, every day. There are dramatic examples – soldiers dying in wars, citizens gunned down in the streets of the cities, lovers murdered by jealous exes. Incredible seismic shifts in the very surface of the Earth have pulverized Haiti and caused the ocean to boil and swallow so many people in Japan. There are countless examples of lingering deaths – two days ago I met the most beautiful, charming person; a towering, kind man of Scandinavian descent, with a stunning woman by his side; he has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and less than a year to live. There are the horror stories of youth: suicides, abortions, overdoses on drugs. Death can come as a complete mystery. Death can come randomly. So many die on the roads every year, every day.

So what compels a person to calculate the date on which the world will end?

Personally I think it is ego. There is some fascination with being the last of a dying breed – Charlton Heston in “Omega Man” - Ishi with his brain in a specimen jar. People want to think they will be the last to experience this crazy, terrifying life. Miserable people – I find them miserable, and pathetic, and beneath contempt. We all fight and work so hard to find the good and the reason for this life, and these doom prophets want to tell us it is meaningless, and that we live this life as a sacrifice, to move onto some “better place.” This is a “death cult,” plain and simple. You can gussy it up all you want with talk of peace and love; forgiveness – but it's still a death cult.

The world will end. A meteorite, or a massive environmental catastrophe – maybe the atmosphere will degrade, plague, disease, who knows? At some point we know the star that provides us our warmth and light will burn out, or explode. There will be an end to this planet, and to life as we know it. I can't tell you when that time will come. If I could, I wouldn't want to. The best we can do is to live our lives knowing that death is always there – and to carry on.

madbob@madbob.com

Germs, Anecdotal Sources, and Penny Dreadfuls

“I bet Narcissus had some amazing wanks.”

Peter Serafinowicz

Argh I don't know. I had this great piece sort of structured in my head on the way home from work but now it isn't making any sense. The computer is barely functioning – now it seems to have come to life; sprung up at last. Jesus.

The place is abuzz with activity. Bill is licking out an empty carton of sour cream. Trish is reading, and eating microwaved food. I am lamenting roasted lizards. I am considering work loads and feeling my shoulders rise. They are just about to hit the bottoms of my ears. “The tension is palpable” is probably how they would write it in a hard-boiled detective story; or in a “penny dreadful.” At times like these I feel it is necessary to drink red wine. It sounds dumb, but it works out, mostly, more often than not. That is the best we can ask for.

This is the face of a twitter addict. I can't string two coherent sentences together anymore. Life has become a series of disjointed, chain-reacting, one-line jokes – maybe two – so long as it fits into the allotted 140 characters.

And the point, what I am getting back around to, is the narcissism involved in writing. “LOOK AT ME!” I scream it in this column, when I sing, play music, dance, post to my FaceBook account; tweet...

Hard Times

I'm having the weirdest time right now. I have this friend who is a very devout Christian, and he has been sending me some really strange information, that I am absolutely convinced is bullshit. He is so Goddamned convicted though! Any piece of information he gets, that fits into what he already believes, he is totally willing to believe that shit: 100 percent! 1,000 percent! I mean, I'm not even going to get into the content, it's horrible, offensive stuff; but the material is being generated by authors of, if any, dubious distinction; and their entire works will rely on a single, anecdotal source. It... I can't really even bring myself to formulate an appropriate rebuttal because I can't figure out where to start. What these “authors” are doing is making stories up to fit with an agenda.

A part of me feels like this is beautiful. If you have the ability to sculpt words like this – to more or less completely fabricate in order to advance your ideology – more power to you. I'm sure the anecdotes are based on a germ of truth. Everything is based on at least a germ of truth. These kinds of stories are a brilliant, warped, reflection of our innate desire to understand, to believe... in something.

See, the word is fickle, the word is manipulatable, the word is lugubrious. Nothing is at it seems; there is no fixed point in this Universe – save, possibly, that dense, dark, immaculate spot in the very center of the thing... there, maybe, finally, we could find some sort of order. Do you think? Now I'm not really sure...

madbob@madbob.com

18 Beers to L.A. - Sobriety, Ron Paul, and the Bright Side of Death

Well the World's favorite reality show has finally come to an end. An on-going nine and a half year narrative – with a deep and tangled back story – culminating in a daring late-night raid on a fortified compound; a blatant and calculated assassination. Brilliant. I think a lot of us forgot that narrative, or rather pushed it into the background, into the semi-conscious, to get on with things. Heads down, move forward: progress, progress, progress. This killing brings about a full stop - finality.

Death is sobering. In this case, folks are celebrating, going crazy, rejoicing that this plane of existence has been freed of a certain bodied energy that had spread a taint onto everything. The hangover is coming. The reality of what has been done – everything that has been done, will set in soon enough. Now we remember: the good, the terrible, the inconceivable – the waste and loss and the human suffering for no real reason; for ideologies and borders; boundaries, rules, religions, resources... (resources are real, sure enough. I'm not sure a war has ever been fought that didn't involve resources. I mean, really, what would be the point?)

Anyway – life goes on. We'll pick ourselves up, shake off the blood and the sweat, experience our psychological trauma. For a second we will empathize with the dead, and then we will get back to the act of being alive.

Flying in a Jet Airplane

I'm going to brave the intense security of our state's capitol airport and fly down to Los Angeles this weekend. I was hoping that the recent damage discovered on an assortment of Southwest Airline jets would result in a reduced fare. Maybe it did, Southwest appears to still be the cheapest airline – but the fares are not cheap, not even reasonable – they clock in right around the tail end of “barely affordable.” But it is this, or to drive my 1989 Toyota pick-up over a thousand miles in a handful of days – risking break-down on the side of the highway, death smeared along one of the L.A. freeways, or just die of pain and boredom somewhere on a tired stretch of I-99. Not worth it; and the gas and necessary beers would probably set me back more than the plane ticket – assuming the whole thing went off without a hitch.

Not that I have such great faith in air travel. I heard Ron Paul talking today about the “moral hazard” created by government programs and protections. His way of thinking explains that, because there is an FAA, or whatever governing bodies, that exist to find fault – it takes some of the pressure off of industry to regulate itself, and to expect and demand a higher level of safety and efficiency. It sounds great on paper – I am ready to sign up; but then that cynical part of my brain kicks in and says: “hey wait a minute – if the markets self-regulated, then why did we ever need these governing bodies to step in in the first place?

Anyway, my chief reason for confidence in flying doesn't lie with the airlines, or the planes, or the pilots. No, to my way of thinking, one of the chief benefits of flying is that, if I should go down in a fiery wreck, at least my family would be compensated for my death. It doesn't get much better than that, these days.

madbob@madbob.com