gonzo literary boof draws lines in the sand
I don't expect people to do a lot of literary mining when they read me, and I don't want to only write for a few highly sophisticated critics and eager grad students and Marxist reviewer's fro the Nation (who I love dearly... man, I would like to get a few of them over here for dinner... hey, Nation people, email me and we'll toke doobies in the windy city and blow the smoke on those stoner mallards who hang out at the park down by the lake with the junkies, who think it's funny to see themget wasted and all excited and flapping around playing like ducklings... no, wait.. that might have been; for some odd reason, the memory is vague...).
I hope that the ideas that I am writing about, the behavior I am attempting to INSPIRE, gets across to real people who need to be reminded and prodded to act on the knowlede that they live in a scientific equation that is presently badly weighed against the planet surviving GLOBAL WARMING. They can essentially be a part of the problem and part of the solution at the same time in this post--modern multi-faced culture of ours.
I think if the audience is lost, the writer has done something wrong. I mean, if the idea is important enough for someone to think they have to wrire about it, then if it isn't getting across, the story has done nothing. I don't buy the whole arguement that writers are not responsible for what they write. That is why we have liable laws and inciting riots laws and screaming fire laws and and laws against threatening to harm the president laws and laws against using racial epithets laws in the workplace to describe someone who pisses them off. On the other hand (one of them at least), I write what I want when I want regardless, as long as it does no harm.
Writers should be like doctors -- try to do no harm. Unless, of course, something needs to be harmed... innocent individuals are off limits to me. But if you are in a cult, or treat other people like shit, or are using your fame to become a metaphor for inspiring evil, I am going to be a voice on the outside screaming at you that you have HEADINTHEASSITIS and better pull out your mouth (no matter how much you like licking down there) before you drown in your own butt juices... and I am going to go mano mano to stop them if that's what it takes to keep a few readers of mine from going into a scientology office and getting brainwashed into thinking they are supermen. You wonder, with the big stars, if they do really convince them they have magic powers? You could do this, I suppose. I HAVE GOT TO WRITE ANOTHER TOADHEAD SMOOZE, where his handelers are convincing him he is opening a door with his mind, while in reality one of them is using a string, which he sees... and is told that he doesn't see it, over and over, and begins chanting it isn't there. The cult handlers tell him that if he no longer looks at the string, ihe can easily believe that it does not exist. I suppose they could use their breathing exercises to make his mind condusive to sprayng a little windex in ears and using extra long q-tips that they tell him are actually going into his brain and making everything shiny and new looking.
They probably have a secret book about this. Some religion... they don't want anybody but them to write about themselves.
Kind of like the mormon's saying that boof who says he found gold tablets that disappeared before anyone could see them and sounded suspiciously like the religious debates of the time, was assasinated. He was actually caught by an angry mob after he pulled a land grab scheme -- a scheme he had pulled off in other cities. And the Navoo's hung his ass for his crimes. They make it out like it was religous oppression, but no -- they were killing a fucking snake in the grass. Half my illustrious family, once kings of half of england, original protestant invaders of Ireland and Crusaders and Templers... kings and freinds of kings with Castle ridways... chose to go Mormon in the thirties. I think the great depression caused a lot of people to jump into this cult that pretty much took care of anybody who lived within their culture. Economics, Marx might say... Economics are the roots of even something as esoteric as madness. . . It's fun for me to read this book from 1938 by professor ridgway, about the days when our family was rich enough to bequath ten villages and various towns so Westminister Abbey could be built, but it is stilted reading. Sometimes there are lists. Like the one I joked about in here a few years ago when I wrote a big thing about the ridgway book, where like six generations of Ridgways were known simply because they were killed by The Danes. I swear, the statement, HE WAS KILLED BY THE DANES, appears about fifty times in the book. I personally know nothing about Danes and could care less. That was them, this is me. What we have in common is barely legible to most people, though others know there is a rich tradition of scholarship and arts and that some of it seems to have seeped down to me. . . well okay,
the others are just me.. might as well be honest, since I have little else to reccomend me, and it is a free way for me to feel moral, rightous, and engaged.
My grandfather acted in Shakespeare at his church, where he also did some preaching, I guess. For his time, and in the small town in Indiana that he oh so loved, he was a shining example of the best of us.
In the Book Of Ridgways, there were more monks than I could have imagined. I do have a strange fascination with monks. This and other things make me think our cultures are passed down in famalies, and that certain patterns of behavior remained. Some are like vestigal organs (look up appendectomies to see if this is right). Take for example, I grew up hating rich people. And the Royal Family in England were at the top of my scorn list, which is kind of odd for a kid in Garrett, Indiana. A goodish kid with generally goodish intentions, I had no idea how they could live like that while the rest of us were occasionally struggling through without lights until the next pay check, and othes were outright starving, children on the nightly news with distended stomachs, living in places where no calvary was going to charge in and save anybody. I saw the world more clearly then, in my ignorance.
Life is as complex as hell; it should be a lifelong study for all of us... especially that preservation part that is dying to save the tribe from the corporate--military beasts tearing up the ozone and selling us our new air -- I think they're going to charge us extra for all the free heat this year, which cut down on their oil revenues and required a government subsidy to meet the Golden Parachute Demands of their billionare executives.
I almost hate bringing up this book, because of the way it looks. I don't bring it up in conversation, because when I first got it, I was excited about it and told people about it. This, coupled with my incessant need to identify my work and self at parties to try to turn people on to my work, and me... if they seem the sort who might be interested... made me come off as bragging. I don't need to brag. That is not a statement of bravado. I used to need to brag sometimes, to shore up my ego when I thought I was a peice of shit for awhile; I sure as hell acted like one on occasion, and I have always had a hard time reconciling my violent, mildly twisted self . . . with the image of myself that I like to live up to in my head. Especially during the sorry little short, thank god, period when I used to drink to excess. I was no good at it, so I just stopped the stuff. This was long before the medication I'm on made drinking a ticket to coma town. In fact, I was just out of high school when I put the cork in the bottle. I took it out again occasionally, during weird or really fun times, but then I would get sick of it after a few weeks and quit again for a few years. Now, a decade has passed without me going out and drinking.
I did not know any of this family history until I was in my mid thirties, when one of my laconic, barely literate dousins (I am not making this up, or being mean... it's sad, she wrote me an email -- this kindly and smart cousin, that told me she didn't learn to read. SHe and her people do not read this blog, or I would save that tidbit until after her and her husband are dead, or not tell it at all. I do love the anonymity sometimes. I have met people with this problem before. Dyslexic, probably). Anyways, I esd on a sleepy farm in St. Joes, Indiana, when she happened to mention, after pounding a few beers, that she had this out of print book in a safety deposit box ( a hair stylist who used to come to the hospital and give me haircuts, during the year they thought I was going to die... at five, I spent a year going through chemo therapy for spondalolathesis. They didn't think it would work, and in fact I was written up in medical journals as the first one this worked on. They don't do this anymore... perhaps because of the tumors that appeared up and down my spine -- which they dutifully cut out, and have not bothered me since. The alternative to the chemo was removing most of my spine. My mom decided to risk my life to try something new, and so I have a spine. When I think of her making this choice, I come as close to crying as this repressed, tough white boy who grew up fighting appalachian hillbillys on a tri-daily basis can get... You didn't cry in a fight, you won. I never lost a fight when I was a kid, for some reason. We always boxed, and I had two older brothers who I had to fight on occasion, and since they were like six years and eight years older than me, you can imagine how I lost (one of them dropped me down two flights of stairs, where my head hit the wooden step hard enough to break it, and left me in a coma for three days.. this was before they knew what to do with psycho kids... he got better as he aged, of course... and at sixteen, when he was becoming a football star, he died, a tragic newspaper boy accident involving a van left in gear and rolling down a street, and a big, husky, clean cut kid who got half ways back in the vehicle, then before he could reach the stick shift, the van's door hit another car and closed... crushed him instantly out of this life.
Once I might have lost a fight, after boxing for about twenty minutes with a kid twice my size who was bullying one of my buddies, who ended up scaring off the guy he was bullying so I hit him as hard as possible, and ended up the next day outside the high school, surrounded by circle of kids. I was getting hit so hard that once I flew back into this house. I turned to my buddies laughing and said, "Yea, great fighter, ain't I?" I was reminded about that for the rest of the year. I can still hear some of my buddies joking with me, saying, "Great fighter, ain't I" as they pretended to slam themselves into walls. Before he could put me down, and after he raised bruises all over the right side of my face ( Eugene was a lefty who pitched a perfect little league game with that arm) and a black eye, all the big kids were telling this guy they were going to kick his ass when he was done with me. As luck would have it, a sane adult pulled up, Eugene's aunt who lived across the park, and got his ass out of there.
and it may still be the highlight of his life... him and both his sisters ended up in prison, which is too bad, because we were all pretty good friends when he wasn't compelled to bully us -- of course, he had been mercilessly bullied himself... how sad, the infectious nature of the mental diseases.
I don't want to write prose that makes people dress up like vampires, start a cult, or kill themselves and others. No, this here boy is going with my new non-religious statement -- LOVE LIFE MORE THAN RELIGION.