For those of you who have attempted to
pierce the natural casing of my being by painting me as a horrific misanthrope,
a curmudgeonly, cynical, nit-picking moaner and a dyspeptic agent of the highest
order, all I can say is “Fuck You!” You wouldn’t know how to live if you had a
coupon for a free week on Porn Island...you sorry blue pill popping bastard!
I’m going to like bitch slap you like a fly in January if I ever see you
strutting you’re sorry shit again...like you got it going on, flip flopped, tan
and ready for your close up. I’m going to bring one up from the floor and crash
it against your syphilitic, gourd-like skull. Put the coffee down! Coffee’s for
closers!
I tell this story as only a layman can. I am
not bogged down with academic dogma like so many professional thinkers, but
bring to the problem an assembly-line worker’s perspective, a football tackle’s
doggedness to the rigors of living in a system where true passion is
ceremoniously subjugated and smashed. We live in a time of reconstitution,
where a culture would rather go to the cane than let passion flow unencumbered.
Freethinking has gone the way of the mumps. Dogma is the coin of the realm and
creativity has been sentenced to the clock tower. As citizens in a culture
nothing is more rewarded with “pat on the head” approval than rugged
capitulation. I call it this
because most citizens will defend with Shiite fanaticism their roles as actors
in the culture. As citizen/actors in a capitalist system we are given no choice
but to “enjoy” our lives and revel in the construct that is our role. To
dismiss our role is to admit that our lives might be a sham and who could
honestly do that after living such a
“long and fruitful” life?
For most people modern life is akin to
living on an ant farm. You can watch this scenario during rush hour as the ants
queue up on their way to the rock pile. Walk around town on any given day and
talk to the people who tend to our laundry or fix our cars. Ask them to opine
about the exigencies of daily life and you’ll invariably get treated to a dull
stream of monosyllabic claptrap. “How’s it going?” “It’s going…” That’s it?
It’s going? You are content to watch it go? Where’s the juice? Where’s the
exhilaration? For most of us life has been reduced to the consistency of
lukewarm gruel. Is it in us to rise above our stewardship of the mundane, our
fanatic attachment to that ratty, dirty blanket? No, I don’t want to go to
Applebee’s or meet you at the parade.
Why is it so hard for me to take succor from modern life’s seemingly
simplest pleasures like American Idol and KImye (Kimye - in the current
cult of personality, a commercial hybrid code used to delineate the merging of
two popular personalities.) In this case Kanye West and Kim Kardashian) Why is
it impossible for me to understand the subtleties of standing almost nude in
sub-zero temperatures painted in the complimentary colors of a local sports
team while screaming like a banshee?
I knew was in big trouble when I saw the first Star Wars in
1977 and couldn’t figure out what all of the hubbub was about. The crowd had
embraced in my view a perfunctory little science fiction film and blown it up
to apotheosis proportions. I couldn’t believe or understand it. It was then as
I walked out of the theater that I knew what my destiny would be and I would
play that roll for the rest of my life, a man with little interest in anything
culture has to offer, does not participate in any communal surface activities,
possesses no indigenous spirit regarding holidays or publicly endorsed
celebrations, shuns everything remotely organized, shrinks from his vomit
inducing role as citizen, yet will content himself to tread in this dark murk
while secretly thrilling to the absurdity of it all? What is the genesis of
this disgust? What makes this salty dog shrink in horror at the prospect of
canoodling with even one morsel of sanctioned trumpery? What has proven to our
man so thoroughly emetic that to eat shit only makes him feel better? If you
ever see a doughy, pasty-faced white man in his early dotage cold-cocking mall
shoppers with arthritic fists of fury, dawdle a few moments until the lactic
acid built up in his tiring, yellowing extremities recedes and he will only be
too glad to meet you at the Cinnabon and repeat the process.
Why has the insignificant become so
significant? Chitchat has supplanted discourse, impalement has overtaken
lovemaking, commerce has become the new modern art. We look to the wise men of
our times for guidance only to see them break wind and be gone. We have no
problem in transferring our individuality to these keepers of the beacon, but
want nothing to do with the consequences. We claim to want to know the meaning
of life, yet continually spend our days denying it, pissing away our time in
what Ian Anderson of the band Jethro Tull refers to in the band’s masterwork
“Thick as a Brick” as playing our “animal games” and looking to the enlightened
of our times for guidance only to again be disappointed “as the wise man breaks
wind and is gone”.
So, if I get such little pleasure in the construct that is
modern life, why do I live at all? What propels me to tie my shoes and walk out
the door knowing all too well that a succubus waits behind the nearest billboard
to sap me as if I were a young maple? How does a man who hates most marketable
undertakings manage to keep from inhaling deeply from a gaseous oven? Well, If
you’ve ever been alive then you most certainly know that the vagary of
existence is the spice that flavors all, a condiment so pungent and aromatic
that to leave it out of the bouillabaisse of life only leads to the castration
of experience and an appearance on the Price is Right!
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever listened to a piece of
music that was so amazing that it moved you to tears? The experience was so
powerful that language could not possibly describe your reaction to it. Like
maybe
seeing a great
ball player launch himself high above the fence, flicking his glove at the last
possible second, dashing the dreams of the opposing rabble. How could he do
that? There was no way and yet…
Perhaps it was seeing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for the first time, his
tragic humanness emanating from each brush stroke, that became your causa sui
or seeing a love’s naked body for the first time that catapulted you into a new
dimension. I hate to be a killjoy, but that’s it folks. That’s the meaning of
life. No more no less. Each disease we find a cure for, each new planet we
discover, each new symphony we compose is our way of trying to get to the
ungettable get, our Sisyphean mission. That’s the beauty of this remorseless
life. We achieve apotheosis by the mere fact that we believe we can. Greatness
out of delusion.
La Cosa Nostra, this thing of ours, Life,
was as infinitesimally likely to occur as the Cubs winning another World
Series. For the right chemistry to create life the odds were so great and
impossible that to take it for granted is tantamount to abdicating all that is
awesome in the universe, yet we treat it like the disposable seed of youth. Man
needs to step up and realize that we are all bozos on this bus, that no one has
any purchase on the ultimate meaning of life. To do this we must remove the
commercial God from the equation. Only then can Man place himself in his proper
place as one tiny cog in this ever spinning, churning, roiling Petri dish and
not as the arrogant zenith of evolution. This will allow Man to become his own
God, a god all men can aspire to.
Art and human creativity are the highest and
the only callings. Artists create art because it is the only reasonable
alternative to an unreasonable situation. He longs to get to the godhead, but
knows it is impossible. The sense the artist takes from it may be paltry, but it
sure beats sitting on the couch watching TV for 50 years only getting up on
Sunday to fill a destiny as a munificent supplicant.
In everyone’s life there
are experiences that are indelibly etched into their memory. These experiences
are the closest they’ll ever come to finding any real meaning in life. They are
perhaps illusions, but it is because of our humanity that we inculcate them
with so much importance. It is the best we can do. It is the tragedy and
triumph of humankind. I say forget about it and enjoy it while you can.
If Rembrandt were alive
today would he still have painted “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer”,
or Sophia Loren contemplating the bust of Jayne Mansfield?
