Put The Coffee Down. Coffee’s For Closers

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?