“Every tombstone
there’s a birth date and a death date.
And for the most
part we have nothing to do with either birth date nor death date. But on that
dash between birth and death is where our lives are lived. On that dash many
live meaningless or meaningful lives.”
Jesse
Jackson
Jackie Robinson’s Eulogy
If you ever see a man in desperate need of a
bib his spattered shirtfront a serendipitous dead ringer for one of Jackson
Pollock’s great rebel yells be sure to stop and chat him up. You see, this man
resembling Aqualung’s not so accomplished younger brother is a mangy cat to be
sure who upon first glance seems ever the ready to impose his greasy ways on
the next local Lolita that sashays along, but in reality is an accomplished
multi disciplinarian just looking for a little respect and the occasional
thumb/index finger symbol for OK. So thoroughly unschooled in the rudiments of
personal hygiene that to even sit within the olfactory purview of an arctic
wolf would cause the toughest bad ass to drop to his knees and heave like a
besotted 10 year old after his first pint of 20/20. Just because this cat’s
countenance is snotty and he sports a shiny, drool cup doesn’t mean he is not a
desirable piece of kosher brisket. Circumvent the oily complexion, the whiteout
from dandruff, and his sporadic tumescence and you have a jazzbo ready to make
the scene.
But what scene is this praytell? What kind
of scene would welcome this modern day John Merrick with open arms? What world
could embrace someone so remiss in the mores of popular culture that to wipe
his ass is tantamount to climbing Mt. Everest? Not this one. Not a world that
drowns in the cult of personality by worshiping the thinnest of patinas. Our
man has a well-drawn inner world. It is a world of ideas and emotion, a theater
of the mind. His well-being comes from deep down in the intricate sulci of the
brain. For despite his unseemliness this is a man of great accomplishment so
what if he wears his meals? He is a poet, essayist and photographer. You would
never know this based on the sorry cut of his jib. But what a beautiful soul he
is. He has lived his life with a clear understanding that the mind has it’s own
vitality. That to live in a world that values only surfaces and makes judgments
only based on surfaces is not a life worth living. Real life is buried deep
inside. That this poor soul is so vilified by the public for his shabby
appearance is a testament not to his miscalculation of the standing of hobo
couture but to the ultimate vagaries of existence. It is a great crime against
humanity as our man dreams of the day when his body is viewed as nothing more than
a vitrine that houses the beautiful and rare objet d’art of his inner
cosmology.
But who can this angel be, this man of
beatific proportion? Is he the new archetype, so magnificent on the inside that
the dilapidated shell that masquerades as a body is given the weight of a
losing lottery ticket? Can he triumph over the current buffed standard with his
own charming whimsicality? Would a modern hottie forsake the six-pack of the
local neighborhood bowsprit with his Neanderthal pronouncements and tumble for
the new paradigm, the man with the caked on detritus, but life affirming,
poetic inner-vision? I present to you the new post, postmodern man. He will
make love to you, but not in a way that requires a working set of cojones.
So what? I have an inflated view of myself.
What an ego the critics belch! The guy has truly driven off the deep end. This
pantywaist is so full of himself that the size of his head is the only thing
reminiscent of John Merrick. In his own mind he had finally become the true
neoman with sensitivity oozing from every pore. He thinks he’s getting
insightful with all that spiritual balderdash crap too. Not this jackanapes who
prances around like he’s some new uberdude. Sheesh! I’ve read his poetry. A
poet? This schmuck writes about guys from Nantucket for crying out loud. He
thinks he’s an artist because he takes nudes of 80-year-old women with
C-sections? Have you ever read Hysterical Paroxysms, his blog about how life is nothing more than Man masturbating
into the abyss? He is the ultimate poseur with the self-aggrandizing,
delusionary, braggadocio of a fashion designer.
Yeah, so what I blow a little smoke. Screw
you guys. I exaggerate to clarify. I admit it. I’m a pathetic proselytizer. I
aspire to greatness and weep at the creative geniuses that have looked up to
the heavens and said, “Fuck you!” I’m addicted to hyperbole. I can wax on and
on about The Bambino and Ennio Morricone and the miraculous, salacious freedom
of The Aristocrats. I will make a bad, cornball pun and hammer the crap out of
it because I can’t believe how good it sounds to my ear. I’ll spend ten minutes
kvelling about how good
a Vienna hard salami sandwich on rye with Bertman’s stadium mustard tastes with
a Dr.Brown’s diet black cherry soda because someone should. Some days you can
see me at the counter of Radio Shack gesticulating wildly at some young
whippersnapper about how My Favorite Things by the John Coltrane quartet is the
National Anthem of jazz. Heaven forbid we ever meet on the street because I
will engage you and suddenly you will find yourself in the bit playing my
youthful ward in some silly nonsense, the bit of man loving to breath deeply
the air of the moment. Who cares if all of the shit hammered clerks who go
through the motions and won’t smile and give bad service stare at me like I’m
the missing link? Am I an asshole because I have passion?
What concerns me most about modern life is
man’s refusal to come to grips with his inner life. He has no passion. He will
calculate or plumb for years on end and never have a thought any deeper than to
not forget to get some Lamisil for his jock itch. Don’t ask him pointed
questions about what is really bothering him just treat his goddamn jock
itch. The quick fix is what we are all about. Keep children busy 24 hours a day
so that the useless pursuits of lollygagging and daydreaming are expunged from
the simple joys of childhood. Ennui is remedied by pharmacology. Alcoholics
stop drinking and are reborn as autocrats. Personal inventory is verboten.
Expediency is the essence of modern life. This current zeitgeist reminds me of
a joke:
A man tells his doctor that he cannot help cutting
paper. All he
does 24 hours a day is cut paper.
What should he do? The doctor pauses for a
moment then says, “Don’t cut paper.”
Does the man in the joke really want to find out why deep
down he is compelled to cut so much paper? Maybe his father was a paper
salesman who molested him as a child and it the man’s way of killing him over and
over again? What’s the point? It’s too much work and money to get to the root
of this obsession. Isn’t it enough that the cessation of the abhorrent paper
cutting be his immediate goal? Who cares? Just get this chooch to stop cutting
the fucking paper! You’re driving everyone nuts.
So much popular culture is presented as
truth by a culture that has no patience for the real truth. Technology has
ramped up daily life to the point where the act of wondering is a luxury. All
you need to do is close your eyes and it is all there, the sturm und drang, the
boundless creativity, the kaleidoscopic mélange of possibility, Scarlett
Johansson. Man seems to have no interest in cultivating a life of the mind and
would rather immerse himself in the bread and circuses of his time. The Romans
knew how important relaxation was to the populace. They thought it was
imperative for the citizens to have some down time as long as they controlled
it. That gave the emperors a massive advantage in advancing their agendas. This
is enormously prevalent now. Pro football is modernity’s equivalent of the
gladiators.
But how can this possibly be? How can man
with his potential to embrace the infinite forfeit this amazing good fortune
and willingly be satisfied to live as a cannibalistic, humanoid, above ground
dweller or CHAD? Is the barrenness of his inner topography commensurate with
the shallowness of the times? Do the Fashion Police and Hillbillies For Hire
suddenly matter? It seems they do as we live in a time where clothes somehow
make the man, where original ideas and savage minded thinking are looked at
with indifference and scorn. Are we at the crossroad when liberated holocaust
survivors run not for the couches of their psychiatrists, but instead for the
nearest haberdasher to smooth their reentry into modern culture?
Go inside the great Petri dish of human
apathy, the mall on any given day. You will witness a sadness that only
termination with great prejudice could possibly alleviate. See the people
shuffling back and forth with not a care in the world one-way or the other. Ant
farms come to mind as the mindless fill its days with the trivial. Everything
is on sale including the shoppers. Why waste time digging deep into a psyche that doesn’t require it when a
Starbucks is such a beautifully, subtle deception. Its magnificent conceit is
that the good life can be enjoyed by anyone with five bucks. This is a culture
dying on the vine. You’ve just entered the Twilight Zone.
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