That's The Book

I need to find a sense of purpose, for surely all hope is lost if I fail. Why the fuck would anyone still have hope in this day and age? Hope for what? Any person with an adult conscience AND consciousness has to see that there’s no organic justice. The more we think we understand some divine purpose, the more ridiculous we appear. There is no reason to trust that things will improve, neither on the global scale—the scene where all CNN news plays out from broadcast towers and dishes large and tiny, pareve and fleishy, squirting birds we love to preserve with radiation and adoration—nor on the bathroom scale, the most important one. 

We know there is truth about eternity in every particle. It is no secret. There is forever ensconced in a grain of bacterial shit. The charred remains of my grandmother have fertilized twenty five hundred tomatoes, and nourished another three hundred rabbis, and twelve or fifteen Nazis.  That’s not an injustice. Neither messiah nor money, science or séance, can change this, because frankly, nature doesn’t care.  It remembers everything, in a way, but it doesn't care.

The only ones who really care are little kids. They stop caring when they turn 19 or so. Yeah, they might honestly think that they care after that, drawing straight lines to their graves with pens inked in their own sweat, blood, and merlot. But that’s only so long as they’re well-nourished and properly clothed. And even then, they might grow up to be suicide bombers. Guarantees are only good for electronics. 

God has a curious way of taking the best stuff and making mush out of it—must be part of the plan—but there’s hope. Yeah. I’ll cry over a brain splattered on windows, but there’s still reason to keep a firm grip on the future, I say. Better times are just ahead. People with power, intelligence, good intentions, lots of influence and access, are just waiting to do the right thing with my hard-earned retirement funds. Institutions of higher learning are bringing on the brightest and the best to maintain standards of excellence, to promote humanity, to end slavery and raise the potential of human accomplishment. But then there’s that whole fallability of humanity thing. Ah well, regardless of one’s record, image or intent, it’s always smart to have a good, well-fed lawyer on retention.

Remember those children? They care about their mommies and daddies staying alive. Kids need food and clothes and reasonably dry housing. But remember, it’s important to teach them to love their guns, to hate gays, and for heaven-sakes to fry their brains with pissy beer and cheez wiz. 

Western society is so very good at promoting illusions

American Girls

High School Musicals 

Bradys 

Batmen

rock and roll 

gasoline tankers 

Las Vegas lights 

chewy steaks 

ewy gewy ice-cream pops 

and health maintenance groups to carve out the calcified fun 

if you ain’t felled by a gun  

And that would be fun too. When times are bad I’ll give cash to Katrina victims. When times are good I’ll buy a BMW. And when the storm is across the street though my awning is water-tight, I'll just raise a glass. Goodwill trickles to hapless urchins in Peshawar, and tips the scales from Kalachnikov to Nabikoff.

If there’s beauty, it’s in the chaos of chaos where true order is only that which is quietly tapped into a browser for some sugar-fat, single-malt, or made-in-China amplifier.  Hey guys, there might be beauty everywhere.  

Hope? For what? That profits from senate seats sold on ebay won’t go to whores and coke dealers? Remember, we can raise the capital to cart sewage and TB from southside projects in Inglewood, Hollywood, and the 1600 neighborhood. 

A note to my comfortable, well-fed friends: Let’s pray for all this to continue. It couldn’t possibly be useless. I know this because I was able to actually witness useful things on my way to the office this morning. With neurons properly pickled, and synapses legally greased, there was happiness within and without. Christmas lights in windows awash in candy canes, and at Centinela and Pico—an unshaven guy with cigarette, hacking, prostrated.  Nobody asked him if he was okay, if he needed a place to stay, if he wants to play.  At least I didn't.  Sorry everyone, I’m really sorry.   Ah, that's better. 

Okay, suppose it’s not my job to finish the job.  Even if that axiom doesn’t absolve me from cutting a new key. I cannot believe that God doesn’t want me to be a critical fucker. I really don’t think God cares. God doesn’t care, because to assign caring to God is like pretending that Himmler was sorry for branding arms with numbers. Philosopher Alan Watts suggested that one single wave in the ocean is what the ocean is doing.

In the bible, there is a story about the raping of Jacob’s daughter. The whole community from which the rapists come, repent and then dutifully cut their weenies just so, and bled an oath upon the earth to live more like the children of Abraham. Jacob’s sons said thank you, and promptly skewered them to death when they convalesced, their children, their women, their elderly.  The whole lot.  And it is with these, God-blessed progeny of Israel, the world is supposed to make peace?  If it's true, that the seeds of Abraham are still offering a light unto the nations, then I conclude that there must be some other definition of peace that I'm not aware of.    The peace I’ve understood heretofore has something to do with lions laying down with lambs, and flowers in gun barrels and swords beaten into ploughshares. But there’s some other peace apparently, and that’s one where God is praised and uplifted through smoke and blood.  

In his opus tome, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson suggests "if someone tells you they are related to William Shakespeare, it is not at all inaccurate to respond, yes, me too.” Why? Because we’re all made of the same stuff, and there’s lots of it recycled all over the place. I have DNA from dinosaurs, Moses, and Jack The Ripper. 

Dissonance generated by witnessed facts is often more jarring than I'm able to bear.  But truth isn't necessarily fact. The dismembered child is a text message, while I  contemplate the weather for Sunday.  I'm confident a therapist will tell me that I'm heading for overload if I attempt to live these two thoughts at once.  Somewhere a child is born and another dies in the womb. And both are forgotten, unless they coincide with something memorable.  One event of gargantuan significance across the globe from me, can become a tag that I'll employ as a memory aid.  The tsunami which wiped out a quarter of a million people? Oh yeah, that was when my parents were visiting. 

The value in all this?  At any given moment, something important is happening, at least to one person, somewhere. The moment is mundane for you.  Tears for a parent or a lover can send troops into Iraq. I too am what the universe is doing, when I scream at my wife or caress my black cat. People will sing hymns and drink fine wine in Mira Mesa while bombs fall in `Aza. No need to punish the wine drinkers, because the children and the children and the children . . . People will jubilantly praise the sunset before Shabbat or copulate as the Oscars play on a TV, and that night we’ll see a star whose light is new to me, but as old as a sacred moment in Jefferson’s nursery.  A bullet stands frozen one millimeter from Kennedy’s head.  This whole enterprise is a river of tears, some that evaporated from a tissue in my bathroom two years ago, and others that obeyed a command to lift unremarkably from a tepid pore, in an unmarked hold in Sarajevo or Kigali.

As numb as we want to be, as loud as the music can blare, and for each cheese puff crunched and forgotten, something reverberates, and some noise is retained.  Has to be.  That’s the book.