It’s Water, Don’t Try To Fight It

Last Thursday I came home to find water pooling in my closet. It was dripping, strangely enough, from the air conditioning unit above the vent in the ceiling of my closet. It was a terrible tragedy that dragged on through the entire Labor Day Weekend until Tuesday, when our handyman Ken finally fixed it. He's got dozens of aging units to care for and, as far as I can tell, no one to assist him. It's like some weird synthesis of Hercules and Sisyphus, constantly waging war against entropy like that. My parents did it with old cars when I was a kid, so I have a reverence for that kind of losing battle. It is maddening to fight against the tendency of things to break down, and I admire the tenacity and commitment to mental illness necessary for such work.

Sometimes I feel that's what life is about, tenacity and mental illness in dealing with certain inevitabilities. And having been raised Presbyterian, the Calvinist in me thinks that all things are inevitable, and everything happens or does not happen just exactly as it is supposed to. I don't know if I can or want to accept such an orderly universe, but watching the water drip from the ceiling to the shelf to the bucket over and over, I couldn't help but think that entropy is one of those inevitabilities, and with entropy comes the flavor, if not meat, of chaos and I find that somewhat comforting. I am trying to find comfort in the idea of an orderly universe running on a straight track just as it is supposed to, but I'm not there yet. Maybe I'll get there in this lifetime.

I wish I could say for certain.

I Should Be Grateful, I Suppose, And Compare You To A Summer's Rose.

One of the most appealing aspects of religion is the way that shitty events get explained away as "God's will," or "the Universe trying to teach us a lesson," or whatever.

It's kinda true, though. Well, I'm not going to go on record either way on the whole is-He-or-isn't-He (or She or It or Them) question, but I have found that shitty events can be made to serve us. Buddhist thought, for instance, finds reasons to be grateful for failure, persecution and violent tragedy, and not just because those experiences help to burn away bad Karma (or sin, if you will). They help individuals to reflect on themselves, their past and the Universe in general. Pretty neat, huh? Most of your non-Odin-based religions have similar tenets, and I'm honestly torn from day to day as to whether or not the lemonade is real or just a means to keep chumps under control.

I got a chance to test it out last week, though. It was Wednesday, and I was on my way to the Loony Bin for the evening show. It's my first time hosting a normal Loony Bin show, and I want it to be great. Part of my ritual, when I can do so, is to feast upon a falafel and hummus from Gyro's Etc. in the shopping center across Rockwell from the Loony Bin. Best falafel ever.

Seriously.

Only sometimes they have trouble with my debit card, and I'm left with no way to pay for said delicious falafel, as I usually don't carry cash (note to muggers: I'm not worth it!). So, I decide to stop at a nearby ATM to get some cash. Now, I'm not going to name the financial institution, so let's just say that their name rhymes with "CHASE RANK." I pull up to their outdoor ATM, put my card into the green blinking card slot, and wait. For those of you curious about what blinking green lights mean, let just tell you, they don't mean "happy to serve you, sir!" The actual meaning is closer to "I'm hungry! Give me your fucking debit card now, asshole! Mmm... yummy debit card! It's mine now, fucker! HA HA HA HA HA!" Some of that is a little idiomatic, but you get the drift.

I am now sans card. I have already established I have no cash. So, I'm left with my checkbook. I might as well be paying people in fucking Confederate Dollars, because the thing has an address from two homes and one city ago. So, great. Thanks CHASE RANK! You guys "rock!"

By the way, if a machine grabs your card and won't give it back, that shit is GONE! No way you will get it back, it gets shredded immediately.

So, I drive to Wal-Mart, where I bank ('cause I'm a high-fuckin' roller!) to cash a check so I can, you know, pay for food and gasoline. I order a new card while I'm there, expecting that I'll have it by the end of the week. No, 5 to 7 days I am told. No, wait, 5 to 7 BUSINESS days. Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?! How hard is it to stamp out a damn card and put it in the mail? Are these things hand-crafted by a one-eyed master back in the Ozarks somewhere? Like, it's just him, a whittlin' knife and a big 'ol block o' plastic, perhaps? Because why else in the world would it take one of the biggest banks in the area a fucking week and a half to replace one lousy DEBIT CARD?!

But I digress.

I get the cash, I get the information, and more importantly, I get a nice dose of hate. It pushes out the nervous, the anxious, the oh-boy-I-gotta-do-good-tonight vibe in my head and replaces it with icy hot anger. I turned in a great performance that night, and like a good little method actor I had that nugget of hate at my disposal for the rest of the week, just smoldering in my back pocket where my debit card used to be.

So thanks, CHASE RANK ATM, you malfunctioning piece of shit. I hope you get struck by lightning.

He Who Fucks Nuns Will Later Join The Church

I feel like I avenged myself tonight. I had a setlist. I had themes. I had callbacks (planned). I had a dead pope joke. By the way, I was feeling reverential this afternoon, and tried to create something that expressed that reverence and respect for God. This is how it turned out. Listen.

By the way, it was Pope Formosus.

We Come In, We Go Out The Same Way: Alone.

I had a dream this morning. I dreamt that I went back to school at OCU to finish my Master's. Why? I have no idea. I was dreaming, all right? I moved into a dorm/academic hall, into a teeny tiny dorm room with two other people. They just happened to be Lucy Davis and Columbus Short from "Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip." Cool roommates, right? The whole thing felt like my freshman year of college. In the dream, I looked around, felt a strange sense of circuity, and said to myself "well, we come in, we go out the same way."

Then all hell broke loose.

This dark thing, some kind of bipedal monster, appeared and started slashing people's throats. Blood, screaming, dead and dying falling all around, decomposing before my eyes. I've had the image in my head all day. I do have some control over my dreams, though, and I saved Lucy (well, not me, but I changed the narrative so that she lived). She hid in a mascot's outfit until the thing had passed. I can't remember if it killed me or not.

I awoke for the first time in my adult life on the verge of screaming. But I was raised Presbyterian, so I kept my emotions under control, like a Calvinist Vulcan. I shook it off and went on with my day.

About five hours later I heard what had happened in Virginia.

I sit here now, staring at the screen trying to wrap my mind around this horrible tragedy and pull it out of my brain, but I can't. So many thoughts, reactions, images and words swim through my mind right now that I just can't. I can't fucking do it.

All I can think is that anyone who wags their tongue today about the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is an asshole, either way. This isn't about gun ownership and whether or not it should be legal/regulated/restricted/whatever. That discussion will come later, and I'm sure it will be ugly.

This story isn't about the law. It is about a monster that lived outside the law, that grew inside of a man and was left unchecked for too long. It's about the innocent people of Virginia Tech, now awash in blood and tears, and how they will continue to face down this brutal act long after the specters of today have faded from our minds and the next tragedy seizes our country by the throat.

But that isn't the end of the story. We've seen this cycle before. The pain, the grief, it pales in comparison to the resilience of humanity found in those who have been tested by such sorrow and pain. I know that the people of Virginia will overcome this, and go on to find hope and peace. I know this story will end with hope.

I can't think of anything else to say, except that I'm sorry.

God bless.

The Present Is A Gift

I worry about things. I worry about global warming. I worry about AIDS. I worry about the end of the world. I spend so much time worrying about these far-off threats, which are scary as hell, that I sometimes lose track of what's going on in the here and now.

And fundamentally, here and now is all that we ever have. I have struggled my entire life to realize that there are no act breaks in my life. Each moment leads inexorably into the next, whether or not I'm aware of the change. I guess that's why procrastination is so damned seductive. If we can compartmentalize our lives into "now" and "then" we give ourselves the illusion of control. We can trick ourselves into thinking that Time's March is interrupted from time to time, giving us a chance to breathe and reflect before we carry on. That would be nice. But it's bullshit. I think it's more important to disabuse ourselves of that idea and concentrate on "now."

I'm not sure if I mean to say that today is all that matters or not. I think maybe I do, actually. Today is the day that we write that novel, or we don't. Today is the day that we cure cancer, or we don't. Today is the day that we take that drink, or we don't. It's really not even today, though. It's the moment, and the next moment, and then the one after that. Each one is a gift, and how we use them will determine what kind of gifts we get next. But, regardless of how we use them, they keep coming until they stop.

I think I've wandered a bit off my original topic, so I'm going to get back to it now.

What is it? Simply this: the future is uncertain. It may be shitty or it may be great, and a lot of it depends on us. But all we can do is to make the best choices now, today, in this moment, in each moment. Being alive may seem like an unrelenting task sometimes, but it is one I firmly believe is worth the trouble.