Hello, Hello, I Occasionally Bellow About Paying Dues and Tithing Tuition
An Intuition of Fruition in a Blog a Day,
Or,
Hello, Hello, I Occasionally Bellow About Paying Dues and Tithing Tuition
Saying hello to virtual acquaintances is not a lot easier for me, psychically, than bellying up to the bar to flirt and seduce whatever remnants of the cognescenti are present when I wander through whichever den of iniquity I happen to inhabit at any give moment. I admit that, unless a source of something more powerful and poignant happens to be under cover on the staff, the venues I choose generally serve nothing stronger than caffeine. But iniquity is omnipresent, just as the angelic is also always with us.
So here I am, to tell readers of my life and the panoply of souls who come through my doors like visions of heaven and hell, a chance for destruction and all to be well living inside of each of them. Although I see the simplicity of how everything fits, I like making the complexity and ineffablility apparent as well. I don’t trust much of anything that seems easy, so popularity is hard to imagine, in spite of how much I long for love---at least as much as anyone. And, here’s a big surprise!! I like big words, too, so a lot of folks think, “F**k This!” I know.
Hey! Hello anyhow. Why do I do this? What are we up to here? AIl I know is that since I was a teenager, I’ve had a habit of listening to people. I’ve somehow magnified or magnetized peoples’ feelings so that they couldn’t help opening up to me. What spills out are the things “I haven’t even told my therapist.” A common line is “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” Obviously, I’m aware enough to realize that I don’t have any definitive answers as to why this happens and why someone might care, but I have a clue or two.
Humanity is riding a train of fate that will soon arrive at a destination we detest, unless we collectively manifest a plan for diverting our engines of mass destruction to some other track. Somehow or other, I have the sense that my words, however tortured and bombastic they are, are nonetheless part of plausible transformative scenarios. As I paraphrased a Catholic Archbishop, last August 10---NAME THE IMPORT OF AUGUST 9TH, SOMEBODY!!!--- as he spoke against one of several H-bomb factories within a few hours of my home in Atlanta, “instead of WMD, we need WMI, Weapons of Mass Instruction.”
My works lack polish, clearly, and I may never have the discipline completely to clean them up. But somehow, a calling has continued to grow inside of me, until it is so powerful as to be irresistible. ‘Speak,’ this voice says. ‘The time has come when people will listen; folks are longing for stories that help them see. Do the job you’ve been assigned and don’t worry about the details.’
So here I am, with another installment and an apology. I don’t mean a single person harm with what I write. Until people know me pretty well, they generally fail to see that I couldn’t help being sympathetic to the worst cretins and thugs in history, who, if they asked me to hear their tale, I would open my ears and my heart and listen. I don’t judge anyone, but I can no more set aside the analytical bent than I can tear out my own liver. What readers get is what I see and hear and discover, without any bias other than my own skin, my own cock, and my own children, all of which I see as interrelated with the well-being of other people. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
I love all that life has to offer, so I don’t write about a single topic or character either. I believe powerfully that sex and drugs and rock and roll---raw and uncensored and as real as the “Realest White Man in America” can make them---have to be part of our survival paradigm. I am tolerant to a fault, but I can’t keep my mouth shut about what strikes me as hypocrisy or willful ignorance or death worship or any of the myriad of whining, mincing, vengeful, victim-loving strategies for disempowerment that keep the rich in power and the poor ready to cower and complain.
And, like DUHHHH! I’m a socialist. Either we find a way to relate to each other with love and sharing atop the agenda, or we watch the entire charade fall to pieces and the best hope for the future turn into a quagmire of brutality and pain. Such a vicious eventuality may in fact be inevitable, but I’m betting on life anyhow. Why bother otherwise? I’ve gambled at different things my whole life and been a winnner at everything, on balance, even though I’m the world’s most awful poker player who also has a three digit IQ.
Jackson Brown put beautifully what motivates me, in a lovely song of loss and redemption that may be the best future possible, in spite of my stubborn optimism that some sort of long-shot miracle can still allow the lot of us to experience the power and happiness that are ours for the asking if we can just learn to love each other half as much as we seem to adore finding fault with and condescending to each other.
AFTER THE DELUGE
“Some of them were dreamers,
Some of them were fools
Who were making plans and dreaming of the future.
With the energy of the innocent,
They were gathering the tools,
They would need to make their return back to nature.
As the sand slipped through the open end....
And their hands reached for the the golden ring....
IN THEIR HEARTS THEY TURNED TO EACH OTHER’S HEARTS FOR REFUGE,
IN THE TROUBLED YEARS THAT CAME BEFORE THE DELUGE.
I’m for cultivating this instant, in spite of the melancholy sustenance of a different vision on the part of one of my favorite minstrels. To me, when the Nazarene said that “the kingdom of God is at hand,” he didn’t mean to support an apocalyptic vision of the rewards of heaven. He meant to say that heaven is this life, this miracle, this mysterious gift of the eternal now that some creator we never can know fully has given to us, for reasons we never can fathom fully, and that hell is ignorance of this gift, especially if we insist on the righteous rectitude of worshipping death and the hereafter instead of harvesting this moment of ecstasy each of us has to embrace, ready and “at hand”, like “the kingdom of God” promised by Jesus.
As for a passage of the day: Hmmmmm!!! One of the most amazing aspects of my existence is how folks from every corner of our community of cousins pass through my life, frequently on a daily basis. Asia does so now, for example, in the form of colleagues from all over the South and Southwest of the largest continent. And, as a result of the blessed miracle of randomly encountering a miraculous saint, I have the privilege four or five days each week of teaching Korean and Chinese American children writing, reading, and production.
This saint nearly starved to death several times before he reached his seventh year. He selected an unfortunate time to exit his mother’s belly, in the Spring of 1950, two weeks prior to the beginning of the Korean conflict. At the age of six, he went six days without one mouthful of food. He only missed one day of school, however, in that nearly weeklong nutritional hiatus, this fanatical attitude toward education more than endearing to a nerdy boy such as me.
He went on to a six-figure-engineering-Ph.d. life building airframes and missile bodies for a death merchant with generous benefits, until he couldn’t stand himself for collaborating in the problem instead of imagining possible solutions. He’s run schools and educational services ever since, managing a comforable life in the process, finding ways to bring consciousness as well as calculus to his cohorts from Northern Asia---the reading syllabus is full of civil rights and people’s history, powerful social science as well as the normal SAT parlance. The conservatism of his clients is always a delicate matter, but he balances this with easy humor and analytical facility, and perhaps a faith that the parents will never care too much for the English lessons of their children.
And thus a madcap madman, Socratic wisecracking social democrat such as I can come on board and discover that my “Doctor Sanso’s” father, at 86 still loves to flirt, talk about the horrors of the war, and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. He promised, next break we have, to help me interview papa about the travails and glories of the nine decades that have nearly flown, decades that join in one life vectors of meaning for every cousin Jack of us.
Each youngster I cajole and instruct has some bizarre tale to tell as well; for many, this craziness involves covering more miles in a single day of their migration than entire extended clans did collectively in lifetimes past. For others, a constant battle is noteworthy, between ancient ways and the disintegrating effects of the Holllywood-Mafia-Lottery ethos in America that always reaches out for fresh meat and new converts. Theirs are a few of the sources I will share with you as I enter the crazed concatenations here of the random strains of the universe’s choral song.
I am no conductor, but I surely do listen and record, and I await friends, and hope for questions friendly or hostile, so long as they are genuine. Keep me posted and thanks to any who read and respond.
Ciao for now,
Jimbo