Mostly Mulch

June 15, 2013

Gerard LeDoo, Part I of II

Hello and welcome to my short story. I am your author, Andy Jezuitski. It’s a pleasure to have you. I do have just one thing to say before we begin. I want you to know that, as a clumsy amateur writer, I am at least smart enough to know that I am not supposed to tell you anything. I am supposed to show you. I think I learned this rule in the sixth grade (in a public school of all places). It is a rule that was made up by so many people who are now dead. I must admit, even though those people who made it up are now dead, it is a good rule. Many authors have followed it to great affect. The problem I have with this rule is that the dead people who made it up could not have predicted the state of reading in the twenty-first century. I can tell you firsthand, again as the amateur author, I have absolutely no idea who won the Nobel Prize for literature in the current year. I can’t tell you who won in 1977 either. Awful waffles!

Also, aside from being an amateur writer, I have been a professional employee of the public library system for more than two years and can tell you there are only three kinds of people who still use libraries:

1. Children

2. Very old people

3. Stinking Bums

I didn’t put bums last for cheap comedic effect. I did it because bums seem to outnumber all other library visitors. By a lot. Of course, they have stronger motivations for being there than measly-peasly books. The library offers shelter, drinking fountains, and public restrooms. It also provides computers with free internet access. Contrary to what you might expect, the bums don’t use the computers to learn about Dos Passos or Herman Melville or even E.B. White—they use them to look at pornography. As you might expect, the library has a rule against using their computers to look at pornography. Here’s what the bums have to say, in unison, about the library’s little rule: “Bollocks!”

This is the state of literature today. Something less than thriving I might say. So! Here’s my case: if we are living in an era where bums don’t even have to follow rules against looking at pornography in a public library, I certainly don’t have to follow rules about showing and not telling. And with that, I am ready to tell, tell, tell!

……………………

Although Gerard LeDoo was forty-five, he had once been twenty-two. The intervening years seemed to have passed by within a single breath. I am going to try to tell this story within one breath too.

…………

When Gerard LeDoo had been twenty-two he had graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in poetry. It didn’t take Gerard long after graduation to learn that poets didn’t exist anymore. How he wished someone had told him this before he had chosen his major.

…………

So how did Gerard LeDoo survive to become forty-five? What occupation did he hold? You will never guess. To prove myself right (something I like to do as often as I possibly can) I will give you three guesses. Go.

Give up? Gerard LeDoo had become an Episcopalian priest in Laguna Beach. Not even a young Gerard LeDoo could have guessed that.

…………

A young Gerard LeDoo had once dated a Christian girl named Sharon Shi. At the time of her meeting Gerard, Sharon had already devoted herself to another man—to Jesus Christ. This made for a rocky relationship with Gerard. For one, Sharon Shi didn’t want to sleep with Gerard unless he married her first. Gerard wasn’t about to do something brash like that. This left the two young lovers at, what the French might call, an impassé. Gerard LeDoo didn’t speak French, and was quite immature, so this is what he called it: fucking shit!

There was another little quirk to Sharon Shi. It was worse than not wanting to sleep with the young Gerard LeDoo. If you can believe that. (Gerard couldn’t). Anyways, Sharon wanted the world to end. She wanted the world to end so badly that she prayed for it every night. She wanted Jesus to come back from the dead…again. She thought that the world ending would be a grand thing.

Gerard started to suspect Sharon Shi wasn’t right for him. Gerard started to think the apocalypse and Christianity weren’t right for him either.

…………

Well, live and learn—sometime during his twenty-sixth year of life, Gerard was born again. That means that he, like his ex-girlfriend Sharon Shi, had decided to dedicate his life to Jesus Christ. And, surprisingly, it had more to do with Sharon Shi than you might expect. No, she hadn’t converted him with her words—her white horses and flaming swords and fireworks—she had taught him something that lay far beneath the surface. She taught him that a whole lot of people living on planet earth, probably the great majority, believed in whatever they wanted to for no reason at all other than that’s what they wanted to believe in. People on earth were allowed that freedom. Gerard learned he shouldn’t judge an idea based on who believed in it, but rather, on its merit alone. For every fiery-eyed apocolypto, like Sharon Shi, there was also an Oxford-educated man, with a mind three or four times more fantastic than Gerard’s, who also believed in God. Steve Wonder, for example, believed in God and he had won three consecutive Grammy’s for best album of the year. More than this, he was blind. Always trust the questions of the cosmos to the blind. Sharon Shi had 20/40 vision and wasn’t any kind of credible evidence against God.

Gerard spent the next half-year trying to find the blind evidence of God. It didn’t work. It left his brain so wrecked it could have fetched a fair price at any competitive scrapyard. So Gerard decided to take things to the simplest level. What would calm his mind? Surely happiness must have something to do with the sturdy design of his own being. Let the choice make itself. Gerard’s mind was happiest believing in God, so that’s what he did. Easy as pie!

May 9, 2013

Living with the Kettle Drivers

That’s what my garage sounded like for two years. Imagine that. The band is the Kettle Drivers and they don’t drink light beer. I once lived in a house with two out of three Kettle Drivers and I also don’t drink light beer. Whenever I see someone drinking light beer I picture a white towel flying through the air towards the center of a boxing ring. Imagine that. Almost everyone who doesn’t play an instrument has this to say about the Kettle Drivers: Why don’t you get a singer? The people who ask this question are almost always under the influence of light beer. In the times of Johann Sebastian Bach, the question of a singer was never once brought up (light beer had not been invented yet).

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I had to secretly record what you just heard because Greg Johnson (the guitar player of the Kettle Drivers) likes two things: quality and not having panic attacks. Posting a digitally recorded practice song on the internet (of all places) is in direct violation of the things Greg likes. Sorry Greg.]

Anyways, hearing my garage sound like that always made me feel enthusiastic about living because, in my perfect world, that’s exactly how a garage should sound. Some of our neighbor’s were less enthusiastic. Our house had nicknamed one such neighbor Dan-archy (his real name was Dan). Danarchy had a whole lot of aggressive bumper stickers on his car to let you know how he really felt about guns and politics and tax rates and to what degree he felt the media was being honest with him. I’ve found, as a general rule of thumb, the more bumper stickers someone has on their car, the less you need to know about them. This is especially true for aggressive bumper stickers.

Our good friend Dan worked as a garbage man but, according to his bumper stickers, he would have been a perfect fit as a soldier in the army of some country already in the midst of a brutal and senseless war. One brutal and senseless war Dan was not happy with was the one occurring in our garage every time the Kettle Drivers practiced. Our noisy garage didn’t belong anywhere near Dan’s idea of a perfect world. And when Dan was finally at, what I imagine was, his wits end, he had a talk with me to let me know playtime was over. He started off by telling me how he had once been young too and how he listened to punk music sometimes and how he understands, he gets it. He kept saying that, “Listen, I get it.” He was telling me how he didn’t want to be the neighbor to tell us to turn it down, that he gets it, but, well, turn it down fuckers.

It didn’t stop with the garage—the Kettle Drivers have played a lot of shows they shouldn’t have been allowed to play. They once played out in front of a movie theater in a shopping center in Irvine. The City of Irvine is a planned community. This isn’t so different from a planned pregnancy in its ability to be financially prudent and utterly dull. The shopping center the Kettle Drivers were playing in was the area the Irvine planners had designated as an appropriate place for yuppies to spend money. A Kettle Drivers performance in that same shopping center was an unplanned pregnancy. While the Kettle Drivers were playing, an old man in a ‘Vietnam Veteran’ hat watched in disgust. Greg was playing around with the feedback from his guitar. I’ll admit, it was really loud. I could see this unasked question on the old veteran’s tart-scrunched face: I fought for this?!

There was another time when the Kettle Drivers played an art walk in Santa Ana. The art walk had multiple stages. The Kettle Drivers didn’t get assigned to play one of the main stages—the Kettle Drivers were supposed to play at the very end of the art walk, past the food trucks, on Harbor Boulevard. I imagine the organizers of the event planned this—“Put the noisy bands on Harbor so they won’t bother the art.” Well, “Bollocks to that,” said the Kettle Drivers, “we’ll play Harbor!” So they did.

There wasn’t hardly anyone at the Harbor stage and it was freezing cold outside. It was still one of my favorite shows (probably for those same reasons). There were a few other bands that played with them and they all played for each other and for the oncoming traffic and for the unsuspecting pedestrians. I remember we had a friend named Piers who played bass in one of the other bands assigned to the Harbor stage. Piers had a broken leg at the time so he played his set sitting in a folding chair. Piers was nearly forty and liked to headbang. It was a funny thing watching Piers headbanging in his chair, with his broken leg, on Harbor Boulevard, blasting out bass notes—because that’s exactly who Piers is (Piers is as crazy as chicken skin). I’ve been subjected to many Piers lectures about the hundreds of nuanced ways the government is trying to control me, spy on me, and poison my water. Don’t ask Piers about chemtrails. It’s almost beautiful, in a way, to see someone so passionate and so fully convinced about something nowadays. By the end of his lecture you would sometimes find yourself wondering if the government really was after you, just because of all the childishly fevered passion behind it. God bless Piers.

I meant to make this article short and digestible but I can see I’ve already made it as long as a Piers lecture (and nearly as indigestible). I could continue on with Kettle Driver stories like this forever. The point, which I didn’t articulate very well, is that it takes a lot of cold shows on Harbor before you ever get good at anything. I think a lot of people today hold on to a belief that there are natural-born-geniuses in this world and that natural-born-geniuses don’t have have to try hard at anything. You just have to show up at a singing audition for a reality TV show and let the chips fall where they may. I can’t think of a more degrading paradigm. The idea that you can’t achieve anything without the consent of Coca-Cola and a major broadcasting network. Or the contrary, that the people who are good at something never had to fret a day in their life about getting good. So here are your marching orders: go work on something you like for a really long time and enjoy doing it, even when it’s as boring as Irvine and as unglamorous as a garage.

April 20, 2013

Pollock Jackson, A Life (or, how to become unreasonably wealthy without exerting more energy than it takes to tie a pair of shoes)

I originally wanted to title my memoir Pollock Jackson, Comfortably Poor. Then I realized Americans don’t want to buy books about how to be, or how to become, poor. Americans want to buy books about how to become unreasonably wealthy without exerting more energy than it takes to tie a pair of shoes. (We would also like to lose weight and thankfully there are books for that too). So I ruminated—what would my memoir—a memoir that could very well change the world—be called? Six excruciating weeks later I settled on my title: Pollock Jackson, A Life. It’s a great title (I think) and it will sell (I pray). I thought of it all on my own. Sadly, the rest hasn’t come out quite as nicely as I’d hoped. It’s a pulpy bulk. It wanders. It spends a lot of time trying to figure out how my life (I) got from point a to point b. It’s tedious and boring (and in that respect it imitates the subject very well). I’ve submitted seventeen different drafts to seventeen different publishers and I’m hoping to receive seventeen exactly-the-same rejection letters (and I won’t mind the rejection. I love it when a very famous person gets to name all the people who told them they would never be very famous. I will keep the rejection in my back pocket). It’s unlikely that anyone will even bother responding to my submissions. It’s unlikely anyone will read them at all. My best shot is if some stoned editor confuses my name with the abstract painter Jackson Pollock (who never wrote a memoir on account of him killing himself first). He was very famous. I’m not famous and likely won’t ever be. I would hate being famous but I like fantasizing about it. It’s a deranged fantasy. Sometimes I’ll watch airplanes passing overhead, hoping their engines won’t fail, but watching just in case they do. I’ve never seen an airplane engine fail and am glad they very rarely do. Even so, I watch. My airplane-watching and my fame-fantasies are approximately the same disease. It is hereditary. If my family became famous for anything it should be for our many diseases (that we have collected and perfected so carefully over the years). If you took my family’s DNA under the microscope it would look something like burnt macaroni and cheese. Our gray matter, under the same microscope, would resemble stale pastrami.

Anyways, to start my memoir. I’ve worked in an office all my life and they don’t really care so much whether my family is whacko or not—they need bodies. I hate telling people I work in an office and I hate the town my office is in and I hate feeling like a body and I want out of my job. (Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?) When I was first hired I felt tempted to tell the other people in my office about Uncle Jerry. Uncle Jerry was my mom’s uncle who successfully jumped off a bridge. I would say he jumped to his demise if he had—he hadn’t. He had become fully demised well before his jumping off of the bridge. The reason Uncle Jerry jumped off the bridge was simple: imaginary people were after him. When I was younger, in elementary school to be exact, there was a school program for kids called The Imagination Machine. The program taught kids that imagination was perhaps the most powerful force on the planet, more powerful than gravity or nuclear fission, and that it should be exercised liberally. I can’t remember them ever mentioning a bridge. The saddest part is that not even someone with a liberal imagination like Uncle Jerry could imagine what the imaginary people would do to him if they ever did catch him. For all he knows they could have just as well been trying to tickle him to death. Since the people who were after Uncle Jerry didn’t exist they didn’t have to hold jobs (like I do), but if they had existed they would have probably worked in an office or for the government. Uncle Jerry suspected the latter. The one job I wouldn’t trade my office job for is Uncle Jerry’s coroner. Imagine what that guy must have thought when he had to fill out that paperwork. When he looked down at the form and read,

Cause of Death:___________________.

How long and empty that line must have seemed. Uncle Jerry was a paranoid schizophrenic who took hard drugs and swan dives off of bridges—what exactly was the cause of all that? Heaven knows.

Anyways, I didn’t tell anyone in my office about Uncle Jerry (even though I wanted to). I also didn’t tell them about Grandma Sue (who thought pills were the yummiest things on the planet) or Uncle Red (who thought alcohol was the yummiest thing on the planet). I also didn’t mention how all three of those people had left notes. Right off the bat people know what I mean by that because our society has become so lazy that no one takes the time to leave a note anymore except for one reason (common courtesy has gone straight out the window).

To be fair, the people in my office are crazy in their own way (in a less entertaining way). The people in my family are crazy like wet cats. The people in my office are crazy like albino salamanders. Nothing can illustrate how crazy the people in my office are better than the office bathroom. There is one rule in our office bathroom and it is known and abided by all office employees (except me). The rule is: don’t touch ANYTHING in the bathroom or you might die!

The people in my office use paper towels to open doors. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them hold their breath while they’re in there. Recently, a motion-activated paper towel dispenser was installed so that you don’t even have to touch the paper towel dispenser—you simply have to wave your hand in front of the device as if it were a magic lamp and your only wish was to never have to say the word eww again.

There are disposable toilet seat covers in every bathroom stall. They look like victorian era doilies—only they are meant to keep germs from crawling up your asshole. The box storing the doilies says: Provided by the Management, for your protection. In one stall I used a Sharpie to cross this out and wrote: Orwell was here.

March 30, 2013

Behold the Bridegroom!

Is a rose by any other name not as sweet? Only someone very gay like William Shakespeare could say that. And as it turns out, he got it very wrong—marriage by any other name can cause quite a stink. But I don’t blame the Bard for getting it wrong, he didn’t know what a Christian Fundamentalist was. In case you don’t know, a Christian Fundamentalist is a person who is right about everything, all the time. The Christian Fundamentalists know they’re right about everything all the time because it’s all written down in a book. This is very handy because books can be trusted, all the time.

One thing that surprises me, considering how gaga these Christian Fundamentalists are about things written down in books, is that many of them haven’t read any book other than their own. I guess that just goes to show how good their book really is (although I do wish, for their own amusement, they’d try a few others. Just off the top of my head I can think of one they might like in which a princess kisses a frog. Then the frog turns into a prince. Then the prince and the princess get married—JUST LIKE THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO). Anyways, I’m not a Christian Fundamentalist, but I have read their book and I must admit I really like it (I’m a sucker for a happy ending). But reading their book didn’t help me understand why the Christian Fundamentalists are so defensive about the word marriage (their word marriage). In fact, reading their book only makes me more confused on the subject, I’ll tell you why. Towards the end of the book the reader is introduced to a nice fellow named Jesus who is constantly doing terribly nice things for other people. Jesus’s story unfolds in such a way that you can’t help rooting for the poor bastard. I’ve never rooted for anyone so hard in all my life. At some points in the story I actually felt a burning sensation under my belt like I was going to piss my pants. This was no accident—the Author knew exactly what He was doing when He was writing about Jesus. He spelled it out for us: we are supposed to fall madly in love with Jesus—he is supposed to be our bridegroom. That’s the word the book actually uses, bridegroom. I’m supposed to love this Jesus fellow as if he were my husband. Now…as a man, this begs the question: can I get into heaven if I’m only in a civil-union with Jesus? Or what about a domestic-partnership? And even more importantly, considering the hard economic times we’re all going through: what’s the tax code like in heaven? Can me and Jesus file jointly?

This warbly rant might be giving you a clearer picture of why, as I listen to news reports about our nation’s marriage debate, I can’t help but get the feeling that I’m really watching a second-grade spelling bee. The giddy parents have filled the auditorium to watch as three-hundred-million soft second-grade brains feebly guess their way through three-letter words they’ve never heard before. And quite fittingly, outside of William Shakespeare and second-grade spelling bee’s, I don’t think I’ve heard more words that no one ever uses than I have in the past week. Sanctity. The sanctity of marriage. I don’t have any idea what this word means (and I suspect no one does). The dictionary seems to think it means ‘the state of being holy, sacred, or saintly.’ The dictionary hasn’t met a lot of the married people I know. The dictionary hasn’t met my uncle, he’s currently living in my aunt’s garage. He left the family when his two kids were still young—he’s dead to them now. Well, his two children say that, but I don’t know how dead a person can be when they are so obviously alive in the garage. My aunt and her two kids wish he wasn’t in the garage, that he wasn’t allowed in there, but he is, legally. My aunt and uncle didn’t technically ever get divorced so now they both have to adhere to the sanctity of marriage. My uncle doesn’t have a job so he passes his time at the local library, researching how he can sue my aunt for money. The sanctity of marriage is really driving my aunt up a wall.

But back to my spelling bee analogy—we have all of us Americans up on stage, trying to spell words like cat and tree and gay, and then we have the judges who are supposed to tell us if we spelled them right. Not just judges but supreme court justices (try spelling that!). Now, if I were a subversive gay and wanted to make a mockery of the institution of marriage and the institution of the United States both at the same time, I couldn’t come up with a finer way of doing it than by having nine old people, nine straight old people, dress up in black robes and debate who is and who is not allowed to use a word. It sounds like a Scrabble game gone amuck. Nine straight old people who all went through many years of law school at some of the most challenging and expensive law schools in all existence. I wonder if they’re thinking, all that hard work really paid off! Perhaps the word they should really be debating, instead of marriage, is fundamentalism—a word that contains both fundamental and fun yet so obviously has nothing to do with either one.

Why do I even bother getting worked up over any of this? I shouldn’t and probably wouldn’t if my sister were not gay. But she is. So I care a hell of a lot more than any single straight male probably should. She told me three years ago. When she first told me I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. It felt like something big was going to happen—a bomb was supposed to go off. As it turns out, nothing happened. The only noticeable effect her coming out has had on my life is that some people, thinking they are being sensitive or respectful, now whisper the word gay when they’re talking to me. Like this: (gay). I don’t know why they do that but they do. Maybe some people are afraid of that word—maybe it turns some people’s armpits into the jungles of the French Guyana. I don’t know. Sometimes they whisper (girlfriend) too, but not always. They usually try not to use the word girlfriend at all. Instead they magically transform into verbose poets, using phrases like significant other and committed partner—phrases that aren’t nearly as offensive as (girlfriend). People also think, because I’m the brother of a certified-gay, that I have insights into issues that aren’t accessible to people who, so pedestrianly, only fornicate with the opposite sex. They feel safe asking me questions they wouldn’t dare ask her. They always ask them like this: Have you ever asked her about _______? I would love to know what she thinks about it. After they say this they look at me like I have two magic eight-balls rolling around in my eye-sockets. I usually don’t have a very good answer (TRY AGAIN LATER). I don’t ask my sister hardly anything about her love life. I wouldn’t ask her about her love life if she dated boys either. And she doesn’t ask me about my love life (although, to be fair, I don’t give her much to ask about). Lately people want to know: Have you ever asked her about gay marriage? I would love to know what she thinks about it. When people ask me this I am reminded of a trip I took to visit my sister when she was living in Washington, DC. On this trip I didn’t ask her about gay marriage but we did visit the Holocaust Museum together. There was one exhibit I distinctly remember which displayed all the shoes collected from a concentration camp. Hundreds-of-thousands of shabby grey shoes. Shoes without logos on the sides of them. Shoes that used to belong to feet. Shoes that are now footless. Homeless. Piled waist-high in an endless glass display. For every two shoes you saw, one human being had died. It knocked the wind out of you. Now, when I saw this, as I stood there with the wind knocked out of me, I didn’t start looking around for a Jew, or a brother of a Jew, so that I might ask them how does this make you feel? While I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to wear a pair of those shoes, I didn’t need anyone to tell me that something so obviously sad, was in fact, sad. This is the same reason why I don’t ask my sister how she feels about the traveling circus of humanity telling her she isn’t allowed to get married—I would feel fucking dumb asking the question.

What I really wish is that everyone in the world could have a gay little sister. A gay little sister that you care about and love exactly the same whether she wants to marry a woman or a man or no one at all. A gay little sister you look forward to seeing on weekends. A gay little sister that you can laugh with when you talk about growing up together. I wish everyone could have a gay little sister so that everyone could see nothing happens when you find out you have a gay little sister—that having a gay little sister is eerily similar to just having a little sister.

March 4, 2013

Hugh Carpet Looks For Some Prime Jive

Prime jive. Hugh had heard of it before and now that he was in the city he wanted to find some. New York was allegedly bursting at the seems with prime jive. And I’m not talking about coffee shop writers or leather-loving scarf rockers—I’m talking about the real thing: PRIME JIVE.

Unfortunately, Hugh Carpet wasn’t a homosexual. Unfortunate because there was only one place left on the planet earth where you could find even one ounce of prime jive: gay bars. Well anyway, that’s exactly where Hugh ended up.

Sitting at the bar, surrounded by bucking denim bronco’s, Hugh became nervous. His stomach gurgled with pale yellow gases and this let Hugh know he was on his way to some prime jive.

Hugh sat in the corner of the bar, relentlessly ordering black and tans. Hugh felt this was just the drink for a straight man to order in a gay bar. It let the boys know he wasn’t there for any bullwhacky but also that he didn’t mean them any offense. Well anyways, after a few black and tans (more than three) Hugh started to forget all about bullwhacky and he noticed a man tucked into the other side of the bar, almost mirroring himself. Aha! thought Hugh, Here was a good man! As Hugh sauntered his way over to the good man he tried to size him up. What was his weapon? Paint? Film? The written worrrrd? Hugh couldn’t decide and was excited to find out how this man was helping humanity.

The bulb above the cornered man was half-dead, emitting a tired light. Hugh imagined that half-dead lightbulb being very similar to the human experience of glaucoma. He felt proud for thinking that (he thought it was a very artistic thought). A row of bar stools, topped with red leather cushions, lined up empty next to the cornered man. Hugh straddled himself up onto one of those stools and threw his finger into the air. His finger was supposed to let the bartender know that he was ready for another black and tan. The bartender saw and understood this signal but pretended he didn’t. Hugh hadn’t been tipping, so now Hugh had to wait. No matter, this gave Hugh a good opening, ‘can you believe the service here?’ The cornered man responded, ‘eh?’

‘What’r you in for,’ the black and tans were making Hugh wish he were a Hollywood star. He’d regret it in the morning, but not until then.

‘Eh?’ replied the cornered man.

‘I mean, hey, what’s your name?’ Hugh was still holding his finger in the air. It looked like he had a question or had just remembered something.

‘Bradley Putz,’ said the cornered man.

‘So what are you here for?’

‘I’m just here,’ Bradley Putz had stopped looking at Hugh, had started staring straight ahead as he had all night long before the Hugh Carpet inquisition began.

‘Hey, what’s the matter with ya, you shellshocked?’

‘Eh? Nah.’

‘Well I’ll tell ya what,’ Hugh noticed his finger in the air, wondered who had put it there, and humbly lowered his arm, ‘I’ll tell ya what, I was just as shellshocked, back in California, but I’ll tell ya, you can get through it.’

‘Ya?’ Bradley Putz wasn’t listening to Hugh.

‘For me what it took was me shellshocking the hell out of my own,’ Hugh was starting to say things that would make him hate himself in the morning, ‘self…’

Bradley Putz interrupted, ‘hey, you’re not gay are you?’

Hugh had forgotten he had a cover to uphold and he had blown that cover to smithereens, ‘well, no, but you know…’ Hugh hoped Bradley Putz was about to ask him about prime jive. Hugh wanted to know everything there was to know about prime jive.

‘Then why the hell are you hitting on me?’ asked Bradley in a very tired way. Bradley looked like the only man in the bar who wanted to take a nap.

Hugh suddenly noticed Bradley was also the only one in the bar, aside from himself, not wearing denim. ‘Oh, I’m not gay,’ said Hugh as the bartender came over with two black and tans for the new couple. Hugh lowered his voice to a whisper so the bartender might not catch wind of his cover, that he wasn’t gay, ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘Why the hell do you want to talk to me then?’ Bradley was exasperated, inviting Hugh to leave without anger.

‘It’s just that I have this sharp perception that most people don’t have, and I could tell you might know a thing or two about…’ Hugh was going to hate himself in the morning more than he ever had before, ‘prime jive?’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Bradley paused and then reconsidered, ‘yeah, actually it’s funny you mention that.’

‘It is?’ Hugh was joy on high.

‘Yeah, I know all about prime jive.’ Bradley assumed prime jive was some gay term for handjob or cocaine or any number of other ways a man could defile his willy or his noggin. ‘But it ain’t here.’

‘No?’ Hugh looked like a puppy who had just pissed the carpet. Bradley Putz was about to hold his nose in it.

‘It’s all the way back in California.’

You might think Hugh would have left after that, but he had too many black and tans sloshing around in his belly to let him do anything like that—anything that might improve his morning morale. Bradley had decided to tell him why he was at the gay bar: Bradley Putz’ fiancee, whom he loved, had slept with one of his close friends. Both his fiancee and his close friend assured Bradley that they were too liquored up to remember any of it (except for it happening) and that he shouldn’t take it so seriously. In fact, Bradley’s fiancee still wanted to get married. Bradley had a hard time not taking things seriously in general so it didn’t surprise anyone that he was taking this seriously as well. And he was in a bad spot because his fiancee lived with him, so whenever he came home from work she would be there, pleading. At first he tried going out to bars (regular old straight bars) just to get away from her but he had some kind of scent on him. You know those scents that are living and color-filled, only perceptible to women? Bradley’s scent was like that. Women hit on him left right and center. Bradley didn’t want to be hit on at all. Bradley wanted to try to turn himself asexual. That’s what led him to the gay bar, he told Hugh, it kept him away from his fiancee and no one noticed his scent. Every few minutes, while Bradley told Hugh about how he ended up in a gay bar, Bradley would throw in, for no reason at all, that his fiancee was probably banging his friend right this very moment and in his own bed! ‘Is that what you mean by prime jive?’ Bradley asked. Hugh could only put his hand to the back of his neck and look away—it was the prayer he had learned as the grade school dunce—praying not to be called on to answer a question in front of the class.

It also turned out that Bradley wasn’t an artist of any kind. He was a maintenance man for a building on the upper east end. The upper east end was full of artists and so was the building Bradley Putz’ worked for. Hugh thought this might make Bradley the perfect person to understand the core meaning of art. Hugh almost asked Bradley what does it mean to be human, but the black and tans were settling out and he was starting to realize how much he would hate himself in the morning. Bradley didn’t wait for a question to let Hugh know how he felt about artists: he hated them. They don’t know how to do anything. It’s a state of emergency whenever a door jams or a lightbulb goes out. They’d be better off staying at home with their mommies. Hugh was surprised someone like Bradley Putz, someone at the doorstep of misery himself, could hate artists. Though, Hugh did agree that artists usually did miss their mommies very much. Hugh missed his mommy for a moment, then asked Bradley how, if not for art, he gets through? Bradley said, ‘I’m sitting in a gay bar talking to a man who’s wondering about prime jive. Is that what you call getting through? With that, Bradley waved to close his tab, paid his bill, and left. Hugh tried to follow him for about a block or two, asking him more questions about art and getting through, until the a clock chimed twelve times, signaling it was midnight and, like a Cinderella of self-hatred, Hugh became himself again and trudged home with a sobering brain that was trying to make a self-destructive dive towards the pavement below.

February 23, 2013

How Hugh Carpet Feels About RELIGION [a very small nibble from a very long short story]

Here’s what Hugh Carpet thinks the Bible is filled with: higgledy piggledy. It angered him that it’s pages were supposed to be filled with so much hope and all he could find was a desert of nearly unintelligible misery. Especially the story of Job—the sorry story of Job, Hugh thought. Hugh had the perfect parable for how he felt about all of this.

Back in elementary school Hugh’s class had been taken to an actual archeological dig site. The teacher, Mr. Norris, told it to them just like that—Class, we’ll be going to an ACTUAL archeological dig site! When the kid’s in Hugh’s class were told where they were going, to an ACTUAL archeological dig site!, they went bonkers drunk on thoughts of dinosaurs and cavemen and maybe even a wooly mammoth. When the students got to the ACTUAL archeological dig site they sobered up hard. A bunch of rocks with not so much as a chicken bone among them. One kid, feeling confused and deceived, asked Mr. Norris a very honest question.

‘Mr. Norris, where are the dinosaurs?’

Mr. Norris started telling a very long story about geology, trying to convince the kids that a living earth was even more exciting than an extinct dinosaur. But the kid wasn’t gonna keel over without a fight.

‘So there’s no dinosaurs?’

Mr. Norris thought he was ready for this, ‘well no, there aren’t any dinosaurs, but what we have here is even bette…’

‘It’s just a bunch of rocks guys!’ the kid sirened his bland revelation to his peers.

So there weren’t any dinosaurs, but Mr. Norris still had the upper hand over Hugh Carpet’s elementary school class—an ace up his sleeve. Mr. Norris was an adult!—the teacher and overlord of these twenty deflated kids and he was going to strong arm them into watching rocks, even if they did think it was the silliest thing they’d ever heard of.

The ACTUAL archeologist didn’t fair much better. He desperately pleaded for the kids honest interest. He explained how there were different layers of rock, and from just a few patterns in a sample he was able to tell if it was, say, one million years old, or, …he paused for dramatic effect…, a few hundred million! The kids had no honest interest in one hundred million years if it didn’t have any dinosaurs in it. So all the kids went home that day resigned to wipe away the day with no dinosaurs from their memories. They all did a pretty good job of it except for Hugh.

And that was Hugh’s parable. Hugh felt the same way about those limestone rocks as he did about the Bible. A lot of people would plead with him to take a look at those leather-bound pages, to take a closer look, and Hugh would look. He would look to the point of exhaustion. He didn’t care if this book was a chunk of compressed wisdom from the bedrock of man—it didn’t have any dinosaurs (I mean this figuratively, although, the literal Bible also doesn’t have many dinosaurs in it).

So Hugh hated the Bible—big whoop. Almost everyone hates the Bible (and it must be a pretty detestable book if everyone hates it without having even read it!).

February 2, 2013

Luke 6:29 or Bust

Let me set one thing straight: our country barbecued the Vietnamese because we didn’t agree with their social system.

No, actually it’s slightly better than that: our country barbecued the Vietnamese because we didn’t agree with the USSR’s social system.

And here’s the punchline: we dig freedom.

But I’m boring you. I can see it all over your face. Why the hell is he talking about Vietnam? Doesn’t he know that happened a long time ago? Everyone knows Vietnam was the bad war. (Hey, you can’t get’em all right!) And since that war ended we’ve made quite a little comeback. We’ve had hot wars and cold wars. Near wars and far wars. All kinds of wars! And while some were admittedly better than others, they were all at least above average. Especially the ones near gulfs (I don’t know why it is, but those ones always end up being a real hoot).

So maybe we really are getting better. Maybe I’m getting upset over nothing. But then I think of our current war—I don’t know what to call it. The Twenty Year War? Adventures In Arabia? It reminds me of the fog in San Francisco. Coming and going without schedule. Rhythmless focus-less-ness. Clouding and unclouding everything. Then I think of the war as a living thing—as a fat little boy in a balloon store with a pin. I think of that pin popping those arab balloon heads. Pop! Pop! Pop! Maybe it’s a snipers bullet or maybe it’s a missile launched from a military yacht parked somewhere far away. Pop! I’m grateful that we have the bravest soldiers in the world.

How did we end up like this—like spoiled lardy pin-poppers? I remember back in the 1900’s there was a country called ‘Germany’. They went mad for a little while because they didn’t have enough food to go around and it made them feel ashamed of themselves. They had breadlines. When they went mad they didn’t like popping balloons so much as they liked baking the balloons. Maybe they thought bread was going to come out of the ovens. It wasn’t a pretty thing. But we don’t have breadlines. We have lines of opulence. Abundance lines. Midnight iPhone lines and video-game console lines. That’s why our carnage amazes me, I can’t find one good excuse for it. I mean, we’re a Christian nation for cryin’ out loud! Sometimes I’ll see a car driving around on the freeway, burning up that arabian crude, with two bumper stickers right next to each other:

“SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!”

“JESUS LOVES YOU!”

That always bamboozles me. I try to imagine Jesus cruising down the same freeway. I see people trying to merge in front of him and him just waving them over—relentlessly waving them over. I see a few people cutting him off and I see him keeping his cool. Maybe he even throws a peace sign. And then as he passes me I look at his bumper and for the life of me I can’t see a “Support Our Troops!” bumper sticker. Perhaps my imagination isn’t what it should be. I can maybe see one that says “HEAVEN IS FOR LOVERS”, or “JEWS DO IT BETTER”, or “YOU OWE ME ONE”, or “UNION CARPENTER”, or “LUKE 6:29 OR BUST”—but certainly not some cheerleading tagline for warriors.

Now where am I going with all of this? I don’t mean to suggest we’re in the middle of a new Crusade (or that the old Crusades never really ended). I don’t mean to suggest Americans are Nazi’s. I don’t mean to suggest that Jesus is a phony (although, I do mean to point out that, even after that whole incident with the cross, we still insist on abusing him to this day). What I really mean to say is very simple, I just don’t know how to get it out right. I feel like an adolescent boy trying to ask out a girl for the first time—stumbling and shaking—tumbling my thoughts around inside a heavy-load washing machine. What the adolescent boy is really trying to say is: I think I like you, and who knows, I might love you! And my plea isn’t so far off from that: can we please stop killing people we’ve never met before?

January 19, 2013

The Silence and the Monotony

My primary problem is that I am unhappy. This is likely a symptom of the fact that I am required to work, and worse, that the work I chose to do was engineering. The primary problem with this is that I am not an engineer (contrary to what my income tax records might suggest). Additionally, I am surrounded by people who are engineers and because they are engineers, they enjoy being engineers. They like calculators and shortened weekends and to argue. They argue in a friendly way about problems that they themselves have created. They take pride in discovering problems because it ensures that they will be able to continue on being engineers, who’s primary purpose is solving problems. Sometimes I wonder if they are happier to create a problem or solve one. At any rate, they are happy with either situation. Seeing other people who are happy with their work usually makes me more unhappy. This alludes to a longer problem I’ve had (all of my problems seem to be born of other problems I have failed to solve). I’ve never known what I wanted to do, or be. I’ve been very patient and this has taught me patience isn’t worth a piece of shit.

Recently I’ve discovered I was probably supposed to be a writer. I wasn’t exactly a great detective in figuring this out, it took me a very long time and I still have many major doubts and concerns. The one thing I am sure of is that becoming a writer is exactly the thing to make me more miserable than I currently am. The primary problem with writing is that it isn’t an occupation, career, or a job. The good thing about this is: that’s exactly what I’m looking for. Not working sounds perfectly agreeable. The problem with this is: it doesn’t get me any money. I don’t like money but there are a lot of wacky rules in place that require me to have it (some people even take classes in college on the wacky rules and then graduate and get paid to study and manipulate the wacky rules—which is probably a better job than most, if you’re a good appreciator of irony). I wish money were more like oxygen. I need oxygen just like I need money but I’ve found it to be much more readily available.

There are other problems with me becoming a writer other than concerns about money and the wacky rules that require it. Chiefly, I don’t smoke cigarettes. I know, I know—I could start any day. But that’s the thing with me, I’m lazy and I’ll probably never start (even though I know every great writer does). Also, I don’t know how to speak french. I took four years of it in high school (which is perhaps one of the many missed clues in my history that was meant to tell me I was supposed to be a writer), but I don’t remember hardly any of it. I can say how’s it goin’, but I can’t say it properly. I say it, how is it going. As an aside, I think french is really a stupid language to learn. It’s only really used in one antiquated country and I suspect it’s only still alive because poets and artists really like antiquated, useless, and unimportant things (otherwise why would they carry on all day writing down their own stupid thoughts and drawing pictures of things that already exist?).

Another important detractor is where I live. Nobody’s ever going to create any art in Costa Mesa. Our city has a lot of minorities (probably more than we have majorities) but they aren’t the good ones. They don’t commit much crime and they like to go to church a lot. Most of them speak spanish but nobody calls them latinos. They call them hispanics when they call them anything at all. Hispanics are much better behaved than latinos. Latinos like to protest about labor rights and drink before they go to work. I think it’s probably because, deep down, they’re upset about being called latinos when none of them know how to speak latin, and wouldn’t know what roman numerals were if it weren’t for the Superbowl. We’ve never had any protests in Costa Mesa.

We also don’t have any tall buildings. I think there’s a city ordinance against it. There is one tall building, maybe 15 stories, that was built before the ordinance. Nobody knows what it is (many suspect it is a mental institution, or worse, a home for old people) and it can be seen from everywhere in the city. Whenever I see that building it reminds me that I could never make it as a writer. A writer needs a proper setting in which to write. A writer needs to know what a tall building looks like. A writer needs to know how a man feels when he looks up at a very tall building. I don’t know a damned thing about how a tall building makes a person feel. I hardly even use elevators (and when I have the choice of an escalator or stairs I almost always take the stairs because I’m afraid of becoming too sedentary and developing a heart condition in old age). I know, I know—I could move to a big city. San Francisco isn’t so far away and it probably has tall enough buildings to write about. But I told you, I’m unmotivated. I would take up cigarettes before I moved away. Also, the city scares me. There’s the crime and the muggings and worst of all, the very high rent. This would lead me straight back to my money problem because I fear (to the point of certainty) that I wouldn’t be able to make a single cent as a writer and this clashes, very harshly, with very high rent.

And my list isn’t done. I have no creativity (and am starting to suspect no one really does). The primary problem with this is, I’ve been told, writers are supposed to be very creative people. A good writer should be bursting with creativity, spewing over with creativity. All of my writing is simply a very bad repetition of things that actually happened and very little spewing is involved. As I see it, I am really nothing more than a courtroom stenographer who is very hard of hearing and afraid of losing his job. Where is the nobility in that! To prove my point, I’ll show you something I wrote recently. It’s not creative and I didn’t think it was worth the time to edit:

My sister was asking my mom to come to the mall with her. To do something with her. My mom was wearing sweats, a bathrobe, and sneakers and didn’t want to go because she didn’t want to get dressed. An argument ensued. I watched the argument and then entered it. It wasn’t a mean argument, it was a fun one. My mom was upset because, while she didn’t want to get dressed and go to the mall, she would be even more upset if my sister went by herself and got killed while she was there (or on her way). We ruminated about made up statistics on drive by’s and traffic accidents and all sorts of other ways a person can die. You’re more likely to be shot at a mall than attacked by a shark. I was instigating my mom because she usually has some pretty funny things to say about made up facts. It depends on who you are. If you go swimming in the ocean everyday, and never go to the mall, you’re more likely to get the shark attack. She really didn’t want to go to the mall. Even though her fact was also made up, she was probably right. I personally did go into the ocean a lot, and almost never went to the mall. I’m more likely to be shot by a shark than to visit a mall. I said it in a way so that it sounded like a proper statistic. In your case, you’re more likely to be shot by a disgruntled employee than attacked by a shark. I work in an office so my mom was probably right again, even though it was, again, a made up fact. I am more likely to BE the disgruntled employee. We all laughed. My mom ended up staying home while my sister went to the mall. It was fortunately a Saturday so I didn’t have to go to my office.

December 11, 2012

Balboa, CA

I laid on the dune, drugged by the spring day. It was the season just before the beaches were of any interest to anyone but the loners and we had it all to ourselves. The dune was made of a very fine grain of dusty platinum and was patched with dark green aloe vera. My dune was inclined to keep me in a sublimely balanced state of falling into sleep and waking – some sort of awake-REM cycle. A steady stream of mist, a mist of finer grain than the dune, brushed off the sea and kissed over me. The sea was billowing, fighting with the air, and it felt as if the sunbeams themselves were billowing as they were carried by on streams through my hair. Nothing was happening and there was no sound other than the whooshing of elements just described. I felt closer to my mother’s womb than I had in a long time, even more so than from my bed on a rain-cancelled day. With so much beautiful nothingness aerating around me, I wondered what I could fill it with. It was nearly a divine thought in itself – to be given a canvas and a will, what a lucky gift! My tendencies were practiced to reflex towards memories. But I realized I could only tarnish the memories, by mixing them into this fortunate present I found myself, or, alternatively, could bring a premature end to the state I found myself in – as a trained painter knows, one color too many will turn all to mud. And I found the less I thought about anything, the greater the strength of the wind and the greater the easing of life – that is to say, the greater the easing of burdens. Didn’t it make fantastic sense! I didn’t want to think about it, because to think about it was to argue against the result, but I had to, just once, acknowledge the surprise I’d found – even in thinking of what to think of, I had created juxtaposition in my mind – that creating a decision automates the creation of a problem. In just the way the release of intercourse causes a child.

My problem was I didn’t know how to stop my thought, as I had practiced my whole life to the contrary, and I felt dopey trying to instantaneously turn myself into an eastern philosopher or a yoga teacher or, if not those, perhaps place myself into the shoes of an addicted shopper. I needed to vegetablize. The wind provided an indication of my progress. A warm stream would build and hiss upon me as I surrendered my way to no-thought. But every time I became near to, what hinted at, a precipice, I would wonder what was coming at that singularity and what it might be like. Wooden deck chairs were launched into sides of brick buildings behind me as my maelstrom grew, and there upon the walls they were pinned with all the other loose debris of beach-society, until my failure came and the winds receded in less than an instant and all the wall-stuck trash remembered its slavery to gravity and fell to the ground in straight lines. Paradoxically, the absence of the ripping wind was louder than its presence. My ears filled with a droning ring that soared above the octaves of the birds to the immusical world of computing – droning and chirping. I felt disappointed but knew not why. How could I overcome this game? And with that question came the others and they all dog-piled. Is this a game? With who am I playing? Can there be a winner? But to the last question there was an answer – yes. I could not explain it but I knew something was being done wrong, and I also knew, once righted, there would be reward.

When I realized I hadn’t moved in a very long time I felt a burr of suspicion chase through me. From my star-like adornment upon my dune, I dug in my elbows and spun my head to see the mess left behind me. I didn’t feel proud and wondered if I had done something wrong. From my everlasting human marriage to the morbid, I wondered if there was death buried in those piles of fallen debris. It wasn’t until my eyes were put on the scent, like two darting bloodhounds, that I noticed it – everyone was gone! I don’t mean the relative form of everyone, in which I might refer to everyone I knew, or most people as compared to a busy summer day, but the absolute – every ONE! And I don’t mean gone as in they had stepped out, or that they lay in a pile of deceased rot, gone from breathing humanity, but again the absolute – vanished into never existing! This caused a panic worse than death. Every piece of feeling I felt was utterly natural and beyond explanation. What had I done, and what would come of me! With the wind knocked out of the wind, the game had to move in a different direction. A cloud covered the sun and those cheerful bouncing sunbeams were replaced by a still grey air. The warmth started to fall out of the sky and I was left burrowing myself into my dune where some warmth was still trapped from my ecstatic wind-game.

My sand blanket leaked out its warmth so quickly it simulated pain as it burned across my skin. I tried to return to thinking of nothing, but this proved impossible with these snakes of hot pain slithering along my body. When my temples felt as though they might blast out from internal pressure – as if my blood has boiled intravenously and was now steaming through the pipes that wrapped my brain – I tried to think of something in place of the pain. My attempts were embarrassingly inadequate – like the thoughts a young boy might scramble through while trying to keep his cool in front of a girl – baseball, food, weather. Then, without effort, a word was sent to me, mother, and my response, audibly, was please, and the pain was gone. It might have happened the other way round, with the pain leaving and then that angelic message, as time and sequence don’t concern divinity.

Had I performed my first prayer? Had it worked? From my basking in physical relief I was able to raise my head to look over the ocean again and there she was, my mother. She was not in a physical form and my words are only able to describe what forms she was not. She was not a ghost, she was not a hologram, she was not a thought, and she was not a dream. She was not transparent and she was not opaque. The only English words I have that come anywhere close are, Manifest Memory. I had great understanding of her through the abstract of that vision. Her form changed shape rapidly, as though her history was not pinned to a time line but instead her time had been rolled up into one big ball of laundry, so that any one instant in time could tumble with any other regardless of sequence. The lights rolled with the darks, the youth with the aged. The whole thing was entirely unearthly and yet surprisingly comprehensible. What pleased me most was, through this heightened sensation of comprehension, I was able to discern one great paradox from my Manifest Mother – that she was both the Life-giver and the Bringer of Peace. Then she spoke:

Remember, my son, all that was before you.

I waited expecting more but her instruction was over. If there was anyone I could trust through this trial, it was my own mother, and so I set myself to remembering. I expected, like all times before, to fall into a pile of feathers, a dreamy syrup of time-past – frolicking through the bless-ed chosen memories, but all I found was alarm. It was as if someone had drilled a hole into the backside of my head while I was not looking and drained the memories from my skull. Or perhaps it was a degenerate worm or bacteria, undiscovered by man’s microscope, that feeds on the juicy parts of brain-flesh swollen with memories. Or, still perhaps, it was purely Divine and some imperceivable hand had reached down and cut the sinewy strings of intellect that connected all of my packets of memories together and made them accessible. It was silly to worry about causation at such a time, but I couldn’t help myself. Reluctantly accepting my feeble role in this new reality in which I found myself, the one in which all constants were evolving into variables, I again looked up to my mother and she spoke a second time:

Nothing born from earth will endure. Neither flesh nor intellect.

It was a strange thought, but strangeness was something I was now rapidly growing accustomed to. My memory had returned but it had left long enough to inflict the lesson. I had long ago accepted the ultimate destruction of my physical body, as I had billions of previous case-studies (disregarding one or two abnormalities) proving a man is born to die. I also accepted the ultimate destruction of my world, which had been gravely understood the moment the modern-scientific man discovered that stars, stars like our own sun, eventually explode, thus proving a star is also born to die. But through this wealth of knowledge I had managed to hold on to something that might be called, by those more spineless, a sense of spirituality. That all was not lost. That perhaps I had a soul – or that I had a minute, yet important, push on the history of time – or, in my most desperate hours, that at least I had my memories, and those surely couldn’t be stolen by the hands of crazed entropic destruction. How else can you explain man’s worship of photographs? But here was my own mother telling me these last shards of hope I held were empty presents – boxes tied with ribbons and bows, prettily wrapped, housing only empty space. The deflation brought on by my acceptance of this revelation was too great, and being only a man, I tried to re-inflate my hope. After all, she did not say there was no hope. This must mean I’ve only been on a wrong path. My mother was only trying to correct me, as she had when I would eat with my hands or when I would burp in public or when I would try to put off my homework. The re-birth of hope brought back some solace, but with it also came hope’s eternal companion, frustration. When would angels learn to speak plain english?

With that thought, a warm gust of wind hit me and forced me to remember my physical state – the half-grown man buried up to his head in sand – and as I did, almost as if I had encountered the same problem of my wind-trial, of thinking too much, it all went away, bringing normalcy back to life. It felt like I had just existed a dream that I had not entered through slumber or exited through waking. I stood up from my dune, brushed the sand off my clothes and turned to return home, without any urge to relay my experience to anyone.

November 21, 2012

Rebuttal’s Rebuttal

Where is the fairness in the world? Why are the babies dying? Why are the black folks starving in Africa? These are some of the grossest rebuttals to Christ that still exist in the thoughts of man. Gross because of how absurdly they misunderstand the man and his message. Watch his life – see the poverty, see the acts of kindness, see him refute all acts of violence (even those that condemned the swinging of swords against his enemies). Then see him flogged and strung up on a cross like an authentic Christmas ornament, and see him die at the age of thirty-three for upsetting some religious traditions. What part of this seems fair? Is that the lesson the God-made-Man was teaching? That life should be fair and resolved? Not at all. The only lesson I can see is that life should be suffered, and the greater the toleration for suffering the better.

Suffering is a thing of beauty – it is where the soul lives. Should it surprise us that soul music was delivered to us by the niggers? To suffer is a blessing. One we cannot feel, appreciate, or understand. Effort is the spring of all beautiful water and is effort ever easy? No! It is effort! To put forth effort is to suffer. Thus to live is to suffer. And life is the most beautiful of all the arts – infinite in color and tempo.

But why should this be good news – they do call them the Gospels don’t they? What can this lesson add other than a layer of misery upon our suffering? It apparently only teaches us that there is no hope for internal peace. To that I say the serenity we long for is in the realization. Once it can be not only understood, but accepted also, that our purpose is to suffer, and from our suffering comes a great thing – then it is tolerable, and not merely tolerable, but the blessing that it truly is! Why did the Christ nail himself up for humanity? Why do parents nail themselves up for their children? Is it without reward? Those are self-answering questions. A parent knows the reward and those same mechanisms of self-death can be applied to every moment of life! Suffer on!