Oh, baby!

The problem with being a serial procrastinator and congenital escapist is that your brain is hardwired to wander aimlessly, wrangling with issues and visualizing bizzarre scenarios that have ZERO productive value to you, personally...just so you can avoid doing any real work.

So in that vein, lately, owing to the fact that many people I know have had/are having babies, I've been ruminating upon this whole 'Miracle of Birth' business. Of course, being intrinsically perverse I've just gone ahead and built a whole operetta in my head featuring the exact moment that the people who've just had the babies first come to terms with the reality of the situation, hallmark-tinted glasses slipping for just that one moment.

Tinkly merry-go-round music forms the soundtrack of the scene, as they try to wrap their heads around this bundle of wrinkles: Oooh, look honey - ten fingers, ten toes, mom's eyes, dad's schlong, brain still in it's original shrink wrap packaging - perfect. blank. unbroken. Tra-lala-lala-la...

SCEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeCH!!! Craaaaashhh!
The tinkling Mozart baby music comes to a screaming halt inside their heads as the thought slams into them: Is this Mother Theresa,Jr. or Charles Manson, version.07 they're cradling here?

Freeze frame.

See that moment right there...that's pure, uncut, I-want-my-mommmmieeee(or-enough-horse-tranquilizer-to-kill-a-small-rhino,) blind, undistilled TERROR we're talking about.

That's the moment when the realization of the hopelessly wide chasm of possibilities between Option#1 and Option#2 knocks them on their asses, and then hyperventilating (and possibly dropping off into a catatonic stupor lasting 19 years or so) they attempt to come to terms with the invariable certainty that before the fat lady sings, they will have taken this bundle of pure, untapped potential and FUCKED IT UP in so complete and unique and irrevocable a fashion, as to warrant a lucky psychiatrist somewhere a very tidy beach house on the Cote D'Azure.

Welcome to parenthood, suckers. Your life as you knew it just ended.
The requiem mass has been cancelled because you'll be needing the cash...y'know - for formula, and diapers, and G.I.Joe toys, and yes, also all the beer and drugs they'll buy after raiding your unsuspecting wallet the minute they hit 15.
Have fun, good luck. You're gonna need it!

(Hey, I warned you I was a twisted fuck!)

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So it goes

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is dead. Aged 84. The semi colon has been replaced by a period. Full stop. So it goes.

Here's the thing - I never took Lit. in college. I never learned how to read the classics or anything that would qualify as 'Literature'.
Consequently, most of 'Literature' scares me. And what doesn't, it bores me.
What is the underlying motivation of the protagonist, what are the central themes, the symbolism - why is the moon like a siren's gaping maw and what does that have to do with the asscrack of eternity?
Fuck that shit, I don't know.
Kudos to my mongrel education, I barely learned to spell.

So, I stayed well away from the 'Important' writers. Writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway and Mailer and Vonnegut etc. They seemed too clever for me, too abstruse. (To my credit, I dreamed that word up...plucked it out of the ether. Thank god it actually exists and means exactly what I need it to mean.)
Funnily enough, I was right. They were clever. Sneaky, even. Because, somehow (I don't know if it was the smell and feel of ancient books bought on sun-warmed pavements or the fact that secondhand was all I could afford to buy at the time) I got hoodwinked into reading the things I had initially dismissed as 'The Classics'.

And I was surprised when in a lot of the writing I found echoes of my own thoughts. Notions that had vaguely occurred to me, only set down with such clarity and economy and wit as to give me pause and make me wonder if, perhaps, I hadn't thought those thoughts independently, but had stolen them from the author by some form of pre-osmosis.

Vonnegut was one of those. At the first reading, it was like expecting to find a dour college professor or sanctimonious, old-fart, elderly relative and instead finding an ageing beatnik who maybe listened to Greenday and had a weakness for fart jokes. I mean, the guy said Fuck...A LOT! How scary could he be?
Surely, this couldn't be 'Literature'! It didn't seem painful enough. The writing wasn't flowery or long-winded. There weren't even any 'thees and thous and thys.' And wait: he was actually funny, and irreverent, and poignant, and absurd, and ironic and gentle. And hip! And he MADE UP WORDS!!!

The first one I read was 'Cat's cradle.'

It was unexpected. It was funny and weird and profound and it took me a while to wrap my head around it.

So now the thing is, I never know if I ought to recommend Vonnegut to just anyone. Because if you come into one of his books with a defined notion of what a novel is supposed to be, then you're going to wonder about my taste and maybe even my sanity. So, the best I can do is tell you that he's weird, but in the best possible way.

Look, this guy says things like "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." and "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." and "I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool"

His characters travel back and forth in time...and no they don't save the world (though they try.) And maybe their only super power may be a slightly heightened ability to see their own specific strand in the cosmic cobweb of reality. His Heroes aren't tights and cape wearing Pin-up idols for the gay community, just worn and wearied versions of himself and his villains are time and tide and the dogma of mercenary modernism. But he manages to amass so many potent features of life and living and pack them all so diabolically into a device as simple as a few hundred ink-stained pages, bound together by string and glue.

So wait, to simplify - here's what I think his books have been about: truth and simplicity, and absurdity and seriousness and frivolity and gentleness and dystopia and hope and the past and futures and nihilism and idealism and science fiction and family and war and politics and ethics and tequila and peace and forgiveness...in short, EVERYTHING.
Go read one now.

Gratuitous yet occasion-appropriate Vonnegut quote:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." - Slaughterhouse Five.

I contain multitudes.

The chief problem in living with the schizophrenia of me is that I never know which avatar is going to be in the driver's seat at any given point.

There's obssessive compulsive mimi, paranoid delusional mimi, chocolate fueled degenerate mimi, endorphin laced earth mother mimi, ass-whuppin' tank grrrl mimi, whingeing wimp mimi, nasty crunchy PMS mimi, weeping willow PMS mimi, super efficient professional powerhouse mimi, temperamental prima donna artist mimi, mother of confusion mimi, super slick rockstar mimi, nobody loves me mimi, couldn't give a fuck mimi, hypersensitive wuss mimi, insensitive bitch mimi, oddball goof mimi, stoic buddha mimi, queen of chaos and melodrama mimi, rational pragmatist mimi, juvenile delinquint mimi, aging singleton mimi, infantile passive aggressive mimi, firebreathing dragon mimi, peace corps pacificst mimi, social butterfly mimi, complete social retard mimi, sanctimonious purist mimi, raving alcoholic mimi...

and on and on and on...and on.

And if you thought listening to these whinging wierdos was a pain in the ass, think about when it's time to buy them shoes!

The Anatomy of Revolution

Heaven and hell are not features of the after life.
The gore and the glory, it's all played out on this earthly plane.
Revolutions abound.
Ideology is to Physiology As Bullet is to Bone.
A million people kill and a million more die.
For the cause, against the cause.
At the heart of the struggle there's only that. Always that. The Cause - informing the process, validating the madness.

And then eventually one day, when rhetoric has buried rhetoric and more blood than is merely tragic or obscene has been shed, one side wins - generally the oppressed.

Utopia is born. The footsoldiers of the revolution dare to dream of life, pure and plentiful, bought and paid for in blood.
But they forget - the balance of power may shift. It's nature doesn't.
Like a see-saw there are only two possibilities, and only one equation: up or down, oppressor and oppressed.

And sure as every new day is born, only to crust over and then ignobly die, the shine on the brand new republic quickly fades.

Strife sends up heroes and martyrs. Peace buries them and places a fat guard at their tomb to collect an admittance fee.

And The Cause...under whose tattered awning the throng once huddled to ward off a common enemy; The Cause is wrapped in parchment and mothballed away along with words like nobility, honour, duty, glory.
Words like development, progress, efficiency and bottom-line take their place.
'We' becomes 'me'.

And the dispossessed remain dispossessed...only under new management.

And then the vague realization hits you - Life really is only about 'Business as usual' and a Revolution is just a Hostile take-over.


Go read 'Animal Farm' now.

New Year Blues

Another year gone and still no sign.
I waited and waited for the epiphany to come. It didn't. Second year in a row.

Last year, the wine and weed addled euphoria coaxed me into believing that the lack of an epiphany meant I was going to be ok. 2006 was going to be a good year...the year we had all been waiting for. It had to be! Things HAD to be better this year, we could all just feel it.
And see!! No pesky epiphany. No word from the void. No freaky, unsettling prediction about the state of being for the coming year. Surely, that was a good sign.

Turned out, not so much. It wasn't the year we thought it would be. Far from it. Instead of being a year for healing and having and forgiving and forging on to bigger, better things, it was about growth. The painful kind. The kind that involves fear and hurt and relinquishing and being pushed further out into the unknown without a safety net and no respite.

Betrayals, evictions, ejections, rejections and too many goodbyes. Bad choices, stupid mistakes, reality checks and human let downs.

I suppose it is a necessary thing and I should be glad for it, but that may happen later, as a feature of hindsight. Right now, I'm smarting with the petulant indignation of a child that's been slapped in the face and wonders if, perhaps, there wasn't a gentler way to teach the lessons that needed learning.

And now, another year has turned without a sign. I suppose that's just the Universe saying, "Beware! Different year, same shit. Don't break out your dancing shoes just yet."