tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68597575315458115892024-02-21T12:02:22.702-06:00Drumming in the DarkDarkness calls the light. In their interaction they bring color to the universe. Quiet calls sound and music springs forth. Read strange stuff here.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-57562469599511320642017-02-12T12:20:00.001-06:002017-02-12T12:20:31.511-06:00Stories, Why They're Influential, and Why I'm not Writing Them......yet. I'm studying to write stories, but it's very lonely independent study, because I don't know anyone who teaches what the world has not yet learned.
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The adult world has not yet learned to tell or hear the kinds of stories where people are people. Instead, we have stories with heroes and villains--even superheroes and supervillains, even though we know that no people in the real world have superpowers or super-morality--because those are the kinds of characters and the kinds of conflicts that make stories interesting to people. Heroes, villains and conflicts make stories marketable. Stories that are too different don't sell.
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If someone writes a novel (whatever possible use that could be...) that doesn't follow an accepted format of what publishers want to see in a particular kind of novel, it's just another wannabe novelist being told that a publisher doesn't currently have a place for that novel. That happens so much it's a cliché, which is ironic. A cliché is an un-original idea, so getting a rejection letter from a publisher because the ideas in the writing were <i>too different</i>, and that whole scenario being so common as to be cliché, is <i>ironic</i>. Irony is...oh, skip it. We aren't a dictionary. We're just trying to convey an idea that is so odd, we are sure we can't explain what it's going to take for us to promote this much-needed idea in storytelling, and that storytelling affects everyone's world-view. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-GT8BPjdulUgDUcZnmnD0SDSCOWVGn61d94Fx4pR5nswLVIL9pZTNKlsjxPWgZJPd2uuDf12OWs65S9Wdc0sEgG_IgWdGvopI8LY8E2klmlsReJPISPZ6X2f-Jf46ijTdcPCu3U_PYm8g/s1600/frustrated-writer-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-GT8BPjdulUgDUcZnmnD0SDSCOWVGn61d94Fx4pR5nswLVIL9pZTNKlsjxPWgZJPd2uuDf12OWs65S9Wdc0sEgG_IgWdGvopI8LY8E2klmlsReJPISPZ6X2f-Jf46ijTdcPCu3U_PYm8g/s320/frustrated-writer-2.jpg" width="320" height="200" /></a></div>
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I've found my way not to be the writer in the photo to the left. For a start, I write and publish here, online. No one tells me what to write and no one has to buy my writing, ever. The pressures of a novelist trying to get published do not apply to me. I write. Nothing really stops me except not finding the words to convey the ideas which are my own ideas. As long as I can think in words (I don't always. I also think in pictures, feelings and music) and can tap keys on the keyboard, I don't get writer's block. The only other challenge is reader's block. My writing is (obviously) an effort to connect through words with another person: right now, you, because you're reading. My only real challenge at the moment is keeping your interest.
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So let's discuss some stories that might be familiar to you, but let's try to look at these stories in a particular way. Let's look at fiction stories to find truth in them.
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I can come up with two stories I think will be familiar to readers of my blog: One is Star Trek and the other is Lord of the Rings.
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Like many other people who were teenagers in the 1970s, I read the Lord of the Rings books, starting with The Hobbit, which wasn't part of the trilogy, but was the book that got many young readers interested in reading the other books. Since it is a trilogy-plus-one, it's quite a long story. I won't waste time trying to summarize it. Instead, I'm going to focus in on one set of details: in the LOTR story, there are several races of sentient, human-like beings, and a certain consistency in how they're described; all the different kinds of "people"--whether they are hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs or men--each have a racially-linked basic character. Hobbits can't help being into a leisurely life, dwarves are industrious workers, elves are lovely and magical, orcs are ugly, coarse, stupid and evil, and men are strong, brave conquerors and rulers; all of these qualities are shown consistently in the LOTR stories as character traits that are entirely due to the race to which an individual belongs. The basic character of each and every character in LOTR is determined by their respective races.
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I'm not the first person to notice or describe this. I'm just very concise in my description.
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LOTR was very likely written as an analogy for World War Two, which was an era when most people had no issues at all with dividing the entire world into races, nationalities and racial/national character. Orcs were Nazis and axis nations. LOTR presented a world in which we could all think of Germans and Japanese as pure, irredeemable evil, and that the allied forces (of good...) really had no choice but to destroy these orc-like peoples. The big war ended before LOTR was published, but LOTR found its initial audience among readers in the English-speaking world who had recently been slaying orcs and dethroning Sauron.
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That's about all the time I have for writing today. The other thing that keeps me from being the classic frustrated writer is that I have a family that loves me and needs me around. I choose not to sequester myself for days at a stretch, imagining that writing is more important than anything else in my life. It's important, I'll keep doing it, and that's what I have for today's session.
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Stay tuned if you want. Next time I'll be writing about how to revolutionize storytelling and being human. It's the good part. Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-48759582155146298802017-02-05T08:32:00.000-06:002017-02-05T08:32:52.039-06:00Video of Drumming in Near Dark<div id="fb-root"></div>
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<div class="fb-video" data-href="https://www.facebook.com/richard.wallace.144181/videos/10212408749961702/?ref=4&action_history=[%7B%22surface%22%3A%22group%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22surface%22%2C%22extra_data%22%3A[]%7D]" data-width="500" data-show-text="false"><blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/richard.wallace.144181/videos/10212408749961702/" class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/richard.wallace.144181/videos/10212408749961702/"></a><p>January 2017, Dog Beach, Chicago.</p>Posted by <a href="#" role="button">Richard Wallace</a> on Saturday, January 21, 2017</blockquote></div>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-13357221422892497502017-01-29T12:49:00.001-06:002017-01-29T12:49:54.235-06:00On Cellularity and Choosing It's one of those strange ideas I get. I've given it several years to either flesh itself out or go away, and it didn't go away.
It's time to let it grow.
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This idea first started to form in my head some years ago when I was pondering several seemingly unrelated ideas and activities. These things included social music making, finding connecting points with others even in the face of differences of opinion that seemed insurmountable, musing about what life is in its most basic form, gardening and how to tend a garden, and good old trying to better understand living on a suitably deep level.
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The core of the idea, stated as simply as possible, is that all life is cellular. As you might guess, since it is an idea that makes an effort to think in big-picture terms, it gets quite a bit more complicated, but it retains that core of simplicity.
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I should say--not for the first or the last time--that it is not an interest of mine ever to tell anyone what to think. Take a minute to let that sink in, because it's unusual. A lot of things you could read will try to tell you what to think. I am only here with what I feel are some helpful ideas to assist you in thinking productively for yourself. Even if I could make all the sense in the world, every mind that thinks needs the ability to make sense on its own. We each have our own lives and our own things that we need to do and our own things to figure out for ourselves. My selfish part here is that I hope to live among people who know how to make sense for themselves.
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So let's get into it.
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It starts with elementary biology. Every living thing is either a single cell or is a bunch of cells that make up a complex organism. You and I are both complex organisms. All humans are. No matter where any of us came from or are going or are living right now; no matter whether we are male or female, or what language we speak or what color our skin is; no matter if we have a religious or political affiliation or point-of-view; no matter even whether or not we care about how our lives originated--important though those details may be--every one of us is made up of cells, and it is productive to understand what cells do and how they work to make life.
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Meaning in life is quite a separate question, beyond the scope or the needs of this piece of writing. This is about the simple fact of life. Life exists and is made of cells.
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A cell in its most basic form has an inside where the life exists, an outside which is the environment in which the life lives, and a cell membrane which separates the inside from the outside. I'm glad I gave myself time to think about this. I'm finding the simplicity.
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The most basic life forms are single cells, and they are the lives with the greatest limitations. Protozoans and amoebas can't move around much, can't perceive much of their environment except on a purely chemical level (if we can think of that as awareness at all) can't reproduce sexually, and therefore can't really develop themselves from one generation to the next, can't learn much (no brain) and are really completely at the mercy of the environment they just happen to be in. If the environment in which a single-celled creature lives turns hostile to that creature's life, the single-celled creature simply dies. It can't decide to get on the bus and go to a nicer place. It has nearly zero choices in life.
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Now I'm using scary words. Some people don't take kindly to words like "choice". Try to be courageous. I promise I'm not going to write about birth control or whether or not we have free will. Those are areas of opinion, speculation and philosophy. That's not what we're doing.
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Maybe you noticed that I said a single cell creature has <i>nearly</i> zero choices. It's zero choices if you think of it in the way people normally think about choices, but a single cell makes chemical or molecular choices by the chemical/molecular composition of its membrane. The membrane of a cell "knows" what to take in as nourishment, what to keep inside as part of itself and what to excrete as a waste product. It "knows" these things chemically and molecularly.
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Let's zoom out at this point to a more familiar magnitude. We've been looking through a microscope at tiny life. Let's look the same way at life that is the size of us. We're made of the same kind of stuff on a bigger scale. Our cells are specialized to specific functions in our bodies. One important difference: our cells team up to make the bigger and more complex organism that is a human being. One important thing is exactly the same: our cells still have that basic chemical and molecular ability to choose what comes in, what is kept out, what is kept in and what is let out. Another vitally important difference: our cells--individually--die off and regenerate all the time, and we, as complex multi-celled organisms, don't die when our individual cells die. To recap this vital point, if an amoeba experiences the death of a cell, that's a dead amoeba. One cell was all it was. By being a multi-celled creature, we get to live much longer than we could if we were just one cell. Multi-cellularism is a survival strategy, courtesy of our biology. Thanks biology!!
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Somehow (remember, we're foregoing speculation here...) life develops into something more complex and longer-living, but still retains its cellular basis. Along with more complexity to the organism comes more complexity in how choices are made and a much bigger range of possible choices. At this point, please try to refrain from jumping to any absolute statements or ideas about choosing. We still die some time. Choosing, from the point of view in which I find myself living, does not seem absolute. As much as I'd like to, I cannot choose to eat any and all available matter to fuel my body; I cannot simply choose to live forever as the body in which I live now. As a physical creature, I still have limitations, but I have far fewer limitations than an amoeba has. Thanks biology!! I really mean it. I'm grateful I'm a human. Being an eagle looks fun too, at least the soaring high in the sky part. Eating rodents that aren't cooked or seasoned doesn't seem like it would be all that enjoyable. I suppose there are positives and negatives to everything. All in all, I'm happy to be a human.
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Being a human means--among other things--that I was born with an organic (yep, cellular) computing organ in my head, and much of the programming of this computer is programming I get to do for myself, according to the needs in my own life. That's an awesome thing about being a human. Maybe I still don't have every choice in the universe, but I'm not stuck dying just because one of my cells dies and I don't have to eat raw rodents for a living. My life as a human lets me make choices on a scale far beyond single-cell choosing or even eagle- lion- or dog-choices. As a human with a self-programmable mind, I can choose whether or not or how much the "membrane" of my life and my mind are open to my environment. I can choose to close myself off from the world.
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Er....
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Except for that thing where I have to perceive and interact with the world (my environment. Every life lives in an environment) just to survive. If I don't take nourishment into my body, I will starve and die. If (yep, you guessed it: this is what I've been leading up to) I try to close off my mind from the world, I cannot learn, and my mind will die.
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I have heard people say that if you have an open mind, all of your knowledge might fall out. It honestly doesn't work that way, just as cells, the basis of all of life, don't work that way. A mind, living according to the basic rule of all of life, knows what to take in, what to keep, what to keep out, what to push out as waste and what to put out as work produced. It is built into everything your organic computing organ is made of. It is a wisdom of the body, like breathing, like your heart beating without you telling your heart to beat, like hunger telling you when to eat or tiredness telling you when to rest.
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An "open" mind gains knowledge through perceptions of the environment outside the body.
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You would almost think that an open mind would be hard-wired, standard equipment on all models of humans, but oddly, we get to choose whether or not and how much our minds should open.
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With as much truth as I am able to know, we don't have every choice in the universe. I think it's good to make the choices we do have count, and that some of the best words ever spoken are
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CHOOSE WISELY. Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-91402251957234145122012-02-04T10:36:00.000-06:002012-02-04T10:36:29.343-06:00Near-Unknown Facebooker Calls it Quits, No One Notices.By B.D., <em>Drumming in the Dark</em> Staph Righter<br />
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At some time in the past two months (the exact date and time is impossible to pinpoint due to apathy) a once-hopeful, enthusiastic, positive, smart, persistent poster to facebook simply stopped posting--citing "because who gives a drunk fuck?" as the main reason.<br />
As of this time an estimated 700 million facebook users have not noticed any difference whatsoever in thier social networking experience that could be attributed to this change. Sarah X, a facebooker from Shitswallowsville, S.C. sums it up this way: "who quit facebook? sum loser dude? idk wtf ur takking abowt. hey, check out my hawt new profile pic!"<br />
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In another comment on what meaning there might be in the departure of Bob "Zilla" DeVore (age 52, from Chicago, IL) from the social network, Zack Gnarly from Greasy Palms, NV said: "Who cares? Quitting is gay. Hey, check out this awesome video!" </div>
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According to a self-described "friend" of Zilla, he "wrote the best comments. He always had something witty to say. I read some of his blogs and I didn't always get what he was talking about, but he was <em>a really good speller</em>."</div>
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No other information is available on this story. We would post updates in the future as more information becomes available, but who would give a drunk fuck?</div>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-41304387951454969432010-03-07T11:14:00.003-06:002010-03-08T07:42:20.830-06:00I knew it wasn't about ME......or "Cleaning off my desktop"<br /><br />About 3 weeks ago I heard the old Carly Simon song <span style="font-style: italic;">You're So Vain</span> on the radio. Yes, I still listen to oldies on broadcast radio.<br /><br />I remembered that I always liked the song, primarily because of the quirky bass intro and a great guitar solo. I know I'm <span style="font-style: italic;">supposed</span> to enjoy pop songs for the lyrics, but that's how I am: it hits me musically or it doesn't hit me.<br /><br />I wanted to know the names of the musicians. I Googled and Wikipedia-ed.<br /><br />The info that came easily through my search was all about how Carly Simon had never revealed who the song was about. Did I care about that? It's a SONG. Why do I need to get caught up in entertainment gossip just because I like a song?<br /><br />I searched a little past the surface and found the names of the crew:<br /><br />album "No Secrets"<br />Produced By Richard Perry<br />Jim Gordon – drums<br />Richard Perry – percussion (Cowbell. In precisely the right amount. It DID NOT need any more cowbell. I love cowbell played tastefully in the proper place and the right amount. I like comedy too. Enough cowbell is enough.) <br />Mick Jagger – backing vocals<br />Jimmy Ryan – acoustic guitar, electric guitar<br />Klaus Voormann – bass<br /><br />The possibly-apocryphal story behind Mick Jagger's rare backing vocal on this song runs thus: Carly Simon is in the studio rehearsing vocals with Harry Nilsson, Mick Jagger walks in and says "Wha choo doin?"--I guess if you're Mick, you can just walk into anyone's studio--Carly says "Hey Harry Nilsson, would you excuse Mick Jagger and me for a few minutes? I have an idea." Harry says "Of course, Carly Simon. I think Mick Jagger would be a MUCH better backing vocalist for this song than I."<br /><br />So we had ""Yo so vayne, I betchoo thaynk the song is abow choo, don choo?"<br /><br />Warren Beatty was so vain he thought it was about him.<br /><br />Here's an easy guitar transcription:<br /><br /> Am (2)<br /><br />You walked into the party<br /><br /> F Am<br />Like you were walking onto a yacht<br /><br /> Am (2)<br />Your hat strategically dipped below one eye<br /><br /> F Am<br />Your scarf it was apricot<br /><br /> F (½) G (½) C (½) (Am) (½)<br />You had one eye in the mirror as<br /><br /> F C<br /><br />you watched yourself gavotte<br /><br /> G (½) F (2)<br />And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner, they'd be your partner, and<br /><br /><br /><br />Chorus:<br /><br />C (2)<br /> You're so vain<br /><br /> Dm7 C<br />You probably think this song is about you<br /><br /> Am<br />You're so vain (you're so vain)<br /><br /> F G (2)<br />I'll bet you think this song is about you--Don't you? Don't you?<br /><br /><br /><br /> Am (2) <br />You had me several years ago<br /><br /> F Am<br />When I was still quite naive<br /><br /> Am (2) <br />Well, you said that we made such a pretty pair<br /><br /> F Am<br />And that you would never leave<br /><br /> F (½) G (½) C (½) (Am) (½)<br />But you gave away the things you loved<br /><br /> F C<br />And one of them was me<br /><br /> G (½) F (2)<br />I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee, and<br /><br />Chorus<br /><br />Instrumental Verse (sing last line):<br /><br /> G (½) F (2)<br />I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee, and<br /><br /><br />Chorus<br /><br /> Am (2) <br /><br />Well, I hear you went up to Saratoga<br /><br /> F Am<br />And your horse naturally won<br /><br /> Am (2) <br />Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia<br /><br /> F Am<br />To see the total eclipse of the sun<br /><br /> F (½) G (½) C (½) (Am) (½)<br />Well, you're where you should be all the time<br /><br /> F C<br />And when you're not, you're with<br /> G (½) F (2)<br /><br />Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend, and<br /><br />Chorus<br /><br />/ C - - - / - - - - / Dm7 - - - / C - - - /<br /><br />C (2)<br /> You're so vain<br /><br /> Dm7 C<br />You probably think this song is about you<br />C (2)<br /> You're so vain<br /><br /> Dm7 C<br />You probably think this song is about you<br /><br /><br /><br />/ C - - - / - - - - / Dm7 - - - / G (hold) /<br /><br />and a video:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="349"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mQZmCJUSC6g&rel=0&border=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mQZmCJUSC6g&rel=0&border=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="425" height="349"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />So then--after like 30 years and about a week after I started thinking about it--Carly Simon finally comes out and tells the world that <span style="font-style: italic;">You're So Vain</span> was about David Geffin. As though we really wanted to know.<br /><br />I've always had the gift of these of precognitions, but only about really trivial things.<br /><br />The fun thing about pop songs like <span style="font-style: italic;">You're So Vain</span> is making up your own lyrics:<br /><br />...clowns in my cornflakes...underwear spy...what the heck is a gavotte?...<br /><br />...or mathematical analysis: if a man has two eyes to start with and one is strategically hat-dipped while the other is in the mirror, he has zero eyes left for seeing Carly Simon as she looks at him and comments on how vain he is.<br /><br />Now there's one less thing on my desktop.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-15551704215958093662010-02-07T11:32:00.017-06:002010-02-25T21:23:57.251-06:00Review of Banana ShpeelI don't get paid to write entertainment reviews. I'll write a review if some piece of entertainment moves me in some way; if it gives me feelings that I want to process in writing; if it makes me think.<br /><br />I went to see Cirque du Soleil's <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span>--written and directed by David Shiner--at the Chicago Theater because I was invited by my friend Mike Smith. He had won a contest on Facebook. He entered a video of himself playing trombone while hula-hooping.<br><br> <object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/A3Dr5LDtN_w&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/A3Dr5LDtN_w&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><br><br>The prize was that he got to perform in the lobby of the theater before the show and free tickets for a bunch of friends. Since I was the appreciative friend with a car, I drove Mike to the theater that night, arriving about an hour before the show started.<br /><br /><br />While we were hanging out before showtime, we chatted with a few theater and Cirque employees. One told us confidentially that "There's a reason vaudeville went away." The reason wasn't stated at that time, so I was left to ponder why vaudeville--THE most popular entertainment of its time in the 1920's and 30's--had gone away.<br /><br />I didn't have to wonder for very long. <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> led me to the answer. As often happens, one good answer led to more questions. So I write.<br /><br />One of the first questions was why the promoters of <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> would solicit performers on Facebook then give away a bunch of free tickets. I think it was to generate a buzz and fill some seats. The Chicago Theater had lots of empty seats that night, even though the FOMS (about 50 Friends Of Mike Smith) made a good, high-spirited effort to fill as many seats as they could.<br /><br />My second question is a little more difficult to ask, let alone answer. It has to do with the entertainment world in general and vaudeville more specifically. From its inception in the late 1870s, vaudeville was designed to appeal to a broad-social-spectrum audience. Vaudeville and circus were the original "something for everyone" shows. Cirque du Soleil was a reinventing of circus and <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> was--I suppose--conceived as a different direction and new offshoot of Cirque. They made circus into something new and exciting; now they are trying to do the same for vaudeville.<br /><br />One of the problems of circus was that people knew that animal performers were treated badly, so Cirque du Soleil omitted animal acts from their shows. One of the problems of vaudeville was that people knew that human performers were treated badly--that in front of a restless, jaded audience, entertainers had just a few moments to do something spectacular; that they were generally over-worked and under-paid, that dancers and acrobats would push themselves to the limits of their abilities, often causing themselves disabling injuries in the process and then...well, a broken performer is an out-of-work performer. Many circus and vaudeville performers ended their careers with something that went approximately like "You gave your all for the show and now you have nothing left. Buh-bye!"<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> begins with a pair of clowns (Daniel Passer and Wayne Wilson) who introduce the premise, the "story" and the evil vaudeville producer--the "been there, seen that, you've got ten seconds to impress me" Marty Schmelky, played gloriously over-the-top by Arlington Heights native Jerry Kernion. Schmelky is ridiculously costumed in the colors of money and is purposely loud and mean. Once Schmelky has come to the stage, I begin to put the pieces together: the two clowns aspire to be more like Schmelky. Their slapstick is mean-spirited and they are obviously in awe of Schmelky's wealth and power. These are all intentional parts of the show. <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> is trying to tell me something about the seedy world of mass-market entertainment in the context of a mass-market show. It's the perfect irony if they can pull it off.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxsjJOEkkL5pvD-3qiWhh-u3POLgMEQQL-1lrkKbJxc9hJ_J5rP8ryuGHx-oGDgct0SFzMfp_G1pv-3tpqzgHukF_nl1Nq7gSmrdqHc0N2V2ws-U9XfTW_Ex8GLyGpNcSfcW3G04Qsj7z7/s1600-h/Banana+Shpeel+4.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxsjJOEkkL5pvD-3qiWhh-u3POLgMEQQL-1lrkKbJxc9hJ_J5rP8ryuGHx-oGDgct0SFzMfp_G1pv-3tpqzgHukF_nl1Nq7gSmrdqHc0N2V2ws-U9XfTW_Ex8GLyGpNcSfcW3G04Qsj7z7/s320/Banana+Shpeel+4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441829456588183730" border="0" /></a><br /><br />To waste just a few more of the seconds that I have to impress you, I have a little something to say about critics. To watch a skilled, hard-working performer and then rant about how much you didn't like what that person did is one of the most pitiful and useless things in the world of entertainment. Our world is afflicted with dislikia. It's too easy for us to say what we don't like. I guess critics feel some responsibility to their readers to steer people away from bad entertainment: to tell people when it seems necessary "don't waste your money on this one, folks." If show business is an ocean and performers are fish-in-the-sea, critics are bottom-feeding algae. I'm a freelance reviewer: still a bottom-feeder, but more of the catfish variety.<br /><br />After setting up the premise of open auditions for Shmelky's Follies, the clowns call out seat numbers. Of course, the people who come to the stage are cast members, but we are supposed to believe that they are just people from the audience. I actually did have a moment of "Gee, I hope they don't call MY seat number." I wanted to believe the premise.<br /><br />First up is a wacky Brazilian guy, played charmingly by wacky Brazilian guy Claudio Carneiro. He does some sort of shtick that is immediately rejected by Shmelky and is told to leave the stage. Next an elderly guy (Gordon White) with a walker is summoned. He moves very slowly to his position, then very slowly reveals that he will perform as a mime. We see Shmelky's impatience right away and the old guy character becomes someone we sympathize with. He too is rejected and asked to leave the stage, but before he makes his excruciatingly slow exit, he tries once more: he's not just any mime. He's also a ventriloquist. A ventriloquist mime. At that point, the slow pacing helps. It takes the audience a few seconds to put those pieces together and respond with the show's first big laugh.<br /><br />Brazilian guy comes back with a fake mustache and some slightly different shtick, but we recognize him because of his beaming smile. Thus far, the two "rejects" are considerably more fun and charming than the clowns or the producer. Yes, this show is definitely trying to say something.<br /><br />There's a chase scene to get Claudio offstage so that the auditions can continue. Next up is a strange little guy whose bare legs are visible beneath his trench coat: another easy-to-identify character. He's a flasher/pervert, played by Patrick de Valette. Once again, in spite of our knowing that he will be immediately rejected and berated by Shmelky and in spite of our identifying him as a social outcast, he is fun and funny. Shedding his coat to reveal a wiry underwear-clad body, he launches into a ridiculous (but quite skillful!) "interpretive dance" that becomes an uproarious chase scene. He eventually disappears behind the curtain.<br /><br />The comedic tale is thus set up. The clowns and the producer are the villains, the social outcasts are the heroes, the audience has no idea what will happen next. So far so good.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHxoWqcNC_13h5TUoszdE18BI6VhvwS9z7aVw6k8YUSIYSENLFqt3tvdNozgONbOuR1pFpMEA9pf3mD8_LzlIPycNJDlyaEfTIIVGBUsSbQzBmlG70bzSzuqfTOOIHMQNuRjyeU2Vz3Jhy/s1600-h/Banana+Shpeel+5.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHxoWqcNC_13h5TUoszdE18BI6VhvwS9z7aVw6k8YUSIYSENLFqt3tvdNozgONbOuR1pFpMEA9pf3mD8_LzlIPycNJDlyaEfTIIVGBUsSbQzBmlG70bzSzuqfTOOIHMQNuRjyeU2Vz3Jhy/s320/Banana+Shpeel+5.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441829717732798690" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiCDcueQqs95Ta8zlWC0SVqgkrMcYsj8QYv9Cwac-GATDyRb4h452kCTuFHygFptkpqVsqA9vuIgcyRA83Fvp6Sl3yxgJ-X_QmX6hEdbZUAyWhl_DMY5MWF3ZrY5fy0bGYCoWEptKtIrTc/s1600-h/Banana+Shpeel+6.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiCDcueQqs95Ta8zlWC0SVqgkrMcYsj8QYv9Cwac-GATDyRb4h452kCTuFHygFptkpqVsqA9vuIgcyRA83Fvp6Sl3yxgJ-X_QmX6hEdbZUAyWhl_DMY5MWF3ZrY5fy0bGYCoWEptKtIrTc/s320/Banana+Shpeel+6.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441829872325560546" border="0" /></a><br /><br />What happens next is that the elderly mime/ventriloquist's dummy comes to life in the form of a diminutive painted clown played by Tuan Le. He does a hat juggling routine that keeps getting more and more amazing. My jaw was on the floor. I've seen some pretty great juggling before. I've worked with a few pretty great jugglers. This guy was simply the best juggler I have ever seen anywhere at any time.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1laCYTFqfLvZNsBNBgf2xsx6Lx0bePvh1G1_EtVU_i-wyG1oJJ_Hje_FdvoHF0bs4wBMpXIOGlxJcwBP-KS-Lmce61D-utZueoLkvFEliqoK-8bkYlL0s4_E_C8Lh-9_WmeDcz_X0SZm/s1600-h/Banana+Shpeel+1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1laCYTFqfLvZNsBNBgf2xsx6Lx0bePvh1G1_EtVU_i-wyG1oJJ_Hje_FdvoHF0bs4wBMpXIOGlxJcwBP-KS-Lmce61D-utZueoLkvFEliqoK-8bkYlL0s4_E_C8Lh-9_WmeDcz_X0SZm/s320/Banana+Shpeel+1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5435556628429071026" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />Now I begin to get it: the ironic comedy and the mean-hearted slapstick are just stage-setting for the real entertainment. After the incredible hat juggling there's a musical number (featuring a really great band. I wasn't able to find the names of any of the musicians. They deserve lots of credit for making the show work) and a great dance number featuring brother-sister tap duo of Joseph and Josette Wiggan. When the slapstick comes back, it is annoying. By then, I am seeing what the show is capable of and it is really great entertainment. That is UNTIL it gets stopped by the clowns.<br /><br />Daniel and Wayne are the two characters whose names are revealed to the audience. I had to look up the names of the other performers. Daniel and Wayne are both great at what they do and are (to me) obviously highly skilled actor/dancer clowns. It is the show that forces them to be annoying characters.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7UGeKXewjrOPYAP_ZBcqsRCQ6fUqHrJlVtF56eKJ21YCe-n0JrluruX_PeTUsH-ujNkZMOJCC0mA5rZmrWTf5pG34CksVX4C_k65ia1639X_X93GfHsICf2Py-FCXdMaNuZgs3Hy0UiXv/s1600-h/Banana+Shpeel+2.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 230px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7UGeKXewjrOPYAP_ZBcqsRCQ6fUqHrJlVtF56eKJ21YCe-n0JrluruX_PeTUsH-ujNkZMOJCC0mA5rZmrWTf5pG34CksVX4C_k65ia1639X_X93GfHsICf2Py-FCXdMaNuZgs3Hy0UiXv/s320/Banana+Shpeel+2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441830208500503202" border="0" /></a>This is foot juggler Vanessa Alvarez. She's great too. Awesome, in fact, and swell to look at. But her act and costume reminded me that vaudeville might at any moment degenerate into a girly show. Not that there's anything wrong with that...but here's a highly-skilled performer--world-class talent even!--and I'm looking at her scantily-clad spread legs...maybe it's just me... <br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3lRoTMkf19dSFOXq6BGvP2ByGhiuZ_GN2kmwB-XXxxjnnSBptYetsnHsc0Ts5d-DXIiljSUp1qG3iiWncCjR1hrWo_WYklGKOrm__leVpl2ugT_S-d4b-HUs7BwlmRceZyD1C4WJtofFr/s1600-h/Banana+Shpeel+3.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3lRoTMkf19dSFOXq6BGvP2ByGhiuZ_GN2kmwB-XXxxjnnSBptYetsnHsc0Ts5d-DXIiljSUp1qG3iiWncCjR1hrWo_WYklGKOrm__leVpl2ugT_S-d4b-HUs7BwlmRceZyD1C4WJtofFr/s320/Banana+Shpeel+3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441830073991255458" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />This is either acrobat/pole dancer Dima Shine or Russian hand balancer Dmitry Bulkin. The man-on-the-pole who performed the night I was there was nothing short of incredible, but neither the Cirque nor the Web told me exactly what his name is. <br /><br />I couldn't find a photo of gymnast/balancers Jeff Retzlanff and Kelsey Wiens, but I thought their routine was breathtaking.<br /><br />The show also features vocalist Alexis Sims, sister-brother tap dance duo, Joseph and Josette Wiggan, singer-actor-dancers Robyn Baltzer, Alex Ellis, Adrienne Jean Fisher, DeWitt Fleming Jr., Luke Hawkins, Kathleen Hennessey, Adrienne Reid, Anthony J. Russo, Melissa Schott, and Steven T. Williams.<br /><br />Plus a really great band! Band Leader Robert Cookman directs the <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> band featuring drummer Iohann Laliberté, bassist Bobby Brennan, multi-instumentalist James Campagnola (who mostly plays keyboards in this show), cellist Peter Sachon and a horn section composed of Roland Barber on trombone, Jean-François Ouellet on saxophone and Scott Steen on trumpet.<br /><br />I had two main motivations for writing a review: one was that I wanted to have a written record of the names of all the great performers. The Cirque's website didn't tell me who these people are, so I found as many names and photos as I could. These people deserve credit.<br /><br />My second reason for writing this review is to say the long version of: "Parts of <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> were AWESOME!!! Other parts...meh."<br /><br />All in all, this show is full of wonderful performers who are trapped in a show that holds them back from their potential. The clowns are great, but in the context of the show, they are forced to be annoying. The circus performers are spectacular, but in the context of the show, they're unknown bit-players.<br /><br />On closer examination, <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> is camp: it pokes fun at its own art form. It presents a vaudeville show as a way of displaying the inherent evils of the vaudeville form. It attempts to do to vaudeville what <span style="font-style: italic;">Little Shop of Horrors</span> did to movie musicals: it tries to make fun of itself and let the audience in on the joke.<br /><br />I get it.<br /><br />But where <span style="font-style: italic;">Little Shop of Horrors</span> succeeded, <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> fails. LSoH let its talent shine. Shpeel holds its talent back.<br /><br />I wouldn't have gone to <span style="font-style: italic;">Banana Shpeel</span> if I hadn't gotten in for free. As it was, it was an enjoyable night with great friends. If I had gone alone and paid to get in, I'd have been tempted to ask for my money back.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-8174201814969380762009-10-26T14:56:00.002-05:002009-10-26T15:26:37.442-05:00A Personality TestThis test is posted here for informational purposes only. You may read and answer the questions if you wish--including copying and pasting it elsewhere--but <span style="font-weight: bold;">no personal information will be gathered here and no results will be given.</span><br /><br />To be clear: <span style="font-weight: bold;">this test is here for YOUR information and entertainment ONLY </span><br /><br />1) Do you make thoughtless remarks or accusations which later you regret? <br /><br />2) When others are getting rattled, do you remain fairly composed? <br /><br />3) Do you browse through railway timetables, directories, or dictionaries just for pleasure? <br /><br />4) When asked to make a decision, would you be swayed by your like or dislike of the personality involved? <br /><br />5) Do you intend two or less children in your family even though your health and income will permit more? <br /><br />6) Do you get occasional twitches of your muscles, when there is no logical reason for it? <br /><br />7) Would you prefer to be in a position where you did not have the responsibilities of making decisions? <br /><br />8) Are your actions considered unpredictable by other people? <br /><br />9) Do you consider more money should be spent on social security? <br /><br />10) Do other people interest you very much? <br /><br />11) Is your voice monotonous, rather than varied in pitch? <br /><br />12) Do you normally let the other person start the conversation? <br /><br />13) Are you readily interested in other people's conversations? <br /><br />14) Would the idea of inflicting pain on game, small animals or fish prevent you from hunting or fishing? <br /><br />15) Are you often impulsive in your behavior? <br /><br />16) Do you speak slowly? <br /><br />17) Are you usually concerned about the need to protect your health? <br /><br />18) Does an unexpected action cause your muscles to twitch? <br /><br />19) Are you normally considerate in your demands on your employees, relatives or pupils? <br /><br />20) Do you consider that you could give a valid "snap judgment"? <br /><br />21) Do your past failures still worry you? <br /><br />22) Do you find yourself being extra-active for periods lasting several days? <br /><br />23) Do you resent the efforts of others to tell you what to do? <br /><br />24) Is it normally hard for you to "own up and take the blame"? <br /><br />25) Do you have a small circle of close friends, rather than a large number of friends, speaking acquaintances? <br /><br />26) Is your life a constant struggle for survival? <br /><br />27) Do you often sing or whistle just for the fun of it? <br /><br />28) Are you considered warm-hearted by your friends? <br /><br />29) Would you rather give orders than take them? <br /><br />30) Do you enjoy telling people the latest scandal about your associates? <br /><br />31) Could you agree to strict discipline? <br /><br />32) Would the idea of making a complete new start cause you much concern? <br /><br />33) Do you make efforts to get others to laugh and smile? <br /><br />34) Do you find it easy to express your emotions? <br /><br />35) Do you refrain from complaining when the other person is late for an appointment? <br /><br />36) Are you sometimes considered by others a "spoilsport"? <br /><br />37) Do you consider there are other people who are definitely unfriendly toward you and work against you? <br /><br />38) Would you admit you were wrong just to "keep the peace"? <br /><br />39) Do you have only a few people of whom you are really fond? <br /><br />40) Are you rarely happy, unless you have a special reason?<br /><br />41) Do you "circulate around" at a social gathering? <br /><br />42) Do you take reasonable precaution to prevent accidents? <br /><br />43) Does the idea of talking in front of people make you nervous? <br /><br />44) If you saw an article in a shop obviously mistakenly marked lower than its correct price, would you try to get it at that price? <br /><br />45) Do you often feel that people are looking at you or talking about you behind your back? <br /><br />46) Are you "always getting into trouble"? <br /><br />47) Have you any particular hate or fear? <br /><br />48) Do you prefer to be an onlooker rather than participate in any active sport? <br /><br />49) Do you find it easy to be impartial? <br /><br />50) Have you a definitely set standard of courteous behavior in front of other members of your family? <br /><br />51) Can you "start the ball rolling" at a social gathering? <br /><br />52) Would you "buy on credit" with the hope that you can keep up the payments? <br /><br />53) Do you get an after-reaction when something unexpected such as an accident or other disturbing incident takes place? <br /><br />54) Do you consider the good of all concerned rather than your own personal advantages? <br /><br />55) When hearing a lecturer, do you sometimes experience the idea that the speaker is referring entirely to you? <br /><br />56) Does "external noise" rarely interfere with your concentration? <br /><br />57) Are you usually "up-to-date" on everyday affairs? <br /><br />58) Can you confidently plan and work towards carrying out an event in six months time? <br /><br />59) Do you consider the modern "prisons without bars system" doomed to failure? <br /><br />60) Do you tend to be careless? <br /><br />61) Do you ever get a "dreamlike" feeling toward life when it all seems unreal? <br /><br />62) Do you speedily recover from the effects of bad news? <br /><br />63) When you criticize - do you at the same time try to encourage? <br /><br />64) Are you normally considered "cold"? <br /><br />65) Are your opinions insufficiently important to tell other people? <br /><br />66) Are you so self-assured that sometimes you annoy others? <br /><br />67) Do you keep "close contact" on articles of yours which you have loaned to friends? <br /><br />68) Do you enjoy activities of your own choosing? <br /><br />69) Does emotional music have quite an effect on you? <br /><br />70) Do you completely condemn a person because he is rival or opponent in some aspect of your relations with him? <br /><br />71) Do you often "sit and think" about death, sickness, pain and sorrow? <br /><br />72) Are you perturbed at the idea of loss of dignity? <br /><br />73) Are you always collecting things which "might be useful"? <br /><br />74) Would you criticize faults and point out the bad points on someone else's character or handiwork? <br /><br />75) Are you openly appreciative of beautiful things? <br /><br />76) Do you sometimes give away articles which strictly speaking do not belong to you? <br /><br />77) Do you greet people effusively? <br /><br />78) Do you often ponder on previous misfortunes? <br /><br />79) Are you sometimes considered forceful in your actions and opinions? <br /><br />80) Do you accept criticism easily and without resentment? <br /><br />81) Are you usually undisturbed by "noises off" when you are trying to rest? <br /><br />82) Are you likely to be jealous? <br /><br />83) Do you tend to put off doing things and then discover it is too late? <br /><br />84) Do you prefer to abide by the wishes of others rather than seek to have your own way? <br /><br />85) Do you find it easy to get yourself started on a project? <br /><br />86) Do you bite your fingernails or chew the end of your pencil? <br /><br />87) Do you "turn up the volume" of your emotions just to create an effect? <br /><br />88) If we were invading another country, would you feel sympathetic towards conscientious objectors in this country? <br /><br />89) Are there some things about yourself on which you are touchy? <br /><br />90) Do you have few interests and activities that are your own choice? <br /><br />91) Do you ever get a single thought which hangs around for days? <br /><br />92) Are you a slow eater? <br /><br />93) Can you be a stabilizing influence when others get panicky? <br /><br />94) Would you stop and find out whether a person needed help even though they had not directly asked you for it? <br /><br />95) Are you prejudiced in favor of your own school, college, club or team, etc.? <br /><br />96) Do you pay your debts and keep your promises when it is possible? <br /><br />97) Do you sleep well? <br /><br />98) Would you use corporal punishment on a child aged ten if it refused to obey you? <br /><br />99) Do you prefer to take a passive role in any club or organization to which you belong? <br /><br />100) Are you logical and scientific in your thinking? <br /><br />101) Does the youth of today have more opportunity than that of a generation ago? <br /><br />102) Do you throw things away only to discover that you need them later? <br /><br />103) Would you give up easily on a given course if it were causing you a considerable amount of inconvenience? <br /><br />104) Do you "wax enthusiastic" about only a few subjects? <br /><br />105) Do you rarely suspect the actions of others? <br /><br />106) Do you sometimes wonder if anyone really cares about you? <br /><br />107) Do you turn down responsibility because you doubt your fitness to cope? <br /><br />108) Do you sometimes feel compelled to repeat some interesting item or tidbit? <br /><br />109) Do you tend to exaggerate a justifiable grievance? <br /><br />110) Is your facial expression varied rather than set? <br /><br />111) Do you usually need to justify or back up an opinion once stated? <br /><br />112) Do you openly and sincerely admire beauty in other people? <br /><br />113) Would it take a definite effort on your part to consider the subject of suicide? <br /><br />114) Would you consider yourself energetic in your attitude toward life? <br /><br />115) Would a disagreement affect your general relationship with another person? <br /><br />116) Does a minor failure on your part rarely trouble you? <br /><br />117) Do you sometimes feel that you talk too much? <br /><br />118) Do you smile much? <br /><br />119) Are you easily pleased? <br /><br />120) When met with direct opposition would you still seek to have your own way rather than give in?<br /><br />121) Provided the distance were not too great, would you still prefer to ride than walk? <br /><br />122) Do you ever get disturbed by the noise of the wind or a "house settling down"? <br /><br />123) Is your opinion influenced by looking at things from the standpoint of your experiences, occupation or training? <br /><br />124) Do you often make tactless blunders? <br /><br />125) Are you suspicious of people who ask to borrow money from you? <br /><br />126) Are your decisions swayed by personal interests? <br /><br />127) Can you get quite enthusiastic over "some simple little thing"? <br /><br />128) Do you frequently take action even though you know your own good judgment would indicate otherwise? <br /><br />129) Are you in favor of color bar and class distinction? <br /><br />130) Are you aware of any habitual physical mannerisms such as pulling your hair, nose, ears, or such like? <br /><br />131) Can you quickly adapt and make use of new conditions and situations even though they may be difficult? <br /><br />132) Do some noises "set your teeth on edge"? <br /><br />133) Can you see the other fellow's point of view when you wish to? <br /><br />134) Do you go to bed when you want to, rather than "by the clock"? <br /><br />135) Do the "petty foibles" of others make you impatient? <br /><br />136) Do children irritate you? <br /><br />137) Are you less talkative than your associates? <br /><br />138) Do you usually carry out assignments promptly and systematically? <br /><br />139) Would you assist a fellow traveler rather than leave it to the officials? <br /><br />140) When voting, do you vote the same party ticket straight rather than studying the candidates and issues? <br /><br />141) Do you frequently dwell on your past illnesses or painful experiences? <br /><br />142) Do you get very ill at ease in disordered surroundings? <br /><br />143) Do you usually criticize a film or show that you see or a book that you read? <br /><br />144) When recounting some amusing incident can you easily imitate the mannerisms or the dialect in the original incident? <br /><br />145) In subjects about which you are not expert, are your own ideas of sufficient importance as to tell others? <br /><br />146) Do you have a tendency to tidy up a disorder of somebody else's household? <br /><br />147) Can you accept defeat easily without the necessity of "swallowing your disappointment"? <br /><br />148) Do you often feel depressed? <br /><br />149) Are you ever ill at ease in the company of children? <br /><br />150) Do you get frustrated at not being able to do something rather than finding a substitute activity or system? <br /><br />151) Are you sometimes completely unable to enter the spirit of things? <br /><br />152) Do you rarely express your grievances? <br /><br />153) Do you work in "spurts", being relatively inactive and then furiously active for a day or two? <br /><br />154) Does the number of uncompleted jobs you have on hand bother you? <br /><br />155) Do people enjoy being in your company? <br /><br />156) Could you allow someone to finish those "final two words" in a crossword puzzle without interfering? <br /><br />157) Do you consider the best points of most people and only rarely speak slightingly of them?<br /><br />158) Do you laugh or smile quite readily? <br /><br />159) Are you definite and emphatic in voice and manner? <br /><br />160) Are you effusive only to close friends if at all? <br /><br />161) Are your interests and fields of knowledge so important as to give little time for anything else? <br /><br />162) Would you like to "start a new activity" in the area in which you live? <br /><br />163) Would you make the necessary actions to kill an animal in order to put it out of pain? <br /><br />164) Is it easy for you to relax? <br /><br />165) Do you have little regret on past misfortunes and failures? <br /><br />166) Does the idea of fear or apprehension give you a physical reaction? <br /><br />167) Can you trust the decision of your judgment in an emotional situation in which you are involved? <br /><br />168) Could someone else consider that you were really active? <br /><br />169) Do you find it hard to get started on a task that needs to be done? <br /><br />170) Are you opposed to the "probation system" for criminals? <br /><br />171) Do you spend much time on needless worries? <br /><br />172) In a disagreement do you find it hard to understand how the other person fails to see your side, and thus agree with you? <br /><br />173) Do you cope with everyday problems of living quite well? <br /><br />174) Are you usually truthful to others? <br /><br />175) Would you rather "wait for something to happen" as opposed to you causing it? <br /><br />176) Do you spend too freely in relation to your income? <br /><br />177) Can you take a "calculated risk" without too much worry? <br /><br />178) If you were involved in a slight car accident, would you really take trouble to see that any damage you did was made good? <br /><br />179) Do others push you around? <br /><br />180) Do you make allowances for your friends where with others you might judge more severely? <br /><br />181) Do you often ponder over your own inferiority? <br /><br />182) Do people criticize you to others? <br /><br />183) Are you embarrassed by a hearty greeting such as a kiss, hug, or pat on the back, if done in public? <br /><br />184) Do you frequently not do something you want to do because of other people's desires? <br /><br />185) Are you sometimes convinced of the correctness of your opinions about a subject even though you are not an expert? <br /><br />186) Do you often find yourself "going off in all directions at once"? <br /><br />187) Do your acquaintances seem to think more of your abilities than you do? <br /><br />188) Is the idea of death or even reminders of death abhorrent to you? <br /><br />189) Having settled an argument out do you continue to feel disgruntled for a while? <br /><br />190) Are you friendly in voice, attitude, and expression? <br /><br />191) Does life seem rather vague and unreal to you? <br /><br />192) Do you often feel upset about the fate of war victims and political refugees? <br /><br />193) Do "mere acquaintances" appeal to you for aid or advice in their personal difficulties? <br /><br />194) If you lose an article, do you get the idea that "someone must have stolen or mislaid it"? <br />195) If you thought that someone was suspicious of you and your actions, would you tackle them on the subject rather than leaving them to work it out? <br /><br />196) Do you sometimes feel that your age is against you (too young or too old)? <br /><br />197) Do you have spells of being sad and depressed for no apparent reason? <br /><br />198) Do you do much grumbling about conditions you have to face in life? <br /><br />199) Do you tend to hide your feelings? <br /><br />200) Do you consider you have many warm friends?Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-76538025938342223462009-10-15T20:23:00.003-05:002009-10-15T20:38:28.963-05:00From Beyond the Veil<span style="font-weight: bold;">AAAAAAAAAIEEEE<span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>!<br /><br />Did I scare you? No? Oh. I didn't think so.<br /><br />Perhaps I'll be scarier when I'm dead, but then only if I was <span style="font-style: italic;">living <span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>dead.<br />How about this video...does <span style="font-style: italic;">this <span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>scare you?<br /><br /><br /><div><object width="480" height="376"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/xoybd&related=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/xoybd&related=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="480" height="376"></embed></object><br /><b><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xoybd_michael-jackson-ghosts_music">Michael Jackson - Ghosts</a></b><br /><i>Uploaded by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/Wakazai">Wakazai</a>. - <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/us/channel/music">Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.</a></i></div><br /><br />There's a bit of a shocker in the end credit montage. Ego is indeed the scariest thing of all.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-24948953361446781142009-04-13T15:57:00.003-05:002009-04-13T16:16:04.494-05:00notes for note writingIn the past few weeks I've had thoughts about writing pieces on these themes:<br /> Military drumming versus trance drumming and the different emotional states that arise from each.<br /> Listening to Nirvana Unplugged at the Seattle coffee shop on Easter morning, perhaps with musings on the differences between Chicago and Seattle and why I live in a place I like less.<br /> Brother can you spare me a solo? <br /> TNT as sung by Carlos should probably contain the words "Actually I think I might be able to explain the reasoning behind that. You see, it's due to the fact that I'm TNT..."<br /> Somewhere between too much and not enough is the mysterious, nearly undefinable quantity called "just right".<br /> I'm getting old. Last week I spent nearly two full minutes thinking about things that were completely unrelated to sex.<br /> Travel by air: the views from above.<br /> Fake niceness only SEEMS nicer than genuine rudeness.<br /> Country song: "I still miss my ex, but my aim is improving" Buy More Bullets Remix.<br /> Note to self: Don't include song title listed above in any public posting.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-34838871344485088992008-06-24T10:32:00.002-05:002008-06-24T11:15:18.154-05:00True? Love, a novel in progressI suppose I could blog about anything I want to blog about. I could do a journal of day-to-day stuff, write poems, post my photography, do political rants or rants about religion. I could write porn. I could post pictures of naked people. I could do anything I want and if I get in trouble for it, do I really care? No. Not really.
<br />
<br />I'm writing a novel. It may need to be extensively edited later and it is far from being finished, but such as it is, here are the first chapters of the first draft of my first novel. It is as true as any fictional story.
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<br />My Novel: True? Love
<br />by Bob DeVore, self-published on the Internet, first on MySpace, then on Multiply, now on the Blogger network--2008.
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<br />This is a work of quite amateurish fiction. All persons, places and events appearing in this story are entirely the product of the author’s nightmares and any similarity to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental. The author apologizes if anything in this story even remotely resembles the truth. That would be accidental and completely unintentional. The author has no idea what the real truth is.
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<br />Chapter One: Warren Peas, otherwise known as A Sale of Two Titties
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<br />The lies men tell are numerous and diverse, although they often adhere to a standard formula so that even without an obvious signal, other men know to go along with it.
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<br />We are being purposely gender-specific in saying that it is men who lie. Women never lie. The author would like for you to know at this point that he is a woman so that you can be confident that everything he says is completely true.
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<br />Even though the lies men tell are nearly infinite in variety, they all fit into one of two classifications: there are the lies men tell to save face and there are the lies men tell to save their asses.
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<br />It isn’t always the concealment of misdeeds that causes men to lie. It is often simply a fact of nature that men are forced to lie because they don’t really know the truth.
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<br />Brad carefully typed the words “the meaning of life” into the Oogle search box in the Oogle toolbar at the top of his Oogle homepage; a window in a window in a window on his computer—Brad’s window to the world. “You can find anything on the Internet”, he self-satisfiedly said to himself in a way that indicated his self-satisfaction.
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<br />Before he clicked the search button, he hovered his cursor over the box, causing a drop-down menu to do what drop-down menus do, namely: drop down. On small tabs on the drop-down were a few of Brad’s other recent Oogle searches: “does god exist”, “is there an afterlife”, “what is truth”, “does the universe go on and on forever or does it end somewhere and if it ends is there something else after that” (long tab for this one) and “what do women really want?”
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<br />This last one was rather a rhetorical mooted point since—as far as Brad knew—the one thing no woman wanted was Brad. Truth be told (not that Brad—a man—could tell it) his recent volley of Oogle searches was really just a way to push that “what do women want” search to the bottom of his search history so it would disappear from the drop-down menu. He didn’t want to be reminded that among all of the things he didn’t know, what women want was near the top of the list.
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<br />So Brad (not his real name since fictional characters don’t have real names) clicked “search” while silently reminding himself that with just a few more Ooglings, he could begin to forget that he had no idea of what is was that he lacked that women wanted.
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<br />At the exact same moment—according to the strictest Einsteinian definition of simultaneity—on the other side of the same town—a medium-sized city in the Midwestern Affiliated Regions of Solumbinia—Tiffany (her actual name. No lie this time) was conducting an Oogle search on her own computer, similar to and perhaps complimentary to but significantly different from Brad’s search. Tiffany (or Tif as she was sometimes known) searched for “an honest man”.
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<br />Point four-three seconds later, the powerful Oogle search-motor dutifully displayed the results: 437,958,219 pages found for “an honest man”, but all the pages were from works of fiction. Another forty-three hundredths of a second elapsed in which Brad and Tif remained completely unaware of one another even though they each had jobs that brought them separately to the same building each day of the week, Brad’s in a cubicle on the thirty-seventh floor from 9am to 5:30pm and Tif’s at an impressively-polished desk on the fifty-eighth floor from 9:30 to quarter of six. Tif never came to work early and Brad never stayed late. Immediately following the aforementioned eighty-six one-hundredths of a second, another brief interval of time elapsed during which very little happened that was of any significance to Brad, Tif, you or me, but this was a VERY brief period of inactivity because in a first chapter, one wants to keep the story moving.
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<br />The reader might assume at this point that—despite all odds—this story is shaping up to be a standard “boy meets girl, notices girl’s inner beauty as an asset quite apart from girl’s prodigious outer beauty, boy tries to win girl’s affection but girl supposes that boy is just as dishonest as all the other boys who have tried to steal her heart so boy must undertake some challenge to prove himself worthy then manages to get a first date with girl but ends up alienating her in some clumsy, stupid, avoidable way which leads to him needing to save the world in such a way that he could afterwards rightfully claim that the world now owes him something but instead he shows genuine compassion by letting the world off easy, impressing the girl so much that she decides to give him a brief kiss off to one side of his face before realizing that she really doesn’t like the way his breath smells” story, but the writer has no intention of writing some heaving-bosom novel that will be published directly to paperback and merchandised alongside copies of this month’s “Better Houses and Lawns” and “Ladies Room Journal” at the local Wallbrown’s drug and discount store.
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<br />So I’m going to keep Brad and Tif away from one another as long as possible unless they declare some kind of literary mutiny.
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<br />And they really can’t do that.
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<br />This is MY lie—on my sacred oath as a gentleman trying to be the best woman a man can be.
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<br />Chapter 2: The Runt for Head October
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<br />The very next thing Brad did was to log in to his account at I-needadate, using his screenname DudeManly4782 and his password--which showed on the screen as ******************** so that Brad could feel secure as he typed in ohpleasepleaseplease! The speakers attached to his computer immediately hummed to life with the opening chords of the new Frascal Ratts song that was set to play automatically on his profile page, causing Brad to wince and grab the scrollbar with his cursor (in the shape of a single red rose) to move down to the music player where he quickly clicked the pause button to stop the music. He never really liked Frascal Ratts, but he assumed that women did. His profile on I-needadate wasn't for him after all. It was to attract chicks.
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<br />He reviewed his "Search for Dates" screen, which said that he was a man looking for a woman, barely noticing his own disgust that there were so many other options in that category. Instead, he focused on the helpful search hint at the top of the page: "Choose what you really want in a date. Be honest."
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<br />He had set up his date-search a few weeks prior, checking what he felt were the appropriate boxes at the time, but since the powerful I-needadate search motor (editors note: are you sure you want to keep saying "search motor" instead of engine?) had not yet found any good prospects, he thought it might need some tweaking.
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<br />Ages 20 to 50, check. Any hair color, check. Any body type, check.
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<br /><em>Maybe I checked too many "anys". Maybe I seem desperate. Maybe I AM desperate. But should everyone KNOW that I'm desperate?</em>
<br /><em></em>
<br />Eyes? <em>Yes please</em>. Lifestyle? <em>Sure, why not?</em> Interested in?
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<br />Here was the question he couldn't quite answer honestly. Was Brad looking for casual fun, someone to hang out with, a dinner/show companion, possible long-term relationship or other to be written in comments? It all depended on how well they got along, how they hit it off, how Brad felt when they spent time together, chemistry and physics and stuff. How could he say what a date might turn into when he hadn't even met her yet?
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<br />So he kept his previous selection--ask me later--and went directly to the page that had profiles of possible dates. Brad knew that this part of I-needadate was the part he would have to work if he was going to find a date this way, but something about it really bothered him. It was as though he was looking at cans of soup in a grocery store. The faces and screennames were just like labels on soupcans and the brief profiles looked just like nutrition facts and ingredient lists to him.
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<br />"<em>This is no way to shop for a friend</em>," he thought--almost out loud, then, "<em>Hm! Did I hear what I just thought? A Friend! I'm looking for a friend! And a date. Yes, that's it: a female friend. That's what I want."</em>
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<br /></em>As Brad experienced this profound insight into his own interests, a photo caught his eye: the photo of a very kind-looking woman whose screenname was Hotbabe3764, known offline as Tiffany. Hovering his rose-shaped cursor over the snapshot of Tiffany caused a dialog box to appear on the screen. "Do you want to...send message, add to favorites, ask for a date or wiggle eyebrows at Hotbabe3764?"
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<br /></em>Brads eyebrows (the ones on his actual face, not his virtual eyebrows) moved around without his willing them to do so, indicating that he was thinking about what to do next. He clicked "send a message", then stared at the blank box for quite some time with no clue as to what to say to Hotbabe3764. He sat and stared at the screen for so long that his computer decided that it had been left alone and activated Brad's screensaver, an animated 3-D bouncing ball. He shook the mouse to make the screensaver go away and stared at the blank message box for a few more seconds before clicking the back button to return to Tiffany (I mean Hotbabe3764)'s profile.
<br /><em></em>
<br /><em>Hey Brad. Don't make it bad. Take your sad ass, and get up off it. The minute you let her under your skin, then you'll begin to feel the itching, twitching, throbbing, sobbing, thumping, bumping YEAAAAAAH! Na, nana, nanana naaaaa! Nanana naaaaaa! Hey Brad!
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<br /></em><em></em>Ancient pop songs with altered lyrics tended to spring into Brad's head for no apparent reason, but sometimes they got him through indecisive moments. Brad bravely wiggled his eyebrows at Tiffany. Actually it was DudeManly4782 wiggling virtual eyebrows at Hotbabe3764, but eyebrows got wiggled and that's the important thing here.
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<br />Unfortunately, since this isn't a romance novel, what Brad didn't realize is that he was about to become...a heartless, grisly serial killer!
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<br />"No I'm NOT!" said Brad
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<br />"Oh yes you will,” said the evil writer.
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<br />"No, I will NOT" Brad reiterated, somewhat more firmly.
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<br />"Oh, we'll just have to see about that," said the writer, with an evil giggle.
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<br />
<br />Chapter 3:Gidget Bones Diary
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<br />Guess what, Mandy…I have a date! It isn’t a guy from the club—you know I don’t date those guys—or any of the stiffs from the office. Some of them act like they would like to date me, but I really don’t want to get into some crazy sexual harassment thing that might make me lose my day job. This is an actual date with a guy I met online.
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<br />I know what you’re going to say about meeting guys online, but I have my reasons. All the other guys I meet are so hung up on how I look, I don’t get to know them as people. Or they don’t look at me as a person. Or something.
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<br />It’s like, at the club, once you’ve danced naked in front of a guy they don’t look you in the eyes anymore. I could be talking to a guy there, but he’ll be staring at my boobs and just saying “uh-huh” no matter what I’m talking about. Don’t get me wrong: the money is nice and I enjoy feeling attractive and all, but I think it’s time for me to meet a guy who will like me as something more than a hot body. Sounds strange doesn’t it?
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<br />And then at the office, it’s like those guys don’t see me for who I am either. It seems like they’re all competing with each other to see who can score on the office hottie first. I don’t really want to be like the end zone in a football game, where a guys is going to slam-dunk me, do the victory dance for 30 seconds and then run away to the other end of the field.
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<br />I already decided: no office-guys and no club-guys.
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<br />This guy is different. We’ve haven’t met in person yet. We’re getting to know each other through messages on that dating service I subscribed to: E-You.
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<br />This is such a different thing for me that I’m kind of nervous, but it feels right.
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<br />I hope he’s cute. But really, more than that, I hope he’s someone I can talk to; someone who’s interested in what I have to say. It seems that way when we chat online. I just hope that when we meet in person, this whole rapport thing we’ve developed doesn’t melt into a puddle of raging hormones. I mean, I hope there are some raging hormones, just not the kind that makes us both lose our ability to talk to each other like people, kind of like you and I talk to each other.
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<br />Except with some romance in it. Um, I mean, you’re my best friend and everything Mandy, but I want to have a guy in my life who can listen to me and still want to cuddle with me after we do the wild thing.
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<br />I’m meeting him tomorrow night at the Dusty Duck. Do you think it’s a public enough spot? Not too dive-y? They serve food. Tomorrow they’ll be spinning dance music after 11 (if we stay that long).
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<br />Wish me luck!
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<br />
<br />Chapter 4: From Lawn to Lusk
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<br />“<em>Why am I doing this</em>?” Brad asked himself. “<em>Is it just for the money or the adventure or is there something I don’t know about myself</em>?”
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<br />These are the sorts of thoughts that were simmering inside Brad’s mind as he piloted his huge black Stinkin Aggravator (or maybe it was a Frod Exploiter—it was hard to tell in the dark) through miles of near-empty highway, along mountain passes, through city streets, staying constantly alert for any signs that someone might be following him.
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<br />He had prepared for tonight in the usual way that he prepared himself for these jobs: by looking at the photos and maps, reading the profile of the target (then burning the info packet in his fireplace) double- and triple-checking the SUV to make sure that all the special equipment was working the way it should, packing his “tools” into the concealed compartments. There were many things about Brad that made him good at the kind of job he was doing tonight. He was thorough, prepared, experienced and capable, but none of that would have gotten him the contract he had for this night if one particular qualification had been missing: no one in Brad’s personal life knew about his independent contracting business. He got these good-paying jobs only because—other than his employer—no one knew he did this kind of work. He was unseen and untraceable.
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<br />“<em>Sometimes it seems like I’m living some other person’s life; as though this really isn’t me; as if someone else is calling the shots</em>.” Here, Brad had to smile at his own unintentional pun. “…<em>calling the shots. Good one</em>.”
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<br />The Boss (whose name Brad didn’t know and didn’t want to know as long as the cash kept coming) had said the same thing about the current target that he said about every target: that it was someone the world would be better off without. Brad knew that The Boss said this to him to keep Brad from feeling guilty; to allow him to feel that his actions were proper, good and justified. Brad didn’t want to look into it too deeply because of the chance that he might find out that what he had been doing was not in fact a good thing to do. He merely reminded himself that he was good at his job and that for all he knew, he was making the world a better place by taking out the trash.
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<br />Brad didn’t call himself any of the words that others might call him. Brad knew himself as a person who did things that needed to be done. He was a contractor—like other contractors. He could tell people he did freelance consulting.
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<br />The target was exactly where the target was supposed to be. The two 9mm rounds went into the target in exactly the way small lead projectiles were supposed to go into undercover terrorists: one in the heart and one in the head in classic execution style. No one saw Brad come or go. He hadn’t left so much as a fingerprint, a stray hair or a clothing fiber at the scene that could be used to identify him. It was as clean and professional a job as any of the other jobs Brad had done. But still, something troubled him.
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<br />“Is this really who I am?” Brad asked aloud, as if there was someone to hear his question.
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<br />“Oh well. At least I have a date tomorrow night.”
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<br />
<br />Chapter 5: A Tinkle in Rime
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<br />Tiffany was surprised that she was feeling nervous. It was just a date, just a guy. It wasn’t as though she had any trouble getting people to like her. She met people all the time and people liked her. There was no reason—she kept telling herself—to be nervous about this.
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<br />It had started during the moment when she opened the door of her closet, standing there wrapped in two fluffy towels—one around her just-showered body and the other turbaned onto her still-damp hair—as she surveyed her clothing options for the evening. “<em>Okay</em>”, she thought, “<em>let’s consider this carefully. Shall I wear some clothes tonight? These ARE my best towels after all. They even match</em>.”
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<br />That was when she realized she was feeling nervous. She always tried to make herself laugh when she was nervous. “<em>Yep</em>”, she thought, peeking at the full-length mirror on the inner closet door, ”<em>I look good in towels. If DudeManly is going to like me, he’ll like me in towels</em>.”
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<br />At that point, she did manage a small jitters-busting giggle, accompanied by a few small thoughts that brought more giggles: “<em>Yeah, right, he would probably love to have me show up wearing a towel</em>” and a brief quick-time fantasy involving her towel getting caught in the car door as she arrived at the Dusty Duck. At some point, she decided that she was giving her brain too much leeway in her efforts to get over being nervous, so she shook her head to shake the goofy thoughts away, causing her hair-turban to loosen and fall to the floor. With a deep sigh that she used as a kind of mental reset button, she finally acknowledged to herself that she was being silly because she was feeling nervous about meeting DudeManly.
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<br />“<em>Ummm. Okay. Maybe this nice blue hoochie dress. It fits about the way my towel does</em>.” She pulled the small curl of spandex out of the closet and looked at it. “<em>No, that’s a little too…stripper-y. I don’t want to look like a stripper tonight</em>.
<br />
<br />“<em>Or maybe this nice sun-dress. When was the last time I wore this? Have I ever worn this?”</em> She let her mind imagine herself running through a field of tall grass with sunlight glinting through her free-flying hair as DudeManly chased her playfully, all in a hazy, brightly-colored slow motion. “<em>Err, I don’t seem to be having any luck with putting clothes on. I do know how to wear clothes, don’t I? I need to just pick out some clothes and put them on. This isn’t supposed to be about my clothes. It’s supposed to be about me meeting someone I can talk to. If I don’t get dressed—somehow—I won’t get out of this apartment to go and meet the guy I’m going to try to talk with. First things first: underwear. I am going to wear underwear</em>.”
<br />
<br />Making a firm decision felt good, like a step in the right direction. She would wear underwear damn it, and the moment it took to put underwear on would give her a moment to forget about being nervous and just get dressed. “<em>Yes</em>”, she thought, with new resolve as she rifled through the drawer that contained her drawers, searching for the right one, her thoughts becoming an audible verbal expression to indicate her increasing sense of commitment to a plan: “I am going to wear…THIS underwear! What’s more, I am going to wear (more searching) THIS bra! And if Dude doesn’t like me in this bra and this underwear, then he just doesn’t know what he’s missing!”
<br />
<br />It took another reset-sigh to get herself back to the present moment. “Ummm, Tif, sweety?”she said to herself, “He probably isn’t going to see our undies tonight. Remember: we’re a good girl. We don’t show a guy our undies on a first date.”
<br />
<br />It went on like that for a few more minutes. Eventually, Tiffany pulled out a pair of jeans and put them on, then hemmed and hawed about what top would go best with the jeans and which shoes and…eventually, with great effort, she was able to leave her apartment.
<br />
<br />
<br />Brad had only a slightly easier time getting dressed that night than Tiffany did and that was only because he didn’t have quite as many clothes to choose from. But still, he fretted a bit about looking good and he acknowledged that he was feeling nervous and—like Tiffany was doing at about the same moment—he reminded himself about why he was going on this date tonight. His reasons seemed a little different from hers (not that they were able to compare notes at that point: It’s only you and I who can see what is happening in these people’s heads) but it came down to a very similar thing. Brad wanted someone—maybe it would be Hotbabe and maybe not—who could know him for who he really was and could love him.
<br />
<br />That should be easy enough, shouldn’t it? Don’t we ALL deserve to be loved, even a stripper, even an assassin?
<br />
<br />Brad dressed in good jeans, a decent shirt and some boots, then he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror—not a full-length mirror, but he didn’t need to see how he looked below the neck. He looked at his face, looked himself in the eyes, looked at the part of himself he wanted Hotbabe to see while they talked.
<br />
<br />“It’s going to be a good night”, he promised himself.
<br />
<br />
<br />Chapter 4.5.1: The Hell-hale Tart
<br />
<br />“Lair” is probably one of the more common words that we might choose as the name of the place where It lurked and lounged, awaiting Its moment, but “bunker” or “double-wide prefabricated home on wheels” might serve just as well. We want to have some way of telling something about It because even though Its basic nature is quite easy to describe—pure malevolent evil—very few of Its physical qualities will admit any simple descriptions and if the truth is to be told (which it really can’t be told here) even Its location in space-time is a rather iffy, indefinite idea.
<br />
<br />We can think of It as having a roughly-humanoid body, for example, with arms and legs and a head at the top where Its ravenous mouth yawned lazily beneath Its wide-open eyes, but if we think of It in that way, we must remember that a construction crane has an appendage we call an “arm” and the pressure in any high-pressure system can be called a “head” and the part of every river where it empties into the sea is known as a “mouth”. The Beast we endeavor to portray in our imagination can be thought of as having these parts—as having a definite physical form and as being in a particular place—but these are only the roughest of guidelines to let us imagine the unimaginable.
<br />
<br />It actually has an incredibly devious way of appearing quite non-descript and unremarkable until just before It strikes, remaining completely unnoticed until Its victim has been thoroughly trapped, and at that moment Its “true face” will momentarily appear to be anything the doomed soul fears deeply. Living flesh is Its food and nourishment, but disabling, paralyzing fear is Its favorite seasoning.
<br />
<br />So although we can often convince ourselves during our happy rational moments that such monsters do not exist and even though we might be content to think of this monster as lying on Its back in Its hovel waiting for the moment when It would take Its next meal, these imaginings are only approximations. It was actually anywhere and nowhere; It was actually made of All The Evil That Ever Was and at the same time made of nothing at all; and It lay in wait, but Its waiting was an active inactivity.
<br />
<br />Likewise, It could have many names in many languages and It could answer to those names and could hold the most erudite of discourse with any or all thinkers and sayers-of-names, but no name—secret or mundane—could be used to control It.
<br />
<br />Its real name was therefore simply It.
<br />
<br />It was hungry for the sort of double-value meal that might be named “Brad and Tiffany attempting to fall in love.”
<br />
<br />Mmmmm. Such delicious fear!
<br />
<br />
<br />Chapter 4.5.2 Omer’s Hilly-ad
<br />
<br />Kind Reader, be cautioned and bolden thine heart
<br />For herewith approacheth the difficult part
<br />Departs for a moment the bits to bring laughter
<br />And thereby to strengthen the parts that come after
<br />The Poet intends not to ridicule suff’ring
<br />But breaks into verse with a view toward buff’ring
<br />For true horror lurks both in world and in thought
<br />And if we won’t look or won’t see, tell me what
<br />Meaning can be here contained in a tale
<br />worth telling.
<br />
<br />The young girl has a name that her parents gave her
<br />But naming her name now does nothing to save her
<br />Hers is a tragedy not rare enough
<br />Though rarely we see it: our hearts are not tough.
<br />Starving, near-useless, never to learn why
<br />Her fate is to live but a short time, then die.
<br />
<br />She knoweth not even that she is a she
<br />Knows not of the glory a woman can be
<br />Never learns that within her life-seeds could be carried
<br />Or that she could live long enough to be married
<br />And thenceforth to reclaim a renewal of life
<br />Created of love.
<br />
<br />The rice that was declared unfit on that night
<br />By the Dusty Duck’s chef and was heft in a white
<br />Plastic bag to a dumpster that sits in the alley
<br />Of a mid-priced café in a sub-urban valley
<br />and yet this food—rejected and tossed
<br />Could have saved the life of a child.
<br />
<br />Bad enough already, but it gets worse.
<br />I continue, shielding us both with my verse.
<br />
<br />Because even though you might say I control it
<br />The story’s not mine. I’m just here to unroll it.
<br />I’d love for life to be all sweetness and honey
<br />With always enough food, enough love, enough money
<br />And never with fear or with pain may we live
<br />with never an urge to do aught except give.
<br />I’d sincerely love to live in perfection
<br />Where no stories need to be told.
<br />
<br />It was there, collecting and feeding.
<br />Feeding It-self while others stood needing.
<br />The girl-child could not be consumed by Its terrors.
<br />Fear could not touch her, her soul free of errors
<br />Of greed or of hatred or dishonest vice.
<br />With all hope denied her, she never thought twice
<br />And though it’s a thing quite beyond our belief
<br />Sleep without waking was—to her—a relief.
<br />
<br />No, she was not the focus of Its hateful attack
<br />She was only unbless-ed to live in a shack
<br />By a side of a road where a man whose heart hated
<br />Was driven to crimes here to be related.
<br />
<br />Welcome to Spirituality 202: The Next Level. You may remember from Spirituality 101 that we began to approach the subject of coping with one’s feelings in a perfect world. The writer (a dedicated liar, you’ll remember) is unable to report at this hour that a perfect world actually exists, and so in the next level we shall begin to explore coping with feelings in a world that might contain some imperfections.
<br />
<br />A few notes: in all cases, the writer is not to be thought of as a guru, master or teacher of any sort. At best, the writer is simply a fellow student who is learning through writing. The roles can, may, should and probably will be reversed at some point. Eventually, it will be you talking and me listening. And I’ll be quite grateful for that opportunity.
<br />
<br />Secondly, we will be confronting the subjects of reality and truth. This novel is a work of fiction—quite outside of the set of objects called “truth”. From the perspective of a place outside of the set, I hope to get a look at the set in the same way that one can see the earth as a whole only from a place at a distance from the earth. We are outside of truth, looking in.
<br />
<br />In the third note, I would like to ask you if love exists. If you answer that “yes, love does exist”, I would like to ask that you notice where and in what manner it exists. Please notice at this point that your answers are your own and I will make no attempt to lead you toward any particular answer. It will be enough for my purposes that I point out to you that if love can be in some way “real” then hate can be real in the same way; that hope exists in the same realm where fear exists—but maybe not at the same time. And—if these things exist at all—unlike some other things that exist, love, hate, hope and fear exist mainly because we believe they exist. Unlike most physical objects and unlike some mental objects, these spiritual objects become real only because of our belief in them.
<br />
<br />And they don’t exist if we don’t believe.
<br />
<br />As an example, I—the lie-teller—believe that the monster I have named “It” actually does exist beyond these pages, however “I” do not exist except as a storyteller here in these pages, a free, no-obligation gift that is included at no charge as part of your MySpace account. I haven’t specifically asked Tom if this is okay, but on the other hand Tom has not specifically told me that it isn’t okay. As long as I don’t show photographs of naked humans or use really offensive language, I don’t think Tom will mind.
<br />
<br />Without further preamble, the rest of chapter 4.5.2 continues this way:
<br />
<br />Heroic verse is for the singing of the deeds of heroic people; people who are not gripped and frozen and consumed by fear; people who might rightly feel fear, but are not victimized and controlled by It. Recounting the deeds of cowardly people is not an appropriate use of heroic verse.
<br />
<br />Neither Brad nor Tiffany ever met Roger, but they both met Roger’s cousin Mikey. Roger never traveled from his native country of Ijoq (right next to Ijog in the Oroborian Gulf region) to the place where Brad and Tiffany lived: the A.R.S. (short for The Affiliated Regions of Solumbinia, a “free”, populocratic, Western nation.)
<br />
<br />Mikey traveled to A.R.-ia on a secret mission: to carry out a terrorist attack. As part of Mikey’s efforts to blend in and be inconspicuous (and perhaps for some other, more-secret personal reasons) he visited the Honey Hive and came face-to-face (in a manner of speaking) with most of Tiffany’s outer beauty. He tipped reasonably well if somewhat awkwardly.
<br />
<br />Brad “met” Mikey under less-friendly circumstances. Mikey was Brad’s target on the night before Brad met Tiffany.
<br />
<br />Bad news travels quickly. During the same moments in A.R.ia while Brad and Tiffany were preparing to meet one another for the first time, Roger had learned of his cousin’s death and—quite distraught and angry—drove a car full of high-octane vaxoline fuel (vaxoline is a plutroleum distillate, used to fuel just about everything in this alternate, fictional version of the world) into the offices of Shrubco International, an A.R.ia-based plutroleum company that was drilling for the precious fuel within the nation of Ijoq.
<br />
<br />The car blew up, causing a huge chain-reaction explosion of the entire Shrubco complex, sending pieces of super-heated debris flying at high speeds in all directions.
<br />
<br />The evening news reported that five A.R.ians died in the explosion and that property damage was expected to add up to billions of Solumbonians.
<br />
<br />There were no news reports that included the injuries of the large number of Ijoqis who lived in the immediate area, as if no one who wasn’t an A.R.ian really mattered.
<br />
<br />Neither Brad nor Tiffany caught a news report that night. Neither was affected by this sad news when they sat down to enjoy a dinner together. It wasn’t completely necessary to include this part of the story except as a way to show what kind of world Brad and Tiffany lived in and how great were the challenges that came between potential lovers and that which their hearts truly desired.
<br />
<br />Just before the car exploded, Roger saw It, but to Roger It looked like a foreign God, speaking in a foreign language, defiling Roger’s homeland.
<br />
<br />Chapter 6 The Feces/Fan Incident
<br />
<br />Ethan-- the parking attendant at the Dusty Duck--was listening to either Spritzeny Beers or Chupak Boocoor as he watched Brad's ten-year-old Loyola Cabron pull up to the curb. He noticed the look on Brad's face: a look that said "I don't really want to valet this car" and--
<br />
<br /><em>sorry, phones ringing brb</em>~
<br />
<br />"Hello?"
<br />
<br />"Hi, is this Mr. Zilla? Mr. Bob Zilla, the writer?"
<br />
<br />I couldn't quite place the voice, but I know that it wasn't a telemarketer. Someone selling magazine subscriptions or security systems wouldn't have called me Zilla or a writer. In fact, it could only be someone who knows me pretty well; so why didn't I recognize the voice? "Yes, this is Bob," I said, "Who's calling, please?"
<br />
<br />"Mr. Zilla, my name is Tiffany. I'm a character in a story you've been serializing on MySpace."
<br />
<br />Uh-oh!
<br />
<br />"Oh!" I remarked as the first syllable of what might turn into a protracted utterance of hesitant stammering sounds, "I wasn't expecting a call from you. In fact I had no idea that it was even possible for you to call me."
<br />
<br />"Well, it IS possible. I CAN call you. I can speak to you. I realize this might be kind of a shock, but just because you made me up, that doesn't mean I'm not real and it doesn't mean that I don't have my own feelings."
<br />
<br />"Uh," I said as a way of showing my amazing intellect.
<br />
<br />"In fact, Mr. Zilla--"
<br />
<br />"Please. Call me Bob."
<br />
<br />"Actually, I'd prefer to keep it formal at the moment, " she continued, without missing a beat, "because I have some real concerns about the way the story is going."
<br />
<br />"I see. Okay, please go on." I began to brace myself for the worst. I was sure that Tif would be telling me some things I really didn't want to hear. But--funny thing about problems--they don't go away just by ignoring them. I knew I'd have to listen to what she had to say. I suppose I even admired the courage she was displaying by calling me in the first place. Well, courage AND a total break with the traditional relationship boundaries between a novelist and a fictional character.
<br />
<br />"In particular, I really don't see why I have to be a stripper. I don't even understand why you would want for me to be a stripper. This story doesn't have any pictures in it, so you don't actually get to see me naked. And I can't think of any other reason a writer would make the female lead in his story have to be such a skanky kind of ho. I'm really NOT that type of girl at all, you know."
<br />
<br />She seemed to have no trouble getting to the point: she had said a mouthful and then barely took a moment to reload before saying another mouthful.
<br />
<br />"Um, look, Tiffany: I have not portrayed you as "skanky" or "a ho" or anything of the sort. I haven't actually even used the word "stripper"(here, I had to scramble to my notes to see which words I actually DID use) "nor do I plan to make you seem skanky in any way. You're a stripper for a couple of reasons: I needed to make you a character who was kind of vulnerable, someone who has a need to be seen as pretty, someone who craves attention and also someone who has a secret that she might hide from Brad. If you look at it that way, you are actually a part of ME. You're the character who represents all of those sorts of things that are actually parts of me--Bob."
<br />
<br />"Fine," she said, unimpressed, "If YOU want to be a stripper, Mr. Zilla, then YOU go take your clothes off in front of strangers. Don't make ME do it for you just because it's part of YOUR sick fantasy."
<br />
<br />"Sick fantasy?!? Now look here, Miss..." Steam was beginning to rise from my ears, near my red, overheated cheeks. The nerve! My own character calls me up to tell me off like this? Is that gratitude? Is that respect? No. It ain't no gratitude or respect and it ain't proper at all. Now this chick was going to get a piece of my mind. If I could spare any..."In the first place, you are a fictional character. You are the product of my imagination. No one blames you for the way you are. Readers are smart people. They know that you are who you are only because I made you that way. If it's your reputation you're worried about, you needn't concern yourself with that."
<br />
<br />"No, Mr. Zilla, that really isn't it. I just don't know that I really want to be in this story of yours."
<br />
<br />"Are you calling me to say you're quitting?"
<br />
<br />"Well..."
<br />
<br />"Do you realize what that means, Tif?" I waited a few seconds to see if she would have an answer. "If you aren't in this story, you don't exist." Those words felt very strange as they came out of my mouth, as though I was saying something that--even though true--was something I really shouldn't be saying. "You're fictional. You can't exist without a story to be in." The re-phrasing only made it slightly more palatable.
<br />
<br />"So you're saying that I can be a skank or I can be not-at-all?"
<br />
<br />Is that what I was saying? Not exactly...
<br />
<br />"I'm saying that you can be the kind of character I write you as. I made you the main female character in my story--let's be blunt here, Tif--because I like you. I want you to be a person who has some challenges and some flaws, but who still manages to find something good in life. I want you to find love and truth and all the good stuff like that." I paused to take a breath in, then let it out, then take another. "Just like I want those things for myself."
<br />
<br />"I'll think it over. I still don't see why I need to be a stripper. Ill think about it and I'll get back to you."
<br />
<br />"Have a nice date tonight, Tif."
<br />
<br />"Thanks. Bye."
<br />
<br /><em>k im back. phone call went well...where was i? o yeah--</em>
<br /><em></em>
<br />Ethan-- the parking attendant at the Dusty Duck--was listening to either Spritzeny Beers or Chupak Boocoor as he watched Brad's ten-year-old Loyola Cabron pull up to the curb. He noticed the look on Brad's face: a look that said "I don't really want to valet this car" and--Ethan understood why a guy wouldn't want to let a stranger park such an old car. Ethan spent most of his Friday and Saturday nights parking other people's cars and he was well familiar with all the different types of people who put their vehicles in his care. He gave Brad a small smile that was intended to put his client at ease. Brad gave Ethan a nice tip--a five Solumbonian bill!--and so Ethan was able to classify Brad: he was the type who tipped before getting his car back in one piece.
<br />
<br />The next car that came to Ethan's valet booth was also a Loyola, but a much newer one and the much more luxurious Maximoose model. The woman who hopped out of it didn't seem to have any anxiety about leaving her car with a stranger. And she didn't give Ethan any money up-front. Ethan classified this driver (Tiffany, but Ethan didn't know her name) as an "after-tipper". She would give Ethan a couple of solumbs only AFTER her car had been returned to her.
<br />
<br />Brad sat at a table facing the door so he could see Tiffany when she came in. He reminded himself that he was going to have a good time tonight and that he wasn't nervous. "<em>I'm not nervous</em>" he said to himself. "<em>I'm here to have fun. I'm not nervous. No, I am not at all nervous and I am here to have fun--"
<br /></em>
<br /><em>rrr! sorry its the phone again...
<br /></em>
<br />"Hello."
<br />
<br />"Hello, is this Bobzilla, the author?"
<br />
<br />"Ah, hello Brad. I've been expecting your call. This is Bob, but I don't really call myself an 'author; more just a writer or storyteller. 'Author' sounds stuffy and conceited.
<br />
<br />"Okay, whatever, as long as you're the guy who's writing this story that I'm in. I'm calling because I have Some Serious Concerns."
<br />(I joined in on chanting those last three words as though it was the chorus of a familiar song. We said "some serious concerns" together, Brad and I. I felt that it might make him feel better knowing that we all have serious concerns.)
<br />
<br />"You aren't alone, Brad. I heard from another character just a few minutes ago who said the same thing. And to be honest, I have concerns, too."
<br />
<br />There was a pause at the other end of the phone line. I noticed that—unlike most of the moments in this story—over the phone, I couldn't actually hear Brad's thoughts. Writers of this type of fiction kind of depend on being able to know what the main characters are thinking, writing out the parts of their internal processes that the reader needs to see in order to understand the character. Throughout most of the story, we get to know exactly what Brad is thinking, but here on the phone now, I can't hear his internal voice. I have to wait for him to speak.
<br />
<br />"So," he finally continued after a few moments, "since EVERYONE has concerns, maybe you won't be so sympathetic about MY concerns. It's the old 'you've got your troubles, I've got mine' routine, eh?"
<br />
<br />"No, that's not it at all, Brad. I only mean that you aren't the only concerned citizen in this story. Maybe I'm not saying it the right way. I'm actually a lot better at writing than I am at talking. I'll listen to you. Please tell me what's on your mind."
<br />
<br />He let out a sigh—in the manner of one who has decided to just go ahead and say what he's going to say—then he spoke in clear, careful tones: "I really just don't understand why you would want for the central male character in your story to be a murderer. You do realize--don't you, Mr. Zilla?—that whatever traits you give ME will be seen as traits of your own. Your readers will know that the 'hero' of your story is your own alter ego." (at this point, as I sat with the phone against my ear, listening to a fictional voice, I think my mouth was hanging open a little bit. I had no idea that Brad knew this kind of stuff) "When you make your hero a murderer, you make your readers think that you yourself somehow identify with a person who murders."
<br />
<br />I let a slow four-count pass before I responded. I knew I wasn't going to be able to bullshit my way out of this. "I understand what you're saying, Brad, but you aren't a murderer. You're an assassin. You don't kill for fun or at random or purely by your own choice. You do assignments. Yes, you kill people, but only when you're hired to do so and the people you're assigned to kill are always bad people."
<br />
<br />"Do you believe in that, Bob? Do you actually believe that some people are 'bad' people who deserve to get killed?"
<br />
<br />This was so not fair. How does this guy know how to get to me?
<br />
<br />"No," I admitted, "I don't really believe that there are people who are inherently 'bad'. It's just that I think that a lot of people DO see things that way: that there are good people and bad people. Especially in stories. Stories are supposed to have good guys and bad guys."
<br />
<br />"Okay," he said, trying to recap what I was telling him, "because of some outdated method of storytelling that you don't even believe yourself, you made me a 'good guy' who kills 'bad guys'. Is that what you're going to tell me to make me feel better about myself?"
<br />
<br />"Let's try a different way of understanding it." At this point I was beginning to realize that Brad wasn't going to accept any partial solutions. "Why does a storyteller tell stories in the first place?"
<br />
<br />"Because it's just who they are?" he offered.
<br />
<br />"Well, sure, but also because they feel that they have something to say; something more than can be said in another way."
<br />
<br />"Okay, so you're telling a story to share your great wisdom about life," he said, with just a bit of sarcasm.
<br />
<br />"I am trying to share something, but not really because I think I'm some fountain of wisdom and truth. If I just wanted to preach, I'd write essays. I'd get on my soapbox and I'd spout my opinions at the top of my lungs, getting all red in the face and always insisting that I'm absolutely right about everything. In a story, people get to see the situations for themselves. They get to make up their own minds about what's right or wrong. A story shows interactions and conditions and situations and lets the reader or listener think for him or herself."
<br />
<br />"But you're the storyteller. You make the decisions about what the story is going to show."
<br />"Only partially. To a great extent, you are as much in control of the story as I am, Brad. You do things in the story that I can't do by myself. You create the story as you go by being the person you are."
<br />
<br />"Yeah: the fictional person I am, " he replied, still skeptical. "Left to my own preferences, I really would not have chosen to be a killer. I just want to find a nice girl to love. That's the only thing that's keeping me in this story at all."
<br />
<br />"Understood."
<br />
<br />"Just promise me one thing, Zilla: No matter what, you won't put me into some kind of crazy situation where this woman I'm meeting tonight becomes my target. I will outright refuse to even think about killing a woman I'm supposed to be trying to love. I'll take the Exploiter (or Aggravator or whatever my work-car is called) and I'll drive the hell out of this story if you so much as hint that I'm going to get an 'assignment' like that. Do you understand me?"
<br />
<br />I doubt that many other writers have ever been placed in this position: being threatened by their own characters. It's quite undignified. But he has a point. "Okay, Brad. No killing the girl. I promise."
<br />
<br />"Good. I'm not certain I can trust you, but as long as we understand each other, it should be okay." A pause, then, "and one more thing, Mr. Zilla? If it isn't too much trouble, would you mind writing some sort of physical description of me? Something that says I have an honest face and kind eyes? Without that, I think the readers might be a little scared of me. You want them to like me, don't you?"
<br />
<br />"Yes, Brad. I want people to like you. I'll see what I can do. By the way, are you at the Dusty Duck now?"
<br />
<br />"Yeah, I'm here waiting for this Hotbabe3764, talking to you on my cellphone, getting dirty looks from the other diners."
<br />
<br />'Okay, just try to relax. The woman you're going to meet tonight is very attractive and smart and has a great sense of humor. I think you're really going to like her. Just have fun and be yourself."
<br />
<br /> "Yeah, " he said with barely-audible laugh, "I'll be 'myself'—whoever that is."
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Chapter 7: A Meal Other Than Breakfast at a Place Other Than Tiffany’s
<br />
<br />Brad didn’t realize it as he drove to the Dusty Duck that night, but his personal vehicle—a Loyola Cabron—had just turned 10 years old. Happy birthday Cabron!
<br />
<br />He did notice that some of the Cabron’s acoutrements weren’t working as well as they had a few years before: the windshield wipers needed an occasional nudge to keep them sweeping the mist off of the glass, some of the door locks didn’t always lock or unlock on the first try, the driver’s seat was not as comfy as he would have liked and the interior had a rather dingy look. The big black Stinkin Aggravator was a far more impressive vehicle, but Brad only used the Aggravator for work. The rest of the time it sat in a parking garage downtown in a space leased monthly under an assumed name. For all anyone knew, the Aggravator belonged to a Mr. Billy Bigbucks.
<br />
<br />Besides, the 10-year-old Cabron went a lot further on a gallon of vax than the Aggravator (or was it an Exploiter?) did. Like most cars owned by A.R.-ians, Brad’s Cabron had a faded “Affiliated We Stand” bumper sticker. Practically everyone had bought one right after the tragic events of 10/9, whether the car they drove was A.R.-made or Happonian.
<br />
<br />Those bumper stickers were very important to most Solumbinians. Everyone felt so horrid after 10/9, so distrustful of one another that they needed some way of showing that they were loyal A.R.-ians and of knowing whether the person in the next car was also a good Solumbinian or a potential terrorist. The A.R.S. is a nation of immigrants, after all; made up of people from many other countries, affiliated only in their belief in freedom, truth, justice and the Solumbinian way. The stickers came in three varieties: “Affiliated We Stand”, “This Land is AR Land”, and “In Goodness We Trust”, each with a graphic of a boldly-waving green, white and purple A.R.-ian flag.
<br />
<br />No one thought very much about why the 23 Oroborian dissidents (all registered as “legal aliens” living in the A.R.S.) had carried out the attacks on that autumn day; why men would hijack airliners and crash them into the three towers of the Global Commerce Center in New Blight City (and nearly crashing another plane into the Green House itself! That would have been a horrible blow to AR-ian morale even though President Shrub wasn’t in the Green House that day). No one thought very much about why these men could have been so angry with any and all A.R.-ians that they would sacrifice their own lives to randomly kill anyone who happened to be in the GCC towers that day. No one thought about the irony (or was it mere coincidence?) that Oroboria was a major supplier of plutroleum, that the airplanes exploded violently because they were full of plutroleum fuel, that Shrubco fuels powered all of the transportation in all of the Western world, including all the cars that now bore the bumper stickers.
<br />
<br />No one thought about these things because President Shrub was not directly affiliated with Shrubco Industries. He just happened to be brother, son, uncle, nephew and cousin to all of the official owners of Shrubco. He just happened to be bosom buddies with Sheik Yermoneymaker, King of Oroboria. It was all pure coincidence.
<br />
<br />Even later, after the war had started, after President Shrub had ordered attacks against Ijog and Ijoq, no one questioned it and no one bothered to remember that the hijackers had all been Oroborians—not Ijoggers or Ijoquis.
<br />
<br />But people DID notice that as the war continued, the price of vax kept going higher and higher, and so did the profits made by the plutroleum companies. And Shrubco was just another global plutroleum company. Coincidence.
<br />
<br />The phrases “conspiracy theory” and “paranoid delusions” will not be used in this novel—a work of fiction. In fiction, the conspiracy is not just a theory and the paranoia is not just a delusion.
<br />
<br />Brad didn’t drive his huge black SUV work car to his date that night, in part because he couldn’t afford to use so much vax and still buy a nice dinner for Tiffany. That’s all you really need to know about why he drove his old Loyola Cabron instead of the much more ostentatious Aggravator. Forget about 10/9 and conspiracies and terrors and politics. Forget that Tiffany was born a Soslim in Ijog whose family moved to the A.R.S. while Estephania (her ungainly given name) was a small child so that they could live in relative freedom. Forget about everything else. Dates are not about such matters. Dates are about having fun.
<br />
<br />She spotted him from where she stood next to the greeter’s station. It had to be him because he was the only guy in the place who was sitting alone, looking at the door. Their eyes met in about the same amount of time it takes to ignite a can of vax with a match.
<br />
<br />She noticed that he wasn’t difficult to look at—no strain on her eyes. She estimated that he was about the same age as she was and that he was dressed reasonably well for a casual date. The next thing she noticed was that he had an honest face and kind eyes. Enough for now. She would inspect him more closely once she got closer. If he hadn’t been an acceptable age, dressed okay and with a face that at least appeared to be the face of an honest man, she’d have turned around and left without even saying hello.
<br />
<br />Brad thought “<em>Is that her? That has to be her. I hope that’s her</em>.” He maintained eye-contact as Tiffany sauntered (? Hm. Does Tiffany “saunter”? I wouldn’t want to say that she jiggled or bounced to the table, or that she moved like a gazelle or some other animal known for gracefulness. She’s graceful—she IS a dancer after all—and she moves with a mindful confidence, taking none of her steps without awareness and intent. She doesn’t exactly “stroll”, “wander”, “meander” or “promenade”, nor does she “sashay”. It’s just that “saunter” sounds somehow masculine. What’s the feminine equivalent of sauntering?) to the table, and Brad stood up from his chair to greet her. It was an old-fashioned gesture—a gentleman rising when a lady enters a room—and quite outdated, but Brad was sincere about it. It was a gesture that said “I want to show you respect. I can pull your chair out for you or you can have MY chair or I am prepared to be of any service you might wish for.” All the same, Brad chided himself a little bit for his antiquated attempt at politeness and hoped he didn’t seem too desperate. He held his hand out toward Tiffany.
<br />
<br />“Hi! Are you Hotbabe3764?”
<br />
<br />“Depends who’s asking,” she replied slyly. “Are you DudeManly4782?”
<br />
<br />“Yeah,” he said with a small giggle, but a not-nervous-not-nervous-I-am-NOT-nervous kind of a giggle. “You can call me Brad.”
<br />
<br />“Nice to meet you, Brad. I’m Tiffany.” She took his hand and shook it, laughing slightly at the formality of the gesture, but enjoying the formal excuse to touch hands. “So,” she said with a giggle, “Wanna make out?”
<br />
<br />The five orifices in Brad’s face—his eyes, nostrils and mouth—all dilated at the same time: his sensory organs suddenly opening wider as a way to bring more information into his brain. Tiffany seemed very amused by his new expression and she laughed out loud for a few seconds, then caught her breath to say, “I’m sorry! That wasn’t fair. On the way here tonight, I was thinking about ways to break the ice and I thought about how funny it would be if I said…if I asked…”
<br />
<br />Brad’s facial apertures returned to their normal sizes—in fact, a few of them narrowed just a bit as he said, “Sure. Yeah, that sounds like fun. Let’s make out.”
<br />
<br />“Oh, I didn’t say we were <strong>going </strong>to make out. I was just checking to see of you <strong>wanted</strong> to.”
<br />
<br />They stood there for a few moments. An Oogle search-motor could have found billions of pages of information in the amount of time that Brad and Tiffany stood looking at one another. There are hundreds of statistics about X-events happening every Y-seconds in Z-world and many of those things happened while Tiffany looked at Brad and Brad looked at Tiffany, but those things didn’t happen in their immediate vicinity. It is difficult to say exactly what DID happen between Brad and Tiffany during that moment, since they weren’t speaking or moving much or having any audible thoughts.
<br />
<br />Brad finally broke the silence. “I take it you like to laugh.”
<br />
<br />“Yes,” said Tiffany. “I make silly jokes when I’m nervous.”
<br />
<br />“Ah. I do that too, but I sing mine.”
<br />
<br />“Mm,” she mmed. “Have you been singing tonight?”
<br />
<br />“Humming a little bit.”
<br />
<br />“Okay. So we’re both a little nervous. That’s normal, right?”
<br />
<br />“On a first date? When you’ve never met someone before? When you are hoping you’ll like each other and have some fun? When you’re hoping you don’t make a bad impression?” Brad tried to summarize the kinds of things that had been making him feel nervous and say them to Tiffany in some genuine way to put them both at ease. “No,” he claimed with an eye-roll. “That wouldn’t be normal at all. People on a first date DO NOT act normal. Let’s get some wine so we can make a toast to abnormality.”
<br />
<br />“Good plan,” she said, smiling broadly.
<br />
<br />---Memories of Midnight Confessions
<br />
<br /><em>“Bless me, Uncle, for I have forgotten how to love,” said Tiffany formally through the opaque screen to the anonymous counselor on the other side. “It has been nearly three years since I last held someone.”</em>
<br /><em>
<br />“I understand,” said the voice, “These things happen. Are you about to try again?”
<br />
<br />“Maybe,” she said hesitantly. “Maybe I’m ready to try again.”
<br />
<br />“Why have you waited so long?”
<br />
<br />“I was angry and I felt betrayed.” Even though the feelings were difficult, Tiffany appreciated having this chance to let them out.
<br />
<br />“Were you angry with the one you loved, or with yourself?” If you’ve never been to confession, this might sound like a rather deep question so early in the conversation, but this Uncle was well-trained in the method and this was very much the normal approach in these matters.
<br />
<br />“Both, I guess,” Tiffany stared at her hands, folded on her lap. She knew that it would be up to her to get the most out of this confession and she was prepared to dig as deeply as required.
<br />
<br />“And you do know,” continued the skillful Uncle, “that most anger and feelings of betrayal have fear behind them, don’t you?”
<br />
<br />“Yes, Uncle. I know that.”
<br />
<br />“Don’t worry now. This is your time for healing. Don’t be afraid of healing, even if it seems a little painful at times. Try to tell me what happened that made you angry.”
<br />
<br />“I loved my boyfriend and I trusted him, but then I caught him in bed with…” she stopped suddenly.
<br />
<br />“Niece, you don’t need to tell names here. And anything you do tell here is absolutely confidential. If you need to tell a secret, you can and you can be completely confident that no one else will ever know what you tell me here.”
<br />
<br />Through tears, Tiffany finally forced the words out: “…in bed with…another man.” She drew a deep breath. Getting those few syllables out of the way seemed to open the blockage. She would be able to tell the rest now. “Uncle, I know you can’t really see me from the other side of the screen, but I’m a very attractive woman. I just couldn’t—CAN’T—understand how a man could be with me and yet still crave attention from…from another guy.”
<br />
<br />The Uncle listened—and true to his training, listened beyond the words the young woman was saying—and thought, his graying head nodding slowly as he tried to understand how to be helpful. “What if,” he suggested, “it didn’t actually have anything to do with YOU?”
<br />
<br />There was a pause. It was the kind of pause that happens when someone is thinking instead of making a quick dismissive answer. It was the kind of pause that indicated that a new thought was being considered.
<br />
<br />“That hadn’t occurred to me” she said. “I’m used to taking responsibility for everything that happens to me. Isn’t that the mature way of seeing things? Isn’t it better not to blame others for the things that happen? Isn’t it better to say ‘What can I do better?’ than to say ‘YOU did something wrong’?”
<br />
<br />“Yes, Niece. It IS better to take responsibility for yourself. But all the same, where other people and other factors are involved, sometimes the best you can do is to make your own choices and let other people make theirs.” He paused to listen. “Maybe you weren’t the one who made the bad choice.” </em>
<br />
<br />Meanwhile, Brad was vaguely but acutely aware that the last time he had attempted to have a girlfriend, she had stopped seeing him (citing such standard breakup phases as, “It’s not you. It’s me” and “I think we should see other people”—as though looking at each other had somehow made all other people invisible) for a reason she never said but which Brad knew full well: Brad kept a secret. He never told anyone about his “contracting business”. He couldn’t tell anyone, not his best friend, not his therapist, not his minister (if he had one, which he didn’t) not his attorney and certainly not a woman he dated for a few weeks. How could he tell her? “Yeah,” he might say, “I love long walks on the beach with pretty sunsets, cuddling near a nice fireplace on a cold night, meadows full of wildflowers in the springtime, puppies and kittens and –oh by the way –I kill terrorists on contract.
<br />
<br />“But that’s just to make the world safer and because the money’s good,” he’d add, if he ever got that far. But he had no plans to ever tell anyone. Ever. Anyone.
<br />
<br />Tiffany also generally kept her night-job a secret from most people, but she would be willing to tell someone she trusted that she earned extra money by dancing naked in front of lonely men.
<br />
<br />“Red or white?” Brad asked.
<br />
<br />“Hm. I might have to think about that for a minute,” Tiffany answered. “The wine should probably match what we’re having for dinner and I hadn’t thought much about what I’d like to eat.” There were already two menus on the table and Tiffany directed her attention to one of them, thankful for a moment to have something to distract them both. The attempted humor in her opening line had made her feel…a little fluttery. “Food,” she thought. “I’ll think about food for a minute. That will relax me.”
<br />
<br />Instead—regardless of what she had just told herself—Tiffany felt the need to make small-talk. “I wonder why they call wines ‘red’ or ‘white’ anyway. Red wine is kind of purplish and white wine is obviously clear—with maybe a bit of yellow. Red wine isn’t red and white wine isn’t white, but that what everyone calls them anyway.”
<br />
<br />Brad chuckled. Tiffany liked the sound of Brad’s chuckle and she liked his grin as he said, “I guess it’s just one of those color-insensitivity things like “black” or “white” people. No people are actually black or white. Or yellow or red for that matter. Everyone’s kind of brownish. Some lighter and some darker; some with various undertones, but no one is any of the simplified colors that people use in casual speech.”
<br />
<br />With that, Brad rolled up his shirt-sleeve and showed Tiffany the inside of his forearm. “See? People might refer to me as “white”, but I’m actually a light beige with hints of pink.”
<br />
<br />She took a look at the proffered skin, surreptitiously glancing at the third finger of Brad’s left hand as well to check for a tan-line there. Most of the guys at the club had the third-finger-tan-line where a wedding ring normally covered that spot. The club-guys would remove the wedding ring in an attempt at appearing to be unmarried. That was something that was on Tiffany’s mental checklist for tonight: <em>if he’s married, the deal is off</em>. “Well that settles it then,” she finally declared, smiling in a way that Brad found quite disarming. “We’ll have pink wine, in your honor.”
<br />
<br />“Okay, but I’m going to ask if they have any beige wine first.” Here, Brad’s gaze went to Tiffany’s bare shoulder, quite a nice shade of beige. At the same time, he looked for tattoos. Brad didn’t especially care for tattoos on girls, especially the lower-back ones. Something about tattoos on skin that shouldn’t enjoy all those needle-pricks just didn’t seem quite…wholesome to him. Tiffany didn’t seem to have any tattoos that Brad could see, but he’d remember to try to get a peek at her lower back. That thought made him mentally clear his throat just a bit. He thought, “<em>Ahem! At some point, it may become appropriate to glance at her—ahem! lower, um, back</em>.. ”
<br />
<br />Tiffany seemed to notice that Brad was slightly distracted. A waiter passed their table and it could have been a good moment to order the bottle of wine they had just been talking about, but Brad’s attention seemed to be momentarily elsewhere. She decided to ask.
<br />
<br />“Thinking about something?”
<br />
<br />“Uh…oh, nothing really,” he stammered. But then he thought better of it. Why not try to be honest about it? What’s to lose? “I was looking at your shoulder and I just happened to wonder whether you have any tattoos. Or unusual piercings. Maybe I shouldn’t ask. I mean, it’s okay if you do…”
<br />
<br />“And it’s okay for you to ask,” she said. “I don’t. I’m all natural: two pierced ears and two piercing eyes, maybe one tiny piercing through my heart, but no tattoos. And no boob job.”
<br />
<br />“Ah. Um. Yes. Good.” Brad liked getting the sought-after information, but it was taking him a few seconds to process her references to her eyes, heart and breasts. “<em>Boobs</em>,” he thought. “<em>We can call them boobs</em>.”
<br />
<br />“How about you? Do you have any tattoos or piercings?”
<br />
<br />“No. None.”
<br />
<br />Brad was grateful that the waiter came by at that moment. It gave him a chance to regain his composure and to be in control. “A bottle of your best beige wine, please,” then after an exchange of non-serious looks: “Just kidding. How about a bottle of white zinfandel? It’s pink isn’t it?”
<br />
<br />“Yes sir!” replied the waiter, always happy to be a bit player in a customer’s fun evening. “White zin is the pinkest of the white wines! I’ll get that for you and I’ll be right back.”
<br />
<br />There are of course many possible definitions of such time-related phrases as “right away”; one person’s brief instant is another person’s long wait. Even though the official global atomic clock in Bluepagan, Anglinia continually declared the scientific measurements of seconds, minutes, hours, days and years as the same for everyone, the actual passage of time was always subjective and idiosyncratic.
<br />
<br />“Rowr” says Pippin, the writer’s cat, in response to my leaning back in my chair as I wonder what to say about the passage of time. “Thanks Pip, “ I say. “I’ll type that in.”
<br />
<br />The waiter’s nametag said “Hi, I’m Rich”. Rich was at that moment serving customers at several different tables; most of them were having a fun night, but one couple—at table 6—had come to the Duck that night to break up. Breakup customers always needed near-perfect service. They would be flawlessly polite and cordial although demanding, but would be merciless in their criticism of any imperfections in their dining experience. Abusing the waiter was part of the breakup scenario and Rich had the knack of recognizing his customers’ moods. Table 6 was definitely a couple about to beak up; table 2 was a musical group of some kind coming from an afternoon gig; table 7—the small one in the corner—was a business traveler having dinner alone and table 5 was a couple on a first date. 6 needed a cup of soup and a perfect salad; 2 needed another pitcher of beer; 7 had gotten his dinner and could wait for a while, but would be needing a kind word soon and table 5 was looking for some white zinfandel to enhance their mood.
<br />
<br />“I thought of a few questions I wanted to ask to help us get to know each other,” Tiffany began, but at that moment her purse emitted a sound—an electronic fanfare that signaled an incoming text message on her cellphone. “Um, excuse me a minute…”she said, reaching into her bag.
<br />
<br /><strong>You have 1 new text message from Mandy! Click to view!</strong> She clicked.
<br /><strong>“wazzup? is he cute? is he a psycho? do you need an out?”
<br />“all good, yes, idk, no. cant text now. call u later, k?”
<br />“k, but if I dont here from u by 1am, ill call”
<br />“k. ttyl.”</strong>
<br />
<br />“Sorry,” she said to Brad. “That was my friend Mandy checking up on me.”
<br />
<br />“Oh, no problem. In fact it’s kind of nice that you have someone looking out for you. We’re meeting for the first time after all and you want to feel safe and everything.”
<br />
<br />“Thanks. It’s nice that you understand. Now where were we?”
<br />
<br />“You were about to ask me some questions so you could get to know me.”
<br />
<br />“Oh yeah.” She paused for a moment. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t want to make this like a job interview. I just thought of a few questions to spark the conversation. There aren’t any right or wrong answers.”
<br />
<br />“Fire away,” said Brad, vaguely aware that ‘no right or wrong answers’ was the exact phrase they always used in job interviews before they asked psych-profile questions.
<br />
<br />“Okay: if you had been born a tree instead of a human, where would you want your roots to be?”
<br />
<br />“That’s…a…hm, kind of a Baba Wawa question isn’t it? Does a tree get to choose where its roots will be? Isn’t that really just a random matter of where the seed happens to fall? I mean, I’m glad I’m a human instead of a tree. If I look around myself and I don’t like the place I’m at, I could go somewhere else.”
<br />
<br />“Well sure, but it’s a trade-off, isn’t it? Trees don’t really die from old age. They have to stay in one place, but as long as it’s a good place, a tree might live forever.”
<br />
<br />“I never really thought of it that way. I guess if I was a tree, I’d want to be in a national park right here in the good old A.R. of S,” Brad said, with a growing conviction that maybe life as a tree wouldn’t be so bad. He imagined being in a glorious natural woodland, surrounded in the springtime by wildflowers, his leaves becoming a riot of spectacular color in the autumn, nests of birds in his branches, squirrels scampering up and down his powerful trunk munching on his nuts…
<br />
<br />“I think you’re right,” said Tiffany, “that a national park in this country would be the best place to be a tree.” She continued her thought internally: “as long as there wasn’t a plutroleum well underneath you. And as long as there was no major shortage of toilet paper.”
<br />
<br />“But still, I think I’m glad I’m not a tree.” Brad concluded.
<br />
<br />“Yeah, me too. Let me try a different question. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on 10/9. Where were you? And what kind of things did you think about?”
<br />
<br />Brad stared at Tiffany for a moment. This was indeed quite a different question form the previous one. Did he want to answer this one? Was there perhaps something more he could say about being a tree? He took a breath and held it for a fraction of a second—unnoticeable to anyone whose nerve endings didn’t feel what Brad felt—and wondered if this lungful of air would be the one that would breathe openness and truth into a new relationship. “I was actually in New Blight City, about three blocks away from the GCC towers.”
<br />
<br />“Oh my goodness.” Tiffany had never actually asked this question before and she had no way of knowing that the first time she asked, she’d be asking someone who had been so close to the tragedy.
<br />
<br />“Yeah. A few minutes earlier, I was on the 57th floor of GCC-1, doing a job. I work in IT. I had flown to New Blight the night before to fix a server problem for…a company whose head office was there.” No need to say the name of the company. They were a subsidiary of Shrubco. “The job went well. I was done pretty quick and since my return flight wasn’t until the next day, I thought I’d try to catch a Wide Street show. I was on my way to buy tickets to The Pugilists of Pantalonia. I’d never seen a Wide Street show before and I thought this would be a good chance to do that.”
<br />
<br />Tiffany didn’t say anything with words, but her eyes tried to say something. Her eyes wanted to tell Brad that she didn’t mean to ask about this if it was going to be too painful, but that she would listen to him even if it was. Her eyes wanted to tell Brad that it was okay, that he could tell her anything. But that he didn’t have to tell her anything. Tiffany’s eyes nearly knew how to say what her mouth had no clue as to how to put into words. Tiffany’s eyes said things no writer can write. Brad went on:
<br />
<br />“It’s kind of funny, you know?” Brad tried to keep his serious story somewhat light-hearted. “So many things in life are just matters of dumb luck. If I had worked a little slower, I might have still been in GCC-1 when the plane hit. If I had been a slower IT guy, I might not have gotten the assignment in New Blight at all. I remember there was one guy in the office who wanted me to tell him all about how I fixed the server, but then his boss came in and had something that he needed done right away—seems like everything in New Blight is done in a hurry—and so I didn’t stand there talking to this guy. He, um, didn’t survive the attack.”
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />SOME NOTES:
<br />
<br />
<br />“This place is AR place…” “Affiliated we Stand.” Major cities: New Blight, Sororaphilia, Mugajo, Santa Acrostic.
<br />
<br />Ijog is near Ijoqu in the Gulf of Oroboria region, both are major suppliers of vaxoline, a fuel for everything, made from plutrolem.
<br />
<br />The Loyola Cabron is a popular economy car from Happon (Hapanaisse)
<br />
<br />There are rival factions of Soslims throughout the Oroborian world, mainly the followers of Idaman Jimi and Idaman Vic. King Ebbis of Oroboria is a loyal Jimiite.
<br />
<br />Cystian televangelist Johnny Swagger.
<br />
<br /></em>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-28963045653661697072008-05-12T09:51:00.002-05:002008-05-12T12:40:15.795-05:00Review of The VisitorIt’s me—Bobzilla—writing a movie review. If you know me, you know I’m a drummer and that drum circle drumming is my main thing. I could pretend to be some “more respectable” type of drummer, but then I’d be writing a completely different type of review of <em>The Visitor</em>.<br /><br />That’s the main theme of the movie: who we pretend to be versus who we really are. And the simple fact that what we really do is a big part of defining who we really are.<br /><br />Take Walter for example—the lead character in <em>The Visitor</em>, skillfully portrayed with a restrained, understated dignity by Richard Jenkins. Walter pretends to be writing a book so that he won’t have to put much energy into pretending to teach economics at a college, then in the evening he pretends to be interested in learning to play the piano. All of the “going through the motions” in Walter’s life arise from the simple fact that he isn’t very interested in life after the death of his wife. Walter loved his wife—a concert pianist—and nothing that Walter does really brings her back into his life; not his teaching, not his writing, and he can’t even manage to hold onto her ghost by playing her instrument. Walter’s heart has closed and he only pretends to have a life.<br /><br />This review will probably have SPOILERS in it. But even if I tell the entire plot, watching the movie is still a much more powerful experience than reading even the best review.<br /><br />All of the characters in <em>The Visitor</em> are visitors of one kind or another, even though we may not immediately think of them that way. The fun part of the story begins for Walter when he visits New York to give a talk on a paper that he pretends to have co-written. He has an apartment in New York that sits “vacant” most of the time while Walter’s “home” is in Connecticut. Walter’s visit to his New York apartment shows him that “his” apartment hasn’t been quite vacant while he’s been away. In a suspenseful—and very artistically-photographed—scene, Walter discovers Zainab—played by Danai Gurira—soaking in his bathtub. A moment later, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is in the scene, pushing Walter against a wall, demanding to know whether Walter has touched Zainab.<br /><br />It’s quite an amazing piece of movie magic: a complicated stand-off where the viewer isn’t really sure whose side to take. It’s Walter’s apartment, but Walter doesn’t stay there; Zainab is naked and vulnerable in the bathtub, so I couldn’t blame her for being a troublemaker; Tarek responds to the situation with some quick aggression, but he’s protecting his girlfriend.<br /><br />They’re all visitors in their own ways: meeting in a hallway outside a bathroom. Who OWNS the hallway? Does anyone really OWN the hallways of life? Well, probably so, but this is one of those moments in a movie where you have to ask yourself if there’s a clearly wronged person in this situation or if it’s just people doing what they do, being who they are. It begins to shake Walter out of his…(note to self:: find one of those fancy German words that means the sort of funk you get into when you forget or refuse to feel your own feelings).<br /><br /><br />It takes this kind of a shock for Walter to discover that he’s able to feel some sympathy and concern for others, a feeling that Walter had lost until that moment.<br /><br />Now I realize that I don’t need to tell much more of the plot. Tarek helps Walter realize that there is something immediate and present that Walter can actually do with his time; something worthwhile that Walter can do with his hands and with his feelings: he can play a drum.<br /><br />The drum doesn’t know any pretense. You’re playing it or you aren’t. Walter can tell people that he’s busy with his writing or that he’s busy with his teaching or that he is doing this or that; Walter can make excuses about why he isn’t living his life, but the drum doesn’t take excuses. The drum makes a sound when he plays it and when he’s not playing it, he thinks about playing it.<br /><br />The movie-viewer is given many other treats in this lovely film. You don’t have t be a drummer to enjoy it, but if you are, you notice the changes in Walter all the more powerfully.<br /><br />Nor do you have to know anything about Muslims to enjoy this film, but if you do, you will come away with realizations about why Muslims would want to come to America: to drum, to love, to be human beings, to forget about what one pretends to be and to instead BE the person one really is.<br /><br />I recommend <em>The Visitor</em> to all people who enjoy being people<br /><br />For more info on The Visitor, see <a href="http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809773648/info">http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809773648/info</a>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-86642865041183249222008-05-08T10:07:00.002-05:002008-05-08T11:38:40.793-05:00Post-Armageddon LOLsThe one definite statement I could make about the future is that it hasn't happened yet.<br /><br />Well, okay, there's one more thing I could say about the future: I hope there is one. I have stuff to do next week and next month. And later today for that matter. I want to believe that there will be a future. That's the fatal flaw in my personal philosophy of life: the current moment is a nice moment. Thank you. May I have a little more, please?<br /><br />When I was a tiny little zilla-monster many years ago and the big people in my life--my mummy and pappy--put that big fancy-looking book in front of me (which I thought at the time was just there to teach me to read well and to learn something about how to live a good life) I searched through the words as earnestly as a little monster could, genuinely trying to understand what the big fancy book was trying to tell me. It had lots of interesting and mysterious stories in it and several compelling characters, so it was quite a gripping literary experience for my wittle bwain. Over the course of a few years, I managed to read the whole thing. I would have read quicker, but it was written in this funny old-English style that made comprehension rather slow and fitful. Numerous, sundry and several were the chapters therein, and the chapters of it, numerous, sundry and several were.<br /><br />Eventually--and with a building sense of anticipation--I finally got to the last chapter of the big fancy book with real gold (!) around the edges of all the pages. And the name of that chapter was called Revelations (I looked it up in a dictionary: my other good book) and I found out that a revelation was a revealing; something being shown. I absolutely tingled with excitement!<br /><br />As I began to read the last chapter of the big important story my excitement turned to dread; the rush of tingling became the sort of goosebumps that begin as an non-specific thrill and then turn into a feeling that is quite clearly fear. The last chapter (or <em>book </em>as they say) was about the end of the world.<br /><br />Things began to feel very different to me that day. I began to pay closer attention to the sky. Where I had been accustomed to watching the wind blow the clouds around, I now began to wonder if God was in the clouds about to summon the storm that would signal Judgement Day; where I had previously been able to enjoy a pretty colored sunset, I now began to ask myself if the reddish color was a blood-red to presage the examination of all my most private thoughts and feelings for the small impurities that would lead to my spending all of eternity in a place of burning, weeping and teeth-gnashing.<br /><br />That was all quite too much for me to deal with. I was a nice little monster, far from perfect but I had decent manners, I loved my mummy and pappy, I wasn't selfish with my friends and I wore reasonably clean clothes most of the time. And yet I suspected that God might find things about me that He wouldn't like. What would I say to God if Judgement Day caught me by surprise?<br /><br />I did what any little monster did when the big questions in life got to be too much: I asked my best friend. He told me that if I noticed Judgement Day coming, I should quickly ask Jesus to forgive me for my sins.<br /><br />"Do I have to know what my sins were?" I asked, still not quite reassured.<br /><br />"Um, yeah. You know when you're sinning don't you?" he replied, trying to be helpful. He was a really good friend.<br /><br />"Well, I never killed anybody and I don't steal stuff. And I don't know what fornification is, so I prob'ly haven't done that either."<br /><br />"If you don't know what it is, how can you know whether or not you've done it?"<br /><br />I had to think about that one for a minute. "I guess I would know. If it's a bad sin, I think I would feel bad doing it, like I would feel if I stole something."<br /><br />We were both about 8 or 9 years old, but we were already very capable theologists.<br /><br />Still I had this nagging sense of dread that Judgement Day would come and I would be caught with some sin soiling my spiritual raiment (see? I learned lots of interesting concepts from the big fancy book) that would get me a one way ticket to H, E, double hockey-sticks.<br /><br />I carried that dread for YEARS. <em>Decades</em> even. It weighed on my mind and scared me until I really couldn't cope with the burden of the fear and I pushed it out of my conscious mind to let it fester and swell like a splinter that tweezers can't grab in the shadowy realm of my subconscious mind.<br /><br />Years went by. After a while, I began to realize a couple more pertinent factors: I actually am a good person. God doesn't hate me any more than I hate myself. And it's actually humanity that has the biggest effect on the hastening of Judgement Day--or the stoppage of it.<br /><br />It's actually up to us to end the world or not, by how we treat one another; by whether we decide to make big horrible wars or not. My vote is for NOT making the big war.<br /><br />But it is my understanding that some of the people who share the world with me are people who are still carrying the fear around inside themselves. I found a way to get over my fear. Not every one has been so lucky. They aren't evil people. They're scared. It's hard for them to admit that they're scared. They probably need a hug.<br /><br />Love conquers fear. <br /><br />It's been said before, but I really hope I can say it a little more clearly today.<br /><br />Love might save the world.<br /><br />Have a good day.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-76758537362295888802008-04-25T15:29:00.002-05:002008-04-25T15:38:07.513-05:00Fresh Out of the Photoshop<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfR_k_U3gkkSDYScr3g5FEvWD_j8JFf9NXE8a68QB7W3nC8iaXv7ufsnqlGpbcLVA9_-ZCNajv6L6AW74LrWafsPQvIYgcO-Jll-XUxk6CZluICrnIqXLVo-U_9NomNlZ1qPai_5avALPv/s1600-h/new+kaiju+logo.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5193283133213925650" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfR_k_U3gkkSDYScr3g5FEvWD_j8JFf9NXE8a68QB7W3nC8iaXv7ufsnqlGpbcLVA9_-ZCNajv6L6AW74LrWafsPQvIYgcO-Jll-XUxk6CZluICrnIqXLVo-U_9NomNlZ1qPai_5avALPv/s400/new+kaiju+logo.jpg" border="0" /></a> Funny thing about making band logos in photoshop: I probably spent the better part of two years gathering, saving, fixing, re-saving, cutting, pasting, moving, refining and deciding exactly what this thing should look like. But actually putting all the pieces together took less than 30 minutes.<br /><br />And it seemed like A LOT of work went into creating a very simple image.<br /><br />I hereby claim this design as my own property, to be used only by the Monster Drummers of Chicago prefecture.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-72879854206644655822008-04-24T20:53:00.003-05:002008-04-28T04:26:17.862-05:00Caution: Disclaimer Ahead<p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">Oops! Sorry! I just realized that I haven’t posted a complete set of the disclaimers for the material contained here.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>Please consider this a general purpose and retroactive remedy for my prior oversight.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>Some users have reported mild to total changes in consciousness while using this blog, including: </span></p><ul><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">drowsiness</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">sudden outbursts of laughter with or without comprehension of why something is funny (drinking milk while reading can complicate this condition)</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">outrage</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">sexual stimulation</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">drowsiness</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">deep feelings of all sorts</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">bumps and bruises caused by taking the physical thought experiments too literally</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">fatigue</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">full enlightenment</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">hunger pangs</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">nausea (only 1 reported instance; could have been something she ate)</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">a jittery “gotta get up and do something NOW!” kind of feeling</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">drowsiness leading to napping and thence to dreaming and while the management and staff of <em>Drumming in the Dark</em> recognizes that it may occasionally influence a dream, we cannot take responsibility for the content of every user’s subconscious mind—so if I’ve ever given you any uncomfortable feelings, I’d like for you to know that I didn’t mean for you to have those.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>I was probably just in some pissy mood at the time and I vented on you. I still love you.</span></div></li></ul><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">In addition, please be aware of the following:</span></p><ul><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>Do not read <em>Drumming in the Dark</em> while driving or operating heavy machinery. </span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">Some medications can increase the frequency and the severity of the side effects that have been associated with the use of this blog.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>If you aren’t sure if <em>Drumming in the Dark</em> is right for you—ask your doctor, pharmacist or pretty much anyone else you trust. </span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">We recognize your right to own and keep the weapons of your choice, but we recommend that you refrain from discharging a firearm at your computer’s screen or components in response to anything you might read in this or any other blog.</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>We should also point out that all investments come with a risk and we cannot guarantee that you will make a profit.</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><em>Drumming in the Dark</em> is for topical and internal use, but cannot be used as a substitute for common sense and awareness of where you are and what you’re doing.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>The above statements have not been reviewed or approved by any governmental agency and the management and staff claim copyright to this material if they ever want to use it in official publications or media.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>There are no low-fat or low-carb versions of this blog, but it contains NO TRANS FATS. <span style="font-size:0;"></span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><em>Drumming in the Dark</em> is, always was and always will be set as “adult content” even though users will see very little in the way of nude skin here and only a tiny, mild, almost meaningless occasion of poopy language.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>We keep the “adult” setting in place because we don’t expect children to know how to use this material, not because of the frequent and improper use of the word “adult” as a way to imply something sexual as though there is nothing else that an adult does that a child does not do.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>The word “adult” means more than just sex and the management and staff of this <a href="http://www.tourmycountry.com/austria/fucking.htm">*******</a> blog would like to take this opportunity to go on record as saying that we dis<a href="http://www.tourmycountry.com/austria/fucking.htm">*******</a>agree with sending out the cultural message that being grown up is all about sex because the management and staff of this <a href="http://www.tourmycountry.com/austria/fucking.htm">*******</a> thing isn’t getting any.</span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">And we are <strong>still an adult</strong>.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>So?</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><em>Drumming in the Dark</em> contains over 99.9% pure make-up-your-own-mind and should not be thought of as support of any partisan position whatsoever.</span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>There is no “acts of god” clause in this disclaimer because “god” is a word that means “good” and why do you need a disclaimer against good stuff?</span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>One can lead a horse to <em>Drumming in the Dark</em> but horses cannot read and even if they did, they wouldn't leave a nice comment.</span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>In many—but not all cases—you are free to select all other components of your “atmosphere” as you read this blog, the sole exception being the inclusion of music within the blog itself.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>If you notice that an entry contains music, we ask that you please shut off that mindless drivel you’ve been listening to and pay attention to the music I’m trying to put into your head.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>Work with me here.</span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">In all cases, you must make a comment.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>The management and staff of <em>Drumming</em> likes nice comments, but we’ll listen to a negative comment as well.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>We’ll listen to anything you want to say, but if you don’t say anything, we tend to feel let down and abandoned, as if we reached out—searching for some connection with the humanity that we can sense out there, but our reaching was in vain because we touched no one.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>That makes the management and staff of <em>ravings </em>very sad and then they just want to go away and hide and never, ever write anymore in that place, that place where you scream at the top of your lungs and no one hears you so you try whispering and there’s still nobody there and you try all kinds of different voices and disguises and…every once in a great while for no particular reason, a tiny voice says “LOL” and then the management and staff feels a lot better.</span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">Drumming in the Dark is not intended as a treatment for internet addiction, but could be used that way.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span></span></span></div><li><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size:0;"></span>Clothing is optional while reading or writing this blog.</span></span></div></li></ul><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">That should cover my ass…I mean cover the subject.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>If I remember anything else, I’ll edit it in later and pretend it was there all along.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>Okie-doke! See y’all in cyber-space!</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">Love,</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">B</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">P.S. Do not use this blog as a fly swatter unless it has been printed onto paper suitable for use as a fly swatter.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>And don’t waste paper because paper is trees and trees is oxygen and the removal of carbon from the atmosphere.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span>Paperless is green.<span style="font-size:0;"> </span></span></span></p></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-64580614109490771472008-04-22T09:41:00.002-05:002008-04-22T10:07:26.035-05:00The View From HereI don't really know exactly what the connection is, but I know there's something going on.<br /><br />This year I've started blogging here on Blogger.com and also on Wordpress. I have hit counters on both sites. There haven't been many visits to either site--this one is still under 300 on the counter and my Wordpress stats say that I've had under 100 hits there, and yet...<br /><br />...the akismet comment filter on my Wordpress blog says it has blocked about 120 spam comments so far and I seem to be getting a lot of unsolicted advertising in my regular email inbox.<br /><br />I'm hesitant to call these messages spam since they seem to be from reasonably respectable sources, such as Oprah Winfrey's diet plan (um, couple of questions there*) Rewards For Shoppers and a few others instead of the more instantly-recognizable spam-mail with disposable addresses. All the same, I marked them as spam and sent them away because i never asked these people for any info.<br /><br />How does a blog that exisits in near-total obscurity generate spam? How do they manage to not even cause a click on my hit-counter?<br /><br />I hope to provide some of the kind of writing and the kind of thought that you might not see elsewhere on the web: things to make you see things in a different light, things that might make you think for yourself, things that might make you laugh or feel better or know that there's someone else out here in this big world who thinks about stuff.<br /><br />I don't freak out over a few spam emails. I just don't open them. It takes more than a little bit of spam to discourage a Bobzilla. But there is a footnote here for Oprah:<br /><br />*<em>I don't need to lose any weight. I'm six feet tall and I weigh about 160. In addition, even though I don't watch television AT ALL, I am aware of Ms. Winfrey's battles with extra pounds that come and go and come back again and go away again, then come back again. IF I WAS GOING TO GO ON A DIET PLAN (which I'm not) the Oprah Winfrey diet would be THE VERY LAST diet plan I would consider. I am completely UN-interested in the Oprah Winfrey Diet. Thanks.</em>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-44557349453390134232008-04-17T15:55:00.000-05:002008-04-17T16:04:39.095-05:00Vicious Triangle, Tues. April 17, 2008I read the news today. Oh boy!<br /><br />My brain is turning into some kind of information system that makes connections among otherwise unconnected things. My blog for today will show you what that means.<br /><br />There are lots of stories in today’s Chicago Sun Times, all of them fairly unconnected to all the others except for the fact that they all appear in the same packet of processed tree-pulp that makes up today’s issue of the Chicago Sun Times, where a brain like mine can look at all the stories side-by-side while trying to figure out what—if anything—it all means.<br /><br />One story that caught my attention tells about <a href="”http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/people/899919,CST-NWS-bardot17.article”"> Brigitte Bardot being on trial in France</a> because she said she doesn’t like Muslims and in France saying things that indicate that you might have prejudices toward people is against the law. Acting on prejudices probably needs to be against the law. We have laws in the U.S. against racism and those have always seemed to me to be good laws. We DO NOT—however—have laws against expressing racist opinions. U.S. laws do not try to keep us from talking about bad stuff. Our laws only try to keep us from acting in bad ways. I feel that this is the proper way for our laws to be set up. The explanation of this is not especially easy to understand because it calls for you to distinguish between feelings, words and actions.<br /><br />Feelings are what they are. We might have some control over our feelings, but that control comes from first recognizing our feelings. Very often expressing feelings in words is a major part of recognizing feelings. Words help us process our feelings. When we suppress words, we prevent ourselves from processing our feelings. When we suppress one another’s words, we are attempting to prevent others from taking an important step toward processing their feelings.<br /><br />So that’s THEIR problem, right?<br /><br />Wrong.<br /><br />Suppressed feelings are what cause men who have taken a vow of celibacy to become sexual predators. Deny it if you want, but it’s true. If people who have taken vows of celibacy felt comfortable about having normal human feelings and talking about those feelings, there would be fewer celibates who turn into sexual predators. I would welcome any attempt to prove my theory wrong. At least it would be an attempt and any attempt is more than we are currently doing to deal with the problem of sexual feelings-turned-ugly.<br /><br />Suppressing the important processing tool of speech makes racism uglier and more virulent as well.<br /><br />There are many people who feel strongly about freedom of expression for many better or worse reasons. My two best reasons to support free speech are 1) talking about it keeps feelings from automatically turning into unwilled actions and 2) a visible enemy is much less dangerous than a hidden enemy.<br /><br />Let people talk.<br /><br />In the interest of free speech, I would like to say that the nation of France is stupid, makes stupid laws that are bad for society and above all, France really needs a good bath, a shave and some deodorant.<br /><br />I don’t hate my French ancestors. My commentary is directed toward the current government of France that puts people on trial for saying stuff. Merde total!<br /><br />Besides, (item 2 of today’s triangle) I can write anything I want to write here because hardly anyone reads this blog. My honesty and candor are not hindered by any fear that someone will not like what I say. My obscurity allows me to tell it like I see it.<br /><br />It would be nice to get a few people to read this thing. In my efforts to get readers, I’ve visited the main page at Blogger to see what the top blogs are talking about.<br /><br />One of them is the third point in this triangle “Stuff White People Like”—a blog about which there was another news story in today’s Sun Times.<br /><br />I would like for you to notice that I could have made a link to that article or to that blog in this blog, but I didn’t <br /><br />It’s because they forgot to include one major item in their list of things liked by white people: the disdain that “white people” feel toward themselves and each other. The blog whose title I’m not going to type again is a popular blog because “white people” enjoy ridiculing themselves for being “white” almost as much as “non-white” people love making fun of “whites”.<br /><br />And it’s all freedom of racist expression.<br /><br />That blog would be illegal in France.<br /><br />So would this one.<br /><br />BTW, according to the U.S.-approved race-classification system, Arabs are white people.<br /><br />It does not specify what color Persians (people from Iran) and Babylonians (Iraqis) are. <br /><br />We—the writers of this blog—hold certain truths to be self-evident and some of these truths are that race, religion, national origin and gender have nothing to do with whether or not someone is a good person, but properly processing feelings does.<br /><br />As a patriot, I would like to close this entry by saying Fuck Censorship.<br /><br />Thank you.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-60200858341473760632008-04-13T16:10:00.002-05:002008-05-01T15:34:44.967-05:00BZTV<a href="http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=28430812">Kaiju Daiko at Clemente High School, Chicago</a><br><embed src="http://lads.myspace.com/videos/vplayer.swf" flashvars="m=28430812&v=2&type=video" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="430" height="346"></embed><br><br /><br /><object width="780" height="445"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/cp/vjVQa1PpcFMztw4byJ1cMfDtyECI7uUoTj9_TIwE_NU="></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/cp/vjVQa1PpcFMztw4byJ1cMfDtyECI7uUoTj9_TIwE_NU=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="780" height="445"></embed></object>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-24430631504565789982008-04-11T14:56:00.002-05:002008-04-12T19:04:02.860-05:00In a Recent Survey<p>...over ninety percent of non-human primates surveyed say they do not believe in evolution. Most seem deeply offended at the idea that they might share a common ancestor with humans. “Aren’t they the ones that nearly wiped out the mountain gorillas?” asked one, an orangutan from western Kenya, his or her name name withheld by request. “I mean, if these humans had any ape-sense at all, they’d never do something like that.”</p><br /><p>The survey, greatly facilitated by recent advances in inter-species communication, is the first of its kind, “a much-touted and highly-anticipated glimpse into the non-human mind”, says Seymore “Shaggy” Johnson, chief of research and surveys for the South Harvey Institute of Technocracy.</p><br /><p>“Almost all of the apes we spoke with”, says Johnson, “seemed really uncomfortable with the suggestion that humans might be their distant relatives.” The ape/human conversations took place through a series of specially-designed keyboards and monitors, recently dubbed “the monkey internet”. For an article on how it works <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5503685">click here</a></p><br /><p>“Even if they were related to me”, explained one bonobo, “I wouldn’t be inviting any of them to any of my holiday parties. You just can’t trust them not to pull out one of those fire-sticks and start making your friends die.” One chimpanzee, uncharacteristically forthcoming after being bribed with a large number of Western-style bananas, summed it up this way: “When you look into their (humans) eyes, you can sense some intelligence there and you might be tempted to act in a friendly way toward them, but you really don’t want to drop your guard around a human. I mean some of them are kind of cute, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to mate with one.”</p><br /><p>Unlike the way some humans form opinions, apes rarely if ever cite religious writings as a basis for their worldview. The greater and lesser apes simply do not want to associate themselves with what they see as “such a vicious, barbaric race” as humanity.</p><br /><p>Many take a rather more self-conscious view of human/ape relations. One asked “when was the last time a primate had a serious role in a human movie? Never, that’s when. They always put us in comedy roles, always laughing at us.”</p><br /><p>In another, unrelated survey, most apes like Coke better than Pepsi. </p><br /><br /><br /><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/zj25gRwsZmE&rel=1 width=425 height=355 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowScriptAccess="none" wmode="transparent"></embed>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-43439506299899542722008-04-11T09:56:00.001-05:002008-04-14T10:43:52.022-05:00Six Million, Three Hundred Thousand<p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>No, that isn’t the number of words I’ve written in my blog.<span> </span>It’s a number from my calculator.<span> </span>It’s the number I get when I divide the current estimated population of the earth by 1000.<span> </span>The population of the earth is estimated to be 6.3 billion.<span> </span>That means that 6,300,000 people who are currently alive are each “one in a thousand”.<span> </span>Also, there are some 6,300 people alive today who are each “one in a million”.</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>If I was looking for something impressive to say about a person, I might be tempted to refer to a person as one in a million.<span> </span>That sounds nice.<span> </span>“Hey. You're one in a million!”</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>Yesterday some nice people came to my door and they gave me a FREE MAGAZINE!!!<span> </span>It’s called “<em>The Watchtower</em>.”<span> </span>I think Bob Dylan wrote a song about it, Jimi Hendrix covered it and so did U2: <em>All Along The Watchtower</em>.<span> </span>That song ROCKED!</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>I can only assume that the nice people who gave me a free <em>The Watchtower</em> were also people who ROCK!</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>Rock on Jehovah’s Witnesses!</font></p><br /><br /><br /><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/E3lv5gbMSSY&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/E3lv5gbMSSY&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object> <br /><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>Well, I didn’t see any articles that really rocked, but you know, even <em>Rolling Stone</em> puts out an occasional issue that doesn’t really rock, so I didn’t let that bother me.<span> </span>There’s always next month.<span> </span>I’m a patient man.</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>There was one article way in the back—under the heading “Questions From Readers” about a verse from the Bible.<span> </span>The verse was Ecclesiastes 7:28, possibly written by old-school Hebrew king Solomon.<span> </span>It is quoted as saying “I have found…one true man in a thousand, but never a true woman.” The “…” is the part the magazine editors skipped over.<span> </span>I didn’t choose that snip.</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman">It goes on to say that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines.<span> </span>He must have been something like an ancient P. Diddy.<span> </span>Probably threw one hell of a party.<span> </span></font></font></p><br /><br /><br /><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/EjIYLdalYeE&rel=1 width=425 height=353 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowScriptAccess="none" wmode="transparent"></embed> <br /><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>“Go Shlomo!</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"><span></span>It’s your birthday!</font></font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"><span></span>Let’s party like it’s ya birthday!</font></font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"><span></span>Drink Bacardi like it’s ya birthday! </font></font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"><span></span>It’s ya birthday, it’s ya birthday!”</font></font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>So, the thousand women in Sol’s life were all women whose pants he was in.<span> </span>Maybe he didn’t have time to meet any other women.<span> </span>I think we could forgive him for saying that out of the thousand women whose booties he was personally bouncing, not one of them was a true woman.<span> </span>Familiarity breeds contempt.<span> </span>Ancient kings o’ Israel breeded a thousand women at a time.</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>What a guy!</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>But Ole Dude wisely noticed that one man out of a thousand was a true man.<span> </span>Later, the J.W.’s took that to mean that Jesus was the true man of whom Solomon spoke.</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>Nowadays, with 6.3 billion of us on the planet, there are probably 6,300,000 Jesuses (Jesii?), statistically speaking.</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>That’s pretty decent odds that you probably have a true man in YOUR VERY OWN NEIGHBORHOOD!!! </font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>But let’s make sure we don’t get caught up in Solomon’s personal drama: let’s assume that about half of those true men are true women.</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>Now if that doesn’t rock, I don’t know what does!</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size=3>I can hardly wait for next month’s <em>The Watchtower</em>!</font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><br /><p><font size=3><font face="Times New Roman"><span></span><span></span></font></font></p>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-20170073269693093412008-04-06T11:35:00.006-05:002008-04-07T13:11:52.977-05:00Subconscious StockpotI can’t exactly provide the comfort of telling you here at the beginning that by the end of this article, things will make sense. I am writing to try to make sense of it, but it seems rather sketchy so far.<br /><br />There is a mind connected to the fingers that do the typing here and that mind is a non-physical information system that has developed in and around a physio-chemical structure that is probably based in a brain which is now—in a legally-provable way—nearly half-a-century old and has been inputting indiscriminate bits of information for quite a long time and trying to make all the various and sundry bits fit into some kind of cohesive pattern.<br /><br />One life, one mind, a million memories. And “life”, “mind” and “memory” are nearly indefinable. All the same, here I am, trying to make sense of it all.<br /><br />Charleton Heston died yesterday. He played the character of Moses in an old epic movie “The Ten Commandments.” When I was a kid, the misconceptions went something like this: “Did you see “The Bible”? Charleton Heston is God!”<br /><br />“Yeah, I saw that movie, but the book was better.”<br /><br />“Books are boring. Books are what you have before they make a movie. A book is like a ‘who cares’ version of a movie. Once you have a movie, nobody needs some dumb book anymore.”<br /><br />“Uh…”<br /><br />“Did you see the part where he makes that big sea part? The good people walked through the bottom of the ocean and then when the bad guys tried to follow them, God made the ocean close back up and it drownded all the bad guys. That was COOL.”<br /><br />“Yeah: the Red Sea.”<br /><br />“Whatever…Hey, that wasn’t in the movie! ‘Red Sea’? That wasn’t in the movie. What are you? Some kind of heathen who tries to put stuff into movies that wasn’t there?”<br /><br />“Well, no. I read the Bible. It says it was the Red Sea.”<br /><br />“Reading is for dorks. It wasn’t in the movie. If it was true, Charleton Heston would have said it, after all, He’s God.”<br /><br />“Um, MOSES.”<br /><br />I don’t remember the conversations progressing much past that point. I remember shouting and little sparkly stars swimming around my field of vision, trips to the nurse’s and principal’s offices, quiet hours in detention and being asked whether I’ll think twice next time about starting fights.<br /><br />I do seem to remember beginning to hate movies at that time. There are lots of nice movies and lots of very intelligent, talented people who work on movies. There are lots of truly wonderful things that are done in the cinematic art-form. And there are millions of people for whom a well-produced motion picture becomes a definitive historical document. I could love the version of “Cinderella” that I read in the book that helped me learn how to read and to learn that reading could be meaningful to me, but once Walt Fricken Disney made Cinderella into a blockbuster animated feature, my memories of a written story and my feelings about it became worthless as social currency. Cinderella stopped being a story that could be expressed in a child’s imagination after it was made into a Disney movie. Disney didn’t just steal a classic fable. Disney made off with a billion children’s right to imagine.<br /><br />Who was it that directed “The Ten Commandments”? I don’t even care enough to search Wikipedia for it. Whoever it was, they took something that many people thought was the Ultimate Truth of The Universe and disconnected it from its existence as an element of thought to create one polished picture of something that may or may not have happened in actual history.<br /><br />Starring Charleton Heston as Moses, who was later mistakenly thought of as God but was only an actor portraying a man and was the same actor who later in his career was a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, a group whose lobbying efforts continue to supply automatic weapons to inner-city gang-bangers who think killing is COOL.<br /><br />Because Moses/God says so.<br /><br />I normally like to speak well of people after they die. Once someone is dead, they can’t do any more damage. Oh wait…yes they can: the indirect damage done by the followers of the dead person. Even if a leader leads very nicely, the followers can always mess it up. Just look at MLK as opposed to the Black Panthers or the kind of guy Jesus was as opposed to the sort of people who do all sorts of evil stuff in the name of…something that wasn’t even the guy’s name fer crissakes! If the mailman had come to Jesus’ door saying “Special delivery for a Mr. Christ”, that letter would have ended up back at the post office because Iesa bin Yusuf never knew that later generations would change his name to Jesus F. Christ.<br /><br />What if—just a suggestion, mind you—a person wanted to believe in something TRUE, but all the truth had been buried by ignorance and everyone claimed that the only choices were to believe an ignorant lie or be labeled a heretic? <br /><br />I’m a little angry. I don’t like being angry, but I don’t know how else to cope with something that makes so little sense. If I could make it make sense, I’d have some other choice—something other than anger.<br /><br />Destructive emotions are what take over when we get to the end of sense. They’re the scum that rises to the top of the subconscious stockpot. A good cook would skim all of it off and throw it away so it wouldn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the good soup underneath.<br /><br />To that ignorant brat-kid playground bully who probably grew up to be an ignorant adult bully in some slightly-larger playground, I would like to deliver this message today: Your God died. Naa, na-naa, na- naa, NAAAAAH!<br /><br />That was mean. I am being mean. I’m mean when I’m sad and angry without being able to really understand why I’m sad and angry. The pain of sadness and anger might even keep me from looking beneath my own surface to find out where these feelings are coming from. People like me are the ones who start wars because they’re sad and angry and they don’t know what to do with those feelings except to lash out against others.<br /><br />Or, maybe they write. Or sing or play instruments. Or make sculptures. The making of art is often the result of channeling the energy of possibly-destructive emotions into constructive pastimes. <br /><br />I can’t swear that this will ever make any sense, but it’s better than physically going on a rampage. I can’t guarantee that my writing will make sense, but it’s the one viable alternative I can find instead of screaming “Geeeeeee-Hawd!” at the top of my lungs.<br /><br />I could start a war or I could join one of the wars already in progress…or I could write stuff that barely makes sense. For the record, I would like it if someone would read my writing and find something helpful in it for making sense of the barely-sensible stuff that fills the average human information system. I would like to write TO someone or FOR someone, but even without that, the simple act of committing words to paper or screen is helpful to me.<br /><br />Words are logical. Feelings aren’t. Actions might be either logical or not. My writing is the alchemy of taking anything I find inside myself and transmuting it into something useful. Let’s see a movie do that. Let’s see any passive entertainment do something that actually brings some peace to a disturbed soul. Emotions are feelings and feelings are energy and energy is a force of nature and forces of nature need something to do. That’s the one sensible thing I can say: Feelings are emotional energy and the definition of energy is “potential to do work”. Energy has to do something and will do something and your choice—when it’s your energy—is to direct it to do something good (or at least not too harmful) or pretend that you can ignore it and let it do its work without your awareness and direction.<br /><br />But—for the sake of making a strong point—I am pretending today that I am actually writing something useful and logical to the ignorant little bastard who used to insist that Charleton Heston is God-whose-word-is-inviolate.<br /><br />Am I making you mad yet? What are you going to do about it? Hit me? Go ahead and try. I work at the store where you’ll have to go to buy a new monitor for your computer after you smash the old one in a fit of idiotic rage. And I get commissions for my sales. Go ahead and take a swing at me. You won’t hurt me. In fact, I’ll laugh about it all the way to the bank.<br /><br />And in the best case, you’ll realize that you were just being silly because you will come to recognize that you swung your fist because you had emotional energy that needed to do something and you proved my point, even if I told lies to make my point, fighting lies with lies in the manner of a person who fights fire with fire and just waiting for the moment when someone says “Hey, this is getting to be a pretty big fire! Maybe we should get out of here!”<br /><br /><br />But it’s just a pretense. That kid probably never learned to read and he wouldn’t be here now. You can’t teach those who refuse to learn. In the later years of life, you finally realize that you are your own teacher, guiding your mind to the places where there is something to learn.<br /><br />And those places are everywhere if you approach life with open eyes and ears, an open mind and an open heart. It is participation in your own life that makes you able to learn. Reading and writing are participatory sports. <br /><br />Don’t wait too long to notice that you’ve been going through life as a spectator.<br /><br />Twelve hundred and forty-one words later, Bob realizes he hasn’t even begun to write about the subject indicated in the working title.<br /><br />There is one truly eternal question in life: what am I doing right now? It takes a few different forms, but it’s always really the same question of what to do. It might be “what do I want to do?” or “what should I do next?” or “what is the right thing to do?” or…any of many variations on the theme, but it’s always the question that leads you to do whatever you do. It’s The Eternal Question because it underlies all of the other questions that are considered classic eternal philosophical questions. If you had no interest in what to do, you wouldn’t ask questions like “Is there a God/Heaven/Hell/afterlife/absolute good and evil?” or “Is infinity real?” or “what is reality?” You’d never ask those questions—or the many other deep-meaning questions—if you did not first and foremost want to know what to do.<br /><br />We have cultural mythologies about “being at the crossroads” and “choosing one of two paths” because we want to simplify things for ourselves by saying that it is either this or that. In reality, there are many more than two paths. All the same—because language has limitations of convention and accepted structure—I’ll refer to the “two-path” system even though each of the two has a large number of variations of its own.<br /><br />Let’s name one path “Logic” and the other “Intuition” or—better yet—one set of paths “logical” and another set “intuitive”. Here we find one of the primary divisions of schools of thought. Some people call themselves “logical” and others specify that they do what they do “intuitively”.<br /><br />But every capable human mind does both.<br /><br />Because of the researches of psychology, anatomy, surgery, electrochemical studies and “brain science”, most of us are somewhat aware of a few interesting bits of information about how brains work. We know that—physiologically at least—we have brains that are composed of a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere: “logical” and “intuitive” sides in every healthy brain.<br /><br />And logic is complex and so is intuition and in every healthy brain there exists a complex set of interactions between at least two highly-complex structures. And some mechanic with a blog and a bad attitude is going to make it all make sense?<br /><br />Yes I am.<br /><br />You see, no one actually deals with the complexity. People who work with complex things have a mental grasp of the complexity, but they only actually handle one simple piece of it at a time. Okay, they actually work with TWO pieces at a time, fitting Piece A to Piece B while Pieces C through X-times-infinity and all pre-A pieces lay on the worktable awaiting the assemblage of A to B. Even in the most complex things, it is always about the work at hand, just like it is in plumbing when the Great Cycle of Waters is connected to a faucet with a drain underneath and the gunk that you wash off of your hands flows eventually to the bottom of the ocean where it becomes food for an algae that no one has ever seen up close.<br /><br />I know that evaporation and aeration and settling and precipitation and capillary action and water seeking its own level and the path of least resistance and the universal force that no one really understands—gravity—are all parts of the system, but in any given moment all I really have to do is make a good fitting.<br /><br />But even with a run-on sentence, you don’t get the real gyst: I only have to DO one thing at a time, but while I’m doing that one thing, I’m holding all the other information relating to that thing in my mind. The One Thing is informed by the rest of the knowledge.<br /><br />Here is what conscious/subconscious is actually about: conscious simply means the thought that you are currently having and subconscious is all of the information in your mind other than your current conscious thought. Suppose you had breakfast today. You can—if you choose—remember as many details of your breakfast as you choose to remember, but if you are thinking about something other than this morning’s breakfast, the memory of breakfast is in your subconscious mind.<br /><br />The subconscious mind of the average person contains more data than most people would ever find any conscious use for, including everything about the way things look, sound, feel, smell and taste and any thoughts or feelings you may have had about every experience you’ve ever had. Even though any individual lifetime has its natural limits, the amount of information we gather is nearly limitless and it is all stored inside us, informing us as to who we are and what we think and how we feel about everything else we experience: complexities built upon complexities and all we really want to know is what to do right now.<br /><br />The parts of the near-infinite information that you can call to conscious awareness and put into order are called “logical thoughts” and the parts that only seem to fit together randomly are called “intuition.”<br /><br />But they are all thought/feeling information that gets us through our days, all “stored energy” in need of work to do, all opportunities to direct our energy to do something we want done.<br /><br />That’s my stockpot for today, April 7, 2008. I feel better now that I’ve stirred it and skimmed the scum off.<br /><br />It’s SOUP!!!Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-9328102434367261352008-04-03T09:59:00.003-05:002008-04-08T09:32:57.566-05:00You can't do that in a blog anymore...Maybe later I'll add my gratuitous commentary, but for the time being I'm just going to use this page as a place to keep a collection of Zappa videos.<br /><br /><br />It's also a test. I don't know (until I try it) what a blog will do with this many separate video players embedded. Time to find out.<br /><br /><br /><br />Don’t eat the Yellow Snow<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/j2nJn6rZdtI&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/j2nJn6rZdtI&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Stinkfoot Live<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kf8TM4CIk5g&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kf8TM4CIk5g&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />FZ at 22 with Steve Allen<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TnpTe6-s_H8&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TnpTe6-s_H8&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />You are what you is<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/y0ay5S6hWJI&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/y0ay5S6hWJI&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Peaches en Regalia<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BnZrbFL9ImM&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BnZrbFL9ImM&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Bolero—live in Barcelona<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/HttVFpgObCo&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/HttVFpgObCo&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />City of Tiny Lights<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rsvN6fDQVpY&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rsvN6fDQVpY&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Baby Snakes<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9hvhTyMvjeg&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/9hvhTyMvjeg&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Baby Snakes—better<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/vJc_TE6y4jQ&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/vJc_TE6y4jQ&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Jewish Princess<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GP3J2tMk5lw&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GP3J2tMk5lw&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Bobby Brown Bush<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6IlE8yAmW3E&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6IlE8yAmW3E&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Zoot Allures/Trouble every day+ band intro& “sit down”<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eAmcmdKjTDA&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eAmcmdKjTDA&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Zoot Allures, studio<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mgdtOPL0ZEU&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mgdtOPL0ZEU&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Dirty Love, studio<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/W6HRAEabk70&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/W6HRAEabk70&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />Black?(maybe Pink) Napkins, live at Palladium (w/Steve Vai)<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PzqoflT70b4&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PzqoflT70b4&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-76181054723587932392008-03-31T13:59:00.001-05:002008-03-31T14:01:53.589-05:00Monday March 31, 2008My brother Gerald called me today to tell me that our mother is dying. She was 35 when I was born back in May of 1959, so if I’m almost 49 and 35+49= 84, then Mom has lived a good long life.<br /><br />I don’t know what my feelings are. A man should have some kind of feelings when his mother dies. She isn’t dead today. She’s dying. She’s in a hospital in Roseville, a small town near Sacramento, California. I haven’t been in California since December 1988 when I left the place I was born to move to Chicago and make a new start. I’ve been in Chicago ever since, not even going back for a visit. I’ve talked to my oldest brother Don on the phone a few times and a short “hello” to Mom was part of those conversations, but I can’t really say that I’ve talked to my mother since the mid-1980’s; 20 years have passed.<br /><br />Mom has had Parkinson’s disease for a while now and has been mostly incoherent and senile for quite a few years. That’s no excuse for a guy not to talk with his Mom and no excuse to stop loving the woman who brought me into the world, fed me, cared for me, taught me to read and sing, taught me about humor and silliness, showed me how a positive attitude can make a big difference in life.<br /><br />She also taught me to be ashamed of my body and to feel dirty about sexuality. She taught me that God was always watching me and that nothing about myself truly belongs to me. She taught me that pride is a sin—that ALL pride is sinful and that I couldn’t ever feel good about myself without being bad in the eyes of God.<br /><br />She was my best friend when I was little, but she was also the worst enemy of my self-esteem.<br /><br />Now she’s dying and I don’t know how to feel.<br /><br />I want to go to her, but I don’t have the money to travel to California and back. I would call on the phone, but I don’t know if the people at the hospital would even let me talk to her. And if I did get to talk to her, what good would it do? Would she know who I was? Does she know who I am? The deterioration of her mind is in a really advanced state by now. A phone call would do nothing except shake the reluctant tears out of me. I would be calling just to help myself grieve.<br /><br />My brother Gerald—who I also haven’t talked with in 20 years—sounded so different from the brother I remember. He sounded like an old guy. He’d be…56 or so right now. Don is 10 years older than I am and Gerald is two years younger than Don. This is so sad that I don’t even know the ages of the members of my own family. They haven’t seemed like family to me in a long time. When I moved to Chicago, I guess I kind of declared myself to be an orphan or a man without a past or a family. I wanted a complete break from all I had known in California. As a teenager I was so surrounded by crime and drugs and death that I was sure that I could never survive unless I got OUT—unless I could be far away from that place. And I left without looking back.<br /><br />They wouldn’t have known where I am at all if not for the requirements of the Ba’hai religion regarding marriages. And I’m not even Ba’hai, nor is my wife Kim.<br /><br />But Kim was raised Catholic and she had already been married once in the Catholic Church. Her marriage to me wouldn’t be recognized in the Catholic Church because she got divorced for a reason other than adultery and that isn’t a proper catholic divorce, therefore her marriage to me couldn’t be a proper catholic marriage.<br /><br />In short, we shopped for a place to get married and the Ba’hai Temple in nearby Wilmette was the nicest temple we saw. The price was good too. Free. They only had a couple of stipulations, one of them being that no members of the couple’s respective families could have any objection to the marriage.<br /><br />Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have had a Ba’hai wedding. Bob and Kim could, but only if Bob got either A) his family to attend the ceremony or B) a written statement saying that they approve of the marriage.<br /><br />So I contacted them to tell them I was getting married to a non-white woman in a non-christian ceremony. I composed a letter for them to sign and return to me. They went along with it, even though I’m sure they were mystified by my request for family approval.<br /><br />Up until then, my oldest brother and my mother had no idea where I was and my middle brother Gerald—the one who called me today—was in prison and probably had things other-than-me to think about.<br /><br />But that’s how they came to know where I was and what I was doing and how to get ahold of me. I’ve had the same phone number all this time. <br /><br />Then today, Gerald called me to tell me Mom is dying. And all I can think to do is write in my journal.<br /><br />I loved you. Mom. I found that I couldn’t accept the religion you wanted me to accept and not accepting your religion made me feel like I couldn’t be the son you wanted me to be. The place you tried to raise me was a place—or maybe a time—that was full of horrors for me and I had to leave that place. I left you because I had to run away from the place you lived. But I loved you. I just couldn’t make the same choices for myself that I felt you were making for me. I needed to have a better chance to survive. I needed a better education and better employment opportunities. I needed some better ideas about God, too. I needed to fill myself with the good qualities that I couldn’t find in our hometown. I had to get away. But I loved you.<br /><br />I will call.<br /><br />I will say, “Mom, this is your son Robert. I love you, Mom. I grew up and I’m doing good. I love you. Goodbye, Mom.”Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-87163535075271174512008-03-30T14:56:00.002-05:002008-03-30T15:07:05.568-05:00"Other" Still Number OneAccording to an <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080330/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_muslims">article</a> on Yahoo News today, Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's number one religion.<br />The article missed a couple of important points, namely that "Roman" is no longer a nationality even though the remnants of the Roman Empire survive only as the aforementioned religion and that the percentages cited in the article indicate that the actual number one "religion" is still "other".<br /><br />I'm an ordinary, every day, garden-variety pagan, like most people.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-18712552560060536432008-03-28T10:43:00.004-05:002008-05-12T10:25:25.880-05:00Creation Versus Evolution?Why "versus"? In the richness of life, doesn't it take <em>both</em>? Are there not examples all around us of <em>created</em> things AND things that <em>develop</em>? Is the world not big enough for creation AND evolution?<br /><br />The other day I was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">cyber</span>-surfing a little bit, just trying to keep up with current events, and I clicked a link in the news window of my homepage to look at an article on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">LiveScience</span>.com that had a title <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">that</span> was something like "Top Ten Missing Links". <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">LiveScience</span> is an entertaining site, full of all sorts of the type of pop-science that most <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">internet</span> users love to look at. I'm sure there must be some real science in there somewhere, but it's mostly "science-y stuff for the masses".<br /><br />"Missing links" indeed.<br /><br />I had already registered with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">LiveScience</span> so I could comment on articles and so I could use their <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">RSS</span> feed on one of my other blog pages. My prior registration seems to have turned into a "missing link".<br /><br />The article I'm referring to is a photo gallery of the "top ten" (their picks, not mine) <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">pre</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">sapien</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">hominids</span> whose bones have been unearthed and looked at by <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">archaeologists</span>, including the famous "Lucy", an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">austalopithicene</span> chick, a few Neanderthal and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Cro</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Magnon</span> dudes, etc.<br /><br />I suppose the upshot is that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">LiveScience</span> wants to show some "proof" of humanity's less-than-human origins.<br /><br />Meanwhile the idea of "we evolved from monkeys" is still quite offensive to religious people, no matter how many "scientists" say things like "we didn't say we evolved from monkeys".<br /><br />"Yes you did."<br /><br />"No we didn't."<br /><br />And so on.<br /><br />Sure enough, the first comment on the article was from an intelligent-sounding guy who said (I'm paraphrasing from memory) "...still no compelling proof of evolution..."<br /><br />Well none of us is ever truly compelled to believe what we don't want to believe, especially when the subject in question involves remote history (let's face it: we weren't there) or any other thing where direct observation is impossible. There IS NO objective, quantifiable observation of things like morality, the meaning of life, the existence of an afterlife, the edge of the universe or the beginning of time. It's all guesswork and we all believe what we want to believe. There are (and I believe that there always will be) exactly ZERO provable facts in these cases.<br /><br />The funny thought that occurs to my tiny, possibly monkey-derived brain is that maybe we don't need to have big, bloody battles about things we can never prove. Maybe there's a lot of it--important though it may seem--where we should just realize that what we think we know is really nothing more than our personal beliefs.<br /><br />I wrote another article about it. It's long and it's unfinished. I'm going to post it here today so I'll stop writing it, making it ever longer, making it ask more questions and leave more questions unanswered. It seems to me that the human mind has difficulty tolerating questions that can't be answered, so we keep pushing our minds to find the answers even when we know that we can't come up with a true and factual answer. We still want to think of what is possible, then choose the possibility that appeals to us the most.<br /><br />Anyway, here's my article:<br /><br />Evolution Versus Creation?<br /><br />There are a few areas of discussion where I feel that I could make a valuable contribution, where the things that need to be said haven’t really been said. This is one.<br /><br />My primary reason for thinking that I have a contribution to make is because of the polarization that exists regarding this debate. There are several such debates in our society of the sort where no resolution seems to be forthcoming. This polarization, partisanism, “taking of sides” or whatever you would like to call it keeps us from attaining the social agreements that we would need in order to be a cohesive society.<br /><br />I’ve written about this before, but I haven’t written so well as to feel that I have said all that needs to be said or even all that I would want to say. So I’m trying again. I expect disagreements from both sides simply because there are two very separate sides and I’m not on either of them.<br /><br />Or I’m on both of them. Confusing? Not really. I’m on neither side and on both sides. I’m a moderate because more than any other thing, I desire social healing. I want to live in A Society rather than living as I do now on the fringes of fragmented societies. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life straddling some crazy fence with one foot in one world and the other foot at the opposite end of the universe.<br /><br />I’m an American. I don’t want to think of myself as belonging to some ethnically or religiously divided version of my society. I don’t want to feel any compulsion to think of myself (or worse—to have others identify me as) Euro-American, or theist/atheist, liberal/conservative, black/white. I’d like to think of myself as merely American: capable of agreeing on the important matters with any other American. The quest for agreement with my society seems to entail a few moments of seeming to disagree with everyone. In a world where all the people have divided themselves into A’s and B’s, I’m the sort of person who just wants to do the math that adds A and B and comes up with C because C is the group in which I belong. C is the set of nice people, some of whom are A’s and some of whom are B’s.<br /><br />Maybe an X,Y, Z equation would be more PC. IDK. LOL.<br /><br />So…I would like to ask both “evolutionists” and “creationists” to prepare to approach the fence that divides our society and for everyone to be ready to do some genuine healing of our shared world by removing the blinders of your own limited opinion. Don’t do it for me. Do it for the higher purpose, the greater good, unity, love, the collective consciousness, the world-soul or for God—whichever of those ideas (if any) seem worthy to you.<br /><br />The sciences are in the domain of thought, while spirituality is in the domain of feeling. Humans are the beings who do both: we think and we feel. If thinking and feeling were always completely reconciled, we would probably never have the need to communicate. Arguments span the entire spectrum from communication with a view to reaching agreement all the way to out-and-out warfare. My recommendation is a simple one. Let’s communicate and disagree when we must, but until we declare communication to be at an end, we don’t need to beat each other up.<br /><br />As a sworn moderate, I will trace the argument back to the last place we were before we decided we couldn’t communicate. I will attempt to begin with a tentative agreement: at some point in time, non-aware matter became something that is alive and knows it is alive, but also knows that it is in some ways separate from- and in other ways connected to-the rest of the universe. We’re individuals AND we’re connected, but the important realization is that we’re alive and aware. We’re aware of ourselves as living beings and we’re more-or-less aware that other living beings exist who are potentially connected with ourselves somehow.<br /><br />The “somehow” seems to us to be largely a matter of our choice. We choose to connect ourselves with the parts of the outside world (including the people in that outside world) that we want to connect with and we try to choose to distance ourselves from the parts of the outside world with which we do not wish to be associated. In our hubris, we think that we can somehow exclude parts of the outside world from our concept of ourselves by shutting the undesirable bits (these “bits” are people not really so different from ourselves) out of our awareness. What we don’t like, we reject in the same way that a body rejects a transplanted organ. It matters not at all to us that acceptance might save our lives.<br /><br />Somewhere between six thousand and four million years ago (depending on how you count and who keeps your calendar) a new sort of life appeared on Earth: humans. We’ve been arguing ever since. We’ve argued about which of us are “real humans”, about what “right thinking” is, about what should be important to us, about which real estate belongs to which group of humans, about who is included in which group and even about how to measure time. The basis of all of this arguing comes down to one simple point: we have questions about which of our fellow creatures we like and how much we should like them. We almost universally decide that we will like the ones with whom we have the most in common. We decide to like people who are like us in some significant way and we often decide to dislike those who are unlike us.<br /><br />You could disagree with me at this point, but that wouldn’t do you much good. Your disagreement would merely be a case of you saying that you don’t like what I have to say because I’ve said something that is different from what you think; you’d be pointing out that your opinion on the subject of like and unlike is unlike my opinion and that you don’t like that.<br /><br />Yes, I am using the term “like” in a funny way. I’m doing strange word-magic with it, but it’s justified word-magic because—at least in English—we have a word that points to the obvious fact that we feel an emotional connection to people who are similar to us; that we like those who are like us.<br /><br />And we dislike those who are unlike us. Unless of course we don’t like ourselves, in which case we dislike others for being too much like us. Complicated? Yes. For something so simple, it IS very complicated.<br /><br />Here’s how to solve any problem that is both simple AND complicated: keep the simple part in your mind as you work your way through the complicated part. Not many people solve problems that way, but that’s the way to do it. It’s just like division or multiplication without a calculator: figure the simplest part first, make a note of it, then calculate the next-simplest part and so on, making notes of the simplified parts as you go. Be the first one on your block to know the real method for solving problems!!! Start today!!! No extra charge!!! No hidden fees!!!<br /><br />The simple part is that we all need the right to decide who and what we will like. That’s a basic survival right. We all need the confidence to trust our own judgment regarding anything and anyone we encounter; the absolute right to choose whether to fight or unite or flee or even to say “eh, seems okay” and choose not to fight, unite OR flee, but merely to ALLOW.<br /><br />The simple part of the problem is that all your choices are yours. Always. Not every circumstance is completely in your control, but your choice about how to meet circumstances IS in your control. What you like or dislike, what you believe or disbelieve, what you include in or exclude from your mind is always a matter of personal choice, even though some “leaders” would prefer that you don’t know that. You are a conscious being. Consciousness comes with rights. Rights come with responsibilities. It is useless to try to separate any of these components from the others. If you try to rid yourself of responsibilities, you throw some rights away along with them and when you do that, you find yourself with fewer choices and fewer choices will be so offensive to your mind that you will be forced to become less aware. The reverse is also true: increasing your awareness maximizes your choices and gives you more rights and more responsibilities.<br /><br />Now, if you look at this problem in a somewhat mathematical way, you can see that the basic choice that all aware beings face is in the level of awareness; in what you allow into your mind.<br /><br />Here, religion agrees with science. The personal practice of religion is with the intent of bringing a person to wisdom. To be a scientifically-minded person is to seek knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge are each species of awareness. Both science and religion are ways of thinking that direct minds to an increase in awareness.<br /><br />At this point, you could begin to disagree with me very strongly, but your only basis for disagreement would be in support of your own chosen position. If you are a believer in science, your disagreement might be that science directs your mind to awareness and religion doesn’t. And if you’re a religious person, you might say that religion makes you aware, but all those science-headed folks are not aware at all.<br /><br />Thus we have one of the world’s oldest and most stubborn debates with the people on both sides pointing at the other side and saying, “those people just aren’t right!”<br /><br />Am I laughing at you? Not really. I’m trying to get you to laugh with me. I’m trying to get you to see how ridiculous it is to continue disliking each other over something so subjective as the fact that we each take different paths to wisdom. Wisdom isn’t really a single destination after all. Wisdom is a process. If wisdom were something that just sits there doing nothing except saying, “Come to me, for I am Wisdom” then what good would it be? No, wisdom is a tool that a wise person uses for the many purposes involved in the living of a wise life.<br /><br />The one thing that wisdom does not ask of you is that you become unaware.<br /><br />Part of me is reluctant to appear to be holding your hand as I walk you through baby-steps to this important realization. It’s the part of me that is reluctant to insult your intelligence. I’m not smarter than you are. In fact there’s every possibility that you are smarter than I am. I am not writing this article in this way because I think I’m smarter than you are. I am writing this article in this way because of the type of specialist I am. Even though you may very well be much smarter than I, you also may have the need of my specialized professional services to do for you what you don’t know how to do for yourself.<br /><br />I’m a mechanic.<br /><br />I’m a specialty mechanic. In the current context, I am applying what I know as a specialty mechanic to a thought problem.<br /><br />I know something that all mechanics know: there is no single tool that does every job. The next couple of paragraphs are going to illustrate and expand upon that point, eventually to tie that point in to the main topic of this entry. If you already know that one tool doesn’t do all jobs, you could skip a couple of paragraphs at this point—unless of course you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing.<br /><br />I’m applying the idea of a tool to more than the common ideas of what tools are, but I believe the logic works in the same way and that it will be a useful thing to make an analogy between physical tools and thought-tools. Starting with common tools, a hammer doesn’t do what a screwdriver does, nor is a screwdriver a good hammer. You could use a screwdriver as a temporary hammer, but it won’t be a very good hammer. You can find a hybrid tool that is a hammer at one end and a screwdriver at the other end, but none of these is either a very good hammer OR a very good screwdriver. The best tools are highly specialized tools, made to do one thing well.<br /><br />And the most accomplished humans are those who have the knowledge and the skill to do one thing very well. However, I’m not comparing a human to a tool. Each of us is a beautiful, unique, sensitive, loving, caring individual. It’s only the people who don’t know us well who tend to think of us as tools to be used for a certain purpose. If you are any type of specialist, you get used to having people think of you this way. You never really learn to enjoy having your human-ness undervalued in this way, but at the same time, it’s nice to be recognized for your skills. No one really likes being objectified, but being thought of as an object is better than not being thought of at all.<br /><br />A hammer is a tool for pounding, a wrench is a tool for gripping and applying leverage, an automobile is a tool for transporting, a tuba is a tool for making a bass sound in a band that has a horn section. A pan is a tool for transferring heat in a controlled way from a fire to some substance that needs to be heated in a controlled fashion and all the various areas of learning are tools for thinking in a controlled fashion.<br /><br />Now, even if (and it’s a very big if) science is the thought-tool that helps us better understand every aspect of our physical world, science still doesn’t do much to help us understand our own awareness and our own feelings. Science is a tool. There are many specialized sciences, each of them a good tool for one type of thought; each of them not much good outside of their own specialties.<br /><br />A “new” science was created many years ago—called “philosophy”—to be an area of study that could link the other specialized sciences into a greater study of knowledge-in-general.<br /><br />And verily, philosophy did go forth and yon in such ways that the thing designed to bring thinkers together became many things that keep thinkers apart, and behold there came to be realism and idealism and existentialism and antidisestablishmentarianism and (as John Lennon sang) ism, ism, ism, proving to us all that we could continue to disagree despite all attempts to unite.<br /><br />Some systems of philosophy were somewhat successful at unifying sciences. But philosophy’s ego became swollen by its successes and philosophy began to suppose that it could treat spirituality as just another science. Spirituality IS NOT the same sort of science as logic, mathematics or chemistry, primarily because the variables in spirituality are too diverse and it is quite short-sighted to apply the spiritual “equations” that work for one person to another person. We each have our own sets of experiences and our own sets of observations and feelings about our experiences. If you look at it honestly (many people don’t) you understand that the primary concern of any person’s spiritual life has to do with “feeling right” toward one’s own existence.<br /><br />Individual choice and aware self-management are essential in spirituality. Any “religion” that does not allow individual responsibility is not actually a spiritual benefit to the practitioner. Religions that attempt to tell people what to think—as opposed to offering guidance as to how to think—is actually just a political movement. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh or offensive, but this is what can save us from destructive versions of “religion”. If it doesn’t let you make your own choices and feel good about your choices, it’s not good for your soul. Religion-by-force is something to fight against.<br /><br />Religious choices are spiritual choices are personal choices. Choice is not absolute. Neither is fate. Life is lived through a succession of moments wherein some events are inevitable and other events can be influenced by choices. An amoeba is a lower-level form of life that has few choices, and yet even an amoeba has SOME choices. The higher you go on the “food-chain”, the more choices you have, even if choice never really becomes absolute. If there is a God, perhaps God has absolute choice. Perhaps even God does not choose to exercise absolute choice even though God is the one being who could. The rest of us do the best we can. An important indicator of how well you’re doing in life is how many choices you have. Your ability to make choices is the most valuable thing you will ever own. This is the actual secret of the ages. This is the actual key to your life. Guard it wisely.<br /><br />Even if (and it’s another very big if) religion is the spiritual tool that helps us feel right about every aspect of our spiritual lives, religion still doesn’t tell us much about our physical world.<br /><br />There is no good tool that is religion at one end and science at the other. You could find a hybrid tool that seems to contain both, but it won’t be very good science OR very good religion.<br /><br />In fact, you could find many different hybrid tools in the realm of philosophy that purport to do the jobs of both science and of religion and you could waste your life away exploring every one of them, witnessing first hand that each has its own advantages and disadvantages or you could simply come to realize that the tools of science are in a different kit from the tools of spirituality, whereupon you could have spiritual tools to do your spiritual work and scientific tools to do your science without ever being tempted to use one toolkit to smash the other.<br /><br />A truly wise person reads more than one book and is able to have more than one thought.<br /><br />Scriptures are not science, nor is science scripture.<br /><br />Attempts to use one in place of the other are the same as trying to use a tuba to pound a nail. If you apply enough brute force, you might get the nail to go, but you’ll ruin your tuba.<br /><br />Here is the big revelation at the end of the story: I just wrote over 2000 words about creation versus evolution without giving you the ability to call me either a creationist or an evolutionist.<br /><br />It’s because I’m neither and both at the same time. It’s because I’m a mechanic doing my best to develop into being a wise mechanic with as many toolkits as it takes to get all my work done.<br /><br />Be wise and well. Love enriches your life much more than hate does, but still all the choices are yours.<br /><br />I merely recommend selecting the right tool for each job.Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859757531545811589.post-73393067766014032862008-03-26T17:46:00.004-05:002008-03-26T18:41:45.251-05:00Sprouts!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqOZANQEX-j0JRd9_VgJzgadXD8ZtdfovQe5lh-Zfxmt9Mn7rsbwS4o5t_ZMTm-pxk9vsBdgx9Wj1t_YmVknEg_ps3bYyVtTMHXBnKRdPH6q_Qiof7MmYsOA9GNesSRDV-rhObPL4lHqId/s1600-h/Cat,+sprout+stories+009.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqOZANQEX-j0JRd9_VgJzgadXD8ZtdfovQe5lh-Zfxmt9Mn7rsbwS4o5t_ZMTm-pxk9vsBdgx9Wj1t_YmVknEg_ps3bYyVtTMHXBnKRdPH6q_Qiof7MmYsOA9GNesSRDV-rhObPL4lHqId/s400/Cat,+sprout+stories+009.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5182198749833942850" /></a><br><br />Alright, I'm calling it: <br />FIRST DAY OF SPRING IN CHICAGO, today March 26, 2008 is pagan new years day.<br />Today there is plant-life pushing itself above the soil where there was none yesterday. I've been watching. No green until today other than the stuff that's always green--juniper, a few creepers and the plantain that never really dies.<br />So tomorrow is the beginning of the annual weed pulling, lest the plantains and dandelions take over the place.<br />At least we don't have kudzu.<br><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWj_T76uk2e8N6SnNhpTbJfrNAc60GkS3fTwsmPLAAOU1T63DYnztLSrFrYmZTD-agNZqOAK_H58R8HD604BYubfXMYFBI2DRQXOwTqoOjgVxKx6AUQV3_2-G4XU0y9cL3g_NW-dj-yenq/s1600-h/Cat,+sprout+stories+011.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWj_T76uk2e8N6SnNhpTbJfrNAc60GkS3fTwsmPLAAOU1T63DYnztLSrFrYmZTD-agNZqOAK_H58R8HD604BYubfXMYFBI2DRQXOwTqoOjgVxKx6AUQV3_2-G4XU0y9cL3g_NW-dj-yenq/s400/Cat,+sprout+stories+011.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5182198758423877458" /></a><br /><br />It's a complicated point of high-energy theoretical logic that involves lots of heavy math, but you can never actually prove that the moment beyond this one will ever come or that the next moment will not be radically different from all the other moments that have passed before it. We can only say that IF things continue the way they have thus far, we MAY be able to make SOME predictions about things that will happen in the future.<br />If there should happen to be a future, which, ya never know.<br />Still, I had been hoping that Spring would come.<br />It's only...what, 5 days past the predicted beginning of spring...?<br />We got sprouts here. CONFIRMED SPROUT SIGHTING.<br />Happy New Year!<br><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHVbKVg8APg8zSVJ7dezhjZK7HYExwFaZGgKEZNPEDwE2MKcZf5hGJi0YXIAz6lVwmC_A3kD2QaM2vLdPhTOW8UXDObHergsTkwZx__QiOainNzCq-oBeOqBsHPoVbYKOaVc0yuJVoO4aX/s1600-h/Cat,+sprout+stories+012.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHVbKVg8APg8zSVJ7dezhjZK7HYExwFaZGgKEZNPEDwE2MKcZf5hGJi0YXIAz6lVwmC_A3kD2QaM2vLdPhTOW8UXDObHergsTkwZx__QiOainNzCq-oBeOqBsHPoVbYKOaVc0yuJVoO4aX/s400/Cat,+sprout+stories+012.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5182198767013812066" /></a>Bobzillahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08626184990478951501noreply@blogger.com7