tom dark thinking

Science Gets Tinier, Tinier and Tinier

2011-12-29T11:10:00.000-08:00

Another bit from Roger's blog. The reference about "Muslims" is owing to Roger's insistence for three years in allowing a hostile, dishonest anti-muslim poster to post a continual stream of muslim-hatred there. Roger also has a sort of mental governor on his mind, holding back thoughts that he calls "New Age woo woo."

Oh jeeze I forgot to mention in the previous blog that somebody oughta do a documentary on the subject wherein I've supplied a URL by clicking my name. There are lots of 'em. One, they say, had to be killed dead and resurrected at least 14 times before the Holy Point was made. (That's "African Avatars", a few blogs back here)

As we may surmise from reading these blog comments these past years, it's very likely that Muslims have secret machinery that screws up people's minds and makes them think blasphemous woo woo like this. Plus, they are no doubt sapping and impurifying all our precious bodily fluids.

But back to our Holy Point. It has always been that there is "life beyond death, in fact, tons of it," by whatever religion and however literal-mindedly expressed. However literal-mindedly expressed, it could never be as reprehensibly literal-minded an idea as a paranoid methodical tattoo that Muslims are Evil and Out to Get Us, as has gone on in this blog for far too long not to question the sanity otherwise presumed here.

Boiling it down to rationality, the non-Muslim-smearing message provided above has always implied that there is such a thing as the "non-physical" -- and this non-physical stuff has an effect on the physical. I'm not speaking of "Laws," which are non-physical concoctions invented to enforce equally invisible theories about how you're s'posed to behave about the apparencies of the physical so far as its legislators are concerned.

Imagine Watson's surprise to hear Bell's voice coming through a little doodad in the laboratory! Yet Bell wasn't there! And Marconi's, to hear voices through a little box of hot glass tubes attached to no wires at all! Invisible people, talking plain as day!

And Alpha waves! And Beta waves! And X-rays! And Gamma rays and more! And wee little particles, so wee as to be inconceivable to all but those fascinated with the wee-est possible things afoot! And! Each one of them invisible, yet capable of even devastating effects on the physical! And... and... is not fire an invisible, non-physical thing, until one lights a match? Or bombs a Muslim village?

Not to mention germs. Nobody had any idea before Van Leeuwenhoek started looking at his gumboils through a microscope of his own invention. Invisible critters! Who'd'a thunk?

All these and more, before conceived, were "non-physical" so far as the concensii of the brightest, if literal, minds were concerned. Huff, huff, huffed those chairing the most respectable departments, this wave, that ray, all poppycock. Yet some invisible, non-physical yearning, if taking forever and even the deaths of the most recalcitrant Knowers of Science Truth, kept bubbling up to the surface, driving later Chair Heads to accept just a little more of what is "real," or physical, at a time, if in smaller dollops by far than Xeno would ever have imagined.

Even now, after a few mere billions spent, glimpses of excitement are being spread through our Scientific Media Organs that there may be a Higgs Boson after all! This, of course, is the legendary "God Particle," the wee wee WEE-est of the wee, which creates reality as only those concerned can know it! All else? Woo woo.

I PREDICT: one day, perhaps thousands of years from now, scientists will determine that All That Exists is 99.9999999999 percent woo woo and always has been! Today's scientific blasphemy usually is tomorrow's rigid dogma anyhow -- which must be guarded especially against Muslims, of course (who else is there to carpet-bomb?).

And of course Black Holes and Worm Holes and all that are woo woo too. They're just ways of trying not to disturb Einstein's Relativity theory, while explaining things it doesn't allow to exist. But lately even the Higgs Boson Tribe, after two experiments so far, have observed for themselves that there is indeed such a thing as faster-than-light, on which the whole of Relativity rests (exactly as "the Resurrection" is the whole upon which Christianity rests). Never mind the 1912 observations that an arm of a certain Crab Nebula appeared to have been traveling far faster than light, too. Never mind the fact that if light will go slower (thus the "bend" in a stick put in water), there's no reason to conclude it won't go faster too.

Carl Sagan famously said "the only thing infinite is man's capacity to delude himself." The history of science itself is that: one delusion lifted after the other, in the hopes of one day peeling off the final skin of the Onion of Truth. This delusion towers most when a portion of the usually male population goes around huffing "I don't 'believe,' I know duh FACTS."

As that venerated chronic potsmoker himself pointed out, this capacity is infinite. I don't see it stopping any time soon.

Telescoping in Time to Hollywood

2011-10-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

(From the you-are-there notebook of Tom Dark)

October 5, 2011, Sherman Oaks Cigar shop

“Hi, Louie? This is the very busy and highly important Tom Dark. I just got a few minutes free and if you call back I’ll head for your place right now!”

The equally busy and highly important Lou Savage hasn’t called back yet. So I’ll start this essay now, here in my notebook, with ballpoint pen. I've found a cigar shop with a smoking lounge here on Van Nuys. The proprietor is sitting nearby listening to a Syrian news report on his laptop. “You sound Russian,” I told him. “I was born in Russia and grew up in Syria,” he told me. No time to get his story.

It’s been raining cats and dogs in L.A. since five a.m. Lance and I were up ‘til three trying to catch up. My client Lance Frank is having one of the very busiest and most highly important days of his life. This evening we’ll be sitting, along with the cast, in a big theater watching his very first movie, which he directed. The cast includes Eric Roberts and among the audience will be forty different film distributors, among whom Lance hopes for a bidding war afterward. It’s an offbeat comedy featuring two horizontally enormous hip hoppers, played by Jerod and Jamal Mixon. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2045621/

I’ll be attending it with my very favorite supermodel on my arm, Gisele Zelauy, who made her name on the runways of Paris, Rome, New York, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. She was also a favorite subject for legendary photographer Richard Avedon.

Gisele means to be a successful writer. That was her other childhood dream. One down, one to go. http://www.giselezelauy.blogspot.com/

She and I talked animatedly for about six hours before I managed to track Lance down and drink tequila with him until three in the morning. I almost never drink, except with stellar people. They don’t have to be rich and famous, just stellar. Lance had been at the studio putting out a fire. Someone had to drive four hundred fifty miles to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch to obtain a piece of processing gear and drive it back to the studio, or there wouldn’t be a movie to show tonight. We were all up before seven, I think it was. Lance and his team will be editing the film until the last minute for the 8 p.m. showing. That’s Hollywood.

Ah! Louie just called back and he knows right where this shop is. He’ll meet me here. We haven’t seen each other since 1984. We were bandmates then. I played my last-ever club gig with Lou at a bar in Sylmar. I don’t know where Sylmar is any more. The drummer at that gig eventually committed suicide. That, I remember.

You all know Louie, right? Well, you know his voice. You probably bought your first Lexus thanks to his convincing, sonorous baritone. He also played a “semi-bad guy” on “Days of our lives.” I think he should take over the “Naked Gun” movies where Leslie Neilsen left off. Louie’s that good. But that’s just me. Two old rock’n’roll farts are about to meet. We haven’t done so badly in the interim.

http://lousavage.com/

I left Abiquiu at five a.m. yesterday, on route 40 out of Albuquerque. I haven’t seen that segment of highway since I was a hitchhiking hairstack who’d just ascended from the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

A man named John Bell picked me up at the Grand Canyon exit, heading for California for my first time. John was a music producer. He trusted a young man dressed in blue wearing a silk top hat lugging those instruments. He needed help driving his tugboat-sized Cadillac as the power steering had gone out. Between us we would wrestle the half-dead luxury craft through the night to Pasadena, California.

John had two eight-track tapes to listen to. One was an album by Al Martino, a crooner rather forgotten today; the other was by Kool and the Gang. We drove in silence, listening to Al once; then we lumped along meditating to Kool and the Gang over and over throughout Time Eternal. Whither goest thou in thy shiny car in the night, America?

Young man: “Kool? I’ve been thinkin’… what can I do to make this world a more beautiful place?”

Kool: You know, that’s a beautiful thought. We? are scientists of sound. We make the world a more beautiful place by making music that makes people move and be happy.” You’d think after hearing that over and over all night I’d remember it verbatim even now.

John dropped me off at an exit in Pasadena. It must have been about three a.m. He left me his card in case I wanted to audition for a studio musician job. I’ve wondered for over three decades what would have happened if I had. I’d have been a funk musician. I did have the chops. I did okay jamming with Earth Wind and Fire at a club in Five Points, Denver. John would have given me a place to stay.

Instead, I got off at the exit and in enough time for the aroma of orange blossoms to make me feel drunk, another black man stopped for me. He was driving a Ford Pinto. I inadvertently left my silk top hat in the back seat.

That hat had a unique flaw in the upper crown: a diagonal scoring where the silk veneer was permanently mussed.

Twenty five years later, Doctor Demento, famed for his weekly radio show of quaint and curious novelty songs, sent me an eight by ten glossy photo of himself, wearing his trademark silk top hat. It had a diagonal scoring across the upper crown, where the silk veneer was permanently mussed. Doctor Demento had started his show the same month and year that I left my hat in that man’s car. I assumed the man sold it to a pawn shop and the good Doctor found it. Similar had happened with “The Wizard of Oz” in 1939. Scouring pawn shops for a coat for the man playing the wizard, a costumer found a coat that, it turned out, had belonged to the late L. Frank Baum, the creator of the story. Nowadays the Good Doctor was playing my own quaint and curious novelty songs on his program and paying me nothing for selling my music. I’ve heard he’s still doing that.

My Russian Syrian cigar shop host is chatting on his cell phone. I can make out only the word “Libya.” By the tone of his voice, I surmise we both agree about it. Bombing Libyans isn’t a “humanitarian effort,” it’s just one more killing fiasco in a long series of killing fiascoes this decade. Down with evil. Up with goodness. Kill those who get caught in the middle.

I’ve been looking for reasons to use “enormous” lately – the world of Man seems to be preparing various enormous disasters. The drive here was spectacular. It was enormous.

The Great Southwest is the result of enormous geological disasters over the centuries. In New Mexico, we live at the edges of an enormous ancient volcanic disaster. They say that ten thousand years ago, a caldera exploded all at once. A caldera is like a carbuncle on a human being, only enormous. All hell breaks loose when either thing blows, but when composed of a circle of volcanoes, it’s enormous.
They also say that about 500 years ago, somewhere around the time Columbus popped in and killed all the Arawaks with slavery and syphilis and medieval theology, another enormous volcanic explosion splattered across Northern Arizona. The results were enormous volcanic rocks, tomb-like cliffs, buttes, mountains and valleys.

It’s now an enormous vista of enormous surreality, an enormous flat plain dotted with old volcanoes and cracked sawtooth mountains. It looks as though hundreds of miles of terrain simply floated up off the planet, did a graceful somersault and floated back down. An enormous catastrophe for who and what lived here, a playful roll in the sleep of dreamy mountains.

I played tandem with a train for hundreds of miles between Flagstaff and Barstow. Four enormous orange engines pulled a half-mile or so of enormous boxcars. It looked like an enormously graceful snake wending its way around mountains and across valleys that dwarfed it. The train would disappear and reappear periodically, sliding its own way through the fabulous enormousness. How did it keep up with me? I was averaging ninety miles an hour. Rent a Prius when driving to California. Gas is expensive and that little sneaker-looking box on wheels can keep up with just about anything else.

There's an electricity in California. You can feel it charging the sky a few miles past Kingman, Arizona. The invisible voltage increases until, just past Barstow, it transmogrifies into enormous long snakes of traffic, bumper to bumper, averaging about eighty miles per hour. Once in awhile vehicles collide. Electrical people will do that.

Finally, into Los Angeles, the electricity has turned all human, endless streets of one-story buildings, populated with electrical people, some of them crackling with artistic pursuits, ideas and ideals and hopes. Such are Gisele my supermodel and Lance my supermilitary man turned writer and movie director.

And such is my electricity, scribbling in this cigar shop. The cozy, funky chairs are now populated with comfortable-looking middle aged men, filling the place with plumes of smoke and chatting in Russian. I chat sporadically as I write. Yes Libya is a fiasco. Just another enormous oil grab, they agree. What am I writing? A story for EbertClub. You’ll all be famous. What’s your name? Pause. “Sam,” they all say. They grew up in Russia and know better.

Lance and Gisele, who haven’t yet met, are my kinda people. They started out with nothing and through the random magic of sheer determination, made something out of it. Gisele’s family considered her an ugly duckling. She succeeded beyond her childhood dream and went international through sheer natural grace. It’s really something to sit with someone crackling with natural grace. I’d meant only to let her know I’d arrived, but we spent six spontaneous hours together.
She speaks Portuguese, Italian and French. She learned English largely through watching movie subtitles. She’s a surfeit of movie recommendations.

Ah, here’s Louie!

http://lousavage.com/articles.html

Back later.

One, Inc.

2011-10-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hi! Don't be afraid! Come on in!

Like the decor? We thought all-white with transparent glass decor would say what we mean. What we mean is One.

You know, "One." The Whole Thing, All At Once. Everything. All-inclusive.

You. Me. Our business here today. Your business, my business.

What business? Sorry to have to seem so... clandestine, I guess is the word... but it isn't really as hush-hush as all that. In fact, anybody who wants to know about it, can know.

Even Imbeciles Can Look Good in a Suit

2011-09-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

I don't pay much attention to Breitbart; come to think of it, I'll read something and if there's an inkling of what sounds like reality to it, then maybe I'll be curious about who wrote it. It's an educated habit: consider the information. Save the paranoia for the Lizard People from Outer Space.

Even old Sherman Skolnick served pepper amongst the flyspecks... tho' these days it's getting tougher to wipe off either thing and come up with the other.

Waaaay back in 1988 or so I decided to get locally political and helped organize people to clean out their local politicos and their cousins and cronies who had been infesting the public treasury like bugs in a grain bin. It was highly instructive and highly successful. It made me proud of what Americans can do, and proud to be one.

Old Humphrey was on our side. He took a shining to me and showed me his basement full of rifles, shotguns, pistols, ammo making equipment, enough for a local militia. He told me all about what the Second Amendment was really for. Never mind the idiotic portrayal Michael Moore tried to make of gun owners. Idiocy is never outweighable, toe-to-toe.

Old Humphrey got so fond of me I finally had to shake him off my boot. You don't chase off a gang of tax-sucking good ol' boys to form another, no matter how noble the new gang feels.

We whipped 'em all good. We got a whole new batch of County Supervisors in. They were realistic, too. For years, I kept in touch. Sure enough, things sounded sensible.

However, in the meantime, two things happened in Schuyler County. Humphrey also took a shining to a fella who came in shouting jobs, jobs, jobs, just support this supposed tire recycling plant he proposed.

I looked into this fella. He was from a mafia-owned dump at Tom's River, New Jersey. They were dumping trash in the woods up here. They were trying to legitimize sending hundreds of tons of dead tires to rot around beautiful Seneca Lake, claiming some new fangled machine from France would make them all into shiny new tires. There wasn't any such thing.

Sneering about "conspiracy theories" hadn't yet been invented. Nowadays it is too easy to sneer any gullible voter away from considering hard evidence. The post-hypnotic suggestion, "jobs jobs jobs" is especially difficult to counter, Republican, Democrat or Satanist.

So at the county meeting I introduced myself to the audience and to the fellow by starting out "I spoke to your parole officer this morning" and continued on with a few things I'd learned. In about five minutes, he and his tire dump fairy tale and jobs jobs jobs were dead in the water.

Humphrey never forgave me. But it just goes to show you the Second Amendment ain't enough.

I wouldn't repeal it, not with the kinds of characters inhabiting America today on any side. It's a rough-hewn provision to keep rough-hewn politicians honest, and most of them, once they can afford a suit and a little diction coaching (including down-home affectations) forget how rough-hewn they truly are.

The second event was when a fellow emptied his shotgun into the local social services office, murdering five women, none of whom had anything to do with the genuine wrong that had been done him.

So, there's the problem of discretionary use of the Second Amendment. It's a Catch-22: if you're smart enough to kill the right people, you're also smart enough to do things in a more civil manner. If you're not smart enough to do things in a more civil manner, you're bound to shoot the wrong people.

Consider the hundreds of thousands, even millions of wrong people bombed into splatter in the various countries to which the United States Government has been "bringing democracy." A suit, a law degree and millions of Americans hooting for you don't make "smart."

There's a reason I rail at the imbeciles sucking for peoples' favorable attentions by demonizing gun-laden "Tea Partiers;" I see lots of them on Twitter. From this I learn that imbeciles are the last to recognize the poor quality of the contents of their own minds. Here in reality those who first, spontaneously, began under the banner "Tea Party" don't much resemble the media clown show capitalizing on those tapped by "the usual suspects" to pretend to represent the real people.

It's not only that the hyukking yahoos don't know who the hell they're talking about. It's that little matter of Second Amendment discretion, once honest rough-hewn people get sick to death of being mistaken for bad jokes. They too could start shooting the wrong people. No collegey-sounding speechifying could stop it. And what rough-hewn reasoning could talk these glib suits into taking responsibility for their parts in it?

Hyuk hyuk hyuk.

Writers, Beware Absolute Shit "Literary" Scam

2011-09-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

If you're a real writer, "professional editors" will give you the creeps. If, on the other hand, you feel that a "professional editor" can make the difference for you between success and failure, a publishing contract and obscurity, you are most likely deceiving yourself, and there are plenty of "professional editors" who will gladly help you keep doing that, so long as you keep paying them.

I say this even though one of the books I edited warranted a commitment from the Hudson Institute for two million dollars for the author's experiment. I say this even though another work I edited garnered a one million dollar publishing offer. It's my job to seek out the exceptions to the rule. It's not my job to pretend to encourage mediocre talent with fake hopes about how anybody can succeed with the "right" boost, merely by paying some amateur grammatician.

If you have a pleasant gift for writing, write your heart out to your friends. Write your secrets to yourself to feel better. Write for your descendants. Perhaps make up a story or two. But if you feel the need for a "professional editor" to interfere in these things, you may be in a dilemma no "professional editor" would help with. S/he'd just keep wanting your money.

Some of you know I'm a literary agent. I deal with stellar people who have stellar personalities. I won't have less. If you don't know you are stellar -- don't worry, you'll know -- stop sending your stuff around right now. Things are tough enough where, in the commercial industry alone, 375,000 new titles are belched out in a year, 93% of them sink to the bottom of the tank, and the 7% that do make money probably include mostly textbook sales and that sort of thing. Anyway, those are the stats I remember reading from last year. The industry altogether, so I read last spring, had so far lost two billion dollars. Since then, Borders -- or was it Barnes & Noble -- has sunk deader than a doornail, after many industry versions of "bailout," or transfusions.

New note -- you understood me, right? Three hundred seventy five thousand new TITLES. Imagine driving through Cleveland, Ohio, where every single resident has lined the streets, waiting eagerly for you, waving a book s/he has just finished writing and is desperate for you to read. Those are only the ones they wrote this year.

I don't want to put anybody off going to Cleveland, but judging from having read samples of somewhere around fifty thousand new books so far myself, ninety five percent of the books these imaginary Clevelanders are waving at you will be boring; about ninety percent of that ninety five percent of boring writing will be imitations of books the writer has seen on the front stands of a bookstore, or of movies the writer has seen who doesn't read enough to know that the movie he is turning into his own new novel already came from a book.

Now, in a city the size of San Francisco, all eight-hundred-many-thousand writers lining the streets "Occupy" style will be waving a book at you that they had printed up themselves, this year alone... over eight hundred thousand different novels and exposes and memoirs and self-help and economic analysis and political theory and philosophizin' and spiritual revelation and psychic instructions from God and so on at you, all shouting at once.

I haven't counted poets. Adding those, I suppose we'd have to move the lot of them to New York City. In any case, you'll be expected to read each of their books that year. They'll want you to. They want somebody to.

While we're at it, I read that only twenty percent of the American public reads books at all, and most of these are women. I'm not sure about that. Even when I shoveled shit for a living (while freelance editing, mind), I didn't meet any co-workers who hadn't read a book. I sat in a coffeeshop on breaks for ten years and kids and old folk alike were eager to talk about books they were reading. Nobody ever talked about books sitting in the corporate bookstores. I paid attention, as it was my job.

Corporate Reading honcho Carolyn Reidy et al have publicly blamed customers for not reading what of the near-four hundred thousand new titles that reaches the corporate bookstores. They're just not reading any more, she said. The other honchos at the big meeting agreed, and so was this recorded. People I know are reading as much or more than ever. They complain to me about what's for sale in the bankrupt-y corporate bookstores. Come to think of it, some who've complained to me are very popular writers themselves. That's more than just the one you might guess from this blog.

One of my authors has gone into his second hardcover edition in a short time and, electronically, is putting out a steady 1200 units a month. He's getting invited places worldwide to speak. A retired PM of Egypt endorsed his work, too (I made that happen). Another was longlisted for the MAN Literary Prize, aka the "Asian Booker," for a novel nobody's even heard of but me, Tom Keneally, Stephen Spielberg, Caroline Leavitt, Patrick what's-his-name and about 60 junior corporate editors so far, who aren't stellar like these people who think it's great. Another stands to get a Spielberg-size budget to direct his own version of a fuggin' SLAM BANG novel he wrote... which yours truly recognized right away, and several dozen editors so far who aren't stellar didn't.

Oh, everybody I have is great. I've made only one error so far: a semi-literate bonehead who has some mentions in the Guinness Book of World Records, thinks he's superhuman, and turned out to be crazy and a liar typical of his brand of crazy.

A few years back I overestimated a crazy woman who had a tabletop "publishing company" funded by her sugardaddy husband -- this factual surmisal is evident on her own somewhat unctuous blog. She had a cop book out, a woman cop complaining about sexual harassment at her job. I thought she might like a look at my cop. One hell of a cop and a good writer.

No, the crazy lady instead left such a loud-mouthed message on my machine I thought it better we just wrote quietly. She wrote back, gladly telling me how to do my business and how this certain thing I happened to be doing was totally impossible.

I bet her an e-beer I could do it: find a publisher for a reporter who had a GREAT scoop on a presidential candidate, at that late hour. I did. I won. I not only didn't get an e-beer, I got a silence so dead I could smell the rot. So much for good sportsmanship.

A month or so later my cop won the 2009 Award for cop-writing, for the book I represented. Pretty damn prestigious. I mentioned it to the crazy lady in an e-mail. She wrote back "why are you sending me this?" "Because it's you, dear," I replied, flirtatiously. Apparently she doesn't appreciate flirtatious jokes unaccompanied by a bouquet of cash.

Missus "Will Marry for Money" warned me that she was going to ruin my reputation. I have it right here in black and white, in e-mail. She proceeded to attempt so at just the e-hole site where bitter semi-literates are encouraged to do that, while having their verbiage crunched by a whole nest of "professional editors."

A month later, my partner, surfing the internet, came across the e-hole in question. If you have stellar aspirations and a wee seed of authenticity, you'll know the kind I mean, you've browsed them. The "professional editors" are usually failed novelists or irresponsible types who fear real jobs. They usually farm out your Instant Great American Novel to some college kid. Believe me. I see this in my inbox all the time. And there was Missus "Will Ruin Your Reputation," sputtering e-venom into an e-hole designed for this kind of helpful horseshit.

To be continued. Check the comments for a run-down on one of the assholes I had to deal with at that scam site.

Hmph. It's going to take longer to finish this than I wanted, partly because it's boring. Will get to it. The message is: do NOT hire internet "professional editors," EVER. If you can't write good in the first place, don't write. Wait'll you hear what I found out about these snot-nosed scamsters.

Sorry I'm late. Not all coincidences are pleasant, nevertheless it's fun to read significances into them. I'm late for three reasons. One, the boredom of tatting out something needing said to a smaller audience than reads my blog, two, I had to deal with a dishonest auto repairman whose work could have killed my mother-in-law had she driven that car, and three, Pete. Pete's found my blog and has been harassing it daily for quite awhile, then spreading his obsessive harassments around wherever he can. Pete's nuts. He fits right in with the subject, however. I've deleted his postings because they're boring, and said so before I realized it was Pete, hiding behind "anonymous." They've been growing increasingly vile in reaction to that. STILL not interesting, even with all the cusswords.

Hell Hath No Fury Like That of a Repressed Homosexual Scorned

Anybody here read Bill Nack's MY TURF? I'm no sports fan but by god, after MY TURF I may be. Bill and I corresponded awhile. While he was smoochin' a gal at Siro's in Saratoga and habiting the Wishing Well there in the days of Secretariat, I was cracking lobster at the one and playing music at the other at the same time, as a 17 year old. Ain't coincidences fun? This was long before I ever heard of him.

Page 307, "The Muscle Murders," contains a good sad description of Pete. Apart from steroids and other crazy-inducing things, there's a "little guy" complex that compels some individuals to lift weights, lift weights, lift weights, play counterfeit macho and entertain violent fantasies. That's Pete, at 5'6", flat feet and a vestigial tail (he once told me this was why women didn't like him, although I doubt any of us has ever seen his little tail).

While one of my commenters suggested I keep a rifle handy (we've got one from Afghanistan), and while Pete bragged about murdering "some jerk" in a parking lot in Santa Monica, CA, with a piece of rebar, plus other adventures with his pistol in other places, I doubt Pete's much to worry about -- even though he HAS assigned himself the role of implacable enemy from the very safe distance of a thousand miles and the internet hiding behind names he hopes I don't recognize.

Despite the tale of Pete murdering somebody in Santa Monica, he's only ever exploded his violent temper at old people -- who of course didn't do anything to deserve it. There was this old alcoholic housepainter in Houston, and last I witnessed, a violent and obscene tirade at an 85 year old, very kindly and quite brilliant writer named Doris Colmes. Look her up. You all must read THE IRON BUTTERFLY. Doris escaped Nazi Germany with her family, then went on an adventure through the American 20th Century that had me reading it even while I walked around, nearly bumping into a telephone pole.

Jew-Haters Welcome at Absolute Shit Writers Protection Service!

Because it goes without saying, I've neglected to mention that there wasn't, isn't, and never would be anything I or anyone at the Agency had done that rated any kind of complaint, not even from a bruised ego, so long as its proprietor was reasonably sane. Period. That didn't stop the "professional editors" from anything.

Has it done us any damage? Well, one client said the agency website was now "skewed to teenaged girl writer wannabes encouraging each other."

Do take a look at the comments section here. A while ago I came across an old letter from Pete. All of them were like the samples excerpted there, from a single letter. They were like Pete in person, albeit I'd curtail this crap periodically.

This is the kind of jerk these "professional editors" think is well qualified to post libels at their site, with his child molester "jokes" and all. I hear they've since erased the nonstop rants, as indeed they could have got into legal trouble like never before, but I don't doubt they've since added more calumnies.

Poor Pete "hates Jews," see. He's always "hated Jews." He'll die "hating Jews." He doesn't know any Jews, really, and I watched as over the years his fantasy grew. "Jews" were keeping him from succeeding at anything, ever. Even Doris Colmes was conspiring against him in his mind, I'm sure. I'm sorry I invited this wonderful writer into a discussion group with my sick paranoid friend. She had asked to be excused, as her daughter was in the hospital near death. This brought on Pete's weird tirade.

I often did my best to bring to his attention that this was, and remains, insane. He heeded to the extent that he broadened his focus to now ranting in hatred against "nepotists" and now "whites." Pete's white, not what anyone would call "ethnic looking," a 3rd or 4th generation American Italian. He changed his surname thinking he was being persecuted for being Italian. He never did join the Mafia for protection, as I suggested. Nevertheless, Pete still couldn't hold a job. Nepotists, you know. "White blonde haired blue eyed" nepotists at that. At bottom, they're ALL "Jews."

I looked up "Peter Wells, Tucson" and was pleased to see that he had been more or less employed until last May. Then, apparently, and according to his succinct statement, either Jews or White people or both caught up with him:

www.linkedin.com/pub/peter-wells/1b/192/bb1
Tucson, Arizona Area - desktop support tech at Honeywell NOT ANY MORE they laid me off. I wasn't WHITE ENOUGH for them. - Honeywell Aerospace

This absurdly embittered paranoid behavior made him the darling of this "we help writers and warn you of enemies" site. More later.

...Sorry for the long delay, same reasons as given above. This dirty diaper does need flushed out, though. Pete's discovered an old song of mine somebody posted on YouTube, and has posted something nasty -- and as usual, witless -- under it. He's determined to hang his furry little star on my coattails, as usual. He'll be sneaking over here again, obsessive and embittered li'l bug as he is.

Pete fit right in with the absolutely shitty "helping writers" gang: exaggerated claims to talent, a big chip on the shoulder and symptoms of serious personal problems. He and the tabletop-mama publisher got along famously, encouraging each other to vomit out malicious libel -- whatever sounded denigratory within the limits of their mediocre imaginations. Perhaps this was to feed their personal demons. What appeared to be a group of semi-literate, snotty little high school girls jumped right in.

A spanking would have been more appropriate than any attempt to debate this little gang. They were (and probably still are) people who had absolutely no business with the Agency at all and never had -- nor ever would. Most had no business pretending to professional writing. Some made false claims of being writers at all.

This made these "professional editors" happy, if hollow ambitions can ever be said to be "happy." A little scandal, even a fake one, to bring in 'net traffic. Why check any sources? Why contact the Agency to respond to even legitimate-sounding complaints? Little minds buzz to dirt and negativity, and likely need "professional editing."

"The more lies we tell, the better off we are," said one of them.

That's a quote and I'm not kidding. I looked into these people.

It was more than from people who offer legitimate 'net services like Gerard Jones does, or the fella who said it was the most ugly, negative site he'd ever seen and everybody he knew thought the same of it.

The above quote was blabbed Manson-girl style by one of them at a book exposition to a friend of mine. They were there passing out billets for god knows what. The spiel amounted to this: their little gang plans to be the "gatekeepers" of literature. They'd ruin every agency and publisher they could and rule the rest. The more hatred and mistrust these mediocre neurotics could sell, the bigger and more important they apparently thought they'd get. Your tedious, overwritten "fantasy" novel doesn't sell? The only solution appears to be take over the industry.

Think I'm joking? This little gang of failed fantasy writers are a little nut cult. Legitimate complaints had been registered about them farming out "professional editing" work and not paying their "professional editors," who, typically, are college kids or ne'er-do-wells as described above.

One of this cult lost a malicious libel suit with a $250,000 judgment against him and, last I looked, another malicious libel suit against him had been green-lighted by a judge.

The little gang of "professional editor" fantasy writers are still embroiled in a ONE BILLION DOLLAR malicious libel suit from an outraged agent. They claimed it was over, but according to my source, they're lying once again and it's far from over. They did, however, get called down for soliciting donations for legal costs from their sadly gullible clients. That's illegal.

What kind of literary ability does it take to be so stupid? Too much sniffing bug spray? Some of my clients also stumbled into that site. Nobody was fooled. However, I did hear from some who weren't my clients.

Most notable was the late Abhijit Dasgupta, who became my client instantly.

Abhijit wasn't a "professional editor," scamming the ignorant with tales of how to get success. He was a real editor: Executive Editor for India Today newsmagazine, India's largest and most respected periodical, and therefore, the world's. Nobody was fooled by the reams of nonsense these "professional editors" were allowing unchecked in their rule-the-industry website, Abhijit advised. He switched from one of England's most prominent literary agents to me, incidentally.

Ma-cho Ma-cho Superman!

One of my clients did jump on board the fake-fest, however. I've described Superboy above.

I had high hopes for Superboy, and 720 hours of unpaid work on that dead-eyed jerk were meant to come to something. But I suppose it's no coincidence that Pete and Superboy were so alike, "little guys," obsessive weightlifters, competitors for page 307 in Nack's MY TURF. Superboy claimed to have got his "powers" from reading Plato while waiting for his mom to pull strings to get him out of a 20 year jail sentence for breaking a Naval officer's neck who had fallen on a cement curb. His manuscript seemed to indicate that he didn't do things like that any more, nor would he slam things into women's faces at convenience stores he was robbing, nor was he chronic depressive or diagnosed for "magical thinking" any more. He claimed he had cured himself.

I'd taken him on because of experiments of my own -- nothing having to do with manic depression or clinical "magical thinking," mind you. I'd managed to do some pretty spectacular physical feats myself, all considered, and so, found Superboy's claim credible for that. I rewrote the first 80 pages of his work, which was less than he had written when he contacted me. They were amusing tales of what a bad boy he "used to be," a thief, a liar, mentally debilitated, beating up women, nearly killing a man in a barroom brawl and so on -- all on the premise that he was none of those things any more.

While coaxing him to write enough for a whole book, I found him the one publisher he'd ever get. The publisher complained that after page 80, it was a bore. I couldn't take the time to rewrite his whole damn manuscript for him. I'd challenged him that if he could break Guinness bar-bet records "with his soul," he could do the same with writing. It's what I do.

I put Superboy on to two very kindly and highly accomplished experts in their fields to help him learn to write his thoughts better. He insulted them both. One was a 95 year old Doctor of Linguistics, a frequent award-winner, the wing of a college named after him. Superboy decided to warn this venerable and brilliant professor that he would die soon and without Superboy's "understanding" of the soul.

Although supposedly a PhD in Platonic Metaphysics himself, the old professor playfully wiped Superboy's clumsy bluster in circles about Socrates, philosophy and the soul in general. Superboy, PhD in Platonic Metaphysics, did so poorly one certainly had to wonder if he'd even finished high school.

He tried bullying a highly respected, award-winning 95-year-old professor with a college hall named after him about his death, to "win" the argument. At the same time, Superboy knew the professor was tending daily to his own dying wife, while teaching classes and chairing his department.

Superboy, for various additional reasons at home, grew manically depressed. I could tell. I wrote and asked him. He e-mailed that I was "the only person in the world he could talk to." Shortly afterward, someone warned me that Superboy had mounted a calumny campaign at that site, himself now mighty and heroic; me, puny and craven.

He hadn't fixed anything about himself as he'd ever claimed. He cast quite a bit of doubt on the truthfulness of any of the heroic stories he'd bungled out about himself. He in effect stole the work I'd put into him. He posted a gang of lies, breaking confidential legally privileged e-mails, excerpting them out of context to make himself look good and me bad. He registered false complaints to an organization to which I didn't belong. As with Pete, who along with Ms. Will Ruin Your Reputation were still busy stinking the blog up with aimless nonsense, Superboy did manage to hurt an elderly woman, an agent colleague. She belonged to that organization to which Superboy sent that false complaint. Superboy knew that. I'd told him. He had to hurt somebody.

"You're going to hold my balls so they don't get rug burns while I fuck your wife," said Superboy to some stranger in a squabble about a dog. I suppose I'm lucky that Superboy merely insulted my wife, also totally gratuitously, on that site.

Superboy turned out to be the same frightened little brat with a weak grasp on reality and a tendency to thievery and violence that his own book says he'd always had. As to the feats of strength? Anyone obsessive enough to ignore his family for lifting weights four hours a day can win a few records for a beer-company records book. His do keep getting broken.

Someone I knew posted a little something in my favor. The "professional editors" deleted it and replied "go start your own site." words to that effect.

These creeps never checked with any agency about the validity of any of the crap they published with glee. These creeps aren't stellar personalities. They're malicious libel bugs. They're poisoned people.

Their personal blogs are overstuffed with peccadilloes and long, long LONG detailed useless "advice" about how to write and how to pick an agent.

Sometimes a Charging Chipmunk Doesn't Realize It's Dead

The other day some goober broke onto my Twitter timeline announcing how superior he was and how ignorant I am for not also gurgling the tiresome pop meme called "evolution." It's on the way out. One of my scientists has a whole bunch of essays from really big scientists, a Nobel Laureate included, that indicates this is the case. The really big scientists see they've been forced to look in other directions, as the "shit happens" schtick of Darwin's accidentalisms doesn't explain shit after all. "Intelligent design" doesn't answer much of anything, either.

So I toss out messages about the weirdness and wrongness of antiquated Darwinian evolution from time to time to see what happens. What happens is that I get lambasted by yokels. They are as precisely outraged at my cavalier disbelief as superstitious and suspicious savages in loincloths would be, hearing their god Jubumba doesn't require human sacrifice after all. Their phrasings are often identical. I do weary of hearing about "mountains of evidence" where not a single outraged science savage will pick even a weed of proof off that mountain for discussion.

They cling to "I don't 'believe,' I know the facts. Evolution is fact" in the kind of meme-ified drone one hears in "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Personal Savior." The difference appears to be, Lord Jesus doesn't cotton to intellectual dishonesties as much as Lord Darwin apparently does.

This goober from Austin, unable to win a smart-assing contest, dug up that stupid site, containing what of that actionable bullshit they haven't yet been smart enough to erase, and spread it as far as his tweeting little heart could muster... two dozen followers, I s'pose (fundamentalist "evolutionists" aren't all that popular out here in reality). This resulted in a small increase of blog traffic for me, and a good one-or-two goobers in disguise, along with poor Pete, trying to post crap in the comments section.

You'd wonder why a die-hard "evolutionist" would NOT wonder about his own obsession for writing cookie cutter novels about the end of the world, human corporate robots clearly under the direction of some Whore of Babylon. Stupid novels about disastrous dystopian dysfunction are about number three in the cookie-cutter queries we get here, behind stories about eternal blood-sucking boyfriends and little magical guys with glasses who go to magic school.

Such people, who really should concentrate on keeping their day jobs, but instead become victims of their own memes proportionate to hatred for said jobs, demand of me what books I've sold. This gooberamus wanted to know the ISBN numbers of all the books I've sold!

Snap snap chop chop!!!! Or I'm a FAILURE. A BIG FAILURE WHO DOESN'T BA-LEEVE DARWIN AND MOUNTAINS OF EVIDENCE! A FAILURE AS A MAN (you who aren't literal-minded, see my essay called "What Happened with Carolyn Cassady." You who are, is there nothing I can say that will convince you to stop pretending your lives away with your damnably stupid fantasy novels and sending them to me????)

A lambasting from a group of chipmunks on this subject had me make up my mind: it's none of your damn business. A) wouldn't I appreciate it if MY agent didn't go blabbling about things the IRS would be too glad to look into? B) Wouldn't I appreciate not getting barraged with tons of cheap imitations of my client's work, for whom I worked my butt off, once he got in the news? Yes I would. So unless it can't be helped by virtue of enormous sales (and who knows who JK Rowling's agent is anyhow?), I'm staying mum.

I may expect a few more turd-like sentences from the one or two creepy-crawlers, plus poor Pete, casting doubt on this. But go back to your "professional editors," where you belong, so long as you feel throwing your money away on mendacious flattery about your chances for the fame and fortune you never get from reality is... valuable, or whatever.

Useful tip: don't look for an agent "with a track record." You're no smart and skeptical shopper in some literary shopping mall, as these creepy people are trying to make you believe. You are being shopped. Agents don't "sell your book." Your book must sell itself or it will sink like a stone. If it's not there in the raw, it won't be after wasting money on "professional editors" either. Don't pretend your "professionally edited" thing will sell 100 years from now because you're a misunderstood genius. I can do that, but not you.

Or do these libel bugs know what they're talking about? True, the most virulent little bug among them, leading the assault on professional honesty, was dumped by a couple publishers. No sales.

And now let me go do something fun. Back later.

I'm ba-ack. Just got back from L.A. where I attended the first screening of my client's comedy. Looks good, but isn't the final edit. If this works, he gets the Spielberg-size budget for the novel I'm representing.

Was accompanied by my supermodel client. She's taller than I and more beautiful by far. She looked like a Greek statue come to life in smashing evening wear. I looked like a scruffy old biker bodyguard. I get away with scruffy because I'm so smart it doesn't matter to people. If it does matter to people, they're not smart enough for me. By the way, I take first-time writers if they ARE stellar personalities. These two first timers have rocketed in one way or another since I recognized their... stellarity. Am real proud of that. As I said, if you're stellar, you'll know. Don't pretend. You'll wind up like Pete and that miserable little lot. If you do choose the latter, be sure to grow a huge beard so you can pretend you're prominent and deep. Wear wire-rimmed glasses if female.

So has another just rocketed. JUST now opened the agency mail to discover my historian got an enormously positive review from a huge national columnist while I was in L.A. We got sick of waiting around so he self-published. It's a great book.

THE EMERGENCE OF AFRICAN AVATARS AND THE SECRET OF FATIMA

2011-08-29T13:21:00.000-07:00

I wrote this in the spring of 2001. It went worldwide, published in a dozen languages. I got calls from Japan and Taiwan as well as from Europe. A now-ex PM of Congo/Brazzaville asked permission to reprint the article "for every church in the Congo." He knew Simeon Toko personally. Do I think "Tio," as he was called, was Christ returned? Naw. Neither did he.

Few Americans are aware of the spectacular religious activity that has been thundering, with incalculable exuberance, through the hearts of millions of Africans throughout our just-passed century. Men and women have been seeing vision after vision, sign after sign, and wonder after wonder. There are national holidays commemorating miracles -- not from centuries ago by some old saint whose paint has long since peeled, but within the last few decades, witnessed by thousands of ordinary citizens still walking among us.

Although few in the U.S. are aware of all this, religious scholars whom I have contacted as independent sources have been recording the activity with intense fascination. Relatively little is known, and scholars are quite eager to learn more. They may be gathering information that could eventually form a "new" New Testament. It may well be that we are viewing the beginnings of a new civilization formed around a new Christ, which, like the occasion that started our present one 20 centuries ago, remains relatively unknown in the world until some time after the events that then inspire so many millions for centuries to come.

I am told, in fact, that I am the 8th American to have learned about the subject of this essay, which is about a man named Simeon Toko, who died in 1984. Simeon Toko appeared before people in an apparitional body and in dream states while he was physically alive, and continues to do the same among certain selected people 17 years after his natural death. At least one witness says he, personally, killed Simeon Toko -- quite professionally, as a hired killer -- and saw him alive again a few days later. Others still living at this writing say they saw Toko physically slaughtered, and watched him bring himself back to life before their astonished eyes. There is a very large body of testimony, of which only a little has yet been recorded or written down by eyewitnesses.

Much of the media news from Africa in the past 80 years has been presented as political rebellion and tribal warmongering, or as a battle between "good" civilized countries versus "evil" communists over the souls of Africans who are still considered uncivilized and superstitious and too immature, to be left to themselves... what with all those raw materials and diamonds yet needing dug up. This is the general bias of newsreporting from Africa as I remember it since my own childhood. It's not much different now. We tend to think of the African peoples in a distortion somewhere between a bouquet of jokes about banana republics and a vague, distant horror of unexplainable war and slaughter.

It is odd that Africa is considered a land of raw natural resources, presumed for centuries to be there largely for the benefit of civilized foreigners, who have had only to educate and "civilize" a species of simple people to work the mines and derricks for them.

It is very odd, considering that Africa is home to the most ancient of continuous Western civilizations, Ethiopia; for that matter Africa is home to the most ancient human bones yet chipped out of an earthly grave. Scientists are lately calling Africa the home of the human race.

Back in the late nineteenth century, British Museum curator E.A. Wallis Budge began translating the papyrii and wall-writings of ancient Egyptian temples. In order to come to some kind of understanding of those writings, Budge found himself compelled to compare the practices described in ancient language with those practiced by "natives," meaning black African peoples, of his time. He was also aware of the similarities of language between the ancient and current tongues.

As "savage" as they supposedly were, many Africans had in fact preserved practices known to and used successfully by their own ancestors, the ancient Egyptians. It is unarguable, looking at the fantastic ancient artisanry alone, that many pharoahs were black, and so too was a great deal of Egypt's ancient population, if not initially populated by black peoples entirely. If by our own accounts African Egypt lasted at least 3,000 years (11,000 according to Herodotus' HISTORIES), we must admit that the wisdom and practice preserved in ancient writings was at the very least partly responsible for the second longest-lived civilization in historical record.

If that is so, then we can surmise that the Africans who moved deeper into their lands to escape the warlike upstart Greeks and Romans, continued those practices for their own benefit. These "savages" lived generally peaceful, productive, imaginative and joyful lives. It is certainly also said that this was how the ancient Egyptians lived. History will show that the migrating central Africans lived the same way, at least until the mercenary and slave raids by Europeans began in the 15th century C.E.

If a civilization can be defined by its coded wisdom, not merely by its pottery or technology, then we can surmise that the Egyptian civilization didn't die out so much as move away with the Africans who founded settlements elsewhere on the continent. The successive overrunners of the ancient African civilization -- now given the greek name "Egypt," not Kemet, as the Egyptians themselves called their land -- have to this day failed to match the accomplishments of its founders. No one as yet knows how to build a massive pyramid set exactly to coordinates aligned with the sun and stars; engineers still marvel daily over their construction. That is only the most famous of many mysteries of ancient Egyptian architectonics. Certainly no one knows how to make a country thrive for thousands of years, even through times of unimaginable trouble. The story that the great buildings of Egypt were built by slave labor, Cecil B. DeMille style, is simply untrue.

It is also untrue that any part of Africa ever was a "dark continent," to be "discovered" by Portuguese boatmen -- as though it were somehow unattached to any ancient glories, populated only by semi-humans, and full of natural riches they themselves could not appreciate.

Anyone who might argue that this depiction of these ancient peoples is not the portrayal that white-skinned European races promoted does not know history. A single example: Americans in the nineteenth century created a law that permitted an African slave the dubious honor of counting as "three-fifths of a man;" in other words, men and women with dark skin were considered less than human in United States law. White slavemasters had obtained at least a little human recognition for their black male slaves, to use them as partial voting blocs in local elections for self-serving reasons.

In the book that this essay will introduce to the United States for the first time, it is pointed out by documentation that the first slave traders who came to Africa in the fifteenth century C.E. found an advanced society dominated by a monotheism with a powerful code of ethics. They did not find half-naked people in grass skirts with bones through their noses. They did not find rows of fat little stone fertility goddesses and voodoo fetishes. They found an intelligent, friendly, dignified peoples who had created beautiful avenues and pleasant buildings and well-regulated agricultural fields and fine clothing. They found a people who practiced the old Mosaic code, essentially (students of Mosaic law will note how much of it resembles Egyptian codes). They found a people whose language, linguists have shown, contains scores of words found in biblical hebrew and later in European languages. They may well have found what really ever happened to the so-called lost tribes of the kingdom of Israel.

Except that the subsequent four centuries have proved out the following statement to a deplorable degree, we could otherwise be incredulous at a surmisal of the main difference between the "discoverers" of central Africa and the people they divided and traded like objects and cattle over the ensuing generations: the difference between the civilized dark-skinned peoples and their conquerors is measurable in intensity of greed and a will to murder to fulfill greed's endlessly wearisome demands. This behavior has not ended in modern times. Slavery still exists in Africa, for instance.

Even at this writing, centuries now after the first slashes into the belly of the African land and peoples, predominantly white-skinned countries still allow predominantly white-skinned corporations to assist insane warlords in killing each other, helping with helicopters and technology, simply to keep company profits going. So reported Global Pacific News not long ago.

There is no question that the peoples of Africa, millions and millions of descendants of the ancient Ethiopians and Egyptians among them, have been methodically dehumanized for centuries. No peoples have met with such enormous psychological and material destruction in recorded human history. If they can said to be blamed for allowing any of it, then their fault could only lie in a willingness to trust fellow men who came preaching religious principles.

The damage that Christian missionaries have done to the psychology of human kindness in Africa over the centuries is untold. Examples would take a litany too long to fit all the walls of any ancient temple. But here are two: missionaries routinely accompanied soldiers who came to steal lands and loot for their home European country. The procedure went as follows: the missionary would stand and read aloud an edict in Latin to whatever villagers had gathered. The edict, completely incomprehensible to the villagers, ordered that each of them must at that moment convert to Christianity or be killed or enslaved. After it was read, the guns and swords went to work. The soldiers felt justified in their murders through the benediction and authority of the Roman church. Through varying interpretations of the works of church fathers, the Roman church developed a system of permissible murder and looting, and it was used routinely.

The missionaries would then go to work on the remaining peoples: the children were taught that their parents' intelligent, peaceful beliefs were "from the devil," and that they were to accept poverty "for the good of their souls;" whereas the conquerers were supposedly blessed by God with superior might and wealth, and so must be obeyed.

Not long ago, Pope John-Paul II issued a public statement apologizing for the behavior of the Roman Church during the Inquisition, centuries ago. Over a period of about four hundred years, Church authorities in Europe humiliated, ostracized, tortured and murdered about a half million fellow Europeans over "matters of faith." As these atrocities in the name of God mostly occurred centuries ago, the apology seemed a little late in coming.

However, no apology seems to have yet been offered for the estimated one hundred million Africans who were categorically enslaved, tortured, and murdered into submission for the four hundred years that the Roman Church itself assisted this activity, quite officially, benefitting from it materially and politically.

One would wonder also why there is as yet no apology forthcoming from the Vatican for its role in intent to murder one Simon Kimbangu. This did not happen so long ago that the descendants have long been unaware of the wrong done and the property confiscated, as is mostly the case with the Inquisition.

There are thousands of Africans still alive who remember Simon Kimbangu very well. Kimbangu's name is celebrated throughout the great expanses of central Africa, and this fame continues to increase. He stands as far more than a mere national hero. A short history of his life can be found in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. He and his followers are also the subject of more detailed scholarly research. Simon Kimbangu was a prophet. Left to rot and tortures in a prison, he died there in October 1951 after 30 years.

There are Africans alive at this writing who were brought back from the dead by Simon Kimbangu, and there are people still living who watched him do it. The claim is that Simon Kimbangu healed the sick, made the lame walk, returned sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and even brought an infant dead three days back to life. Kimbangu performed these miraculous deeds over a period of five months, from May, 1921, through September 12, 1921. Scholars do not dispute that this man performed these miracles. There is simply too much testimony about it.

On September 10, 1921, Simon Kimbangu gave a speech. He announced that the colonial authorities were about to arrest him and "impose a long period of silence on my body." He announced that one day a "Great King" of tremendous spiritual, scientific, and political power would arise, and that he himself would return as a representative. Before this event, a certain book would be written that would prepare the people of Kongo (not "Congo") for this event. This book would be resisted, but slowly, it would come to be accepted. (Ed note: I don't think the book I edited is that so-prophesied one, but wouldn't be surprised if certain elements of it would wind up being part of it.)

Two days later, Simon Kimbangu was arrested by colonial authorities -- on his forty-second birthday, September 12, 1921 -- and curtly sentenced to death. The authorities for the Roman Church had recommended his execution, and so had various other Christian missions. According to noted scholar Dr. Allan Anderson, the Baptist mission alone protested the execution of this man whose apparent crime was to have daily stood in a village for five months and healed, consoled, and revitalized people. The joy and the amazement of the gathering crowds had left the prophet open to supposed charges of sedition by jealous missionaries. Punishment for alleged sedition was death.

Just as Kimbangu had predicted two days before his arrest, he was instead given an indefinite prison term, a "long silence of his body." Each morning he was taken from his tiny cell and put bodily into a tank of cold salt water for lengthy periods in an attempt to hasten his death. His prediction that his body would be tortured and humiliated came true.

He had also predicted that day that Africa would be "thrown into a terrible period of unspeakable persecutions."

For the next 40 years, Africans were indeed put through a terrible period of unspeakable religious persecutions. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, deported, separated from their families, subject to atrocious tortures, and simply persecuted for new religious beliefs.

These new religious beliefs, triggered by the few words of an African man who performed miracles among his own people for "only a little while," sent out great psychological rays of hope to a continent of peoples who had long become accustomed to misery and poverty under centuries of colonial abuse and intentionally oppressive religious instruction. These powerful beliefs are still in development and will reach around the world even in their beginning stages. The appearance of the book this essay introduces marks one of many such beginnings.

Part II

Tom Dark

The title of the book this essay will introduce is THE TRUE THIRD SECRET OF FATIMA REVEALED and the RETURN OF CHRIST. The author is Pastor Melo Nzeyitu Josias; additional research by Rocha Nefwani. Both men are native Africans, both highly educated. I edited the book myself, here in America, and added a little general historical knowledge.

The book was meant to be available on May 13, 2001, commemorating the first of 6 visits of the Lady of Fatima, Portugal, who appeared on that date in 1917. She was visible to the three shepherd children who repeated her words to the world, yet was invisible to the crowds of thousands who were drawn to come see her. The Lady made astonishing predictions. Her two sets of predictions, made in 1917 about events of the coming decades, proved true. Among other things, she predicted the fall of Russia to communism, the end of the First World War, and the coming of the Second World War.

There was a Third Secret, however, which the Lady instructed Lucia Dos Santos to reveal only after 1960, after certain events had passed which would have made it more understandable. It was read to Pope John XXIII in February, 1960. When he heard it he fainted dead to the floor. When John XXIII arose, he ordered the Third Secret sealed up in a vault "forever."

Are we in the "end of times?" Are we at the hour in which Jesus Christ has already returned and gone? It would seem that appearances of men acclaimed to be God incarnate have increased greatly in the past century.

Many children born after World War Two abandoned their family's religions and took up a fascination with Hindu Baba or another, during adolescence -- let's say during their "truth seeker years." Some still follow their chosen Baba, regarding him as God Himself clothed in flesh and blood and teachings.

Few seemed to have realized that the various titles of these Eastern god-men, from "Baba" downward, are conventions of Hinduism; they correspond to the same kinds of hierarchical titlings of western religious personnel, from "Pope" downward. Both words mean "father." Perhaps comparing these things would have made the new religious adventure seem less exotic, and therefore, not knowing the traditional lay of things religious, potentially more "spiritual" to youth disillusioned and bored by what continues on beneath Western steeples.

Officially, any Catholic priest or Monsignor or Bishop or Cardinal is a "representative of God on earth," each of more exalted degree, the same as attributed to revered gurus whose photographs are surrounded by burning incense. What makes the idea less true for one than the other? The idea of a God-ness more particular to such men, East or West, is most often a projection of the devotee, who has yet to even speculate on the source of his own willing projections. Yet in terms of advantages to be gained of any kind, the question is moot. There seem to be no fewer crooks among those declared holy as among those who find no use for gods, and no fewer well-intended. We will reserve judgment on current dramas of religious persecution.

Whether a human being can said to be God made flesh, let alone which individual can be said to be this, can be debated into meaninglessness. There are several main schools of thought about it. The prevailing school in the West remains a Christian line, which says that there is one single God. This God parcels out a single soul to each living human, who is otherwise considered as not much more than a moving mass of organized mud, and is unworthy by nature.

All are represented before God the Father by a single non-physical individual, namely Jesus Christ, a man who healed sick people, raised others from the dead, performed other fantastic wonders and sayings, then was murdered in a routine public ceremony at the behest of an unrecognizing, unappreciative public. This God is not finished with this unappreciative public; at an unknown hour, He will take all the souls he parceled out and dump them into a "lake of fire" for all eternity. Only those for whom Christ has interceded will be allowed to live on in eternity, to live in a city where streets are paved with gold, and to bow up and down in worship of this One God, forever. One wonders whether his back will ever tire of the exercise.

As whimsically as I've put it, this is the prevailing, if fading, stream of belief about Who and what a God is among Catholic and Protestant churches. It is this drama, essentially, that captured the imaginations of Western peoples for centuries.

Spontaneous enthusiasm for this story has been dwindling -- to the point that some Americans believe that enthusiasm needs to be enforced. Political machinations surrounding our alcoholic president George W. Bush are currently attempting to squeeze this tale into the shape of an official state religion, through fiduciary activity at taxpayer expense.

Another school of thought, currently rising (if not having had popularity in some ancient time), inherent in a few words of the New Testament, is espoused by some of the notable 20th Century Indian Babas. The Hindu versions of this idea have been distilled further from their Vedic origins by different new-age or maverick churches in the West, or combined with biblical ideations. This school says that all persons are themselves God; yet due to our egoisms, or ignorance, or sinful natures, only the sparsest few among our present billions can sense this divinity within ourselves.

Those few who are said to have become "god-realized," who made themselves known to the public as for divine purposes and missions, seem to attract material fortunes from a public that is either inexpressibly grateful or is too gullible. Although some Hindu religious branches speak of "five ascended masters" who live invisibly on our planet, there are many quite visible gurus or proclaimed avatars around whom devotees have formed practical organizations of high material worth. Monies are collected and practical social advantages, such as political contributions, keep the organizations going, while their intents are to enlighten masses whom, we must assume, are "endarkened" without them.

Sincere or fraudulent, authentic or imitation, each event of the appearance of a man (usually a male) said to be God or god-realized represents a new bud of one size or another upon a very ancient vine. The vine would be human consciousness, and the bud would be civilization.

A civilization forms through codes of knowledge and behavior that allow each of its members, relatively, the broadest opportunity for value fulfillment. The codes seem most often to have originated with a single man, who is also revealed as God's prophet, if not God Himself in fleshly clothing. New knowledge, or interpretations of it, is added in that Man-God's name.

I wonder about the nature of the human experience itself, as I can not think of any civilization which did not attribute its foundations to a single man at its cornerstone. Even the "godless" communist attempts at a new and sensible kind of civilization quickly became personality-worship cults. Nor should we forget Germany's abortive attempt to found a "New World Order" around Adolf Hitler. However, neither he nor Marx nor Lenin nor Mao nor Kim could walk on water or rise from the dead.

Christianity, of all religions, has come closest to uniting the peoples of the entire world. The emergence of avatars in Africa in the twentieth century maintains a continuity with the ancient prophecies found in the bible. "THE THIRD SECRET" cites biblical passages that make a case that Simeon Toko was Christ Returned -- at least, different Christian ministers who considered the interpretations did not scorn their logic. The following is an excerpt I have culled from the book (Some of the writing has been altered so as not to confuse the reader who will be reading this out of its context):

Simeon Toko was born on February 24, 1918, in a northern village in Angola (the "Tsafon" of Psalm 48: 3) portentously named "Sadi Banza Zulu Mongo" ("the village of the Celestial Mountain"). A newborn emerged from his mother's womb into a very hostile environment.

For almost fifty years, from 1872 to 1921, this region suffered natural disasters. There were long droughts between short lulls. Northern Angola and the southern regions of French and Belgian Congos were devastated. The resultant famines killed thousands; so too were thousands of deaths brought by smallpox, typhoid, sleeping sickness, malaria, and others.

These different plagues represent the fulfillment of a biblical prediction. None but a few people inspired by the words of Lord recognized this.

"And the dragon stood before which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born." (Revelation 12: 4)

The baby Simeon Toko was born mere inches from sickness and famine and plague and death, and many leagues from safety. There was not much reason for a baby to want to live, and much against it.

The infant Toko caught smallpox. He was so badly affected by it that villagers thought the hand of the Almighty Father alone saved his life. He was left with the unpleasant marring of smallpox scars on his face. Compare this prophecy:

"As many were astonished at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men." (Isaiah 52: 14)

Not long after Simeon's birth, a missionary at a Baptist Missionary Society, based in Angola, had a dream. He dreamed that a Great King had been born in the region under his ministry. He decided to go looking for this baby.

Requesting guidance from the Holy Spirit, he came to the baby Simeon Toko. Staring at an infant so rachitic, like a "weak and tender plant," and so blemished a little face, he shook his head. Doubt had come to stay. He asked one or two questions and left, feeling victimized by his dream and the voice that had led him there.

In 1949 Simeon attended an international conference of Protestants in Leopoldville (currently called Kinshasa). During this event, the ceremonial masters asked three Africans from Angola to pray. Those selected were Gaspar de Almeida, Jesse Chiulo Chipenda, and Simeon Toko. Simeon Toko asked in his public prayer that the Holy Spirit manifest in Africa to put an end to the abuses of the colonial powers.

Toko became a dedicated member of the Baptist Church in Itaga. He formed a singing choir of 12 people. Instantly this choir became famous and from twelve members it grew into hundreds.

At each of the choir performances, whether at their church or while visiting another church, the Holy Ghost manifested with such a power that white Missionaries suspected young Toko of possessing black magic powers. Jealously, the missionaries summoned him to abandon his "dark practices." He responded to them by saying "But if we are praying to the same God, how come when I pray, and there is a manifestation of the Holy Ghost, you accuse me of sorcery? Is it because I am an African that my prayers couldn't possibly be answered? (see 1 Samuel 10: 10) Does the Holy Spirit discriminate against Africans too?"

But the missionaries were fed up with him and decided to exclude him from the church. Then what was meant to happen, happened. All those who had joined the church on the inspiration of Simeon's magnificent choir left the church with him. The question was whether Simeon Toko would abandon these followers, or keep them with him.

He decided to keep them with him, realizing all the same that a very harsh duty awaited him. He decided to pray again to his Father, repeating the same prayer he had made three years before at the Baptist conference.

On July 25, 1949, Simeon and 35 members of his choir met on a street called Mayenge, at the house of a man named Vanga Ambrosio. The choir began to sing, waiting for time to pray. Shortly before midnight, Simeon Toko lifted his eyes to the sky and he addressed this prayer to His father: "Father, I know you always answer my prayers. Now look; consider these sheep you have sent to me. This duty is so immense that without the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, we will never be able to achieve what you intended. The prayer I addressed to you three years ago, didn't you hear it?"

At precisely midnight, a strong wind shook the house and the Holy Spirit possessed everyone at the prayer meeting, with the exception of a man called Sansao Alphonse, the choir leader. God let him remain in an ordinary frame of mind so that he could write down the testimonials and miracles taking place before his dumfounded eyes. Many in the group were speaking in tongues. Some saw heavenly light and heard celestial voices; others were able to communicate clearly with people several kilometers from where the prayer was taking place.

The excitement about the miracles that happened at this new Pentecost led Simeon Toko's followers to spread all over town and start preaching the building of God's kingdom. This attracted the attention of Belgian colonial authorities, who viewed the activity as a threatening commotion. Within about three months the police began jailing the preachers.

They were jailed and prosecuted as promptly as were the followers of Simeon Toko's Messenger, called Kimbanguists, after Simon Kimbangu, who himself was imprisoned, from 1921 until his death in 1951.

Some were beheaded, burned alive in their homes, drowned in the river, or shot without being prosecuted. Finally, the colonialists decided to deport them. The wives, husbands, and children were separated from their families by hundreds and even thousands of kilometers from their homes.

When miracles started taking place among the new followers of "Kimbangu," the Belgian authorities tried to suffocate this new Messianic group at once.

On October 22nd, 1949, Simeon Toko and 3000 of his companions were put in two different jails, Ofiltra and Ndolo. After three months in the jails, a decree was passed to deport them out of the country. This is when Simeon Toko started revealing Himself.

The Belgian Administrator of the jail in Ndolo was named Pirote. He abused the "Tokoist" prisoners, hurling racist insults. He always ended with: "Filthy nigger, you're going back to nigger country in Angola!"

Tired of this abuse, Simeon Toko replied sharply to Pirote, "Know that if there is a stranger here, it is you! To show you that I am home, the day you make the injustice of deporting me from Belgian Congo, I'll have you carrying my bags alongside me!" Simeon Toko held up both hands, spread out his fingers, and told the abusive Belgian to count them. He said, "I give 10 years to the Belgians, not one more or less, to leave this country!"

No one at that time comprehended these sibylline words. However, the disciples of Simeon Toko understood later: the day they were deported, Pirote fell dead. He was gripped with an apparent heart attack while working in his office, and died as suddenly as though a bullet had struck him squarely.

As for the other mysterious statement made by Simeon Toko: ten years later, in 1960, the Belgians were obliged to leave their rich colony of Congo.

"The Almighty has made my mouth like a sharp sword;"(Isaiah 49: 2). The proof was made with the two anecdotes relating to Pirote and the independence of Belgian Congo, which took place on June the 30th, 1960, exactly as Simeon Toko predicted, each of his fingers representing one year.

But to impel this event, Simeon Toko "unleashed his army." This incredible story is very well known throughout central Africa, and will be reported in greater detail in another book. The event was witnessed by thousands of people on January 4th, 1959. Some of the author's own relatives were there, but so are there thousands of citizens of the city of Kinshasa who witnessed it on that day alive at this writing. January 4th is now a public holiday in Kinshasa and commemorates this event.

Kinshasa was called Leopoldville. On that day, the "Cherubim and Seraphim" appeared and stood against the Belgian colonial army. The citizens of Leopoldville saw an army of about a thousand very small men -- about the size of children, or dwarfs, with very muscular, imposing bodies. Each of these diminutive human-looking creatures showed great strength -- for example, a witness saw one of them flip a five-ton truck over with one arm!

The Belgian soldiers fired at these little brown angels to no effect. Terrified, the colonial army was thrown into confusion. The little men disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. One year after this amazing mass apparition,
the Democratic Republic of Congo was a new and independent country.

After being deported and arriving in Angola, the real tribulations of the "man of sorrow acquainted with grief and sufferings" were to start. Never again would Simeon Toko rest. His life would be a string of non-stop attempts to kill him to prevent his Mission.

Let us follow what he experienced, from Leopoldville, where he was unjustly incarcerated, and to Angola. While incarcerated in Angola, the Portuguese authorities deported him:

1. To the Colonato of Vale do Loge, in the municipality of Bembe, Northern Angola;
2. From Bembe to Waba Caconda;
3. From Caconda to Hoque, 30 kilometers of San da Bandeira;
4. From San da Bandeira to Waba Caconda again:
5. From Caconda to Cassinga - Vila Artur de Paiva;
6. From Cassinga to Jau, in Chibia's canton;
7. From Chibia, back to San da Bandeira;
8. From San da Bandeira to Mocamedes, in the municipality of Porto Alexandre, or more precisely at Ponta Albina.
9. From Ponta Albina to Luanda, the capital of Angola.

All of these deportations took place in a 12 year period. Simeon Toko's captivity in these prisons and agricultural compounds lasted from three months, at San da Bandeira, to as long as five years, at Ponta Albina.

The objectives of these deportations were to reduce Simeon Toko's influence and to dismantle his church. Contrarily, everywhere he and his followers were sent, they indoctrinated even more and more members into the belief of what Portuguese called "Tokoism." In the end the Portuguese authorities decided to use their last measure. "Simeon Toko delenda (must be destroyed)."

Thus, when he was sent to slavery in an agricultural field in Caconda, in southern Angola, his head was offered for a price. Two Portuguese foremen, excited by the reward, decided to take their chance. They put a plan in action to murder Simeon Toko.

During a stay in Angola in 1994, we collected the testimony of Pastor Adelino Canhandi, who was a cook at the Caconda agricultural compound. He saw what happened.

Busy with cooking, he heard a voice calling him, "Canhandi, Canhandi, come here." It was Simeon Toko. Once outside, surprised and curious, Toko told him "to stand there and be watchful. Once again the Son of Man will be tested." Strange words in in particular for Canhandi, who was not then a Christian and didn't understand the term or what Simeon Toko wanted of him. Curious, he watched.

Trade magazines that deal with farm machinery routinely warn users about it. Harvesting machines such as seed-sowers are exceptionally dangerous, as is very well known. Accidents involving the business end of a sower simply aren't survived, and in many cases, there is not enough left of the body for display at a funeral.

One of the Portuguese foremen showed up and hailed Simeon Toko, "Hey Simeon, you see that tractor over there? There are weeds clogging the sower. Go clean them out!" Submissively, the docile prisoner crawled under the engine to fix it. When he was under the engine, the foreman, sitting in the driver's seat, started it up, which automatically activated the rotating blades of the seed sower. Simeon Toko's body was instantly severed in several pieces.

Terrified, Canhandi stood frozen to the spot, watching. The foreman shifted into reverse to back up and check the damage. A second foreman, who was in service that day, flashed a victory sign, indicating that they had succeeded.

Then the unbelievable happened. Before Canhandi and the two Portuguese accomplices, the body of Simeon Toko recomposed itself; Simeon Toko stood up. Canhandi could not believe his eyes! The Portuguese ran away in terror. From that day on, Canhandi believed in the Lord, and his entire family converted to the church of Simeon Toko.

It was also that day that Simeon Toko made it known who he was behind that smallpox-marred face, purposefully behaving in accord with the following scripture:

"Therefore doth my father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father." (John 10: 17-18)

During Simeon Toko's stay in Luanda, the capital of Angola, while he was in the process of being deported for the ninth time, another event happened to show his hidden and true identity.

We should say that when he came on earth in Palestine, Christ referred to Himself in the third person, using the term "the Son of Man." This time, Canhandi was one of the rare persons to hear the Christ refer to Himself differently. Simeon most usually spoke of the Lord Jesus Christ, which meant to his followers that he too was a servant of Christ, like everybody else. Despite the miracles happening around him, just like a shadow, no one knew who he really was.

His followers were once again bewildered when they found out that two top level emissaries were dispatched by Pope John XXIII to Angola to meet Simeon Toko and deliver a personal message to him.

One of the Emissaries was unfortunate to fall ill with dysentary when he arrived in Luanda and wound up in a hospital. The other was received by Simeon Toko, and he said to him, "I am an emissary of Pope John XXIII, who personally mandated me and my colleague to come and ask you a single question: Who are you?"

Let us bear in mind that the year was 1962, two years after the fateful date when the Vatican had instructions to make public the third Secret of Fatima. John XXIII had read the message, kept it a secret, and very likely had sent his emissaries to Simeon Toko with a sinking feeling in his heart.

Simeon Toko responded, "I am amazed that a high ranking person like the Pope is interested enough about my being to make you travel 8000 km just to meet me. The answer that you should give your master for me is in the biblical scripture, Matthew 11: 2 to 6."

Let's now put ourselves in Pope John's shoes as he read the text suggested by Toko:

"And now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples, and said unto him. Are thou he that should come, or do we look for another? Jesus answered and said unto them. Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me."

Now, we already have referred to an arrow hidden in the quiver of the Almighty, which can indeed be shot from any distance -- even if thousands of kilometers separate archer and target; even if 2000 years separate them, it reaches its target.

Using a brief biblical quotation, Simeon Toko gave Pope John XXIII to understand that what the Pope had found in the note written by Lucia Dos Santos was true. Indeed the former Cardinal Roncalli could have picked any name as Pope: He could have chosen Gregory, Benoit, Peter, Paul, or any of hundreds of saints' names. But he chose "John," so that now the scripture in Matthew that Simeon Toko sent him to read addressed him directly by name.

Fearing Who it was now living among the most disdained people on earth, the Pope contacted the Portuguese dictator, Antonio de Salazar.

On July 18, 1962, Simeon Toko was again arrested and deported; this time, not to some isolated corner in his native Angola, but to Portugal, where his birth had been formally announced in 1917, in Fatima.

"Jesus said unto him, "Did ye never read in the scriptures: 'The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." (Matthew 21: 42)

Indeed the builders ("Pontiff" means "builder of bridges") had again rejected the cornerstone.

When Simeon Toko was brought to Portugal a Portuguese Air Force plane was waiting for him. The plane had state-of-the-art telecommunication and navigation systems.

In the plane sat a Catholic priest and members of Salazar's secret police, PIDE-DGS, including the pilot and copilot. Their mission was to fly out over the Atlantic ocean and after about an hour's distance, push Simeon Toko out of the plane into the deep sea. This was the same inhuman treatment that Argentinian military used years later for their political opponents.

Supposedly, the Catholic Priest was brought along on the plane to counteract the magic powers of the African, through praying. But this skillfully planned project was about to backfire.

The moment the PIDE agents rose to subdue him and carry out their murder, Simeon Toko stood up and ordered the plane to stop. The aircraft stopped in midair. It stood still, not advancing an inch, nor rose or fell backward.

The crew was stricken by panic. The priest could hardly breathe, and hoarsely huffed out desperate prayers. They all started imploring the "preto" [Portuguese denigratory meaning "nigger'] for mercy. Simeon lifted his eyes and hands towards the heaven and after a short prayer he ordered the plane to move again. At once the plane started moving.

Simeon Toko related this story himself. For those who are skeptical, we would remind you that the authority of our sciences do not determine all that is possible on earth or in heaven. This same Personality stopped a storm on a sea for a group of terrified fishermen 2000 years ago. He also walked across the surface of the water and inspired the sun to weave and dance gaily at Fatima.

As an "exiled political prisoner," Simeon Toko was deprived of all human rights. We will pass for now on the many other murder attempts upon his body during his forced stay in Ponta Delgada ( Archipelago of the Azores).

At a future date, we will publish a record of miracles performed by Simeon Toko which were seen by eyewitnesses. Since the objective of this book is to expose secrets kept from the spiritually hungry, we here select only a few attempts made against Simeon Toko during his years of imprisonment on Ponta Delgada Island, under the pretense of being a "political" prisoner. He was assigned the chore of maintaining a lighthouse there.

Dona Laurinda Zaza is a "vate" for present day Toko followers. A vate (VAH-tay) is a sort of prophetic trance medium. Dona Laurinda experienced the following event as she saw it happen to "Tio Simao" (a nickname meaning "Uncle Simon") while he was in exile in Portugal. Simeon Toko confirmed the fact of this event later, and revealed the physical damage that the doctors had done; over the years, thousands of people saw this scarring on his chest. "You could almost see Toko's heart pounding in his chest through the scar; an almost unbearable sight," Dona Laurinda said.

This referred to a most remarkable attempt by these astonishingly misguided men to kill Simeon Toko under Dictator Antonio Salazar's orders. This attempt, which would have been a "first degree murder" if the victim were anyone else, took place shortly before his return to freedom in July 1974.

Some doctors found themselves reading the reports of his purported invulnerability. They thought they might pass the time by drilling for the secret which seemed to protect the mysterious African man. They meant to perform an autopsy on a living human being.

Under the pretext of removing a tumor in his chest, the doctors had Simeon Toko taken to hospital. They put him on an operating table, cut a jagged, mortal wound in the left side of the center of his chest, reached into his chest cavity, and pulled out his still-beating heart. The aorta and other arteries were severed by scalpel and his heart was removed. Simeon lay dead, his body covered with the warm blood that splashed out of his heart and chest.

The doctors dumped Simeon Toko's heart in a metal pan and took it to a laboratory, in another room. They ran various tests on it, expecting to find what, undetermined. The gadgets and microscopes and probings showed there was nothing physically extraordinary or abnormal about Simeon Toko's heart. The doctors concluded that this purloined organ would not have been the source of his invulnerability -- if it can be said that men can make conclusions about any such thing.

Simeon Toko came to on the operating table. To their horror and bewilderment, his heartless corpse was moving on its own volition. He opened his eyes, sat up and looked at them, the chest wound by which they had casually murdered him gaping open. "Why are you persecuting me this way?" he said to them. "Give me back my heart!"

For now we will refrain from reporting many other significant events that happened that same day. We can let you know, however, that the exact time his heart was taken from him, he decided to give a finishing blow to Portuguese colonial power and rule over Angola.

Returning to his native country of Angola, on August 31, 1974, he was carrying the independence of Angola in his pocket. A year later, on November 11, 1975, the country of Angola gained its independence from Portugal.

There, Where Eagles are Gathered

At this point of our narration, you might wish to ask us a question burning on your lips: "Where is he right now?"

We leave it to the scripture to talk:

"The disciples answered and said unto him, where, Lord? And he said unto them, wherever the body is, thither will the Eagles be gathered together"
(Luke 17: 37)

The response of Jesus in latin was "Ubicumque fuerit corpus, illuc congregabuntur et aquilae." (Luke 17: 37)

This passage or scripture gave migraine headaches to a generation of biblists because:

A: The action takes place at the time of the end;
B: Jesus speaks here about a body, His physical corpse;
C: This body or corpse is on a high mountain.

We translated the last part of Luke 17: 34, in latin because the text becomes more transparent. In many Bibles, the title that summarizes verses 22-37 of Luke 17 is: "Jesus announces his Second Coming."

We are now at that "time of the end;" in simple english it means our time, and not the physical destruction of the world. In latin a possessive article is not required when the sense of the sentence is such as it does not leave any doubt about the owner. This is the case here, so that Jesus indicated His physical body.

Many translators have replaced the word "aquilae," "eagles," with "vultures," which seems more logical in referring to the locale of a dead body out in open country. Nevertheless, "Aquilae" must here be considered for its literal and allegorical meanings.

Symbolically speaking, the eagle designates a high ranking person, "someone in a high place." The sense in which to attribute the context of this word is of a temporal, but especially spiritual, superior rank in authority.

Eagles prefer to fly and live at high altitudes, and assemble only on high mountains. Here is what O. Dapper wrote, a columnist of the 16th century in discovering Kongo dia Totela's capital:

"The town is placed on the most high mountain of the country, because from the port of Pinda where we disembarked, until we reached Kongo, it took us 10 days of walk and continous climbing until we reached the aforementioned city, which is inside the province of Pemba. This province is located at the center of the Kingdom and is the head of all other provinces, and the origin of the ancient kingdoms."

The sentence from Luke can then be understood as follows, "I shall return in the flesh without the people recognizing me; as a thief or swindler. I shall secretly carry out my mission. Once my mission is fulfilled, I shall leave my mortal coil on a high mountain."

Durin the night of December 31st to January 1st, 1984, when the death of Simeon Toko was announced by the media, thunderclaps of virtually seismic force and torrential rain burst the skies of Luanda. It had not rained in this area for several years. Meteorologists were mystified. For three days the rain fell continuously. The occurrence of this event was attributed to all the rumors surrounding the death of this great prophet.

A certain politician was recognized as one of the toughest men surrounding Neto, the President of the Republic of Angola. He was often called upon for delicate and confident missions. During the war for independence, the Portuguese, whom he fought during a 14-year war for the liberation of his country, had a good deal to say about him. His name aroused dread and awe; he led a resistance group specializing in chopping heads with "catanas" (machetes). This man was one of President Neto's army officers. His name was Comandante Paiva.

After hearing the news that Simeon Toko had died, Paiva rushed to where the body lay exposed for public viewing. He fought his way through the crowd of tens of thousands of people. He was astonished at the sight of it.

He stood looking at Simeon's body. He asked to speak. He declared "It is not true that Simeon Toko is dead, because he is invulnerable!" To make such a public confession was blatantly incriminating. Seven years before now, Comandante Paiva had orders to kill Simeon Toko once and for all. He told the public that this is what he and his men had done:

He had Simeon Toko kidnapped, took him to a secret location, and once there he butchered him methodically, like a meatpacker with an animal carcass; he severed Simeon's head, then his arms and legs, then split his chest and abdomen apart.

He stuffed the butchered corpse into a large bag, tied the top with a string, and hid it in a certain location. After three days, he brought helpers back to get the bag and take it to the ocean to throw to the sharks. By now the bag had disappeared. The men began to argue about its whereabouts.

Suddenly, in the midst of their bickering about who may have moved it, a voice they described as sounding like " the sounds of many waters" (Revelation 1: 15) overshadowed their own voices: "WHO are you looking for? I am here!" It was Simeon Toko, in flesh and bone, alive, standing majestically. The men dashed away shouting "E o Deus, e o Deus!" which means "He is God, He is God!"

Paiva's butchering had been the last time that anybody dared to touch a single hair on the head of Simeon Toko. And now that Simeon's body lay discarded by its owner, by choice, he refused to believe it.

PART III

Before I continue, a correction must be made. Shortly after my last segment was published here, my good friend Pastor Melo, from whom I am getting most of the stories of Simeon Toko, arrived here in Tucson from Paris to go over the book (again, the title: THE TRUE THIRD SECRET OF FATIMA REVEALED and THE RETURN OF CHRIST). We found that the bible quotations which seem to indicate Simeon Toko's identity had suffered many bruises in translation from french to english, as well as from footnotes from different versions of that book over the decade in which the first draft was produced.

With the assistance of a local protestant minister named Brother Godfrey Lord (who speaks in prophetic tongues and does extremely well) , we spent a dozen hours a day making corrections. One of us manned the computer, the other the hard-copy manuscript, and the other read aloud from one single King James version bible, fixing every thee-and-thou and comma and period.

THE TRUE THIRD SECRET, incidentally, contains an excellent appendix which thumbnails a brief history of the bible from its origins in the fourth century to the present. While it may be that Simeon Toko is Christ returned, in the fashion Christ Himself related (indeed no one is required to "go to the field," that is, to take trips to visit any individual, anywhere, said to be a Messiah), it would be unrealistic to assert that "the Word of God" has not been altered by theologically and politically motivated men, many times.

These, however, while a difficult editing chore, were not the most important mistakes needing repair. Translation had obscured some of the stories of "Tio Simao ('Uncle Simon')" himself, and one such error appeared in the excerpt I presented in the latest article. Corrected forthwith:

Simeon Toko was not in a prison, and he was not abused by prison doctors, when his heart was removed in the horrendous vivisection related in that chapter. He was in exile, remanded by the Portuguese government to operate a lighthouse on an island in the Azores (We don't have an American term for this sort of forced labor, as American the penal system operates differently). A Portuguese doctor had been reading records about Toko's alleged "invincibility," and invited several doctors from around Europe to perform the exploratory murder attempt along with him. Toko was taken to a local civilian hospital for this adventure, behind the guise of an excuse.

If there are medical records available to confirm this event independently, I do not have them now. I would like to see them. All of us involved with this project, here in the states, consider ourselves doubting Thomases, to say the least. Yet the stories of witnesses and followers has kept our fascination.

Pastor Melo has also had his doubts and wonders and expresses them freely; nevertheless, he pursues his journey for "Tio Simao" with the particular innocence of a man who independently follows his inner visions, whatever they may be. Indeed it was a powerful psychic vision in 1983, which occurred in dream states over a period of days, that impelled him to begin writing the book. This highly charged episode of inner communication was his first such experience; until then, he was a not untypical African expatriate, scrambling to make a living in Europe for which there were no opportunities at home.

Those who met Pastor Melo at an impromptu meeting last April (he'll be back) might confirm with me that he appears to be a perfectly ordinary, friendly man, not some wild-haired raving religious lunatic. Nor do his eyes glow; and if he has a halo, we didn't see one.

A pleasant-looking 45-year-old Parisian, with an easy natural warmth, modestly dressed, Pastor Melo started a little uncertainly with the eleven people who had gathered as a result of the EMERGING AWARENESS article; he repeated the story of the Fatima miracle of 1917 to those who had never heard of it (the event remains a major issue among Catholics throughout "the third world.")

As the evening wore on, Melo found himself relaxing in friendly company; he was quite surprised to learn what these Americans "already know." He hadn't expected Americans to be amenable to the possibility, that, for instance, the most ancient Egyptians were largely a black race, or that much of the lore and artwork regarding biblical characters who were originally black had been altered by the Vatican over the centuries. He was also surprised to see that nearly everyone had come prepared with notebooks to note down what he would have to say.

The guests were open and frank and did express their beliefs quite ably for themselves. But I sat asking myself, "how is it a group of people have gathered over, basically, the news that a man has been murdered and returned to life again?" And as one of the guests, who also had an interest in the significance of numbers, pointed out, 12 people were present, the number of Christ's apostles, as well as the number of people in Simeon Toko's first choir, where all the Divine Trouble began in the first place.

Leaning a bit on the good humor I would expect of a man who knows how to get people to kill him so he can come back to life, I'm going to personalize the tone of my essay further, for now.

As I worked along on this project, I had to ask myself daily, "do I believe any of this?" One evening I took a break, and took a walk, pondering what I myself had just typed about some African man: killed multiple times, resurrected Himself each time. How could anyone still believe such a thing? Could such a man be real? If it is, then what I'd been imagining of him as I wrote along would amount to a communication, as, after all, God hears Everything. I wondered if this man, with his "special powers," could send signs, and so on, as Christ legendarily did.

Within moments of that thought I saw a young man killed before my eyes, struck by a car in an act of negligence that was horrifying to see. I heard the sound of a human head cracking on the pavement from about 12 yards away. I will not describe more of what I saw, although I will for a public prosecutor; but I might be unable to describe my shock. I had seen deaths before, but there is no describing the feeling when someone innocent, and presumably unprepared for death, is violated this way. If there ever was a meaning to the word "unspeakable," this would be it.

The young man's body lay motionless in the middle of the busy street, like a discarded marionette; a small group of people surrounded him to prevent any more ravaging from negligent drivers who still whizzed by, perhaps more concerned that something was obstructing whatever errands they were running. The police and the paramedics finally appeared, and I watched the paramedics cover over his mangled face. I walked away feeling terrible about the young man: I regretted whatever past had led to such a harsh and insulting end to his life. He looked my son's age, and this made the scene more poignant.

When I called the police the following morning to leave my number as a witness, I learned that the young man had lived through the night, and was expected to live. What was a terrible blazing of despair before my eyes the evening before, was suddenly a fabulous blaze of hope, coming to me through my telephone. I never imagined that I would have felt this exultant at news of a young stranger who seemed to have died before my eyes, then revived. Psychologically, I had witnessed a man killed who returned to life.

I don't think that Simeon Toko "sends signs" so harsh as to kill people before one's eyes as a philosophical lesson. Nor do I think that the "special powers" credited anyone said to be divine include the power of life-and-death over anyone but themselves, and the wisdom not to begrudge others the same. Yet, as remarked in THE THIRD SECRET, "A coincidence is God trying to pass by unnoticed."

All of us die and return from the dead, all the time. Perhaps Christ is a great Shaman, who reappears every so often to keep us reminded when most needed.

Cowboys, Aliens and Enormous Centipedes: An In-depth Comparison of New Mexico to the Movies

2011-08-21T15:45:00.000-07:00

(Settin' in a rocker the porch: Chomp! Chaw, chaw, chaw. HhhhhhhHHHHK! Pa-TOOEY! Dinnnng!) Wellsir? KathyB wrote me: “We went to see Cowboys and Aliens yesterday. That is some impressive terrain out there where you all live. Movie wasn't too bad either.”

@sallynorris tweets: “Finally got to see Cowboys&Aliens. What scenery lucky you! Masterful horsemanship and wrangling. Would watch again just for that.”

Longtime readers will remember two things: last year I was sitting outside the local general store on a rough-hewn bench, eating and quietly farting on the ghost of Georgia O’Keefe I bet, when a young feller sat down next to me and revealed that he was a crew member for the upcoming big-budget extraterrestrial Western, “Cowboys and Aliens.” Being a stranger in these parts, I couldn’t quite remember who the big-budget Harrison Ford was, but he was to be in this picture, trademark crooked smile and all -- which they delivered, somewhere toward the end of the movie.

The other thing is that, of all God’s skittering creatures, I object mostly to politicians and big centipedes. Both have too many arms for grabbing goodies and legs for skittering away with 'em. Both give you the willies when they doodle-oodle-oodle onto a news show or through a crack in your kitchen floor. I’m confident I can work one of these entities into this article. Probably centipedes.

Let’s see... I’d been sitting on the porch, brooding. Just as I got up to go investigate what Roger Ebert had told me in an e-mail, one of these New Mexico Tiger Centipedes doodle-oodle-oodled up from under the porch and charged hell and high water for the door into the house. It meant to trundle across the living room floor and into the wild canyons of our couch cushions. There it would bivouac and await orders from the Mothership to doodle-oodle into my mother-in-law’s underwear while she was eating and watching a movie. She has not been certain she loves New Mexico. The Law of Attraction also works in reverse.

There would be an odd sensation at first, perhaps a... does something tickle down there? A vague feeling of horror. Then all hell would break loose. Don’t panic. Yes those things are poisonous. It would make an historical family memory.

Also, centipedes are indestructible. My own family history contribution, suitable for grandchildren ages three to five, tells of the night two years ago when I watched a centipede I thought I’d killed a week before doodle-oodle under the door with my seven-day-old bootprint still on its back. I was horrified.

When terrified, you can still run. When horrified, all you can do is watch in paralysis as your predator devours your toes a sixteenth gram at a time over the period of a year.

Isn’t it ludicrous to pretend that Man dominates the Earth? We exist at the innocent pleasure of these bugs. Even if we nuke ourselves, which we are currently doing, they’ll doodle-oodle around gleaning our radioactive bones as though our unimportant bootprints never happened.

They can grow to enormous size. That’s one reason I hope they’re not vengeful and I’m forgiven for stomping on one. The other reason has to do with my being from a planet orbiting Antares, I think. On Antares we regret killing anything. You’d find our movies tiresome. We find yours somewhat biased when it comes to extraterrestrials.

Fig. A: Aerial view of enormous New Mexico Tiger Centipede descending into peaceful desert valley where helpless townsfolk feel odd chills of horror before being surprised, then eaten while screaming: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ybonesy/4991729292/

Although I still feel cheated that Werner Herzog didn’t let us hear the sound of two people being eaten alive by a bear (hard evidence that O.J. Simpson could have done the same?), I probably wouldn’t want him playing a recording of the sound giant centipede mandibles munching crunchy poisoned humans might make.

I’d felt a similar chagrin reading the e-mail Roger had sent me. He’d just seen “Cowboys and Aliens” and reported that he hadn’t seen me anywhere in the movie. “I am greatly disappointed not to have spotted you,” he wrote, “I mean, there aren't a whole lot of people out there...”

A desolate feeling whooshed through my soul. I replied bravely with a lame joke, but Roger is no passerby pal of flighty opinions. He is a man with a purpose. A grave purpose. I myself am a grave man of purpose. I’d better go review that movie with my own eyes.

Longtime faithful fans and any extraterrestrials studying my fiery political invectives with anticipation know that I can’t go to the movies these days. That theater smells bad. But something was wrong. I had to do it for Roger. We’d find out what had happened to me.

Emergency Cineplex!

Hair plastered back by the surging wind (I like sticking my head out the car window), I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. He was doodle-oodling his way to a local bar, you know, the kind with corrugated aluminum walls and roof. He had six kids from two marriages and loved them all, he said. He already smelt of beer, I think it was. Drunk or sober, a man who has a 14-year-old daughter mooning for hours in the bathroom mirror imagining mesmerizing boys with mascara’d eyes can be safely ignored by vehement bar-hopping maybe only once. This is a land where many grandpas are under forty. “Abuelo” is what they’re called.

Screeech! Halt. Slam. I park next to a brand new Lexus in the lot of the Dreamcatcher Cineplex in the Middle of Nowhere. I figure those seedy-looking teens would be less likely to trash my old Explorer if it were parked next to some prominent local drug dealer’s.

“I’m here to see ‘Cowboys and Aliens,’” I announce, Joe Friday inflection.

“Ten dollars.”

“I’m an officer from EbertClub.”

“Como?”

“Not Perry Como club. EbertClub. You know, Roger Ebert. The guy from television.”

“Rigoberto? De ‘Sabado Gigante’? Mi amor!”

“No, Roger Ebert. El criteeko del movie-o famoso? He says he didn’t spot me in this movie. I’m here to investigate.”

“Ten dollars.”

Hmm. Well, it’s a good thing I’ve fictionalized this account. Anyway the place was nearly empty and it didn’t smell that bad this time. I suffered through some unappealing previews, then watched it.

We Begin the Movie Proper

“Cowboys and Aliens” is a hum-dinger. Even if it weren’t, the plethoric sounds of leather-swashing, gun-cocking, pistol-clicking and boot heels thunking across wooden sidewalks are plenty to satisfy any cowboyphile. Not to mention the sight of horses carrying human trouble slouching sullenly toward a clapboard town in the Middle of Nowhere. Plus, how about the gratifying meat-slap whaps of rock-hard knuckles doing justice to bad men’s grizzled faces? And those great hats.

Hombre, aren’t cowboy hats muy bonito? I don’t want one, but they’re still too fun. Third-way through the movie I stopped myself from counting how often our protagonist, the Man with the Negligible Name, played by Daniel Craig, slid his hat off and on again in humorless deliberation. Was the director calling “take your hat off” and “put your hat back on”?

Horse-clopped desert wastelands or not, nobody wears cowboy hats around here, except maybe to show off at the rodeo. I missed the rodeo they had down the street last week, so I don’t know. But it may be decades before movie cowboys start wearing ballcaps like here in usual reality. That’s right, visor to the side or behind like the little bastards in big-city flash mobs.

Movie cowboy hats have changed again and again over the decades. Balloony with prim piping in Tom Mix’s day, cutesie and small in the sixties, big and dirty and sort of floppy mickey-mouse-ear-like for the past few decades. What did they really wear? I visited a Wild West museum in Tucson once and saw a hat worn by a sheriff dead an hundred-odd years ago. It was light grey, round crown, flat brim. I did want it.

Those comforting Wild West stereotypes. The one hatless actor was Doc, a character somewhere between doctor and saloon keeper. Good, because the only medicine cowboys ever need is whiskey. It’s for bullet wounds and unrequited love. As I’ve indicated in other essays, that tradition continues here to this day, like when you have a 14 year old daughter to worry about. I wonder if it could keep centipedes away. Nah.

Doc was the reason for the Mandatory Mexican Cutie, who played his wife. Then there was a good-hearted gun-totin’ preacher, a boy with funny round Tom Sawyer fishin’ hat, a gold-hearted abused Apache, a gold-hearted abusive cattle baron and his little bastard of a son... plus drunks who needed baths, town shooter-uppers, bean-cookers, innocent bystanders in derbies in bonnets, wasn’t there also some man with a British accent, they covered everything almost everybody you’d find in “Blazing Saddles” or “Rustler’s Rhapsody” only serious. A true lover of Western films wouldn’t need pesky extraterrestrials at all. In fact, it doesn’t even need a plot, which is probably why this one was so skimpy.

The cinematography! All these Wild West icons look like they’re fresh out of a Frank Frazetti comic. Darkly illuminated, stark staring eyes, grim visages... when Harrison Ford, playing the gold-hearted abusive cattle baron, finally flashes that trademark crooked smile in the cathartic sunshine after the final shoot-out with those Giant Squishy Bug Beings from Outer Space, the contrast with his heretofore abusive, darkly illuminated character is nigh breathtaking and meant to be.

We don’t crook our smiles much hereabouts. No reason to.

Cinema Verite

With a few exceptions, “Cowboys and Aliens” contains accurate depictions of the reality of northern New Mexico nagual territory. I’d allow it contains more accuracies than “The Milagro Beanfield War,” which, for some unfathomable reason, features Peruvian folk music. I’ve been to Milagro, incidentally. There isn’t any little old crazy lady tossing pebbles at anybody.

Some of you may not have been cursed with the curiosities of soul that have garnered me stiff silences since, for example, when a boy, I demanded of my parents repeatedly and loud to know what “oral sodomy” was. They haven’t answered to this day. One of them has gone to grave still reticent. You may therefore not be curious about what all the sniffing is about in cowboy movies, barring horse ad libs. The actors are always sniffing like Bruce Willis.

It goes “I reckon it’s a two-day ride from here (sniff).” Or, “You’d best watch your step in this town, Mister (sniff).” “Awful good cereal flakes, Miz McDonough (sniff).”

As it turns out, this sniffing is an accurate rendering of Southwestern behavior. It may or may not be in the script, but the air here dries out the nostrils just awful crusty (sniff). S’cuse me.

This wasn’t in the movie, but I may never have the chance to reveal this discovery elsewhere, as my writings usually tend to the metaphysical: did you ever wonder why, in a cowboy movie, whenever an actress has an emergency baby, someone always calls for boiling water? Coffee. They’ll all want lots of coffee.

Eerie Similarities

Many years ago I hitchhiked to Hollywood just in time to watch “Blazing Saddles” at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. It was fun being seated where the big chase scene took place. Now, I sat watching a movie whose setting I happened to drive through to get here. As one drives north from Santa Fe, the first sight of that panorama can be dizzying. Try it some time. It is awestriking. It’s breathtaking. Humbling. Bring money. Watch out for big centipedes.

The scenery played itself nearly perfectly, except for that one big unnecessary cactus they’d trucked in as part of the scene for the clapboard town. It looked like an amateur version of a cactus from Southern Arizona. Gratefully, it was that brief shot only. They’d trucked in a lot more of that stuff when they started shooting, you may recall. The arm-looking prickly cactus with the purple flowers are the real ones here. They’re nothing to fool around with (see fig. B).

Fig. B: Unhappy but handsome desert creature poses with genuine New Mexico cactus stuck on his nose: http://twitpic.com/2vf5ym

The scene of an idiot, the abusive cattle baron’s spoiled little bastard, shooting up the town, compared to here, is badly understated. I’ve told about the first news item I read when I first got here: six whole shirtless idiots caroused the clapboard village of Espanola (plus McDonald’s, gas stations, somewhat Chinese food, etc.). All were drunk, shooting up the town in the middle of a freezing February. I don’t think any of them had cattle baron dads.

Since then, three idiots killed and buried one of their own in a tiff over borrowing a dilapidated truck to go on a date with a girl, probably a 14-year-old with a lot of mascara. Three killed for reasons unknown down the road, one of them a mentally disabled boy. A cop killed in a shootout with some idiot hiding out in some gringo’s vacation home. The idiot also got killed. Two others killed somewhere else, I forget why.

The other day I struck up a conversation with a fellow at the general store and it turned out we weren’t even talking about the same triple homicide. If it isn’t you, you’ll lose track of who’s shooting who.

The other morning I was munching a breakfast burrito (eggs, bacon, red chili) next to a table full of Sheriff Deputies. They wear comfy t-shirts, not fluted cowboy shirts or flappy felt hats. They were talking shop when two others came in and announced somebody else was ready to confess to a murder that hadn’t got to the papers yet.

Oh. Yeh. And nobody seems to know nor care about the EPA officer who mysteriously disappeared after shutting down the only gas station/general store in El Rito, an old silver mining town down the road. El Rito has its own charming boot hill cemetery, God knows what shootin’ they did before the silver was mined out.

Now, if you’re an FBI agent moseying by to look into that one, be sure to eat at Farolito’s, the best darn Mexican cooking in the Southwest. It's right across the wagon-narrow street from the town's now defunct and only other place of employment. I know it looks like an abandoned adobe outhouse. That’s part of why it’s so good. You know how in cowboy movies all they ever seem to eat is this... red stuff? Farolito’s serves the best red stuff I’ve ever had, and I’ve rambled all over this Cowboy Movie territory.

The red stuff, I learned upon moving to the Southwest years ago, are refried beans. There are beans in Cowboys and Aliens and there are beans all over New Mexico. You’ll notice when cowboy movies mention dinner, including this one, beans are what they talk about. It’s because that’s what’s here. I bought a couple large, dirty bags of beans last winter from a truck sitting by the roadside. Once you boil ‘em up, they’re pretty good.

This brings up a scientific question. All those beans make cowboys pretty much vegetarians. You’d think it was only meat-eaters who go around shooting each other up, but it’s not so. This proves out hereabouts as well. Idiots fired up on just beans and drugs do a lot of killing out here. Maybe they’re looking for meat.

Hummingbirds. Yes, there are hummingbirds all over this great looming terrain. The one hired for the movie to provide questionably relevant symbolism has visited our feeder periodically, but since the movie came out, he’s gotten kind of uppity so I haven’t seen him lately. His name is very tough for humans to pronounce, as our vocal chords aren’t made to sound like a metal peg being twisted in a wooden hole, so I nicknamed him Squeechy.

Before he was a big uppity star, Squeechy would visit with about 13 other hummingbirds (try counting them when they’re squeeching and squabbling around your feeder. I think the sugar water makes them drunk). They didn’t give a damn for that centipede under the porch, but that’s because they don’t have to walk. They prefer to visit just after sunrise, us with our coffee, them with their sugar water, all of us smacking our lips or beaks, two of us with Hollywood ambitions, only one of us succeeding by way of movie stardom. They return around dusk, as well.

The more you feed them, the more show up, buzzing and humming and squeeching and cavorting. Friends I knew used up five pounds of sugar a week, but having come from an overpopulated family myself, a dozen buzzing squeechers on the porch per day is plenty for me, at about a half-pound of sugar a week.

If they like you they’ll buzz your hair. A few of them try to butt in while I’m refilling the feeder. Now, I haven’t got a photo of this, but perhaps this facsimile dramatization will do. That’s a Say’s Phoebe, not a hummingbird:

http://twitpic.com/1v362j

What About Pizza?

What about pizza? There isn’t any pizza visible in “Cowboys and Aliens,” but it’s just off scene playing an essential role. The wranglers for this movie ate pizza every night.

I know this because Marta, proprietor of Mamacita’s, the finest pizza joint in these United States as I have known them thus far, told me so. She kept running out of ingredients because the wranglers kept ordering all her pizzas. She’s a one-woman shop – there’s room for only one in Mamacita’s kitchen, plus an automatic pistol, don’t MESS with her – and found herself spinning thirty-eight pizzas in one night.

“They were real wranglers,” she said, “they were all ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am’ and ‘thank you, ma’am.’”

How could a descendant of conquistadors know how to make a great pizza? Twenty years in New York City is how. Columbus brought syphilis to America, but Marta brought real pizza to New Mexico. Plus an automatic pistol.

You may think this is far afield from the movie, but you may think wrong.

Area Fifty-Two and a Half

A half-hour’s ride from Mamacita’s and about the same distance from our spread, the big finale of “Cowboys and Aliens” takes place (sniff). Those big, mysterious white cliffs? They’re real.

Yes they’re real. They jut out of the ground in geological mystery (and since I don’t believe in plate tectonic theory I’d as soon leave it mysterious); they were formed by an All Knowing, All Powerful God, who, early one morning in October 4,232 B.C. or whenever that was, knew that the sons of Men would require them for a big wagonload of cowboy movies.

Well, okay. Geologically this area is at the edge of an enormous volcanic caldera that blew its many tops all at once, they say ten thousand years ago. I believe that. I’m also leaning toward the Indian legend that says it blew a perfectly good advanced civilization up with it. A lot of these ancient formations look like the ruins of a vast city, especially in the evening sunlight.

What th’? I hear an Indian wooden flute playing outside this moment. It sounds mournful and authentic. It’s supplying haunting music to this paragraph. I didn’t mean to get that ancient. Ghosts? Wait a sec. It’s my sister in law, down from Colorado. She’s got an art show to set up tomorrow. Play that flute among those cliffs and it’ll echo.

Have I mentioned how I met a lady the other week who had met grandsons of Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and the Wounded Knee guy all in the same week, all around here, all by coincidence? Yup. The movie’s right. The native children are all still here. To them, not unfairly, we’re brief guests at best. To the bugs, they too are brief guests.

Ordinarily, and by that I mean it’s the most ordinary thing in the world to spot these same alabaster cliffs in almost any cowboy movie where the shoot-out isn’t downtown, the shoot-outs shot here don’t involve squishy-looking razor toothed aliens from outer space here to steal our gold.

Anyhow it’s silver around here, not gold, or at one time it was. This negligible faux pas aside, “Cowboys and Aliens” broaches a daring secret. They’re here.

If the legendary Bill Cooper hadn’t himself been shot in a shoot-out with the IRS some years back, he could confirm it. They’re cute little humanoid buggers with big eyes and they’ve got a vast underground extraterrestrial civilization throughout the Great Southwest. Here’s some footage of a dead one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubWUvFY403M

Sorry it’s so grainy, but you know how our underfunded U.S. Military has never had enough money to afford good cameras. That would take more bake sales than they have time for, defending our freedoms and all. Still, s/he is/was a cute little pooper, more like the hairless superior intelligences that lived in Whitley Streiber’s closet than what the movie depicted. Still, they’re here. They run people for President, too.

I have only heard this, but a few days ago a woman who lives just two miles from here says the local extraterrestrials are purple. She has seen them with her own eyes. Blurred by a little medicinal whiskey, perhaps, but she had every reason to call her tenant around 3 a.m. the other morning and warn her that one of them was outside peeking into her bedroom window. I’ve only heard this, I don’t know. But the muffled booming sounds we hear from deep underground in the dead of night around here could be more proof.

There are two things in this movie I can’t explain. I don’t know where the big upside-down paddlewheel riverboat would be around here, and I don’t know why there’s an ice wagon in the final shot. Ice wouldn’t slow a big centipede down for a second. They’d gobble right through it.

Sorry, three things. After all that investigating I still don’t know why I’m not in that movie. Nobody called. They did forget to throw a comical sidekick in there, I could have done that. Maybe they thought I was too sarcastic, but they’re wrong, I’m sardonic. Some people do have trouble recognizing when I’m joking. But I do know a fun movie when I see one and good pizza when I taste it.

The Big Out Loud National Prayer She-bang

2011-08-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

People don’t understand that prayer works. If they included instances where it backfires, maybe then they’d understand.

Saturday I had the truck radio on as I wandered these dried roads looking for hay. It was live reporting from one of those shebangs, hosted by Texas Governor Perry, who was once fingered as a "one-world government" agent by a genuine and actual Christian conservative I know.

A fella on the scene kept repeating into the microphone how much peace and serenity he felt, oh the peace, oh the serenity, oh my ass. He sounded like a man in a pill-trance.

He sounded just like that weird goose-eyed fat guy in “What the Bleep does JZ Knight Know?” who kept repeating how he created his own reality, oh the creation, oh the reality, oh my ass. His eyes spoke the same glazed monotony his mouth was mouthing. That isn't peace. That isn't serenity. Neither was the religious barker's weird mimicking at the National Prayer Shebang.

Pray on things you believe in, you’ll believe them more. You’ll see more of what you believe as you go about your day.

Try praying on things you only think you’re supposed to believe. You’ll try hard to ignore the protests of your own soul, which knows you don’t believe in this crap. It’s hard to do that when you’re alone and have nobody to kid. It’s easier when you’re in a crowd of me-too types also trying to fake it.

One may hear the crowd chanting “Oh lawd, please steer us out of this mess and bless this nation with goodness and rightness.” With only a minimum of imagination and a little effort, one can hear what’s really going on behind many eyes: “Lawd, you’re a waste of time and I hate you. I’ve got a couple army surplus AR-15s, a 30-30 and even an AK47. I’ve stored up plenty of ammo. I’m just waiting to set things to rights, myself. So feck you. Amen.”

I’m not saying it’s what’s going on behind every set of eyes in the crowd. Keep up with your lame-brained us-versus them ballgame bashing, though, and your prayers too will be answered. Too many have always preferred rightness over sanity.

Ebertfest 2011 Unmapped: A Colossal Ramble through Time and Space by a Sturdy Ohio Man Hell-bent on Ebertfest and Secret Global Domination.

2011-06-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

Yeah... I heard a funny thing
Somebody said to me
“You know that I could be in love with almost everyone
“I think people are the greatest fun
“And I will be alone again tonight my dear.”

--“Alone Again Or” Bryan Maclean 1947-1998

Why I love My Rear View Mirror

Driving, thinking. It’s roughly 1,600 miles to Ebertfest, figuring in wrong turns and sentimental ones.

Driving, thinking, hunched half out the window, half my hair blowing in the wind, one eye fixed on the outside rear view mirror, the other on the road ahead. It’s evening, I don’t know, after seven. This New Mexico landscape is dotted with roadside crosses entwined with plastic flowers. There are two not far from my driveway. Roadsides are also peppered with dead dogs and cats. The only people not ashamed of these eyesores are the drunks whose minds were too foggy and hearts too full of resentment to see the fatalities they were about to create. New Mexico is also crowded with tailgaters, so study that rear view mirror.

I hitchhiked across this same curve of planet when I was out of college and belly-full of a pop music touring band. By morning I’ll pass the big grain silo in Amarillo where a one-armed cowboy in a rattling old station wagon handed me my first Coors beer. It tasted like beer-flavored fresh water. I’ll glide across the pink brown and green desert plains where billboards still say eat this whole huge steak in one sitting and you don't have to pay for it. I’ll coast for miles where the Pennsylvania sculptor’s drive shaft fell apart from metal fatigue, toting two tons of marble slab, all his worldly goods and this music-laden hitchhiker. I’ll spot where, as I sat in the dry scrub dressed in shades of blue playing my blue guitar in a rose colored sunset, an artist screeched to a halt for an emergency sketch of colorful wandering youth in colorful evening light. “You wouldn’t understand what these numbers mean,” he said, “they’re coding for what colors to use.” I wonder if that painting exists now.

I’ll be scooping up thoughts I left hanging in the air on that highway at twenty-two, thumb out, 1820 violin hanging from one side, silver-plated stolen flute from the other, guitar in hand and collapsible top hat on head. The top hat belonged to a recently deceased man who wore it to diplomatic functions as ambassador to Hong Kong in 1928. I would leave it in the back of a car on my way into Los Angeles from the Grand Canyon, somewhere around 3 a.m.

Speeding through Texas by dawn, many of those old thoughts, some fragmented, some never fully formed, will splatter into my mind like bugs on a windshield.

One of Us

Whizzing out of the New Mexico mountains toward the flatlands, I’m thinking of Roger’s review of Tom Shadyac’s latest movie, which I read just before heading out from the rented ranch.

http://j.mp/go8hQF

I met Tom Shadyac awhile back. I’ve belly-laffed at his Jim Carrey films. Apparently Tom had a serious biking calamity at the perigee of his multimillion dollar yuks career.

Somewhere among the unconscious events revolving within the calamity, Tom was hit by the meatball. When he came to, bit by bit, all that material wealth seemed like just a bunch of material wealth. He had to start doing Jesus-like things – such as growing Jesus hair, as he pointed out to me from between two pretty young women when we met walking across the University of Boulder, Colorado, campus. He now also had to do meaningful, spiritual things.

...such as going to Haiti after the earthquake to see what he could do. Well, he could have helped out my pal Dr. Will Houghton, who, along with friends, was healing calamity victims for free. For nothing. Somebody bought them a round of beers. Will came back with quite a story and lots of photographs people still need to hear and see. Will wrote his experience up. We public have otherwise heard just sound bytes.

Will had been hit by the meatball years earlier – a real guy in a real situation doing real things that make real differences, not just fluttering around with pretty pictures and nervous yogurts and the wiggling connectedness of it all, or so Roger had sized up Shadyac’s movie. I believed Roger. This movie was what Shadyac had been doing rather than honoring his promise to meet Will at least by e-mail.

Just to show I’m not all whimsy: http://t.co/cC1OkPR

I quit trying with Tom after a few fugging-well brilliant letters. I guess sometimes the meatball doesn’t hit them hard enough. Well, shoot. I thought he might be one of us. He might have been. Maybe I didn’t ask right.

Don’t ask me what “one of us” is. Roger Ebert is one of us too. All I know is, we’re here. I know that because I’m one of us.

One needn’t meet with calamity to get hit by the meatball, by the way. Calamity does happen, but we are hit by the meatball far more often than we meet with calamity.

As shown: http://j.mp/dtQH8v

Roger was hit by the meatball during his calamity. When he finally came to, he didn’t start figuring out how to turn wiggling yogurt into a movie. You don’t have to go that far out of the way to use the meatball. You just feel a lot more like you do now than you did when you started. I think that’s how you get to be one of us.

Stop trying to think like me. You’ll go crazy and you’ll never get to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. I myself didn’t get there until around 3 a.m. the following day. It was too early to check into the Illini Hotel and too late to find a motel. I slept in my car at the side of Route 57 in the driving rain. It was wonderful. The meatball will do that for you.

Oh. Also, you may find yourself with your own personal Secret Plan for Global Domination. In his, may Shadyac one day do better than collect more money from the What The Bleep crowd. They’re not so much one of us as a bunch of them, and they can be a gullible bunch at that.

A Blur isn’t always a Bad Thing

Sturdy Ohio men don’t bother with roadmaps. We also have faith that, unless there is a woman alongside, we will always arrive a little early. Sturdy Ohio men are unerring at directions, but I admit, arriving twelve hours early can disturb your brain’s alpha waves for the rest of the week.

So I arrived and wandered aimlessly around Champaign, stopped into a gas station on Green Street, asked where the Illinis hotel was and the girl said she didn’t know. It happened to be three blocks down the street. Still, too late. I wandered back out of town onto the highway. I headed for a rest stop but conked out on the side of the road. While the rain roared on my roof, I was rocked to sleep by speeding 18-wheelers nearly pulling my car up off its wheels every three minutes. My Alpha waves picked up this pattern. That, and wandering sleepless around the Illinis Hotel lobby until my room opened up at 3 p.m. left me with a strange effect.

Fancy Protestants, Tasty Grub

The effect is something like being drunk inside out instead of outside in, or vice versa. For example, when I met the mythically beautiful Kartina Richardson at the President’s House get-together, alpha waves that were still going “whoosh!” every three minutes prompted me to tell her she was the second most beautiful human being I had ever seen in my life. The first was a Japanese Afro-American woman I and every other man in a bar in Rialto, California, surrounded agawk one night in the spring of 1984. We couldn’t help it. Kartina’s highly gawkable too.

Calling anyone the second most anything could be a permanent error. I do not know how, or whether, I managed to get out of that one. After my bragging about having invented the ‘zine, she said two intelligible things to me the rest of the week; one was drowned out by the karaoke machine and I pretended to hear her.

(Later Kartina would save me a great deal of trouble. All I have in my notebook about Tilda Swinton’s “I Am Love” is “flowers, skin, hairs, romance, grass, bugs,” which I whispered to Omer Mozaffar during a scene. He replied “an attractive proposition, but I declined.” Kartina wrote this: http://j.mp/lMDzPa

What Kartina looks like talking about it: http://j.mp/eI8duY )

(What Omer Mozaffar writes like when he’s serious: http://mozaffar.wordpress.com/ )

I remember that speeches were given at the President’s house. I remember that Olivia Collette, the third most beautiful human being I’d ever seen in my life, was shy to meet Roger, who arrived with cameras all over him like wagging puppies. I remember that I’d left my car window down and it was raining.

I remember snagging a Stella Artois beer glass. Although owning a beer glass with a logo on it is for me second in classiness only to refilling a snap-top Bud can for guests, the Stella Artois beer glass I’d snagged last year looked too lonely when I’d open the cupboard and notice it. So now we had two and a car seat that took a day or so to dry out.

How good to have Olivia and her husband Russell to hang around with for the week. Besides the fact that they dual-handedly introduced karaoke as a permanent Ebertfest institution, I don’t even have to review “Metropolis.” Olivia did it:

http://j.mp/lhtg4S

She’s just this moment saved me even more work. The following is what I too think of Gerardo Valero. He and wife Monica even indulged me through a little of my receding Spanish.

(Tweeted:)@Olivia_Collette I never cease to be enlightened by @gevalero's
perspective on characters: http://j.mp/irDH8C

“Metropolis” kicked off the week’s films. It seemed as though we all got into our seats and to work right away. Maybe it was those short-circuiting alpha waves. But for instance Gracie, I mean Grace Wang, and I only happened to sit together in the theater this year. I mean "only happened to." After all the fun we were last year, we barely said two words to each other now. To wit: I was aware that Gracie sat down and started writing next to someone who happened to be me. Busy watching "Metropolis" and the musicians playing that wonderful score live. Thanks to those alpha waves that seemed just right.

I was thinking of writing that I had to scratch my nuts something awful all through "Orson Wells and Me" but couldn’t because Gracie was sitting next to me then, too. That would be a fun thing to write. But it would be wrong. I didn’t have to scratch my nuts at all throughout “Orson Welles and Me.”

Anyway, she'd just flown back from her homeland China, where she'd reported on cultural and film affairs there. Here’s Gracie: http://etheriel.wordpress.com/

Jangled, tangled alpha waves led me to the most conversations with Michael Mirasol of Malaysia, whose jet-lag schedule had his and my jumbled minds matching. We seemed to be viewing Roger’s picks at about the same speed. http://j.mp/ml1K5z

...And That Ebert Sure Knows How to Pick ‘em

“Natural Selection,” for instance. Now, you may ask, how fun is it to hang out with the people who made a humongously fun film like that? Well I’ll tell you what, Robbie Pickering knew all the lyrics to that Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre tune without looking at the karaoke screen. That’s impressive. And you know who else besides Tilda Swinton is really easy to fall in love with? That’s right, the film’s star, Rachel Harris. I’ll tell you what else: in a mud-wrestling match against Holly Hunter, I’d put my money on Rachel any day. Cash on the barrelhead. What more to say?

Unintended Belligerence

As I’ve protested before, I’m a “two-fisted heterosexual.” Even at my age I may yet have to punch people, which is why I stay friends with Manny Fernandez:

www.mastersboxingdivision.com
http://www.mastersboxingdivision.com/manny1.jpg

You never know but a friend with a 20-0 knockout record could come in handy. My point is, big men like us don’t cry. Oh, we might look forlorn watching a bus full of nuns drive off a steep cliff before our eyes, but that’s all.

Still, five bucks says Manny would’ve shed some tears at last year’s showing of “Departures,” the Japanese film about a young man who inadvertently winds up as assistant to a funeral director. I myself sat stoically, a dignified tear dribbling down my soldier-stiff face in the dark, trying to think of a joke. “I haven’t heard such a racket since the orphanage burned down” didn’t work too well. Roger turned his head dismissively.

Another five bucks says I'd catch Manny doing it again at “Life Above All,” shot in a real African village with a cast of real people who really live there. Including this... this girl...

It was in the green room at lunch, see. There I was minding my own business, headed down the hallway for a roast beef sarnie when this little girl brushed past me with... I know it was. I’m still enough of a little kid to be able to tell when another little kid brushes past me with an “out of my way, peon,” attitude. Even though she was just a little kid, her “out of my way” was so expert that my feelings were hurt. “Snot nose,” I thought to myself.

What I wanted to say was “Don’t you telegraph ‘out of my way’ to me, you little brat, I’m important.” But I didn’t.

A couple of hours later she was onstage fidgeting and twiddling restlessly and making Pablo Villaca http://www.cinemaemcena.com.br/pv/blogpablo/ cry some more. I myself had sat stoically, a dignified tear dribbling down my soldier-stiff face in the dark, taking comfort that I could hear Pablo snuffling in the seat next to me as we watched. And now, he had to go onstage and interview that little girl who’d just made everybody cry in the movie. Everybody loved that little girl. I forgave her. Still. I’m important. Valuable people have told me so.

Randy Masters, perennial favorite conservative political foil on Roger’s blog, wrote this rundown. “Life, Above All” is number two: http://j.mp/ln6osU See it and cry.

Wael Khairy tells me he’ll review it, since nobody else did. It’s the least he could do for stiffing us this year, not showing up. But Egypt’s become highly absorbing. http://cinephilefix.wordpress.com/about/

BZZZZT! CAREER OPPORTUNITY HUNTER ALERT! TAKE COVER. BZZZZT! CAREER OPPORTUNITY HUNTER ALERT! TAKE COVER.

Sorry. I had to insert this in case any of you thought that my alpha waves had settled down by now. This is how my mind was still running. One great thing about Ebertfest is that there aren’t that many alarms sounding for career opportunity hunters. Those haunted eyes. I spied a pair in time to slip away and not reveal what I did for a living. Brrrr.

45635 and Old Lake Chompaglug

Roger did it to me again, if not to Krishna Shenoi http://cinematicjackass.wordpress.com/

Krishna did not spend his childhood in Ohio, which I did. “45635,” the postal zip code for Sidney, Ohio, could have been my own home town, 44281. That was Lake Chompaglug, or “Lake Chomp” as we called it. The town the Ross Brothers chronicled through video excerpts was just like old Lake Chomp. Does every town have a shirtless bonehead who always winds up in the back of a police cruiser, or just those two?

Tears welled at the shots of Sidney on Hallowe’en, which they do not celebrate in Dubai, Krishna’s home town. I remembered in Lake Chomp where we’d trickertreat at old Aunt Minnie Mae McGlallicluddy’s. She’d come out that ramshackle screen front door ga-ga’ing and ooh-aahing at our makeshift costumes. Then she’d reward us each with a big splab of peanut butter out of a two-gallon bucket with a wooden spoon. We learned to bring plastic bags for that. Peanut butter dashed into a paper bag with that kind of force can put a hole in it and make your candy fall out.

The Ross Brothers, Turner and What’s-his-name (if you’re from small-town Ohio, always try to provoke some other small-towner), are lately editing extensive footage taken of real cowboys over the course of a year in Southeast Texas. Not “Midnight.” Not “Urban.” Real Cowboys. That’ll be something. In the meantime, if you weren’t raised in Dubai, see it: http://www.45365movie.com/

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Exclusive to THE TOM DARK TATTLER!

““I’ve read that when we think, only 40% of our thoughts appear in our conscious mind while everything else is below, in the subconscious spheres, but just as active. I am aware of how my films affect people but I never planned to make them that way – it must have been done by the underlying 60% of my mind. This must also be the reason why they work better for the viewership of one.”

Now that’s good thinking. It was provided to me not one hour ago by Paul Fierlinger, who with his wife and partner Sandra brought the animated feature “My Dog Tulip” to Ebertfest. It’s the animated story of British writer J. R. Ackerly’s adventures with his Alsatian Shepherd, the first dog he ever owned, acquired in middle age.

We’ve watched “My Dog Tulip” twice in my household in the few weeks since my viewing it at Ebertfest. There’s nothing controversial about dog poop unless we interject the emotional stability of those whom the subject makes nervous. My mother-in-law, who is in her eighties, loved this movie and felt a little relieved to know she isn’t the only one who’s ever had trouble housetraining her dog.

I mentioned this to Paul. He guessed that Ma must own a Prince Charles Cavalier, “notoriously difficult to housetrain.” He was exactly right, she owns a Prince Charles Cavalier. That is uncanny.

Uncannier by far is the Fierlinger’s nearly completed animated feature. It’s the story of Joshua Slocum, the first sailor to circumnavigate the world on his own, alone. The script is from Slocum’s book, largely postings to a newspaper as he sailed. Only a little of it is narrated aloud, by Paul himself. Slocum’s words are reprinted onscreen. It’s like opening a book and watching the action unfold on its own in front of you, music moving it along.

FLASH!! Mr. Fierlinger adds: "Would you mind just adding to Slocum that it is slated to be self-distributed and released on the Internet by the end of 2012, as a serialized, animated installment novel? This means that there are no producers, talent agents, marketing fellows, distributors, or approval gods involved so that there is a chance that it will make the Fierlingers’ some well deserved revenue for a change? Use your own words if you prefer, of course. Thanks."

(Criminee, you people, subscribe NOW. This is an animator's masterpiece.)

ONLY in the TOM DARK TATTLER!

Good Lord, This Thing Is Getting Long, Isn't It?

Good lord, this thing is getting long, isn’t it? Those of you still with us, be grateful I haven’t endeavored to give a true and accurate rendition of all my impressions gathered at Ebertfest. I haven’t even got to the deep-dish pizza. Or the free lighter from Jon’s Pipe Shop for me wearing an Ebertfest badge. They did that last year too.

Or The Hat. The guy in “Tiny Furniture” was wearing The Hat. I will explain.

Many years ago, a bandmate found a dumb-guy hat to wear onstage. It was the kind of little brimmed hat that dumb guys thought made them look sexy. He took on the name “Verne,” which at the time was a dumb-guy name. The irony of it appealed to musicians in New York City, where the band played at places like the Bitter End and Tramp’s and even CBGBs.

I filled in for Verne for a season, and sure enough girls came after me, too. It now became The Hat. Some time later I exported The Hat to Southern California. I found one in a thrift store. It became the envy of the musicians in the band. We’d take turns wearing it. The Fabulous Rayguns didn’t last very long, but for the legacy of The Hat.

Devilishly handsome David Call played a snaky chef where Lena Dunham briefly found a tortuous job. He wore The Hat all the time, indoors too, which is what you’re supposed to do. I asked him about it. He said Lena gave it to him. That’s all he knew. I couldn’t find Lena to ask her. For all we knew, Verne left it in a thrift shop before she was born, grew up, found it and made David wear it.

Here is what I wrote in the dark about “Tiny Furniture”: “...makes me think of reports about artificial estrogen now saturating the water supply down the East Coast. It’s causing very strange creatures and strange humans alike.”

Here is what Olivia Collette, bless her soul again, thought: http://j.mp/mabylf

Here is what the Tiny Furniture people think of themselves: http://www.tinyfurniture.com/

Here is a movie idea I thought up: “Evolutionary theory has finally taken over. People are genetically designed, except for the Natural Christians, who are now kept in a game preserve by the Evolution people. You can’t tell the two apart, except that the Evolution people like to hunt down Natural Christians and use them for horrible experiments or kill them in different ways for sport. As it turns out, Evolution was part of Satan’s plan after all!!! Could be funny. I dunno.”

Here is what Olivia thinks of Norman Jewison, with whom I got to sit at lunch: http://livvyjams.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/jewison_superstar/

Here is some more stuff I thought:

Umberto D: An old man and his dog are rendered homeless by a heartless social climbing landlady. The dog leads him on a merry chase away from suicide. The old man is younger than I am. Ulp.

Alpha Waves and World Peace

By Saturday, these dratted jangling alpha waves of mine began to settle down. I sat at a picnic table and wrote this:

Ah, the wind. It’s blowing here the way it was in Abiquiu when I left 5 days ago. It’s splashing the pages of my notebook around and I’ve just chased the lid of my coffee mug through a bicycle rack and into a doorway of the Virginia theater – which is full to capacity this morning, as it has been, day and night. They’re watching a Roger-picked documentary that follows a trail from the spare li'l apartment of an elderly li'l Swedish woman named Hilde Blank through the mails, over the years, into Kenya, then to Harvard, where her small donations helped a couple of brilliant village kids to go; from Harvard back to Kenya, where they’re trying to help kids who didn’t get a few bucks to go to school -- and are still being slashed and hacked to death by the uneducated, putatively in the name of imposing a better class of ideal people upon the planet.

Lord knows we could all use a better class of ideal people on the planet. Hilde’s Jewish parents were disposed of at Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps for that very reason. Yet despite the stirring march of chest-pounding victories against evil since those days, there seem to be even more evil people in need of disposal than ever. Our own government has its heroic hands full bombing evil people and their children to death even as I write these lines. The wind just knocked my coffee over onto my notebook.

Hilde is here today. She’ll be speaking onstage after the feature. She may make people cry and I hope she does. I’ll go back in.

I had to leave awhile. I do know how this one ends – one can stop his race on a mobius strip at any time, is the moral of the story, but that’s not why I’ve come outside. I’m tired. My head hit the pillow around 3:30 a.m. and this morning’s first program started at 9:30 – a short seminar on how to make a movie on no budget at all. Then something else, then Hilde’s story. Too much too interesting.

That Ebert must be up to something to be challenging the lot of us this way. I suspect that, like me, he has a Secret Plan for Global Domination. It must be. The most conspicuous characteristic of such people is how they emit unusual amounts of personal energy. There goes my coffee cup again. Must go in and listen to Hilde. She too must have a Secret Plan for Global Domination, what with these kids so successful thanks to a couple bucks every so often from her kitchen table in a tiny little apartment in Sweden. May the lot of us succeed.

No Rest For The Wicked

When I stumbled across Roger’s blog a couple-three years back, I too was emitting unusual personal energy. My daily work hours were 8:30 a.m. to 3 a.m.

I’d air out my mind throughout those hours by keeping an eye on it. He was reading all the postings and putting them up about hourly, in addition to his other work load, writing reviews, articles, working on a memoir and god knows what else. The time stamp of his blog postings said that Roger was at work an hour longer a day than I was. That’s some plan for Secret Global Domination.

You young punks have no idea what work is. Good lord.

Yes, good lord. Well, some of you do, I know for a fact. A word to the wise is sufficient. Now, I can brag about my good health. I outworked three of you young punks unloading 400-pound barrels of powdered copy machine ink out of a semi-trailer in the frying Arizona heat just a few years ago. I know how to write, too, but I can’t compete with a near-seventysomething who lives with a broken hip, a tracheotomy, a missing jawbone and god knows what else.

Mind you that sorry operation, which nearly killed him, didn’t leave him looking so strange. Like The Joker in one “Batman” or another, it left him with a permanent smile, a sincere-shaped one. It automatically makes you smile of itself.

I know it does that. I tried an experiment once, smiling wherever I walked. People replied with their own smiles. That’s happened to Roger. You can’t help but smile back. It’s reassuring. You just know that if this man doesn’t already like you, he’s figuring out some way to like you after all.

Maybe he isn’t, but the operation made it look like he’s that way. At least it’s reassuring to know that this Globally Dominant movie critic, who has slain many a wide-reaching ego with just a line or two, isn’t clearly and presently planning to skewer your ego for you.

Owing to the insolently slow progress of my own Secret Plan for Global Domination, I can afford to skewer the odd ego now and then – even relentlessly – without fear of consequences. “Careful who I may meet on the way back down”? Fiddlesticks.

Take, for example, Greg Salvatore, @litdreamer on Twitter. He’s here too. I’ve been waving my “VIP” pass gaily in his face and monkeyshining about the free food I get. He’s a good sport. Tip: whether you’re on the top or the bottom of the banana, don’t attack people you don’t think you’d love in other circumstances.

Ohiya

Make no mistake, Global Domination recruits, Ebertfest isn’t for the lazy, the weak, incessant talkers or those who leave their cellphones on. I didn’t know how to shut mine off so I ran out of the theater. Ebertfest can be grueling. It can be blood, sweat and tears...

Here the live notebook account endeth, just like the unfinished narration that concludes “Satyricon.” All that remaineth are “Louder Than a Bomb” with nothing written under it, and this thought from “Life, Above all:”

“One thing clear is these people are routinely ashamed of one another. They are faithfully devoted to a vestigial religious system that says they should be poor and black and sinful, or they don’t fit into this world.

“That anything beautiful about them is a minor accident. Some strain of missionary Christianity that turned sour and withered long ago. And now they’ve got AIDS.”

Then, Sunday morning, into the car and back onto the road.

Sometime in the wee hours, somewhere in Missouri, I had a craving for waffles. They’re nothing I ever think about. Yet President Obama’s weirdly hairsprayed speech about having just now killed Osama bin Laden – the theme from “High Noon” wasn’t playing in the background – made me want to pull into an all-night waffle franchise. And so I did.

“So they just killed Obama — I mean Osama,” said one voice, sarcastically.

“Whee. Bring in the tanks and guns,” said another.

I must have stepped into the only location in the country where people weren’t cheering and dancing and hoo-rahing to beat all bands, confetti and Stuff We Can Believe In. Or maybe that was just radio static. It's been two months now and the poll numbers for President Shovel-Ready continue to drop.

The Long Arm of Ebertfest and the Warm Hand of Tilda Swinton

2011-05-05T07:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Saint Chaz, Saint Roger, and You for whom “blessed” comes to mind increasingly,

Like my father before me and his father before him, sturdy Ohio men we, I get into my car. I set my jaw. I drive hundreds of miles, do my business and return. Grampaw and Grammaw drove 600 miles to visit us, sat on the couch a friendly hour or two, then drove back. Uncle Howky (we never could settle on how to spell his name) drove 700 miles, ate a few items at Dad’s funeral reception, then drove home.

Man, we love to drive and hate to stay. But at risk of damage to my genes, I left Ebertfest 2011 later than they would have dictated. I didn’t want to leave. Lucky I had two friends to haul back to the hotel to catch planes or I might still be tramping around Randolph Street and the Virginia Theater for the afterglow.

I’d been haunted with the feeling that I hadn’t had enough time to talk to anybody. A few words here and fewer there. These sturdy Ohio genes, which ordinarily prompt silence and laconicisms, strained some, perhaps meaning to go Lamarckian and change to the tune of that truly fun environment.

Genes prompt a man to do funny things. Not far from the Mississippi river at St. Louis, they prompted me to exit, bumble through a few streets unrelated to the rest stop, and wind up at a franchise gas’n’eats just off the beaten path from the highway.

No sooner did I hang up from chatting with my wife than another car pulled into the lot and a man got out also still wearing his Ebertfest pass. We laughed and gestured and ate dinner together. His name was Mike Kelly. He was accompanied by one of his twin sons, 26 year old Patrick. Mike and his sons are ten-year Ebertfest faithful. Patrick has a photographic memory, and after meeting Roger in Telluride 10 years ago, decided to be a film critic himself. He has the nickname “Encyclopedia Pat.”

http://nkm2.org/patrickthecritic%20.

Now I don’t know about all this fancy disease stuff. Patrick showed off a spectacular memory for the hour or so we sat. I’ve got a client like Patrick who’s lately turned seventy. He invented digital photography and other amazing things. He too is a frighteningly smart guy. He too takes pills for it. I think that if our society weren’t so damn-dumb frightened of intelligence, people like these wouldn’t need nervous-pills as they do.

We said our g’byes, Mike and Pat to Arlington, Texas, me to Abiquiu, New Mexico and, as genes would have it, returned to the highway through an exit called Randolph Street, same as at the Virginia Theater.

Look at these faithful people, Rodge, driving hundreds of miles to Ebertfest. This is a pilgrimage. Tilda Swinton may be right.

Thanks to Roger’s remark in a column, I got to hold Tilda’s hand for an Anglo-Saxon moment – that’s three minutes, and we are both Anglo-Saxons, if forced into it somewhere in our genes. Three whole minutes holding her hand. I wanted to see if she was a saint. I must explain this, in a way I hadn’t time to do with Saint Tilda.

In 1974 at the Last Chance Saloon in Albany, New York, my gorgeous bandmate Blanchie and I got to shake legendary jazz drummer Jack Dejohnette’s hand. He was reputed to be a saint. He had even spent a year holed up in a cabin in Vermont, reinventing his art and craft in solitude. That’s saintly.

Blanchie said, “It’s funny, but, like, you could feel every one of his fingers one at a time?” (Blanchie never was all that articulate.) Blanchie said it was like each finger could feel you by itself.

Yep. I’d never felt such a handshake before, where all the fingers feel individually conscious against one’s own. We decided Jack DeJohnette must be a saint. The impression remains with me.

I never felt such a handshake again until 26 years later. At the turn of the 21st Century I shook hands with singer songwriter Melissa Ferrick, about whom I later wrote an epic piece I never did finish. What a fire-ant of a performer. Look her up one day. Melissa’s fingers, too, seemed conscious of themselves in that unique way. We hugged and the whole Melissa felt like that. This isn’t just a musician, she’s a saint, too, like Jack DeJohnette.

So, this Roger Ebert fella calls this Tilda Swinton actress a saint. From years of experience I know Roger is no glad-hander and has lots of intuition. Writers must. Tilda turns the tables from the stage that night and tells 1600 people that it’s Roger who’s the saint. What if she’s right? I wanna feel both their handshakes for myself.

A saint is a tricky thing, so one has to be careful whom he calls a saint and whom he doesn’t. The nearest medium-large town from here, for instance, is called “City of Saint Francis of Assisi of the Holy Faith,” or Santa Fe for short. Saint Francis was an alcoholic nicknamed “Cecco,” which I believe was 13th C. Italian slang for “rich kid drunk all the time.” Also, he was nearly burned at the stake at least thrice, and if the Pope hadn’t had a dream that Cecco could make the indebted Church a lot of money, he’d have been dead after only those few locals had begun to suspect he was a saint. Had Cecco not died when he did, he’d have been burned at the stake anyhow. His best pals were tortured to death. Then he was canonized by popular demand.

This is a true story. A Jesuit I know, privileged to have a key to moldier basement vaults in the Vatican, wrote me these things.

After this exchange from the stage about who is a saint and who isn’t, we all retired to the beautiful Betsy Hendrickson’s for a late night party. Shortly after I chatted with another saint who happened to be there – Hilde Back, a tiny Swedish woman whose Small Acts have proven great results on this planet – Tilda Swinton materialized in the midst of the living room crowd. I set my jaw and determined to shake that hand of hers with every sturdy Ohio gene at my disposal.

It’s difficult to earn the focused attention of a celebrity like Tilda, especially at a party. For one thing, my sturdy Ohio man’s ego has little patience to wait around to talk to anyone in this world, no, canals need dug, wild injuns need fought and injustice needs rectified. What, to an industrious and sturdy Ohio man, are these uppity people who may merely be saints?

But Tilda’s eyes were such fun to watch, I could have stood the rest of the night as others bent her ear and traded pens and notebooks and so on. Those eyes were fun in the movie and fun to watch on stage and fun at Betsy’s party (and sigh, hardly time to chat with Betsy either). Those eyes moved according to a fascinating spontaneous vitality. Mm-hm: sometimes saints’ eyes are that way.

“The only thing I have to say to you that might be of any value is that you look all the world like Joan of Arc on the stage,” I said. “May I shake your hand?” We held hands for the rest of the conversation.

“My mother told me I’d surely be burned at the stake if this were the middle ages,” Tilda twinkled. “And I’ve got red hair and a vestigial extra nipple,” she gestured. “I’d be a goner for sure!” A little pause, then, “still... that might not...”

“Perhaps a movie someday,” I offered, still not sure why she reminded me of Joan of Arc or why I should bring it up. I’ve only ever seen the famous painting of young Joan at the New York Met; the model for it was a six year old boy with a snubby nose. Not Tilda. Yet... those eyes... well, I told her so. “You know, Roger’s a pretty intuitive guy... and those eyes... and...”

“Oh, I’m not the saint, Roger is,” she reared, still holding hands, repeating her counteraccusation about Roger’s sainthood from the stage after “I Am Love.” (And by the way, the Tilda who’d come out onstage was exactly the same size as the 25-foot Tilda who’d just appeared in the movie on the big screen. I don’t know how larger-than-life people do that).

I would have heard the rest of this speech except I’d begun to feel the glowing warmth of her hand and looked down at it. Pale Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Pict white, slender and a little bony with blue veins. You’d expect it to feel rather cool... you know, someone who sleeps with the windows closed. But it was as warm and welcoming and generous as a great big Texas howdy-do. The kind that hands the homeless a buck or two. Better yet, the woman she was speaking with was giving her info on how to get in touch with a charity organization that feeds and educates African kids.

So I explained why I wanted her handshake, feeling my time was nearly up (timing, too, is an intuitive thing). “I’ve always wondered if I should be a jazz musician,” Tilda said, turning where she could feel someone else tugging for her attention. We unlocked hands.

Tilda and Hilde had been standing together in the middle of this room, surrounded by buzzing people. Hilde, being elf-sized, was difficult to hear no matter how low I bent. But I already know she’s a saint. I’d seen the movie.

II

Three-thirty in the morning has not been my favorite bedtime for a few years now. I’ve been to bed with the birds and up with the hoof-clomps of cavorting horses. Plus, the hotel bed is too proper. I feel apologetic for wrinkling the sheets.

I forgot my dreams as sunlight wafted into the hotel window. All I could remember was looking at Tilda Swinton’s eyes, which had been such fun to inspect; they were still sort of floating around in my head. I lay a little longer thinking this might help me remember what I’d been dreaming.

Oh, it wasn’t dreams. I’d been dream-thinking through what little of the night there had been. The revered Oscar-winning actress had claimed from the Virginia Theater stage that she wasn’t an actress at all; she was an impostor, a fraud, a complete nothing. She was a film fan, not an actress. Not a saint. A nothing. A zilch. A zero. Diddley-squat. Doodley-squat. A bugger-all git. Jack shit. Careful, self.

Well? I’d sat in the audience and believed her. Right she was, right indeed. No ceremonial humility here. She’d exuberantly, generously released the Key to All Success right there on stage, I thought: you start as nothing. You go back there when you’re done.

As I drove through Missouri composing this letter I did a mental exercise trying to describe nothing, nothingness, zero, zilch, doodley-squat, jack shit. I’ve been playing with that linguistic exercise since I was 22. Still no dice. No wonder Socrates said “I know nothing,” and no wonder Paul (who would also deny being a saint, since he was a psychotic mass murderer before falling off his horse one day) said “I am as nothing.”

No, no, “nirvana” won’t do either. It’s just... nothing... You know, jack. Zilch. Zero. Nothing. Quit the semantics while you’re ahead. I dunno how it works, it just does. He, she, it, you, I, all nothing, then, there you are. You’re a Tom Dark or a... how about being a Turner Ross, I really like that sturdy Ohio man – or a Gracie or a Tilda or a Hilde or a Roger or a Chaz or an Omer, and there you are. Attached are these things you’ve done, the great most of which you’ve forgotten in the ebb and flow of your tides.

I walked into Chaz and Roger’s place for brunch and met Omer Mozaffar Sahib, and he said “Do you realize that one year ago we were over in that corner singing ‘Trololo’?”

Yes, I said, and this year I meant us to try “Stout Hearted Men” and uttered the first line of it before I realized I’d meant “Nellie the Elephant.” This comes of a 3:30 a.m. bedtime for me these days. And anyway Nellie the Elephant was an English song. It didn’t quite make it in the U.S. But what’s this, an English accent behind me... ah, Tilda had arrived for brunch.

But too many, too many people to talk to. All of us. All right, some time with the magnificent interviewer and film critic Pablo Villaca... and veteran David Poland who led the charge to the internet. Poland had brought Ebertfest the cutest little boy in the world, and the three of us philosophized about child rearing. Don’t get stupid enough to hit your kids. I wanted to talk to Rodge, of course. Everybody wanted to talk to Rodge. Some with notepads. Serious. I had a single thing I was dying to tell him. It was this:

“Godfadduh, I am honah’d and grateful dat you have invited me into your home on yuh dotta’s wedding day – on da day of yuh dotta..’s wedding. And may dere foist child be a masculine child. I will leave you now, Godfadduh, becuss I know you are busy.”

Well, it was. I'd rehearsed it, memorized from the movie. But Gracie hissed me out of the way, so I didn’t. Roger flashed me a note asking me, in my semi-awake confusion, to call the highly intelligent Krishna Senoi over (we’d had a chat. His friends wanted him to make sure I was not several people writing under the same name.) Then I sat down.

This was a precious chair to luck into. Tilda was making her way through the tangle of sea-legs and had been halted precisely long enough for me to snag her attention. “I kept seeing your eyes in my dreams all night long,” I said.

She whirled around and bent over indulgently, the way I’d had to do with tiny Saint Hilde, and said “Oh, I’m so, so sorry!”

This meant a bouquet of pleasant ripostes to be made, but time, time time. Oh, no, I said, searching for defining and definite words. “Pleasant” didn’t describe it, although it was. Well, shoot, nothing described it. I didn’t even know what I was saying as it came out of my mouth.

In fact, McNulty’s Twilight Zone stopwatch had been activated. Time stopped as I realized there simply wasn’t enough to articulate what I meant. My account here is a jumble of what I said versus what can’t be said quickly enough, even as a legal disclaimer on a radio commercial.

Whatever I said wound up concluding “You’re very easy to fall in love with.”

I would soberly bang down a judge’s gavel, declaring that this was what to say. Put it in the court record. TILDA SWINTON VERY EASY TO FALL IN LOVE WITH. FILM AT ELEVEN ON EYEWITNESS NEWS. I mean... yeah, really. I sure could. Anybody could. Many have.

But these... distant little glowing coals, what did I see? These were in the Tilda-eyes that hadn’t yet faded from my inner vision and were now a perfect match for the real Tilda’s... what are these? Tiny, distant red glows of alarm? How could this be? Danger, came the faintest call I’d ever heard from Whoville, potential evil has circled the moon at a distance of 249,000 miles, and could be headed here. Just a precaution.

Hmm. Well, here at Mission Control, I couldn’t quite catch what she replied, owing to the high hum of conversation around me. I tried to elaborate, of course she’d agree, she knows it’s the god’s honest truth, she’s easy to fall in love with, period. I mean... so am I sometimes. Not so affluently, though. And this had something to do with being “nothing,” like. Heady stuff. For the weeniest, teeniest millisecond of a googolsecond, something about the whole universe had made the subtlest Higg’s Boson spark of sense. Maybe saints trigger that in people. They can’t be blamed for it.

All I could do was push a mental button that launched these words: “Don’t worry. I’m married to the only woman out of 6 billion who can get along with me... so, you’re safe.”

I’d jumbled the transmission. I’d meant “out of 3 billion women.” I still couldn’t make out what Tilda replied. She turned around to Saint Roger and Saint Hilde who was seated between the two of them. Tilda gave Hilde a kiss, rather vaguely looking back at me. At that point, someone snapped a photo.

Here it is: http://on.fb.me/jBCiqK

The last thing I did before I rushed off to get Saint Anath White and Saint Pablo Villaca to their planes on time was hurriedly shake Roger's hand goodbye. Well I'll be damned, it was a lot like Tilda's.

XoxoxOXoxOXoxXOxoxXOxoxXOxAll, Tom

"Evolution v. Creationism" = Snore v. Bore, but...

2011-04-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

Been in bed too much lately. It's windy season here and I've got a bed on the deck upstairs. When I'm not on it, there are usually a couple of neighbor dogs snoozing on it. When I am on it, they scoot over.

If I had to choose between a night at Hef's mansion with all those genetically sculpted blondes or one on that outdoor bed with the blowing Spring wind and a couple of warm, fuzzy dogs... well... sorry girls, but you talk too much.

It's pretty close to a primeval sky here. A moonless night casts starlight visible on the ground. I see what the ancients saw from high towers in Babylon. They made use of the stars in ways that we don't -- it wasn't for modern-style astrology.

The sight is an everlasting awe. It is realer and more vivid on the emotional Richter scale than photos. There is no comparison with attempts to wow oneself by dutifully imagining some initial "Big Bang" -- which never happened anyhow.

When you are a child, pretending about Santa Claus is healthier and more fun than that. We mostly knew there was no Santa. It did take some growing up to realize that, in addition, there was no "Big Bang" and no "entropy." Those tales reflect a culture of reubens fascinated with "stuff blowin' up real good" and guilty wishes for their neighbors and competitors to fizzle out... or blow up real good. Perhaps a saner culture would have us originating in a galactic-size bulb on a supercosmic Christmas tree put there by an unimaginably mythic Santa Claus. Maybe mankind isn't meant to blow up and fizzle out all the time.

Lying face up on my bed I can see three-dimensional relationships among the celestial clusters, the planets plainly a hand's reach away, the wind blowing dramatically across the bed where I lie. Snatch a planet and toss it with all your might and it would disappear from sight ten thousand lifetimes before it got a fraction of a fraction near the next sunlight. But you and those stars can wink back and forth at each other right now.

There are different colors. There are "dark" areas. There are foggy luminous areas, stars so numerous they outnumber the sand grains blowing across this valley of New Mexico Nagual, the whole Great American Desert's, Mongolia's and Africa's sand grains combined. Leaning deeper, these staggering areas of individual suns look like part of a powder. The components composing this powder are also a trillion miles from each other.

Squint and concentrate on those distant powder-clouds and one can sense them moving in some way. Maybe my mind is anticipating movements a trillion of our puny years in advance. They're aware of their own sensations, perhaps electromagnetically like the minute components of earthly clouds.

I close my eyes and can feel those sensations in myself. I'm making them, not contriving them. They're not being made by some biological brain-glitch predetermined by imaginary genetic goblins. I'm quite conscious of imagining this. Nevertheless, it is real.

Open my eyes and there are the stars again; the night wind blows away every other consideration but these stars I've let play in my psyche. This little part of the universe I'm seeing, an instant googol perplex of matter and space visible by eyes inner and outer, is my creation. I feel it the same way I feel my pulse and the activities of various organs moving throughout my body.

...you can sense these things while in the city, too, if your mind isn't habitually noisy with fragmented gobs of undigested thought. "Do the noises in my head bother you?" Isn't a groundless joke in this society any more.

The dogs hear coyotes hooting and have to join in too. You city gringos would probably run for a big hotel to get away from these canine songs. But so intent are the gorgeous, enormous vitality of this night sky and I on each other, the high decibels of the dogs are cute little puppy squeaks nuzzling their mom. The congress of consciousness between me and these star-fogs "billions of light years away" continues, kindly encloaking the enthusiastic melodies of the dogs on my bed.

Such was my experience. It went on for hours, stretching in slow snake-like undulations between enormous friendly unknowns of outer space and the mundane considerations of a middle aged man in the wee hours of night in the blowing wind.

Neither ceremonial pomposities of science or religion entered into the picture.

What's the difference between reading studies about sex and having sex? If during the act all you can do is think about what you read in a study, you've got a little problem with reality, there, bud. You're out of touch with your own. Literally, you're out of your senses.

So too with these obsessive arguments banging an imaginary "Religious Truth" against an imaginary "Scientific Truth" like a toddler banging alphabet blocks together who doesn't understand the letters on them.

You're not experiencing the reality of either thing. You bang heated meaningless words against one another. It's a substitute for acquiescing to the validity of your own mind and its inner sensations. These need no justification from the flapping corrosions of religions or sciences as society presently tries so dutifully to keep believing.

It's just that people who fear the independent sensations of their own minds may cling to decorations that meet with social approval instead. Science? Theology? Fiddle de faddle.

I see so many sentences that go "I use reason." There's usually such a martial stiffness to them, a parrot would be ashamed to imitate reasoning that badly. An individual's conscious sensations are data. What reason arbitrarily deletes data that doesn't fit a theory? That's "Truth-making," the quickest road to Falsehood there is.

Try not to let these tales get you into trouble. Religious fanaticism is boiling even in this country and "evolutionary theory" has allowed justifications for people to extinct whole masses of each other.

Tweeting for Egypt

2011-01-31T10:49:00.000-08:00

Tweeted after having dropped everything else to assist Egyptians tweeting for help on January 24, 2011. Am still at it. Americans need to know about this thoroughly, and if they think they don't, they're already a part of the enormous problem the Egyptians are facing down for themselves now.

Morning, January 31, 2011

Last night as I shut down, a switch in my head also turned to "off." It felt as though the die is cast.

...as though all subsequent events in Egypt will flow from these past 3 days, Friday Saturday and Sunday. Perhaps for years.

I looked through the "tinfoil hat" news, you know, where likely stories go alongside those such as we're controlled by lizards from outer space.

Of course it's most probable our CIA has been involved, but I'd forgotten to consider Britain's MI5, since it's already been there 100 years.

And lest we forget the interference of the French government. Did ANY of these "former" colonists not want another penny? Left scot-free?

And of course, the open and furtive meddlings of religious and political idealogues, people so removed from reality they hate those who aren't.

Tarpley mischaracterized the Egyptian (and Arab) youth as "Nihilists." That is like saying he is fat because it's his ideology.

I very much remember what being a "nihilist" feels like. It's an older "secret conspiracy" than any other. It is where youth feels great.

..and feels great, endless possibilities for his life. Yet everywhere he goes, he is met by one institutionalized blockade or another.

All these calm reasoned old men attempt to enforce the law of gravity upon him. They are compromised and crusty with torture and "realism."

Youth can not help but see this "realism" is itself a perpetuation of insanity, a long, slow death of the inner possibilities he knows.

The feelings radiating out his very brain and into the world are far from nihilistic. But in a sort of inner sonar, what is reflected back?

Reflected back is nihilism. Wrinkled, crusty elites who think they know what is real, enforcing it so that even his poor family suffers.

They own armies and police, where the young must go if they even want to eat. They are ordered to do things their hearts know are insane.

Those youths who have gone insane, gravitate to groups, usually religious, with a legend to follow that they're going to die anyway.

"My life has no meaning while I am alive, so let it make a statement in death!"

The thoughts I've just sketched out can't be told by some ideologue. They can be mimicked by propagandists, hoping to misguide.

But the meanings behind them, which fuel the words, can never be distorted. That meaning has fueled every motion in Egypt. Go, youth.

Thoughts to a group of scholars, mostly Islamic, Wednesday February 9 2011:

Gentlemen,

I've wearied myself keeping up with "on the ground" tweeters in Egypt, along with my agency chores, which are often like Bartleby the Scrivener's in the first place. I hope I can write a few brief sensible things with eyes open.

Watching all this is part of a very grand personal experiment for me. Are any of you familiar with the 1965 movie, "The Flight of the Phoenix"? An airplane crashes in the desert. The survivors are hopeless, except for an engineer who says they can make a new plane from pieces of the old one. They agree. As the plane nears completion the engineer confesses that he is a toymaker, not an aviation engineer. He is nearly lynched. But as the survivors have no other hope, they board the plane anyhow, and it works. They succeed.

That's how I feel in this voluntary endeavor, but more miniscule. I'm one of many millions, all of whom are shouting, and even ephemeral funnymen merely promoting their careers with dopey jokes get far more attention than what I have to say does. Still, over a period of years, in small counties in two different states, "the people" and I succeeded in ridding those counties of the entire board of leaders and their vested outside interests, old ruling families, and so on, just as the Egyptians now mean to do. As though in a toy model of these events now involving many millions, the elements are the same -- including a little violence and high potentates from "outside." Incidentally, we had spies too.

I kept in touch with friends in both counties -- in New York and California -- for years. The achievements the people made stayed. The "ruling families" and cronies no longer had places in local government. Honest participatory democracy did indeed replace them.

You all largely agree that this Egyptian event has been rigged from the outside to a great extent. This has so many historical precedents, it's ludicrous to pretend there are no such things. Many have been duped, many are decades-long recipients of both bribery and extortion, many are members of longtime international organizations of cracked ideologies, profane false mysticisms and so on.

For all we know, the idealistic young Ghonim may in thirty years be a fat, overindulged, cruel and arrogant despot as is the one the Egyptian people now mean to eject from their government -- even though no one has any true verification of Mubarak's present whereabouts.

Yet no uprising in any country can be manipulated into existence without first the people's spontaneous impulses -- where, as Jefferson termed it, their "inalienable rights endowed by their Creator" have been smothered by egotisms, coercions, taken on voluntarily for fear of reprisals or duped into oppression by the submissive and habitual superstitions of their own societies. The rebels tend to be young because the vigorous, untested intuition of youth, well-meant and altruistic, does attempt to cast off these oppressions. They may do so on behalf of their parents, whom they've seen so unhappy from their first cognitions of childhood. In that way many may attempt to "atone for the sins of their fathers."

Youth may take on new ideologies like so many fine new decorations. America's aging male population is still peppered with long hair, as it once stood for an ideal. We have pockets of aging, wrinkled "communists" and "socialists" and what have you, and a considerable population of what were called "Jesus Freaks." Every one of these poorly considered youthful ideals were highly imperfect expressions of Man's inalienable inclination toward "peace love and understanding."

Some have clung to their faulty intellectual decorations to the point they'll even try to torture the "evil" out of people to force these grand dogmas into universal acceptance. Such a man is Mubarak, such men are the CIA, the moneyed elites and whomever supposes he is qualified to establish a "World Order" and the like. This thinking is not exclusive to some veiled elite. It is universal among all who think evil overshadows good; where all good is achieved only by fitful struggles and only a few truly deserve "Good" in its fullest sense. To my knowledge that's a very considerable portion of the world's present population. Many believe this to the core, to the point of murderous and suicidal conviction.

The Egyptian tweeters who say their protests are a lesson for the world are correct. Some may not realize how right they are. They are in a pincers between foreign agencies filled with unscrupulous ideologues who've manipulated this situation over time and their own personal intuitions "endowed by their Creator." Whatever the outcome, the battle won't be stopping in Egypt by any means, nor in those Middle Eastern countries that have been set up for it by the "insan."

Tom

Tweeted just now, Friday Feb 18, 2011

Sorry I'm late. The tweet episode with the Egyptians has had me brooding more deeply than anything so far in my time spent on the internet from 1997 to now.

For one thing, I'm mulling in wonder at the selfishness of those who wouldn't help. I dropped each without a qualm.

There is a quiet little corner in each of us brooding thinkers, a single chair, a simple little table, an espresso in a cracked cup, and on the wall above, a doomsday clock.

It is not the movement of the hands toward or away from that dreaded hour that matter, so much as the enthusiasm that impels one to move them. The "I'm busy using twitter to advance myself" smell among those who would not help those asking for our help had me stand up and push that minute hand a little closer to midnight with gusto. That made my bitter little espresso a little richer.

Some of those tweeters never returned. I'll never know whether they're alive or dead.

For you who helped, we share an inner brotherhood. For you too busy with "the shitty little messes you call your lives," quote Mel Allen, may you always fret about how life isn't going where you demand. May it never.

And may that clock always seem to tick forward.

Dreaming My Way Through "Inception"

2011-01-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

For Wael Khairy from Tom Dark

November 27, 2010, 4:17 p.m.

Hey kids! Grab your 5D goggles, take your protein pills and strap on your Virtual Reality Helmets! Today we'll be sailing the Yellow Submarine deep into the Collective Unconscious on a Magical Mystery Tour to Psychic Adventure!

In this episode, your Astral Hero captures and beheads the massive akashic Gorgon called "Inception"! So, fasten those psychedelic seat belts and hold on! Heeeeeeeere we go:

Wael Khairy ( http://cinephilefix.wordpress.com/ ) is a rare young man. His writing radiates integrity and diligence. In person, he strikes me as noble -- a rare thing in anyone. Let me be poetic: he reminds me of an ancient Egyptian nobleman.

It happens that here in reality, Wael is an Egyptian nobleman, give or take a few thousand years. Thanks to him and the ancient Egyptians, I'll write this essay, then review "Inception." Wael was impressed enough with a dream I told him about ancient Egypt that he's been prompting me ever since to see this movie, as it uses dreaming as a plot vehicle. What I wrote to Wael of ancient Egypt can be found among the comments on his blog.

At this writing we haven't seen it. We live too far out in the boondocks for a convenient drive to the theater. Anyway the nearest movie house smells bad.

We'll have to wait for Netflix, which will send it to our post office box in January. By then I hope to have put Roger's review of it out of mind. His reviews for me are so often "Roger said it, I believe it, that settles it." But for Wael's request I'll need a more independent perspective.

Many people think nightly dreams are crazy. Yea, these would back slowly toward the door, fumbling furtively for the handle, were their host to start rattling on about dreams. Yet the ancient Egyptians used them even in government policies. They lasted about 3,000 years that way. We "A.D." people, if we're lucky, form big dominant countries which last about 200 years, then fizzle out with bangs and whimpers.

We've generally eradicated dreams for being crazy. Our top institutional minds seem to prefer predictions of gloom, doom, bangs and whimpers: from Church heirophants to storefront psychics to Science bigwig Stephen Hawking. Go figure.

(I just did. There's more money in scaring the gullible with gloom and doom. A word to the wise.)

I'm beginning this essay now, late November '10, because last night I saw a trailer for "Inception." I went to bed and dreamed about reviewing this movie. Maybe that's important. Here's the dream:

In my hometown with some young friends. We're going to see "Inception." I'm not wearing a shirt. I reach into my pants pocket for some change to give the girl at the box office. She instead hands me even more change -- a quarter, a few dimes and nickels and some pennies. Good deal, I'm getting a handful of change to review this movie. I hadn't expected that. The boys and I go upstairs past the balcony, take seats on the rooftop and chat, waiting for the movie to begin. End dream.

(Roll Credits: Starring Tom Dark as himself. Dreamed on location in Ballston Spa, New York, USA, founded 1771. Pop. 5,000 at time of dreaming. Produced and directed by Tom Dark's subconscious.)

While you are digesting this popcorn-crunchy dream, do tolerate the following, lengthy, lecture from its producer-director:

Movies are mass social dreams. We watch on-screen dramas that make our juices boil or simmer or change color or what have you. Dreams are private in-head movies, where the hubbub or serenity is specific to one's most private thoughts and moods.

A movie uses common social symbols, your speeding car, your shooting gun, your limpid rose of a feisty heroine. A dream will use symbols more intimate for its audience of one.

Say there's a cigar in a movie. Crooks light big cigars when they steal a lot of money, dads pass out cigars when their wives have babies. Those are a couple mass symbols we know, a successful heist or a new baby. Freud and Monica Lewinsky aside, in a dream it may represent the cigar a man was chewing at 2:19 p.m. on May 3, 1984, in a shop at 1294 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California. It may allude precisely to your vivid feelings of that moment so long ago.

If unimportant to a mass audience, it will be important to you. Dredged up was the cigar-chewing man who stood behind the counter at the pawn shop where you hocked your guitar. You felt like a big loser doing that. Lately you feel like a big loser again, so the memory is brought up and some alterations made to give your mind a jog and your hormones a helpful twist.

A movie where things blow-up-real-good may liberate some rambunctious hormones. A blow-up-good dream might burn off pent-up energy built up by personal worries, boredoms, what have you. If that cigar explodes, maybe you're still angry for having let that pawn shop man cheat you out of a better price for your beloved guitar. You coulda been a contender, instead of a bum, which is what you are. Because lately you're thinking about pawning it again.

(This is not a true story so far as I know, it's just an example. I've never had to pawn my guitar. Plus, I am already a contender sufficient to my purpose. Thanks for your concern!)

Movies have a way of leaching out into reality. For instance, Mickey Rourke's on-screen persona is infectious. I'll get up and strut around like Popeye ready to sock Bluto the way Mickey does. I've mentioned this to friends and have discovered I'm not the only one who does that after a good Mickey Rourke movie. So! You hometown boys 'fess up: some of you have also marched around mechanically flipping your head from side to side since "Robocop" was released in 1987, haven't you?

Dreams too leach out into one's reality. In the above dream I sat on a rooftop jawing pleasantly with some hometown friends waiting to see this movie Wael wants me to see. Figuratively speaking, that's what I'm doing this moment. I'm jawing with you friends, waiting for January.

Did I mention this rooftop was on my hometown post office? That's because you're all electronic postal correspondents. Back at Ebertfest, you all felt like hometown relatives to me. I'll be sending you this e-mail when I'm done, right from my psyche's home town.

At this moment you are all imaginary, as are dreams and movies. When you get down to it, if it isn't imaginary, you're not here. Those of you whom I have mistaken this way, kindly leave my imagination.

("Attention: All personnel scheduled for de-imagination please report to the de-imagination center for immediate de-imagination." What movie was that?)

I wonder how the unarguably great film critic Roger Ebert would rate this dream, now that I've released it to you, my imaginary yet independently cognizant public. Not only was there no plot, us characters didn't do much, the cinematography wasn't anything to speak of, not even fancy special effects as dreams go.

I expect Roger might give it only one or two stars, and only then because maybe his boss at the Sun-Times forced him to review it at all. "Tom Dark Dream Debut Shirtless, Pointless," might go the lead-line. At least it wasn't full of mayhem and immorality, so I'm pretty sure he wouldn't slap it with zero stars.

A good movie critic will tell what a movie's about and give a few impressions on its more salient meanings. That's sufficient for an intelligent decision on whether to see it. A good dream critic will do the same, although he couldn't help having seen it, and no one else could.

A bad movie critic will maunder off into a maze of implications and associations and rules and theories we hope entertain at least him as he fatigues our attentions. A bad dream critic will do that too. With that in mind I'll review my dream about reviewing "Inception," which I believe in fact deserves three stars.

How's that? Reviewing my own dream production, starring myself? And rating it higher than Roger Ebert probably would? Yes. A good movie critic mustn't review his own movies, but only a bad dream critic would review a dream which meanings aren't entirely privy to himself. So as a matter of integrity, it's up to me.

Why did this dream take place in my old hometown and not at some theater I know of here in reality? Because back in my hometown, us boys would often sit on a rooftop, musing on the absurdity of things as they were and the hilarity of things to come. Grownups would have found much of this scandalous. Therefore, I predict: I'm going to find things funny about "Inception" that I'm not supposed to, just like when I was a teen on a rooftop.

I had no shirt on. That's because I saw from the trailer that "Inception" is a rough and tumble gun-cocking man-punching movie starring dead-eyed heroes and bosomy heroines, whatever else it will be about. The trailer showed the kind of shirtless gusto I've always thought Kenneth Branagh put into his Shakespeare performances. Rough-and-tumble dramas do better with no shirt on, so as a reviewer anticipating this movie in my dream, I followed suit. If it were for something more sophisticated, I'd probably have kept my shirt on. One of my dream-rules, I s'pose.

Lastly, if I get so much as a handful of change for writing this review, like the box office girl gave me... that... that... would be a dream come true. Otherwise, I hope Wael appreciates my work, which, as movie reviews go, will undoubtedly be "small change"... where not priceless to them as has a jocular wisdom.

So there is my three-star review of my dream about waiting to see "Inception" in a month or so, plus a free lecture for which you'd pay enormous amounts to some dream-gooroo with workshops, coiffed hair and possibly Shirley MacLaine hanging on his arm. This much said from the loftiness of my hometown rooftop, I'll now wait for the movie. Seeya then.

PART TWO

ELEVEN YEARS AGO SOMEONE ASKED ME TO TRY NOT TO THINK OF AN ELEPHANT. I HAVEN'T YET WHERE HE IS CONCERNED.

January 4, 2011, 2:48 p.m.

Good old Netflix, right on time. Following the simple Good Movie Critic's rules as stated back in November, I shall now review "Inception" proper:

A. What this movie is about: You all already know what it's about. If you don't, here is Roger's review, which leaves me off the hook. http://j.mp/bowV0C

B. And now for a few salient impressions Sufficient for intelligent dream-artists trying to decide whether to watch it:

Catt just called from the other room. "Yeah... I watched another five minutes and it's still 'The eeeeevil subconscious must be locked awaaaaaay,'" she hissed in sotto voce. Most of this movie is hissed in sotto voce.

Catt's an awful handy wife to have. She not only bakes great, she supervised at big movie studios for a couple decades. It was her job to make great big movies like this one sound great. Before you public even saw a trailer, she'd have been over it hundreds of times in detail. She learned more patience for film watching than I ever will. I can depend on her trained patience to tell me whether or not the thing ends the way I guessed it was going to. Sometimes I've had enough after 3 minutes.

There's another reason Catt was handy for watching this movie. She once had a dream that she should visit some people in Australia. They had called her in a dream. She looked 'em up, and sure enough, they exist in reality: the Yolngnu people of Arnhemland, Australia. They say they've been around for 50,000 years and their whole culture has been based on their dreams all this time. A sweet, pleasant culture it is, too. You can look 'em up on YouTube. Yolngnu chiefs gave her a name and adopted her as part of their dream family. Now and then she and they dream of each other. You can say they meet in dreams.

Go ahead, start backing toward the door whenever you like. Whatever mutant weirdness may be running up your spine about it, this kind of thing is as natural as breathing. It's an art. You practice, you get good. I'm pretty okay at it. Decades now. (Advice: never EVER pay anybody for it. You need only patience, and it does pay off. "Dream workers" are worse hucksters than the gun-toting dream-lothario Leonardo DiCaprio plays here. The Yolngnu don't go around charging each other.)

I got up and wandered away from "Inception" about 45 minutes into it, give or take a little dozing. At least it was more fun than being caught in a bag of spiders. That phrase occurred to me as my mind began drifting during some scene of something blowing up, or turning upside down, or whatever that was. They were hissing hogwash in sotto voce, so it was hard to tell.

I'd managed that long because I'd promised Wael I'd review it from the perspective of the art of dreaming, which just about nobody in Western Civilization does any more -- so busy are they with their dead-eyed gun-cocking and weaving tangled webs and stealing each others' ideas and so on.

And all this scary pulse-pounding music! Right from the git-go. To Jungianize a Mark Twain quip, my subconscious hadn't heard such a racket since the orphanage burned down.

As the scary pulse-pounding music rose in the opening scene, before we cut to Leonardo rising semi-conscious out of the surf-hog-wash with his little pistol, a short story by James Thurber came to mind: a man dreamed every night that Aaron Burr was challenging him to a duel. Finally, he took a pistol to bed and put it under his pillow. He'd get that s.o.b. for sure tonight. The next morning his wife found him dead of a heart attack. I chuckle-grunt at the memory.

First laff: DiCaprio languishing face down on that beach, that pistol stuck in the back of his pants. Guess Aaron Burr showed him a thing or two as well. Second laff: He's telling a stereotypically inscrutable oriental gentleman (should I spell it "steleotypicarry insclutabre?") how he's paid to sneak into people's dreams and steal their ideas. It's what he does. This later expanded into a laff about... dunt dunt dunnnn... planting an idea in somebody's head! Dunt dunt dunnnn, there is apparently some kind of nuke-level dangerous gizmo that can plant an idea in somebody's head! Then again, how many of us have discovered that an e-mail isn't enough after all? What's this guy charge, again?

The laffs went on and on, until they mysteriously transformed, dream-like, slow motion... I kept meaning to note them on my clipboard. Yet my body had become inexplicably paralyzed by a strangely appealing torpor, deep unconscious forces making my pen seem far, far away... perhaps... on one of these snow-covered craggy... mountains... around... here... and miles to go before I sleep... and miles to go before I... zzzzzzzzPOP! Huh? Wha? Hoozat?

Damned if I'd back the CD up to catch them. Instead, in that minute moment of snoozing subconscious endeavor, I dreamed a solution to my critic-predicament. Each line that sounded hilarious -- most of them did -- could be summed up this way:

"Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary."

Ain't real dreams just wonderful? In a microscopic flash, mine reduced every line of dead-eyed psychogobble in this gooey flickmare to a single famous utterance, written by James Thurber in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

In this story the henpecked, daydreaming Walter Mitty had embarked on a medical fantasy, coining fancy-sounding dead-eyed terms to suit his improbable tale of personal heroism. Another superb Thurber perception, echoing the nature of dreams better than this humorless turkey could.

I only rarely interpret people's dreams for them. It's a dumber idea than occult or psychology traditions proclaim. In truth, sorting out one's own dream image-language by oneself finally reveals that the only thing "sub-conscious" is that face in the mirror staring back at you in foggy uncomprehension.

Here I'll make an exception. I'll interpret "Inception" as the dream of an imaginary individual.

I myself would back away cautiously toward the door from this imaginary individual. I would fumble furtively for the handle. He is rattling on with a paranoid fantasy about extravagant, selfish control freaks who are obsessed with injecting magical powers into Rubik's cubes and can't tell the difference between wool or polyester rugs. I'd say the cure would be to put them in a bag of spiders. That'll wake 'em up.

Mind you, I wouldn't claw for the door for fear of some subconscious menace... unless boredom is a subconscious menace. Could be. I just now asked Catt if she finished watching it. Nope. Her subconscious also got really bored. She too experienced the mysterious corporeal inactivity that accompanies a mind wandering off to a nap.

So there we have it, Wael. Dig around among those ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm dead-eyed certain there's a lot better stuff on dreams there than was cobbled up for "Inception."

You will observe that my innocuous brief dream about reviewing this movie turned out to be God's-honest precognitive! All I could do was make irreverent jokes about it from the rooftop of my psyche, here. And these quips are exactly the kind I'd make while not wearing a shirt! Every dream is prophetic, once you pay proper attention!

"Self-fulfilling prophecy," you say? What other kind could you want? Maybe you've never had the pleasure of having some wrong-headed loud-mouthed know-it-all psychic predicting your future for you. I have -- even some fancy ones in mysterious hats. Self-fulfilling prophecies are the best. Though I didn't take my shirt off to watch this movie. That might have changed things, I admit I don't know how.

In my new capacity as amateur dream-movie critic, I suggest that Leonardo DiCaprio should have been shirtless. This would have made hissing all those "Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary." lines more fun.

I saw in the previews that he or Matt Damon (sometimes can't tell them apart) will be in another of this kind of movie this fall. If Wael asks me to review that too, I've already got the title: REAL PSYCHICS DON'T BLINK.

(Tom Dark burbled up briefly from his shirtless adventures of derring-do among uncharted ductal tracts of the Unconscious to write this for Wael Khairy)

They Started This First

2010-10-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

To the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner":

They started this first
We are not to blame
It was all their fault
Why aren't they ashamed?

Yes they started this first
We must do as we must
Who do they think they are?
We shall blast them to dust

And the rocket's red glare
The bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night
That the fault was all theirs

O remember Hiroshima and get out of the waa-aaay
For they started this fiiiiiiiiiiirst!
We are noooo-ooooot to blaaaaaaaaame!

Was taking a walk in Oakland one day, came into the apartment, sat down and wrote this (plus some other verses) for no particular reason, except that I'd had a sniff of George H.W. Bush at the time. He had that kind of infantile personality. When he finally wound up in the White House, my re-write of "The Star Spangled Banner" turned prophetic. The sick man had a publicity company invent a tale that Iraqi soldiers invaded a premature baby ward in neighboring Kuwait, threw babies all over the floor and stole the baby-saving equipment.

The whole story was a total phony, spieled before Congress and the media by the daughter of some ambassador in with Bush. But so what? The media lies now as much as it ever has, and people without worthwhile lives of their own love fantasies of good versus evil. So Dubya Senior raped Iraq -- probably because his old business partner Hussein started buying weaponry from the Chinese instead of Bush's own weapons concerns, and a few other items. Flags waved everywhere, although the protests of millions of people in the major cities across America never got televised (I checked). Still, "They Started This First" never really caught on. It got on local radio in the San Francisco Bay Area for a little while.

Years before any of that happened, I had an inkling I might do something with this song, so I answered an ad for comedy troupe member wanted and sang it a cappella for my audition. I passed. Their show, which ran successfully for months, opened with it. I wound up in all but one of the skits to packed houses before I quit with something better to do. (The show closed with one of my satires too, which also turned out "prophetic" -- a satire on the "fundamentalist Christian" hysteria which was just getting started at the time.)

Bernie Weiner, who was theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, panned the show and singled out "They Started This First" as "appallingly simple-minded."

I thought Bernie was appallingly simple-minded not to notice that the song is supposed to be "appallingly simple-minded." How did Bernie think wars ever started? Complicated people doing complicated things too complicated for simple patriotic cannon fodder to understand?

By the way, how is it these complicated people who understand all the complications never get their butts shot off in the complexities of a war they've started?

Bernie eventually became a fairly noted left-leaning political analyst. He was that when I ran across him while perusing the internet after "9/11," looking for information that might seem a lot more probable than the simple-minded nonsense the newsmedia was feeding the simple-minded about how that particular "attack by freedom-haters" had happened. Two-and-some wars later now, Bernie admitted my simple-minded satire was spot-on after all. He apologized for the bad review. He also edited an independent piece on the child-sex-slavery trade I'd written, now stored on this blog. I think he printed it on his own blog, too.

All this was 18 years after I'd left the comedy troupe. (It was called The Plutonium Players. Don't know whether they're still around. Could be.)

You'd be surprised who is simple-minded, despite displays of intelligence and high articulation. But let me give you a clue. If you're vehemently taking sides in this country and creating imaginary enemies out of people who are pissed off about things that don't affect you personally (and never mind how "compassionate" you think you are), you're really fucking simple-minded. Cut it out, before this becomes your own adipose anthem in the middle of a civil rebellion.

Hollywood in the Purple Sage!

2010-09-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

For all of you too cheap to join EbertClub, here it is! Too bad you missed this great piece in Rodge's last issue! Don't do that again!

(Rodge, I keep forgetting to send in my five bucks. Do you figure this is worth five bucks? If it is, I lately snapped a good pic of Black Mesa, which will be figuring in this movie, out my library window. It's at : http://twitpic.com/265us2 )

(And remember, folks: Ebert Club is a bargain at twice the price I keep forgetting to pay!)

EBERT CLUB EXCLUSIVE! ONCE AGAIN, YOU ARE THERE!
and... and... Was That SAM ELLIOT Eying My Mustache??

Tom "Hollywood in the Purple Sage" Dark

ABIQUIU, NEW MEXICO 12:28:16 P.M. How remote is where we live, you ask? So far four census takers have pulled timidly into our driveway hoping for directions. We're not on their census lists. They can't tell if we're real people, as we haven't got a mailing address.

If we want mail, which we often don't, I have to drive a few miles north to a postage-stamp-size Post Office to fetch it. It's right across from the busiest concession for at least 35 miles around, Bode's General Store. It's rumored that the great Southwestern artist Georgia O'Keefe once hung out at Bode's. The rumor must be true, as Bode's has been the only place to hang out in these parts since before the Model "T" was a gleam in Henry Ford's eye. Lately there's a new Ice Cream Stand open at the other end of Bode's parking lot. It too is the size of a postage stamp, made of concrete blocks, festooned with handmade signs indicating whether or not they have ice cream.

But that isn't the entirety of Abiquiu, New Mexico, no. A walk up the only habitable hill among these buttes, mesas, cliffs, bluffs, dirt, rock, trees and juniper clumps will bring you to a ramshackle flat of wattled mud and brick haciendas, some burned out, some still standing or leaning, still occupied, a suspiciously affluent-looking Catholic church and rectory, and around the corner from that, a large whitewashed adobe church where Ute Indians were first brainwashed beneath a big cross at the promontory overlooking their own incredibly gorgeous land. By 1730, the land was called "Abiquiu" (easier to figure out how to pronounce than "Al Quaeda"), which is a Ute word for "Lumber Stop Here."

Why did the lumber stop here?? Because it had floated down from Colorado forests on what was once a bigger river than now, where people sawed it up and wagoned it off to build more forts out from which to foray and kill more Indians who hadn't converted properly to big crosses on big promontories throughout the Southwest. By the late 19th Century, the Conquistadors and their priestly wizards had been overrun by American cattle barons and their colorful gangs of cowboy thugs, such as Billy the Kid, who left a bullet hole that's a tourist attraction 20 leagues southeast from where I type these words today. By the 20th Century the cattle barons and their thugs had been overrun by artists like D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keefe and their colorful gangs of pretenders; these were finally overrun by colorful gangs of hippies who built yurts, named roads after Hindu celebrities and sold jewelry handmade in China.

There is a yurt about a mile from here, but thankfully it's obscured from my window view by genuine native juniper bushes -- as is the little Buddha worship station, a few hundred yards into the field, under a juniper. No one knows who put it there or when. Perhaps it was the now-extinct idolatrous Lamanites, whom the Mormons swear preceded everybody else.

We live on the site of an Indian massacre. For a change, it wasn't Conquistadors or Custer or cowboys doing the massacring, but two warring native tribes. I haven't the heart to dig around for bones. I don't think the old local ghosts want me to anyhow. This Valley of the Dead is happier left alone.

Nowadays, little remnants of each occupy this sparse territory. Drunken shirtless caballeros, descendants of Conquistadors and Cowboys and Indians all, do shoot up the place now and then, and smug-looking priests do occasionally strut out of that fancy rectory. Grumpy old hippies, white beards down to their chests, eat burritos at the General Store. I don't seem to belong to any of these remnants. I'm not even a Muslim, and so don't habit the largest mosque in the U.S., which is around here somewhere. Although the famous "shoe bomber" attended prayer service at that very mosque, the old ghosts rather recognize in me how much a stranger has parked his boots and horses in this topography. And so, peculiar things happen to me in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Such as this afternoon. Tired of waiting for a hermit neighbor to drop by with one of her big dead dogs for us to help bury, I decided to drive up to fetch the mail. In the Post Office parking lot sat a big trailer containing a helicopter with blades folded up. I wondered. Having got the mail (nothing but a credit-card come-on), I walked across the street to the edge of the parking lot at Bode's General Store to the ice cream stand to order a chocolate malted milkshake.

Chocolate malted milkshakes are precious around here. A little while ago the Ice Cream Stand had run out of both chocolate and vanilla, so no shake. Then they were out of malt, so no shake. Then they were out of ice cream entirely, so no shake. Today? The young man looked at me with eyes bright and said "Chocolate Malt?" "You bet," I replied. He stepped into the postage stamp sized building to mix it up, while I sat outside and watched a pretty Ute Indian girl with glasses proudly marking on the chalk board that they had Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, even Rocky Road ice cream! Today Only! No doubt.

I walked my Tasty Chocolate Malted Prize over to the rustic bench by the door of Bode's General Store -- you know, the creaky old rough-hewn wooden bench that Georgia O'keefe daydreamed on, back when -- and sat down to savor it the way only a rough-hewn stranger in a remote nowhere could enjoy it. Almost as good as a hot bath and Saturday Night Hoedown. Fella comes out of the store with a plate of nachos and sits down next to me on the bench.

Weather? Yeah, good. More weather? Hope so. Funny weather in Albuquerque, he says. You from around here? I ask. Nope, he says. Oh, you're with the park service? He proudly pulls at his t-shirt to show me the emblem. It says "New Mexico Film Commission." Filming one more thing about the local raw natural beauty, I suppose, but I ask anyway. I'm not sure those little documentary companies could afford the big helicopter parked across the street.

"It's called 'Cowboys and Aliens," he says.

Funny title, I say. I try to remember the name of the last Hollywood film shot around here. He names a couple others, those aren't them. "What's this one going to be about?" He's not sure. Well, by the ironic sound of the title, I conjecture, it must be some kind of comedy. He doesn't know. So? Who's in it? "Harrison Ford," he says.

Because I'm in Abiquiu, New Mexico, the name "Harrison Ford" doesn't ring a bell for me. Must be some actor, I guess. It isn't until after I get home, and after I help my hermit neighbor bury her dog, that I realize "Harrison Ford" is one of my favorite actors in some of my favorite films. Come to think of it, Harrison Ford has been huge in Hollywood for decades. The ghosts around here must not care about that, though. I must be listening to them too often.

We both make more conjectures what this movie will be about, then I ask him what he's doing in this project. He gives me a funny smile, shrugging his shoulders. That moment his boss comes out of the store. "Ask him," he says. Our bench is surrounded. His boss is surrounded by some workers and a fellow that looks... familiar. That fellow also seems to think I look familiar. Is he looking at my "Sam Elliot" mustache? ( http://www.michaelmirasol.com/flipcritic/2010/05/ebertfest-day-3.html ) He's wearing one too.

"Rocks, dirt, weeds, tree branches," his boss says. I ask again, as I didn't hear him the first time while looking these other fellows over. "Rocks, dirt, weeds, tree branches," the boss repeats. I joke "Well, hell, if you need more of that, I've got lots. Just drop by my place!" All smirk except Sam Elliot, who's standing there studying me intently. Er... am I supposed to be somebody? I don't ask. It's too odd that a stranger would be studying me like that, and me without a bottle o' whiskey to offer or a six-gun on my hip.

A few more quips exchanged and I realize, this being at least half cowboy movie, they might need more horses,. A cowboy movie was filmed around my old place a year or so back, but I wound up glad they didn't use our horses. The film stank. I say, "Well, if you need horses, I've got 6 thoroughbreds (actually 5 and a Quarterhorse). You got cowboys who can ride race horses?"

"Oh yeah," says the man who doesn't know what the movie's about or what his job is exactly. "We've got great riders." "That's good," I say, "ours could use a workout." We exchange names. He can spell mine, "Tom Dark." He can also find me if they actually need the horses, which I don't care about. But I can't spell his name. "Barrio Te'echerra" is as close as I can come.

They pile into cars and trucks and the caravan drives off... including a big truck loaded with... wait for it... rocks, dirt, weeds and tree branches. I wonder if we locals shouldn't take insult that our local rocks, dirt, weeds and tree branches aren't good enough for a Big Hollywood Movie. Ours are the best quality rocks, dirt, weeds and tree branches to be found since Mark Twain inspected the dirt where Adam was said to be scooped out from.

So, whether our adorable horses are going to be movie stars or not, there's a film being shot here called "Cowboys and Aliens," and if Sam Elliot isn't in a movie with a name like that, I'd be pretty surprised. I should've asked him to talk. That low-pitched moo is unmistakable.

I don't even care to check www.imdb to see if that was Sam Elliot. You guys can.

Watch for Black Mesa in the movie. It's right out my library window.

I helped the lady bury her old dog and then came in and wrote this. She'd been waiting. I left her alone with her tears, as she preferred. I'd always rather do my crying alone too.

When Your Horsie Feels Bad and Wants to Die

2010-08-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

(This is from one of Roger Ebert's blogs last spring. @resplendicity 's beloved horse Luke recently came down with colic and she wanted to see this story. I hadn't saved it. Thankfully, @snowster17 had a copy of it. Here ya go, then:)

And now, for just no reason at all, a little story that just happened.

Our 15-year-old Thoroughbred, Clay, was lying on his side this morning. Horses will bask in the sunshine that way, but there wasn't any yet, and last night Clay had a touch of "colic," as they call it. We thought it had cleared up, but by morning, he was lying on his side just barely moving his head.

Colic will kill a horse quick as poison. They can't burp or vomit, so the obstruction stays inside, their intestines twist up, and they're done for. Apart from how much it hurts to see such a magnificent creature die in front of you, the prospect on a Sunday morning sunrise of where to put a dead animal that weighs a thousand pounds or more is not cheering.

Catt called the vet and I had a little talk with Clay. He raised himself up enough to accept a neck-and-ears rub. He wouldn't take a little apple-and-oat treat, something they adore more than God; that was a bad sign. His breath was short, punctuated with little groans. His rear legs lay under him as though useless. His tummy felt as hard as a rock.

He liked the rub, though. Unusual for an animal as temperamental as a thoroughbred, which, unlike dogs, don't usually have a lot of patience for it. But Clay was listening to me.

He seemed to remember that yesterday I'd promised him a little free-time outside the corral. The corral is plenty big enough for the lot of them to race around in, but that's just not the same as being outside it. So I fetched his halter and a rope and walked him outside the little gate.

The other horses were stunned, barely able to believe their eyes; one of their own had suddenly entered a distant universe. This poor, huge, dying beast immediately transformed, as good as Jesus emerging fresh and a-glow from his tomb on an Easter Sunday morning. I let him off his rope to do as he wished.

Jesus never reared so high nor galloped so full. My eyes watered up to watch. There's nothing like seeing a horse racing in full gallop all by himself, for fun, freedom and nature's own elan.

Clay raced all around the fence -- it's a simple plastic-wire affair, but the horses respect it more than people did the Berlin Wall. Look at me, look at me, look at meee, Clay snorted! His little herd raced along the inside of the fence, magnetized to his every move, unable to imagine what he would possibly do next! Stop and chew on a little dead, curly shrub? Holy cow!!! Run? Trot? Turn this way instead of that?? OMG!! OMG!!

Four noses touching over the fence in excitement, three on the inside and Clay on the outside. Sniff? Sniff? Snort! Watch me! Around and around he raced, sometimes all fours off the ground, waggling his head and mane with that magnificent neck. Superhorse! The poor captive inmates inside that flimsy plastic-wire fence leaped and charged around too.

Clay forgot all about his death-dealing colic and ambled back into the corral to take his place among the hay-and-horse-treats once again -- this time with quite a story to tell. While the fence means captivity, it also means safety and tasty hay.

It wasn't colic, it was a tummy ache for freedom. A few weeks ago he and two other horses escaped and ran off to the brink of forever-land-for-wild-horses before I caught up with them. My knees still hurt from hiking them back home on ropes. Clay never forgot.

So if you ever have a tummy ache, bear in mind that it may not be Pepto Bismol that you need... maybe a little freedom time.

Epilogue The following morning I took everybody out for a little hike, Clay on a rope just in case. Shortly it was apparent he'd be fine. He paired up with his girlfriend, ready to race, so I pulled the rope off and gave him a slap on the butt, go race, you mighty creature. Clay responded by kicking me exact square in the solar plexus with a rear hoof -- and exact square enough to match the pressure I'd slapped his butt with. Rascal. Precise rascal, too.

NOW CAN IT BE TOLD! A CHILLING EXPOSE ON RACIAL PREJUDICE

2010-06-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

Tom Dark

Okay, okay, okay. I mentioned to Edgar Hopper (@edgarhopper on Twitter) that I was thinking about writing an essay on racism, but was so weary of the subject, couldn’t. Edgar gently requested I write it anyhow. I haven’t and that’s weighed on my conscience. Then Rodge wrote one, timely and topical, so I put in a few posts under his. Edgar said that wasn’t quite good enough. His friendly suggestion still weighed on my conscience, and I’m not even a “liberal” or “conservative” or nuthin’. So here ya go, Ed.

Yup, here we go. Current successful movie genius and enfant terrible Charlie Kaufman mentioned his next script will be about a superhero, but he hadn’t yet decided what kind of superhero.

DO YOU THINK I’M LYING? THINK I’M NOT COOL ENOUGH TO TALK TO THE CHARLIE KAUFMAN? Do I have to pull out that photo of Charlie and me having a thoughtful chat? I hope I don’t. It makes me look old and fat and pretty much twice his size. So just believe me, all right? I’ve gotta get some kind of mileage from having chatted with Charlie Kaufman Himself.

Charlie has more hair than I have. So does Roger Ebert, I noticed. People who have rich, fulfilling lives have rich, full heads of hair.

What we were talking about when Roger snapped that photo, there in that free breakfast get-together room, was how come people weren’t crowding around Charlie going “Please, please, please, read my script! Please! You’ll love it! Plus I need you to love me!” At that snap-moment Charlie was replying how people did keep shoving scripts into his face “just for his opinion,” when he knew very well all they really wanted was his agent’s private phone number. Another moment later we were speaking of jealousy in the biz, and I was telling Charlie the story of Joey and Jake, and how after 30 years, Jake’s still bitching that Joey was a big success and he wasn’t. Yet.

Joey had a slew of pop music hits thirty years before I met Jake. After all that money and fame, Joey moved on to yet another incredibly successful business in which he was remarkably happy. That same thirty years later, Jake was still slogging along on marijuana, coffee, living off a gullible Sugar Mama, guitar lessons and some seriously overblown daydreams. Every single time Jake called me, which was every day for too long, he’d complain about how much better and smarter and everything else he was than that pathetic Joey and his raft of big hit songs and successful business. For those of you who don’t hate Jews, Jake was what you’d call “a noodge.” He felt so inferior to his former friend Joey, he’d been carrying on like this for thirty years now.

That’s a serious inferiority complex, which brings us to racial prejudice. Racial prejudice is borne of chronic feelings of personal inferiority, projected upon neighbors of races other than one’s own.

Good lord, Ed, isn’t that enough said? Didn’t I already write a few things on Rodge’s blog? At http://j.mp/cJ9JhS ? Or am I gonna hafta write timeless things, which nobody will understand until after I’m dead, dead, dead and unappreciated for another few centuries, when a significant, if minute, portion of humanity begins to approach the astonishing level of psychological latitude which is presently mine?

There -- right there, above, is a “superiority complex” for ya, which may hide feelings of inferiority. But I once aced a Scientology test first time through, so maybe I’m not so inferior after all. I otherwise routinely inspect myself for traces of hyperbole.

By the way, I can’t write about racial prejudice here in America without using the word “nigger.” God dammit, I’ve used it with black friends just like they do with each other. This, to me, is an honor and a hilarity to be accepted for being that homeboy. When you’ve got friends who aren’t nervous about anything you say, you’ve got real friends.

Anyway. Yeah yeah sure sure, at the core of racial prejudice are feelings of personal inferiority. They’re not even that deep; if they were, the condition would be rare. In fact they’re irritatingly shallow feelings. They’re superstitious magic. They’re magical projections on others about how inferior you feel and how angry you are for feeling so inferior so often.

Whattaya gonna do? All your young life you were kicked around by your dad – if you had one – for whatever reasons. Half the time it was at your mom’s behest. If no dad, you suspected your mom was a whore. You feel like shit, you’re told feeling like shit is good suffering for your soul, don’t get uppity, nobody’s better than anybody else and so on.

It’s an entrenched mood. Dad may still be kicking you around inside even if he’s long gone. You’re scared of the world and looking for excuses and somebody to blame. You might “hate niggers,” but you hate your own kind even worse, particularly family. You’re afraid because everybody else might be better than you are.

You make friends by inventing mutual enemies. Whatever your mutual enemies’ faults may be get magnified in your mind, in your talks, in your jokes, in your encounters, should you ever even have the courage to get up close to the subjects of your fear. If your life devolves to the especially shiftless, the niggers get worse in your imagination. So do the kikes, spics, micks, beaners, dagos, slants, the gooks, whoever isn’t you. When your daily life feels chronically meaningless, it’s good at least to have imaginary enemies to comfort yourself with. You have meaning to somebody, or so you imagine, even if negative. "I got nothing against Jews, but they don't like me," a friend of mine lied, once.

He had just abused a Jewish woman twice his age with vicious foul language in an endlessly corrosive e-mail. She had asked for a little time away from his pointless round of e-mails to tend to her daughter, who was in the hospital in serious condition. He had never met her -- she escaped Nazi Germany with her family as a child -- but he needed to let her know what a "problem" Jews still are. I apologize again to Doris Colmes for ever introducing Pete to her. He is crazy with feelings of personal inferiority. He doesn't really know any Jews to speak of.

You create a counterfeit inferior self and you conduct it like a pro wrestler’s act. You can dress your fake self up with dopey facts any way you want to. “Science” proved the superiority of the masses of honkies and the inferiority of the niggers ‘way back when. According to the Bible, blacks are being punished for their ancestor Ham making fun of his dad Noah, who was drunk, naked, and snoring. They’ll do it again if God turns them white again. Oh, c’mon, I’m tired of all this, it’s been repeated millions of times, pro, con and guilt mongering. It’s all nonsense.

One idea I haven’t read enough of is that mankind, sprout by sprout, grows. Once upon a time, we suppose, human imagination could go only as far as recognizing tribal members as a part of himself: man wear funny clothes, me suspicious, draw sword. But now, there are white spiritual types from solid upper middle class backgrounds who have come to believe all African-Americans should be equal after all. Spiritual evolution!

Whatever your spiritual granfalloon: you feel helplessly inferior, you’ll look for somebody to be better than. You’ll gussy yourself up in a tangle of rationalizations hoping nobody notices you’re doing it because you just plain feel inferior. This clearly goes beyond the negative events of racial prejudice, with results at least as damagine, but Ed asked me to write about the racial aspect.

II.

True Personal Stories of Racial Inferiority

Edgar just told me he’s got too many personal stories that he’s still too angry to write down. Deacon Hopper is a good man, a long-suffering man long in years who always looks at the inner sides of things. I don’t doubt he’s lived a life of extraordinary forbearance. I’ll let him tell his own stories – in fact, I told him that he should pay me for this essay I’m writing with some of these stories of his. People need to know. They don’t need big puffy speeches about goodness, they need to know.

I’ve got lotsa stories of racial prejudice, but only as a listener or observer, and ever so rarely, for my race. Those were sort of amusing. But for instance, I didn’t watch my mom get killed by an iceball to the temple thrown by a nasty white teenager, nor see her get a couple ribs broken by a big fat cocksucker whose “nigger hating” kid had just pulled some childish crap on me. I’ve been discriminated against in various ways, but have usually been satisfied that the wrongdoer was suitably brought to justice -- particularly when I was clever enough to engineer this justice myself. Justice is fun.

Belonging to a race or breed or tribe should be fun. You’ve got ancestors from thousands of years back who felt things back then the way you do now, and you’ve got family mysteries to sort out and learn from. It’s no fun when you’re surrounded by homogenous morons who have institutionalized their inferiority complexes against you, whatever their IQs. Inferiority is no respecter of intellectual capacity.

I’ll bet you thought I was just name-dropping when I typed the name CHARLIE KAUFMAN, FAMOUS MOVIE MAKER. PERSONAL FRIEND O’ MINE! I prob’ly was. Some of you people won’t read anything that isn’t about somebody loudly successful, rich and well loved, and you frequently read it because you hope this wonderful person has just teetered off his throne and splashed into the boring smelly loveless shit that you have to suffer every empty day of your teensy little lives, admit it. Caveat, it didn’t sound to me like Charlie’s rich, and it did sound to me like a lot of people didn’t get “Synechdoche, New York” On the other hand, he’s the only person whom I’ve ever told this movie idea, and I don’t even care what his agent’s phone number is. Nor do I care whether he ever makes this particular movie. He wanted a new kind of superhero, he said. Here’s what I suggested:

SUPERIORMAN! HE’S JUST THAT MUCH BETTER THAN YOU. NO MATTER HOW YOU TRY.

I can see Kelsey Grammer in this role, with his east coast preppy-like vocabulary and rich, deep mellifluous voice that sounds better than everybody else’s. Too bad he’s too old now. I’d match that voice to Tom Cruise, if he weren’t so damn short. I’d cast Laurence Fishburne, but... well, you know, he’s not our kind, even if he is taller than most of us. What about Liam Neeson? No, his nose is too big. Leonardo DiCaprio? Funny little guy, no. Then maybe Johnny Depp? I don’t know what’s the matter with him for sure, but he’s just not good enough for this role. Maybe he’s on drugs a lot, or something.

Come to think of it, maybe Charlie Kaufman wouldn’t be good enough to make a movie about a superhero who is hands down better than you, the public. No fantasy stuff like leaping tall buildings in a single bound; just, for example, getting ahead of you in traffic, or in the grocery line, getting that raise you hoped for, doing accurate math in his head, always having money for anything he wants, witty, suave, friendly to all, never having a flat tire, never getting angry at anything, eating AND enjoying all the right foods, no cavities, has even saved a life or two, better than you at hiking, camping, tennis, handball, picks the winning team and stocks with uncanny accuracy, is never stuck in the past mooning for good old music, romances, prices, this or that, in other words, a horrifying unfolding of perfection in all the areas you just might have the opportunity to fail at if you’re lucky.

To top it all off, Superiorman doesn’t commit suicide out of ennui at the end of this story. No, he’s the real thing, and if he weren’t on this planet, people wouldn’t secretly feel like chronic schmucks most of their days. Superiorman has many enemies, just as Jesus did.

Charlie chuffled thoughtfully at my idea. I just made “chuffle” up. Anyway, I’m taller than he is. I really am. But then, Laurence Fishburne is taller than I and that’s okay too. I ain’t prejudiced. You be same.

Hunter's Horse Funeral

2010-05-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

12:55 p.m. Saturday November 15 2008.

Been awhile since I kept up with this journal. Have been meaning to.

I wonder if this isn't the reason I woke up hoping it wasn't November 15th yet. Sweet dog-boy Hunter just breathed his last gasp in front of me.

I'd been puttering around with work and this and that. Suddenly I felt tremendously tired. I gave into it and went out to lie in the sunshine on the outdoor bedstuffs. As soon as I settled enough to begin a dreamy nap, the idea came to mind: go put some honey on Hunter's tongue. He'd had a chronic cough. The vet said "kennel cough," but I don't know. That was a long time ago.

This morning he wandered just off the property, to the other side of the fence to lie down. He'd been feeling poorly the last few days, and even barfed up his favorite meal, roast chicken I'd been taking him on a ride to get as a special treat. He hadn't done that before. He'd been gaining weight. But he'd lost it all in the last few days, harfing up his usual dog food and the canned stuff that fills both dogs with enthusiasm.

By 11-ish I checked on him under the tree by the fence; he'd pooped himself a little bit. That's fine, I thought, let him rest, nothing much of a mess; animals don't eat when they're ill, and they'll wander off alone to live or die.

A little while later he had staggered back around the fence, where I found him trying to wipe his poopy butt against a fencepost, very wearily. He could hardly stand on his feet. Oh dear, he'd felt a little better and tried to "come home." I got some warm water and suds and washed his dirty behind, like a big mother dog licking, and he liked it.

I picked him up and took him over to his outdoor dog-bed, next to Chase's, under the juniper bush in front of the house. He grumbled a little as I carried him, but realized I meant well and gruntled instead. I set him down on his bed, head in the bush-shade where his lifetime Great Pyrenees partner Chase was snoozing and tucked a blanket around him that we'd kept on the house bed for him to get dirty. He rested, breathing easily, no gasping, obviously enjoying the warm sunshine under the Special Blanket.

I looked out on him from time to time from the front window. Breath regular, comfortable. Around noon I treated the horses to carrots and did other little chores, keeping an eye on him. He'd raise his head now and then, as to get up and investigate, but I'd pet his head and tuck him back in the blanket: No "feeling better" now, buddy, you need to keep resting.

Then back to my computer; again came that unusual weariness, my attempt to nap and the message about putting honey on his tongue.

I got up and went into the house through the back door to get the honey jar, whatever the reason for it. As I reached for it, through the kitchen window I saw him opening his mouth. Uh oh. That's a death-gape, like the birds do. It looks like the silent cry of an infant. But it's a calling out for the relief of death. If I remember egyptology, they believed the soul "left through the mouth."

I stepped outside just as he'd attempted one more harf. I reclined next to him, cooing, and put the honey on his tongue. His tongue went limp. It seemed he died the instant I put the honey on it. I reclined there with my dog-buddy to see if he hadn't just gone into a deeper sleep (as I'd cooed to him earlier). I didn't want him to die.

But he did. My cooing wasn't heard any more. I got up knowing how much I'm going to miss that dog. It was 12:34 when I put the honey back on the kitchen shelf. He sighed out his last dog-spirit probably at 12:30 p.m.

I've laid quite a few pets and critters to rest by now, but this is the first time I've ever felt sad enough to cry; I did, looking around the place, knowing we won't be needing this dog-dish, that blanket, the little treats he'd stashed and buried here and there over the months, no snoozing together, no dirt on the bed, no hay brought in on muddy paws and fur, no barf on the floor, no "emergency" barking in the middle of the night, no nipping at the horses as they'd wake us on our outside bed with their snuffling noses, no chasing at their heels, no kitties loving him up, no diplomatic "cleaning up" around the catfood dishes, no nestling on the barn floor at horse feeding time, no expectant nose aimed eagerly at my dinner, no drinking out of the horse buckets, no rides into town all alert and important, no getting to know each other better and better... not even that still tail, which hadn't wagged but a little since we moved here last March.

...and he's left all his lifelong partners behind, the horses, kitties, Chase; that sweet, slightly hapless one-eyed Queensland mutt made the most shortlived friendship with an animal I've had, and was now the saddest. He just didn't want to live with us any more. He's left a big lonely space even where all the inconveniences of a sick dog were... they were sweeter than not having him here.

I've just checked to see if there's any sign of returning life, but his body has already grown cold, muscles turning stiff so soon, even in the sunshine, still under the warm blanket. Chase, "Big Fuzzy Dog" to me now, named that way after her sister was killed by the cougar, had been sitting watching the both of us while he died so promptly. She has moved away from his body, snoozing around the corner in the horse shed.

This too made me cry... he's left his animal family, the horses and Cats and dogs he grew up with. The animals are taking it better than I am.

II.

I scouted around for a place to bury Hunter. Must be near enough so Chase can keep the coyotes away from his grave -- and where things will grow from his remains, as with my beloved dog-of-my-life, Jolie, whose burial place grew peonies years ago. .

---3-ish. p.m. I decided it was better to put Hunter's body in the barn rather than leave him under his juniper bush snooze-place. for now. I got the barrow and picked his body up in the blanket and took him into the barn to lay on a pallet for a little wake for Catt and me, when she gets home.

Curiously, our handsome thoroughbred Clay and the two mares, Naughty and Midnight, nosed their way cautiously through the sliding barn door. I expected they hoped for a little hay, as they like to hang around there and nibble what falls off the hay delivery truck when it comes, so I forked out a little loose hay from the barn floor for them. They weren't interested. They were looking at Hunter's body in the barrow.

You want to see our dog? Yes? I pushed the barrow out so Clay could sniff Hunter, wrapped in his favorite blanket. Naughty and Midnight also gathered around. It was a bonafide animal wake, they'd surrounded the dog they grew up with. Harley the Quarterhorse and Big Sammy also circled the party of three, but wouldn't get close, not wanting a warning nip from the girls or Clay.

Solar, our dapple-white thoroughbred, was grazing in the upper corral. Well, why not... I wheeled the barrow into the corral; Solar sniffed the blanket carefully, then sniffed Hunter, then gave his whole body a tender grooming. That horse cleaned off Hunter's dirty nose, his eyes, licked his fur into place from end to end, while Sam and Harley stood watching close by. A few yards away the three others watched, their heads all leaned forward to watch their herdmate give their dog final respects. Solar sniffed and licked and tendered that dog from head to tail to feet like an animal funeral director from ancient times.

I left Solar to his tender ceremony and stepped over to Harley, who'd been circling anxiously, wanting to get close to the barrow containing his old dog buddy. A long time ago, while playing with him, Harley rolled over and accidentally caught Hunter's left eye with a hoof, leaving him blind. No hard feelings. And now for god's sakes, Harley had shed a tear! It dropped out of his eye; both eyes welled full up.

Solar took his time to finish, then he let Harley pay his respects. He sniffed the dog's body, maybe satisfied that it had been licked enough. As I wheeled Hunter's body out of that corral back toward the barn, all six horses gathered around the barrow. They loved that dog as much as we did.

Catt returned from her trip, did her crying too, and the following morning I buried Hunter's body in the arroyo some yards from their stall.

It was one of the most remarkable events I've ever witnessed, and I even stood at the end of a rainbow a couple of springtimes back...

I. Ebertfest Live! From My Notebook!

2010-05-17T22:30:00.000-07:00

(Reckon enough time has gone by to put this here now. Roger Ebert asked to use it for his Ebert Club news, which is a dirt-cheap $5 annual subscription for exclusive stuff. Check him and that out at www.rogerebert.com ; also check out Gracie, the star of this story, at http://etheriel.wordpress.com/ ...she made such a fun partner)

Below are certain "you are there" notes I wrote on the spot at Ebertfest. I didn't do too badly sight-typing them up for 'net use, but have since fixed a few things. One does not notice how many thoughts he thinks until he tries to write them all down at once.

I see Grace Wang has already used the word "lush" in describing the Southern Illinois terrain, where Ebertfest sprouts every spring. There’s no better choice. I drove a thousand miles from the northern New Mexico desert mountains to the lush flat wooded plowed expanses encircling Champaign-Urbana in April. It looks like the Steppes with more rain and better housing.

Speeding from Georgia O’Keefe’s old painting ground, the enormous sleeping rock creatures of mesa, butte, plateau, unconscious volcanoes, to the endlessly spreading primary greens and browns of Illinois was a slow, magnificent unfolding. I felt a pang when at dawn, the rear view mirror showed my mountains with my cozy nest receding behind me. But when you're looking forward to where you’re going, all is beautiful. If only you were there, hearing the accents change the deeper into the heartlands I sped, listening to the increase in religious and country music programs. By the time I reached Ebertfest, one of the hippest cultural fairs on the third bulb from the sun, the religious music had transformed from slick derivations of current pop styles to old time, if not backward, up-down white-people-oompah.

I hope these notes are accurate, considering the reputation I have to uphold. I've been a pro bono reporter now and then. When important local issues are at stake, being under an an editor who is sycophants with local bigwigs needing lynched can color one's journalistic integrity some. Some issues demand free citizenship.

Such as "50 Million Reasons to Find a Better Water Company," about the water leaking from the Calaveras County pipes. "It's enough to float the Enterprise," said an angry retired naval hydraulics expert. We trounced 'em. Another was "Shithead Kills Puppy with Pickup Truck," a self-explanatory headline.

Only one of the above stories is false. Young writers, remember when you're reporting an unconfirmed story to leave clues in your sentences -- such as "Duane Shithead (pr. SHIH-theed) ran over his girlfriend's puppy repeatedly until it was dead, dead, dead." Canny readers will catch on when they notice your departure from strict AP style. Still, "Torture and Dismemberment of tourists strictly prohibited" was not entirely a joke report, Calaveras County being headquarters for America’s two most heinous sex-torture murderers to date, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.

Blithering old coot, where was I? Oh. My notes from Ebertfest:

Dinner at the University of Illinois President's House, 4/21/10 5 p.m.

Well? So these are Illinois People, Land of Lincoln, Inventor of the Civil War, star of every penny. I'm alone, writing in the one room guests seem to be avoiding. Either I've made one of those instinctively lucky choices, or the guests peek in, see me, and shuttle their protruding wine glasses elsewhere.

After all, I'm dressed worse by far than the help. I could be eccentric, like the guy twirling around in his luminescent zoot suit in the dining room. There are still hay shards and horse-treat crumbs in my shorts pockets. The help tread through this room carrying trays of classy piles of expensive grub on their way through one of its three doors; from the adjoining rooms come multi-floral sounds of chatter from advanced primates in more ceremonial duds than mine.

You wouldn't hear a classier bouquet of polite conversations at Abe Lincoln's wake. Nor met people who have put more thought into what they're wearing. Now and then one woman or another has passed through this room and stopped to say "You look comfortable" -- using identical ironic-sounding lilts.

I too put a good deal of thought into what I'd be wearing: a shirt, dirty old sandals, shorts that could fall down if I'm not careful (pleased about that. Been losing weight) and a 25-year-old Banana Republic jungle vest which has yet to fall apart, despite all the functions I've attended, where it has served as a sort of office of amateur anthropology. It holds pens and notebooks and cigars and cards and notes from whom I've forgotten. I've worn it from when I was slim and muscular to thick and avuncular. My good deal of thought wound up: "wear this."

Jim Emerson showed up at the last function, a few weeks ago, in a somewhat clean t-shirt and jeans. I enjoyed that. I'll feel less like a specimen of Tonsorial Error if he shows up that way to this one.

I haven't spent any time in the Great Midwest since 1980. Coincidentally, I was touring with a band playing songs by Pink Floyd, whose 1982 movie we'll all be viewing in a couple hours. I've never seen it, but I'm on the critique panel. Roger figured I'll do well; he's got uncanny instincts, I hope.

These Illinoisans -- "Illinis" sounds foreign -- seem in comparison somewhat stiffer, physically, than the people of the Great American Desert to whom I've grown accustomed in detail over the years. This isn't a criticism. I've met Minnesotans who nearly subconsciously shuffle their feet from side to side whenever they're standing, a habit from the winter cold. Like tongues, whole bodies have accents.

Many of these people seem to walk unusually upright. There's a stride to their steps. Their spines seem more vertical than I see elsewhere.

Why do I think it's religious? By Jove, these are the descendants of independent Protestants, striding their ways proudly to the heads of congregations of pioneers, more equal in the eyes of the Lord than I. I wonder if I'll meet Randy Masters of Roger's blog. He's the kind of fellow I'd want on my side in a pinch. He's a religious Illinoisan. I'd conscript them all. They already stand up straight.

"How come you get to wear shorts and not long pants like all the rest of these people," mutters an aged woman who's just now paused in the doorway to have a look at me. That's probably what the other remarks about me looking comfortable meant.

"Rank," I quip. She doesn't crack a smile. She moves away with her protruding wine glass and I think... was that... resentment? A vestigial religious resentment for the unconformed? The Punks? Hip Hoppers? Hippies? Rockers and Mods? Folkies? Beats? Lost Generation? Bohemians? Roundheads? Cavaliers? And beyond, back to Stercutian Christians? Every period has its black sheep who dream their ways out from under flock and good shepherd.

Yep. Vestigial religious. Protestantism is more tenaciously vestigial than the human appendix, which one notices only when it's inflamed.

Perhaps my shorts have made me a victim of the ghost of religious persecution! Woops, I hear Chaz speaking outside on the veranda, where I hobnobbed with the musicians about an hour ago. I'm missing something.

I've found a place out of the way at an outside door to view Chaz and Roger and the ceremony from the rear. That same lady, dressed in her tasteful powder blue pants suit, also found me. She says "God, you were so brave, sitting in that little room all by yourself." So she wasn't entirely resentful. Well, some of us do reconcile our inflamed religious appendixes sooner or later.

Watching and listening. I'm too late to find a place in the eager crowd. It's a granfalloon, as next-door Indiana neighbor Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. might classify it.

It's a benevolent granfalloon among granfalloons, as the featured participants are all dreamers of one kind or another. They're engaged in creating public dreams called movies, or, in one way or another, are builders of the fragile yet powerful tower of comprehensible babble that has no name, but appears in our time as a thing we call vaguely the film industry.

I wander behind the festivity across the lawn to see if I can't get a better view. Surveying the audience, a face stands out like the intrusion of some mythical oriental princess into our time and space and century... smiling right at me. Does she know me?

It's a breathtaking split second. It's Grace Wang, one of Roger's Far-Flung Correspondents! She is gorgeous combined with the evening sunshine. Smiling broadly, I give her Roger's "Thumbs Up" to let her know I've recognized her, too. This will be the first time we've met. With a vision like that, surely we'll be friends.

II. The Rest of the Story; You Are Still Here.

(Screw the notes. I'll just write what I remember.)

Grace and I did make friends. More like playmates, minus the connotations of the Hugh Hefnerist branch of Christendom. Were I not married, more would still be taboo to me: Grace is a first cousin. Like little first cousins, I was beaming proud to get to sit next to her in the theater and at dinner.

All these strangers feel so familiar. Roger would be, from his decades of visitations by TV; but we'd agreed in a chat there's another kinship besides. There are lots of first cousins here, second cousins, nobody further out than third cousin, even those who stopped me to compliment my antics on the Pink Floyd flick panel ("A lotta screamin' and yellin' and ya can't tell what the hell they’re hollerin’ about," quoting an old bandmate's 80-something grampaw about rock music). According to evolutionary thought, China-born Grace is a fifteenth cousin by blood. But by Law of Heart she's a favorite first cousin. I just know.

So too all the Far-Flung Correspondents who write reviews for Roger's Journal: Filipino Michael Mirasol, Pakistani Omer Mozzafar (only lately of Chicago in geological terms), Korean Seongyong Cho, Turkish Ali Arikan, Egyptian Wael Khairy, Mexican Gerardo Valero, all first cousins with too too much to catch up on. Too little time with each. We agreed we needed another week. Grace said wouldn't it be wonderful to wake up and do this every day?

So too with Chaz, Charlie Kaufman ("Synecdoche New York"), James Mattern ("Trucker"), Michelle Monaghan (ditto, what a radiant soul), Jennifer Burns ("Vincent: A Life In Color", who wants me to wear a kilt) Vincent of the zoot suits himself, Barbet Schroeder ("Barfly"), Yojiro Takita ("Departures," which made just about everybody tear up, weep, sob, me too, until I turned to Grace who was sobbing and chuckled about the lot of us, whole theater a-blubber; she hit me and whispered "you're heartless!"), and those whose names I didn't know.

All cousins, all too too much to catch up on. A few minutes here and there, and some just seconds. I've still got "Jake and Jeffrey" mentally bookmarked to continue with Charlie Kaufman one day. Yojiro Takita, who doesn't speak much English, traded bows with me. No no, I'M the one to bow to someone this brilliant, don't bow back! I can't make people cry like that! So I bowed some more. Again he bowed back. This happened at several encounters. Me and Obama, eh? With Schroeder, we just laughed each time we met. He speaks excellent English, but that's the only language I could come up with.

One rarely loves every one of his relatives. Ebertfest came very close to a perfect family reunion for me. Therefore I mustn't linger on a lone jackass. No, no describing how s/he grew crusty with studied sardonics, contrived superiority and arrogance characteristic of someone secretly sinking like a stone in his or her own 100-weight oil. Nay. Nor reflect that his or her movie was in serious need of an enema, no matter what good things people said about it. Nor will polite Protestant manners permit my describing the monotonous look on his or her face telegraphing "this film festival won't help me at all" continually to anyone who can read Remorse Code.

Nay. Instead I shall name Pat Calahan of Jon's Pipe Shop on West Green Street, a couple blocks from the Illini Hotel where we stayed. Pat spied my Ebertfest badge, sold me the thinkin' cigars a writer needs and gave me a free lighter. A free lighter! That's the spirit Roger Ebert imparts to this town, cutting through the noise of drunken freshmen co-eds wowing themselves by not barfing on the streets. Mostly.

Nay, no nattering nabob of negativity here. The theme of every movie Roger picked, and the reality of all on the panels involved in film making, was: keep hoping even when it hurts like hell. Lee Isaac Chung completed the magnificent "Munyrangabo" in 11 days, hell and high water. James Mattern shot "Trucker," with the best acting ensemble I've ever seen, in 19 days ("When's your next movie," I asked. "Did you bring your checkbook?" He grinned). Jennifer Burns made "Vincent" on five credit cards. Greg Kohs, charming ingenuous creator of "Song Sung Blue" was keeping his documentary star Claire's hopes alive even on the panel discussion -- where she took the lot of us by storm, belting out two Patsy Cline tunes and an emotional show-stopper "Dancing Queen" for all she was worth, live in person after the movie. That Roger knows how to bring down a house, pulling a stunt like that.

Oh, how could I have neglected to mention Jenny Lund, one of the team who made “Munyurangabo?” Heck. You all need to see it. It’s about a young Hutu and his Tutsi friend in Rwanda – these people have been at each other’s throats for many generations up to now. It’s the first time a poem, most of which bores me to tears, has made tears well up in my eyes. And everybody else’s. Jenny was on a panel called “Getting the Damn Thing Made.” Her first words were “in the interests of full disclosure, I need to tell you all that I’m not rich. I live in a small apartment in New York City hoping to meet my rent month after month.” We had a great big hug. Their next film, if they can scrape the resources together, will be a whole poem.

These people have hurt like hell, kept hoping and doing, and are getting there step by sometimes excruciating step, producing spectacular dramatic successes on little budgets. The least liked film in the fest, according to audience and panel remarks, was the most expensive: Coppola's zillion buck "Apocalypse Now Redux." The better part of the quorum agreed it was a good thing that they'd removed certain scenes now re-inserted.

Of course I've missed a lot. But as I am presently fairly unimportant, few will feel neglected, and I've got too much other work to do.

"Ol' Ebert, he sure knows how to pick 'em," I joked to Roger sitting in his theater box, using my vestigial Ohiya accent. For picking people as well, he selected a bunch of relatives I didn't know I had -- with stranger accents than you hear on the farm, goats included.

Last I left Ohiya, "Rodan," "Sinbad" and "Red Line 7000" were on at the picture show. Things have gotten classier since then. I wonder just how much Roger Ebert had to do with that. I suspicion it's considerable. Governors don't go declaring whole days with your name on them for nothing. From now on, April 21st is Roger Ebert Day throughout Illinois and in quite a few hearts.

Back to New Mexico and its slow-breathing mountains I zoomed, watching the terrain transform in reverse now, from flat lush green to craggy ancient lava and juniper. Hint to weary travelers, energized by some business as this: don't forget to turn in your hotel key, which I forgot to do. Also, pay attention to what route you're on. It was dumb luck that route 57 out of Champaign is a lot faster than route 55, which I'd meant to take until elan about what I'd been through all week overrode stopping for a map. One cares less where he is going when he has fully enjoyed where he has been.

Amen.

Well? Now what?

2010-05-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

Rats. I finally came back here after some years forgotten, and see I can't edit any of this stuff. Was using this blog mostly to store things I was working on. CDs aren't so reliable after all, the quality of floppies dropped, and I've had to nuke my HD more than once. So valuable, valuable works in progress have been lost by the megabyte. But some's still here, and some of that's still in nasty need of work.

Never have finished the true-life story of shoveling shit and 15-years-piled-up feces out of old Mrs. Doty's house. Maybe will some time. It's still fresh in my mind that people in corporate environments behave exactly as the groups of cockroaches did that day. Nobody could follow the "coincidences" story, too twisty. Still thinking about it.

I see a Melissa Ferrick booster linked my story; that's how I re-discovered this blog a couple days back. Anyway, that was a great night, and in gently shaking her hand, I felt a buzz of holy electricity. We became hug-pals ever after. Plus, learned a clever, clever, clever way to use the 'net to make money after all. But as usual, you have to be really, really, really good at what you do. Melissa's that way. A fuggin' fire ant of a performer, if you've ever observed a fire ant trying to kill you single-mandibly.

Hehpsehboah is as strange and lovable as ever. Have lost touch with her, though. She and her unusual talents appear to have been hijacked by my least favorite kind of people, new-age enterprisers. Haven't heard from the Man from Xebos, either. He said we wouldn't. Also, I see the Danish Government has yet to return my share of the Jutland Peninsula to me, even though I had Viking ancestors there.

Don't write for a CD of my music, I took my production studio down 2 years ago and have yet to put it back together. Satisfying to get a fan-letter about "The Yum Yum Tree" not too long ago, though. It was on the radio 20 years back and I couldn't remember the lyrics, but the fan did. Not too bad! I heard they still play it annually in Mendocino County, CA, but "Yum Yum" isn't about marijuana, not in particular.

Am not blogging about movies, I shall leave it to Roger Ebert's new troupe of Far-Flung Correspondents, all of whom are a) lovable b)smart c) better at it than I. Put your URLs here, guys. And also, go to

www.rogerebert.com -- I know his URL is different, but this one werks fer me.

What else by way of self-advertising, for what teleological reason? Let's see...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd9mTU-9tFw&feature=related (4 parts. My voice was boomy in reality, apparently they turned it down in the mix)

http://www.ebertfest.com/guests.html

That's Roger Ebert's Annual Ebertfest film festival, this year specializing in movies that made THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE CRY.

http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/bios.html?id=83&year=2010

That's the world-famous 62nd Annual Conference on World Affairs. Smart Experts, Big Fun.
http://www.michaelmirasol.com/flipcritic/2010/05/ebertfest-day-3.html

Michael, foreign film critic. Helluva guy. Good chat.

Tell ya what, that Roger Ebert is an even nicer fella in person than he appeared to be on TV. He gets lots of awards for this and that, but I'm nominating him for "America's Most Lovable Man."

Just this a.m. I broke down and joined Twitter.com, too. tomdark9, it is. I think.

So... onward. XOXOXOX

What Happened with Carolyn Cassady

2007-01-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

tom dark thoughts

What Happened with Carolyn Cassady

Hello, I'm Tom Dark, gigolo of letters. This joke will explain itself shortly. I'm also a self-trained failure.

How good a failure? Hard to judge. I'm too impatient for history to do that, and besides, I'll be dead, or it wouldn't be history.

As mighty a failure as Proust? No way. How about Melville? Well, when five readings of MOBY DICK over the years still wets my eyes right from "Call me Ishmael," for God's Eternal Sakes, how can you be a decent failure when you can't write something as immortal as that? And me 'way past thirty. Also, Melville had a job where he could daydream and scrawl things down. They don't let you do that now. All that obvious thinking makes people nervous anymore. I haven't got a job anyway. Starving. Sort of.

Twain would have been a failure had he not married rich. Ambrose Bierce probably snuck off to Mexico because he was out of money and didn't want to die surrounded by all that tongue-clucking. That's how it goes for us failures, great and small. I'm too humble to say I'm a great failure, too proud to content myself with small failings.

My biggest failure to date is called "the 'zine," which I conceived and coined in 1985. I commandeered a somewhat immature engineer in Wisconsin to print it up on his copy machine, using whatever he liked out of my letters. He'd print up 250 copies a month. I'd stick them in a news stall at Sather Gate, UC Berkeley. Kids snapped them up and started imitating them right away, eventually, into the millions. I haven't checked a dictionary to see if "'zine" is now listed as a word. Anyway I expected it'd be imitated, and there we have it.

My second biggest failure also has a name, "African Avatars and the Secret of Fatima," for which I got paid $200 in 2001. In it I prophesied that Jesus may or may not have returned already, and in either case, he's probably black. This news went world-wide republished in various languages in various MAGA'zines and internet sites, and according to the ex-Prime Minister of Congo/Brazzaville, in "every church in the Congo." 6 years later I'm still getting phone calls about it. Just yesterday, in fact. Thanks for the $200, Duncan. The rest of you can go shove, thankya Jesus.

Hard to place where my failed love-letter affair with Carolyn Cassady lies in this enumeration. In the throes of her infatuation, I learned that I'm a better writer than Jack Kerouac Himself. She never much cared for his stuff anyhow, she said. Thankya Jesus again. Here's the story.

Us failures, lacking literary resources like unto the homeless "with nowhere to lay their heads," must paw through the garbage cans of society's castoff creativity and peek through the peepholes of forgotten places for our meager material. Sometimes we stumble upon dust-covered baubles to shine and sell. In this case it was an old motorcycle derelict named Stanley.

In spring of 2002 Stanley, scrawny, straggle-bearded, snaggletoothed, and on social security brought me a few snarled plastic bags full of cassettes he'd been recording for 15 years. They'd been suffering Tucson's sizzling summer heat in his beat-up one-room trailer near the dry wash in a dusty trailer park containing poverty-stricken teenage thieves.

The bags of cassettes comprised Stanley's life story. He wanted to get them down on paper and call the book "Knucklehead Tales," named after the true love of his life, an ancient Harley Davidson "Knucklehead" motorcycle which had taken him on every life's adventure, even the one where he figured out how to kill the rats coming out of his toilet in Oregon. The bike was called a Knucklehead because one would have to be a knucklehead to ride one, which Stanley and his galfriend did, all around the West, for years.

Perfect. I took the job.

One day Stanley, on tape, related a tale where he'd worked as an odd-jobber for a bookshop in Los Gatos, California. At this bookshop worked a woman named Carolyn Cassady.

It was a funny thing: Stanley had only recently read ON THE ROAD for the first time, at a nudist commune in Sonoma County, up to the north. Here now was "Camille," from that very book, in person. Nightly at dinner, Stanley said, Camille would tell her tales of Jack Kerouac and her husband Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty. She related having an affair with Jack under Neal's nose -- rather, over Neal's head, as Jack lived in their attic in those days.

What was the name of that book Carolyn was writing, Stanley wondered on tape. "Heart"-something... "Heart"-something. Dammit, he couldn't remember. He wanted to remember. I shut off the tape and called him up to see if he had yet remembered. Nope, he couldn't, but he still wanted to remember.

He wanted to remember so much I checked the internet for "Carolyn Cassady." Maybe I could ask her. I read and read. Oh, so that's who Carolyn Cassady is.

Carolyn Cassady was the wife and lover of two American literary figures, and the friend of a number of others who, in something like a conspiracy of mass magic, changed the face of modern American literature and altered the course of an increasingly rigid, crustifying culture.

She married Neal Cassady and romanced with his closest friend, Jack Kerouac. She and Jack loved each other innocently until Kerouac's early death, which Carolyn put to Catholicism, not alcoholism (same diagnoses for her husband Neal, she wrote me). These days Kerouac's novels are required reading in school courses, cash-cows for "beat" scholars, and voluntary reading for imaginative teens. The magic is still in effect.

Carolyn Cassady loved Kerouac into literary reality, so I eventually told her. His fame 50 years later remains such that when I spoke his name to a 20-year-old at a local coffee shop, the young man, eager to show off, declaimed "Jack Kerouac wrote ON THE ROAD on a single roll of butcher's paper stuck in his typewriter!"

Thirty years before that afternoon and ten years before the young man was born, I’d one day got myself a roll of butcher's paper, hung it on a clothes hanger on the wall over my dormitory desk, and tucked the paper into my typewriter carriage. My brother Duncan had told me that this is what Jack Kerouac had done. Like Kerouac, I too would write in a stream of non-stop, natural, unfettered Consciousness, without having to so much as pause to put in a fresh sheet. Just let it roll.

Kerouac said he didn't use butcher's paper. Nor did I smoke marijuana when I wrote.

After I flirtatiously told her I was editing Carolyn's autobiography, a cute 17 year old girl at the local market checkout counter chirped to me one afternoon that she was now reading ON THE ROAD, on her own.

I found a website called Litkicks. People there seemed to know her. I posted an inquiry. Pretty quickly I got an e-mail from one Levi Asher with her e-mail address in it. Thank you, Levi. Pretty quickly I e-mailed Carolyn, and pretty quickly she e-mailed me back. Something funny going on, said my cosmic antennae. Better pay attention.

HEARTBEAT was the title of Carolyn's book that heart-something Stanley couldn't remember. By then it had long been the title of a movie based on her book, called Heartbeat, starring Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek. The movie failed at the U.S. box offices 20 years previous.

In a few exchanges Stanley was forgotten (not by me, I finished the job as always) and here arrived a solitary note saying "tell me about yourself."

It was a note from someone signing herself Cari, not Carolyn, and I heard a sort of murmur dipthong in that sentence somewhere. Full volume, it goes "tell me about yourself.. big boy..."

I took the bait. She seemed like a lovable lady, and something was up. Not sure what.

I couldn't possibly relate what-all is in the hundreds or thousand-some pages of correspondence that ensued between us. I'm tired to think about it four years later. Maybe scholars in beep-boop hats in the future will untangle it after our dusts are long dispersed among the dust of the world. I called them "love letters." I insisted on this characterization to the point that the coquettish Cari (I forget who gave her that nickname) returned to Carolyn, and the frequency of her "XOX's" at the close of each letter dropped to a single "x" now and then, and eventually just a "ta." So it goes.

One of the wiser things I'd done was politely decline an invitation to come live with her over there in England, where she had a couple of trailers joined together to make a house in a tidier park than Stanley's.

It was easy to be that wise. The invitation came within a week or two of our first correspondence, and around that time also came her confession that she'd had an affair with a fifty-something year old man, she in her seventies, making her "quite the envy among her women friends" for it. (I learned later that this man suffered from serious bouts of a disabling schizophrenia... we failures can be pretty good detectives, as few notice us.) Carolyn now loved me fully, writing me oaths to that effect.

Okay, so I'm being mashed by an 80 year old woman six thousand miles away who wants to cuddle. She's my mother's age. Fine. What else? What else funny is going on here?

I'd never read OFF THE ROAD, her version of the Beat Generation story, more or less. I bought a copy. I couldn't put it down. I excused myself from all Thanksgiving dinner invitations to spend several days doing nothing but read it. I liked it better than ON THE ROAD, which, like Stanley, I came across later in life. By then I'd had sufficient streaming monologues going on in my own head about where I'd been and where I'd be going. For this reason I found a monologue about some doped-up young men speeding from one hang-around to the next decades ago a little lacking in urgency.

And I, like my pal Dee to whom I then passed my copy of OFF THE ROAD, wondered how and why this classy American middle class woman got mixed up with that lot in the first place.

Dee is a constant reader who was unfamiliar with the Beat Generation and all its literature. Not so much as a poem by anybody in a sweatshirt and beret. Her favorite books just then happened to be the Harry Potter books, which, Carolyn told me, were agented by her own agent.

Dee couldn't put OFF THE ROAD down, either. Returning it in awhile, she said, "this was really great, Tom, but who are those JERKS?" She meant the giants Kerouac, Cassady, and the sometimes Ginsberg as Carolyn had impassively depicted them. Dee wanted to know who Carolyn really was, how she got mixed up with them, and why.

Bingo. The "something funny" feeling rang a ding.

Failures like me stick to the classics and the seeming obscure, but Dee is a world of readers. She loves the Harry Potter books, all 800 million copies of 'em. There is much painful in OFF THE ROAD; we both felt the wrench of our guts as Neal and Jack and Ginsberg did one damned puerile thing after another in Carolyn's sight, and Dee and me and we-all would like to know how that lady came to put up with it. So too wondered the several others who waited for Dee to finish reading.
There are no easy answers. All this is very important in terms of literary study -- which over the generations always proves out over the pop psychological explanations of the day (did I just prophesy again?). Carolyn herself was sick to death of the Beat Generation this and Beat Generation that. Yet somewhere on this planet every few minutes someone is still reading a Kerouac novel, and perhaps every few days or so, someone's reading Neal's own unfinished autobiography, THE FIRST THIRD.

Neal died shortly after Carolyn finally rid herself of him. He'd lost his most important personal mooring. In awhile, the love-play in our letters had me concluding it's unlikely Jack would have had the inner strength to pursue and complete ON THE ROAD without his own affair with this lady, who was now in her eighties and mashing me with divine expressions of cuddle-love. She made me want to write. How did this beat-stuff happen and spread as it has? We'd better start from the beginning: Carolyn Cassady-nee-Robinson's own self-written story. The world needs to know.

II

Carolyn began writing her autobiography to me. By Jove, I'd talked her into it -- her life apart from Jack and Neal and who-all created the Beats myth and later the Hippies myth and even the Slackers myth if by proxy. Let's have at it, then, and this time without the Loretta Young dress. Let's have the story of the truly naked lady beneath it.

OFF THE ROAD wasn't Carolyn's autobiography. It comprises a report she made of life with Neal and Jack and sometimes Ginsberg, trying to anchor things down and raise children like a normal, decent middle class mom. It was the fifties; reading it and its flowing, crinoline style, I imagined her wearing the kind of dresses Loretta Young had on in her fifties television show.

Every mom was classy like that in those days, mine too. Every classy mom deserved a nice house, her own car for toting us kids around, a nice suburban or country neighborhood, and a dad who cheerfully provided all this, having fun working for a living, if grim now and then. It wasn't so hard to do in the nineteen-fifties (and hey, even the poor people weren't doing all that badly in those mythical good old days). For that, her account provides a sometimes breathtaking tension. Its present-moments as depicted -- Neal with a naked trio in her bed, she and Jack smooching while Neal's out philandering somewhere, ostensibly working, Ginsberg orally sexing Neal in the house with the KIDS around, everybody stoned and drugged and so forth -- all this leaves the reader naturally asking "why?" And why put up with it? Why not jail for all 'round and an easy divorce against Neal? Isn't that where the irresponsible bastards belonged? Carolyn's replies, by book, or in our correspondence, weren't satisfactory.

They are equally unsatisfactory in a most curious tale of her life long before having been heart-hijacked in Denver by expert car thief and cocksman Cassady. During the War (this means World War Two, for those who have forgotten), Carolyn was corralled and becaptived by a well-born psychotic murderer whom her parents wanted her to marry. How, how, could she not have got away from him? It is a mystery even her friends, who read the story as she'd earlier fictionalized it, could not understand.

Neither could the two hundred fifty pound boss I had, with the Marines bulldog tattoo, where I was working at the time, to whom I related the story. Hell of a story! It captured the attention of even a big bruiser like him.

She'd somehow go lurching into the grasp of a psycho like that, rather the same way she let the "Cowboy Angel" lasso her life some years later. Well? How? Could it have anything to do with the time she was kidnapped at age five? Don't know, but let the reader decide. So far, with true tales like this, here was a practical winner of a book outpacing ON THE ROAD and OFF THE ROAD both.

Sadly, I must break a moment and mention my friend Merci, as her astute quip one afternoon proved worthier than all the words I have so far committed to this tale.

Merci is an hundred years old now. I visit her frequently. She's had quite a life. The great dancer Bo Jangles danced at the head of her wedding procession, two miles down Fifth Avenue, New York city; in that procession were celebrities dancing along in cheery vaudeville steps "whose names you'd know even today," she told me, still wary of name-dropping.

James Thurber put the very first copy of The New Yorker magazine in her hands as a birthday present. Merci to this day can't decide whether she liked Dorothy Parker or not, who was also in the gang along with characters with wonderful nicknames like "Skeets." She appeared on the front cover of the New York Herald, hiding in a big champagne slipper onstage during a police raid of the place for "public lewdness." She was a dancer, and her then-perfect body was sculpted by a famous sculptor, the statues of which stand today in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Or is the Guggenheim? She can't recall.

One day while I was working -- or rather, love-battling -- on Carolyn's new work, I brought Merci a copy of OFF THE ROAD.

"What's this," she asked. I told her.

She read the blurb on the back cover silently, then remarked "I can't believe this was the first time America had ever lost its innocence," referring to the blurb.

So, why did I bring it to her? She hadn't paid the Beat Generation much attention. She was marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in those days, and various other things. I've always brought her my clients, in person where possible. I've always come away with a few words about them from her that sized the whole situation up unerringly.

Carolyn is rewriting this book, I said. Before the lawsuit, Carolyn was already revising OFF THE ROAD, which had been on the market for years. She wanted to expand it by, well, quite a few pages.

"Why? She already has a book," Merci said. Merci had worked in the publishing business.

"I guess she didn't think this one was good enough."

"Well... there's a jackass in every parlor," Merci quipped, handing the book back to me. It's great to have a 100 year old around who has seniority to say such a thing about an 80 year old.

It was so. Carolyn proved to be the most stubborn creature I've ever encountered in either the human or animal kingdoms. She had the soul of a literary goddess and the ego of a jackass. I kept a sense of humor about it by often imagining the two of us boxing, me at 6'1" 200 pounds and she tiny at 83 by then, duking it out about equally in a ring.

Brevity was one issue, but essential. What publisher, and what audience, wants a book about what she had for lunch in 1947, as it were? OFF THE ROAD had its jackass sitdown parts as well, discussions on the newfound spirituality among them. It had undigested new-age dogma, regurgitated as it were, overriding the more poignant paragraphs about the emotional breaks occurring among themselves over these things.

Back to our love-letter correspondence, and autobiographical progress. Carolyn confessed things to me -- of the emotional order of a confession, which lovers do -- meant of themselves to be in this new work.

But now she wants to delete the bit about masturbating on a cushion as a toddler. And now she wants to cut the bit about being raped, or close enough to it, by her older brother one Sunday alone together in the fine upper middle class house. And the girlish daydreams with the girlfriends! Douglas Fairbanks may have been an early dream of the swashbuckling Neal, we don't know, but use it, it's charming! What girl hasn't masturbated? What girl hasn't been sullied by a boy? What girl has never had a dream-man? No, no, no! No! THIS is the good stuff. THIS is the unpolishable truth swishing beneath the crinoline skirt keeping up the chatty ladylike appearances at Sunday Brunch.

A good failure teaches by example, as taught in Catholic elementary school. So I'd write the increasingly taciturn stubborn Carolyn all about me in sheer candor. And anyway, she asked me to tell me about myself. So here I am, starving now. So there I am, embittered at my mother. And over here, t'other embarrassing thing, brag, or fact. The daily things. Out with it. Take the hint.

Well, by Jove, it seemed to do the trick. Maybe too much. She loosened up enough to put the childhood rape scene in the very introduction of the work, right where it didn't belong -- and with a homemade psychoanalysis (must finally use those college courses?) that this one unpleasant afternoon was the reason she remained frigid the rest of her life, until she was sixty-something years old.

Hold on there. Frigid? What about the big orgasm on that date with the Navy Boy before the war? How about the affairs while Neal was in prison? How 'bout the feeling of obligation to screw a man, just to be friendly?

(And isn't this pretty much what happened with women through the whole Beat Generation, Hippie Movement, Generation X, and whatever names we make up about human cultural behavior nowadays?)

Sigh. All this self analysis. Just tell the story, ma'am; but by now, I was tired and working for free.

I've skipped over this bit, as I must skip so much else. In the interim, the steady-selling OFF THE ROAD had been taken off the market by a cowardly publisher owing to a somewhat indefensible lawsuit by Kerouac's relatives, demanding money for Carolyn's use of Jack's letters to her... 14 years after it had been on the market. While Carolyn was blaming me for starving, her own rug had been pulled out from under her. I'd had a dream some months before then that she'd be facing destitution.

I told her I'd work for free. It was that important, and something, something would happen to make it work. We failures know an important work when we see one. Time wore on. By now I'm a goddam janitor. But I didn't want any other editing work.

After awhile, something happened. Walter Salles, acclaimed for his screenplay "The Motorcycle Diaries," was now screenwriting ON THE ROAD. Producer, the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, whose son had owned the movie rights for 18 years.

Success! Acclaim! Money money money! A tie-in with Carolyn's own story for use to advantage by the most successful literary agent on the whole planet!

I hear from Carolyn some more. She's "disengaged" this agent and rejected the publisher who'd take this now-oversize revision of OFF THE ROAD, minus Jack Kerouac's letters. She's fiddling around with some bozo with whom I can tell by now, she's infatuated, who probably thinks he's roped himself a cash cow.

And I learn the fact that I had been "disengaged" awhile back without knowing it. My "300 page rule of thumb" totally out of the question; the damned "chatty" thing had reached nearly 500 pages of chat by 1948. Even so, I said I'd pare it all down, an Augean thing to do for nothing. No, she's gone over it and made it more "chatty." After all this work trying to prevent a book that would otherwise earn the title, to quote my friend Ivey Brown, "Memoirs of an Old Lady." After all this time knowing the blunt stuff she wrote me about herself, and Cassady and Kerouac, needed to be told to the world... like a great big Beat Emetic.

All gone.

Editor for hire here.

NEXT FAILURE: BARNET KELLMAN TRULY "THE INDUSTRY EQUIVALENT OF A FRY COOK AT DENNEY'S"? FILM AT ELEVEN!

One Little, Two Little, Three Little Coincidences

2006-08-14T01:33:00.000-07:00

(Here follows, if you can follow it, an excerpt from my book. The topic is dreams, and this chapter relates them to coincidences. My aim is to tickle my willing and skeptical reader into conjuring up his own coincidences -- so as to consider the subject with the best possible implement of thought, which is his own experience. The rest of the book has the same intent.

I'm testing this draft out on my beloved gang of private readers, plus a few others; those mentioned here need to make sure I got their tales straight and whether they want their real names used.

Your reactions are valuable -- even certain jealous assholes who do their darnedest to hate whatever I write. It's a love thang. So far, Doris Colmes has been the biggest help. That's why I'm telling you all to read her book, THE IRON BUTTERFLY. It deserves more than the awards it got; it deserves to be read. Tom)

A Coincidental Reality

(Writing at rear left corner table, Shot-in-the-Dark Cafe, Tucson, Wednesday June 27 2007)

On the bus here I played goggle-eyes with a baby about a year old. This happened a few minutes ago. It went like this:

The cute little tyke stares fascinated as I raise and lower my sunglasses and pop my eyes at him. A lady behind me quips "He must think you're famous, the way he keeps looking and looking at you..."

A black man seated across the aisle looks up. He'd been intent on his copy of the Book of Revelation. He takes off his glasses and smiles at the lady. "I thought you looked like somebody famous! I don't wanna show my age, but you look like one of the stars from that old detective show... can't remember her name... was it 'Cagney and Lacey'?"

"The dark one or the light one?" asks the Lady.

"The light one."

"Yeah! I think so too," I chime in, smelling a coincidence. I didn't really know.

What was her name? A woman from behind also chimed in agreement and remembered half the actress' named, "Sharon... uh... Sharon..."

"Sharon Gless?" remembers the Lady.

"Yeah, Sharon Gless!" we all chime. Then the Woman says to the Black Man, "I thought you looked like the detective from that show!"

"Which one?"

"The black gentleman. The guy who played the black detective on that show."

She continues: "I knew him! He was in my graduating class in Minnesota!" What a surprise it was to see her old college classmate on TV, she reminisces. (It was Macalester College in St. Paul and the actor's name was Carl Lumbly.)

So. I'm on the bus, goggle-eyeing a Baby. Lady remarking about being famous. Black Man reading Revelation thinking the Lady looks like somebody famous. Woman behind him thinking Black Man looks like somebody famous from the same show, who was once a friend of hers. A little group of strangers now goggling with that dreamy feeling that accompanies coincidences.

A side-coincidence for me was the Black Man's reading the Book of Revelation. Yesterday on this same bus another man sat down to tell me he'd finally figured that book out. It's about the End of the World, he'd decided.

Lots of people are quietly yearning for the End of the World. Lots of funny-you-should-mention-that meetings to be had when about a third of the people around you are worrying about the End of the World. But the Baby on this Bus burped up a pleasant little chain of therapeutic thoughts instead. Much nicer than more conversations about forebodings of doom.

I stop at the newsstand for a cigar. For the first time in eight years of patronage here I have only a fifty dollar bill, a bother. I hope they'll break it for a three-buck cigar.

For the first time in eight years of patronage here, the young man ahead of me hands the counterman a hundred dollar bill for a packet of Bugler tobacco and some rolling papers. So now they haven't enough change left for me.

A "wouldn't ya know it" coincidence... still, there's that little dreamy feeling.

Five funny little coincidences in about 15 minutes. The fifth was that I'd bought my cigar to ruminate over an espresso and work on this unruly chapter about coincidences. Here I am.

Heady Stuff

Does perceiving dreamy patterns in coincidental events mean you're crazy? Science currently says yes, it does. You've got "apophenia." You may be creative, maybe, but doomed to psychosis and forebodings of doom if they can't fix you. You are locked in an obsessive struggle to create meanings where there are none. There are pills for this.

On the other hand, the fun of coincidences may be an antidote for the joylessness officially instituted by Science, mythologized in the Darwin craze 150 years ago. Science holds that this universe, from the tiniest whizzing particles to the deepest black holes, is entirely meaningless. Shit just happens and so it goes; avoid apophenia.

The late famous science writer Carl Sagan typed sentences like "The great Greek works of art are all meaningless" and "The only thing 'infinite' is man's capability for self-delusion." Not long before he died, Sagan confessed he was stoned on pot when he wrote those things, as well as just about everything else he wrote. No coincidence that I wasn't stoned when reading this blandly eerie stuff, nor am I now.

Once upon a time, people didn't think coincidences were meaningless or doomed them to crazy -- although sometimes they thought a coincidence spelled out their deaths. They ran whole countries which lasted for thousands of years, finding meaning in coincidental events all the way. Interpretations of those events were used in crucial decisions affecting whole nations.

Those coincidences were called "omens." Herodotus' HISTORIES reports lots of them, all "coming true," ironically or otherwise. Ancient Egyptian stories too.

Or take Homer's ODYSSEY: the principle characters have an argument; coincidentally two eagles fly into the room and squabble between themselves, then fly away. The wise man of the group interprets the coincidence correctly. The foolish man scorns this wisdom and eventually gets killed. Lesson? Pay attention to coincidences.

In those wildly contrasting days, people relied on intuition of necessity. A priest who read omens wrong could be set on fire and dragged to his death before the whole village as a legal remedy. Omens were everywhere, not merely listed in a woo-woo book to be held responsible for being wrong or right. Intuitions had to be accurate, as life in those brutal times often depended upon it.

Coincidental events ebb and flow throughout any ordinary day. A run-of-the-mill coincidence, as above, is an omen just big enough to surprise somebody paying attention to it. An omen is a coincidence big enough to rivet the attentions of whole groups of people at once. Nightly dreams are grouped in coincidental, that is, associatively significant, ways.

Although it has long been too confused with "Truth," Christianity puts this same kind of coincidental character at the core of its stories. A cock crowed thrice, goes the story, when Peter denied knowing the man who'd been arrested by Roman guards, just as Jesus said he would, then a cock would crow thrice. When this man Peter denied he knew then died on the cross, so reports went, the whole afternoon went dark and an earthquake tore the synagogue curtain in two. What were the odds of a man dying on a cross, an unexplainable gloom, and an earthquake ominously destroying the Holy of Holies of a temple happening all in the same hour on the same day in what we now call 33 or so AD? People have been tortured to death for not believing this coincidence.

That's probably about when coincidences stopped being fun. Coincidences that yanked attention away from Official Truth were declared witchcraft. Even without the intrusion of thumbscrews and hot tongs, however, what organized science might be made from coincidences called "omens" is too prone to knotty tangling anyhow. A tidy list of what's a "significant coincidence" can be no handier than a manual on how to herd cats. Cats and thoughts alike are organized, all right, but rarely in a straight line. Until that's understood, we're prone to straight-line superstitions.

We're not out of the woods of superstition yet. I read that the last arrest in Christendom under laws against "witchcraft" was in England in 1944. A woman who'd coincidentally determined a government top secret by using a Ouija board was jailed. In the meantime, governments have for decades been experimenting with how to ferret out each others' secrets by... witchcraft.

Note that in this lecture I've avoided using the term "synchronicity."

A Little Demonstration Here and Now

Each of my days from dawn to dusk is peppered and spiced with tangy, energy-emitting coincidences! They are filled with a sparkling, mysterious numinosity! Yours can be too! I'm teasing.

We all have read mighty stories of huge coincidences, such as not getting on a plane that crashed -- in fact, an old rock and roller I toured with has one of those; he stayed behind to do his laundry instead of getting on the plane to the next gig with Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, et al. But these stories just drive us goggle-eyed without illuminating much of anything.

I've deleted a previous story about going on a music tour with that man, which itself produced a chain of impressive coincidences one might enter in a contest. Instead, let's experiment. Let's pay attention to coincidences here and now, today.

"Today" is August 4, 2006. I've decided to count coincidences as they happen at my computer.

It's 4 p.m. I've been answering e-mails for about an hour now. One from a stranger this moment. I'll copy and paste part of it here: it says "Tell the LORD JESUS to come into your life and tell him the areas you want him to effect a change. I have no excuse for not loving you because Christian love is not a feeling but a decision to act in the best interest of others."

I don't know the sender, but I recognize the other dozen e-mail addresses to which this sermon has been copied. Each of them were contributors to "The Ferrick List," an e-mail fan club for boosting a highly gifted singer/songwriter named Melissa Ferrick. I knew and loved every one of the people whose addresses were now being sent to me in an anonymous squeeb about love and Christ. That was five years ago. This anonymous proselytizer has only now found them.

Coincidence one, I wrote Melissa Ferrick a private letter just yesterday for the first time in 2 years. I hadn't thought of Melissa, or any of those fans I loved playing with by e-mail, in about that long. Without adding a lengthy explanation why, my e-mail wouldn't likely have been intercepted and spam-botted. Just now a Christian is e-mailing me Melissa's fan club addresses five years old; it's like a little electronic homecoming.

Coincidence two, it so happens I've lately been reviewing the New Testament and various kinds of fundamentalist Christian literature. The anonymous sender's I-love-you-whoever-you-are messages fits the topic. I've been thinking that people who force themselves to act out certain sayings of Jesus, not even knowing the people they claim to love, are a little crazy. It reminded me of Simeon Toko's quip about our times, "I am crazy, you are crazy, but everyone else is even crazier!" There's a good reason Simeon Toko's quip was right at hand. Coming up.

Coincidence three: the e-mail I'd answered just before opening this one was from another stranger, writing all about Christ's Second Coming, which many thought was Simeon Toko. It was forwarded to me earlier today from an English psychic, who had read my article about Toko five years ago.

While I was playing with the Melissa Ferrick Fan Club I was also writing that article, "African Avatars and the Secret of Fatima," which was has been dribbling worldwide ever since. I'd heard from Doctors, Psychiatrists, politicians (even the ex-PM of Congo/Brazzaville) and others about it. Many people believed that this church choir leader, Simeon Toko of Angola, was indeed Christ returned. He protested that he wasn't. During breaks from writing that article, I played with the Melissa Ferrick e-list.

Is that four coincidences? Ferrick Fans and Toko Fans at once, now coming back in a little bouquet after five years?

The writer who had contacted me through my English psychic friend had decided that because I'd written that article, I was a Light Being, an Angel. Between the lines of love and light and flattery he was looking to get in on the deal. He seemed crazy. On the other hand, the Tokoists had named me as one of the chosen, or Elite of God. That's pretty close to being a Light Being Angel too.

Coincidence number five, I guess.

I replied to my psychic friend: Toko is crazy, we are crazy, but my ambitious new supplicant is even crazier. That makes six funny little coincidences, doesn't it.

Melissa Ferrick has musical cult-idol status. That's a fun thing. Religious cults maybe not so, particularly when God starts "instructing" believers to to kill people or themselves. However, the cult founded by Simeon Toko is also a musical cult -- it is an organization of spiritual singers meant to spread the Christian gospels worldwide.

So, five years ago, I was writing about a musical religious cult while playing with members of a musical music cult. Is this seven coincidences now?

Surely, by association, one could trace any seemingly isolated string of events all the way back to Adam and Eve (about whom I've also been reading) and beyond. Yet, the point of doing so could get lost in a fog of numinous ga-ga! The reader of that Never Ending Story might go a-goggling with numinosity at the vast, oceanic expanses of synchronicity.

Numinous Jung

"Numinous" means tinged with the supernatural. Pioneer Freudian psychologist Karl Jung popularized the term to the degree it ever has been popular. His works also popularized the term "synchronicity" to the point that lots of people who use it don't even know what it means.

Jung warned against numinosity. In the same way, ancient Christian monks prayed not to be "caught up in the spirit" during their fervent meditations. They feared a supernatural presence might take them to where they would not return.

Jung's now-pop term, "synchronicity," narrowed the idea of encounters with coincidence down to the possibility of telepathy, invisible radio-like communications. This created more problems than it solved, so that seeing too much meaning in ordinary coincidences can get you labeled "schizophrenic," if not apophenic and ready for the doom-bin. It's little different from ancient renderings of acceptable omens versus the devil at work, screwing up your soul with the wrong kinds of meaningful coincidences.

Whoa! Coincidence number 8! I just now flipped to a website to brush up on Jung a little; my thumb inadvertently thumped a wrong key. I'm sitting here looking at the name "Paul Richard," the name of the teenager whose death eventually prompted this book. I haven't any idea how this site appeared. I'm on a page about the Manson Family. No, I repeat, no idea how I got here.

"Paul Richard" was the name given the unborn baby murdered in infamous Manson Family killings of 1969, the same year of my best pal Paul's first suicide attempt (see chapter one). Paul was enthusiastic about Jung and in fact introduced me to Jung's works.

So, here I've just been writing about a religious cult whose members believe their founder was Jesus Christ returned. They thought "Man-son" meant "The son of Man." Manson, too, hoped to be a musical star, the story goes. This is an eerie coincidence, all right.

Wo! And NOW, here's an e-mail from my friend Ben in Australia! He tells me I write like Jung! This also "out of the blue," I haven't heard from Ben in maybe a year! A friendly long-time-no-hear note. Is this ten coincidences now, or eleven?

Eleven or twelve: in desultorily re-reading SETH SPEAKS this morning I got to the chapter addressing Jung for the first time. (Chapter 13, session 555). Jane Roberts' Great Muse, Seth, also speaks of coincidences, if sparely.

I think I'll quit trying to count. Numinosity has by now made it an astonishing coincidence that when I tap my fingers on this keyboard, whole sentences come out! I could go supernatural. Yow!

Alors! (don't say "alors," something French will show up) Darn! This very moment, dear reader (6:48 p.m. 8-4-06), I've checked my e-mail yet again. During the few minutes typing the above came a manuscript rebutting Jungian theories applied to Shakespeare. I hadn't been expecting it. An hour ago, in between these sentences, I called my client who wrote this essay. I'd told tell him not to send it for a week or so. But he sent it while I was lolling around with these instant coincidences about Jung.

Oh my god! It's 6:48 p.m. on 8/4/6! 8/4/6 is 6:48 backwards! Help, Jung! Don't let my anima swallow me up in ze big vagina dentata! Drizzen, drizzen, drazzen, drone! Time for zis one to go have an espresso!

Later This Evening

(9:26 p.m., August 4, 2006) I've now returned from the coffee shop; took the bus there and walked back. The name of the coffee shop is "Shot in the Dark Cafe," I'm "Tom in the Dark Cafe" according to a wag there named Sledge.

I've been coming here daily since March. Today was somewhere around the 180th day in a row that the cream pitcher was empty when I got to it for my espresso. No matter when I've showed up, even twice on the same day, the cream pitcher has always just been emptied by someone else.

A pretty and witty young barrista who wants to be called "Junkiepants" here refills it for me. I love her. I often try to make her laugh with strange-but-true stories. She thinks I'm Hannibal Lecter from those horror movies. "Ah, Clarice! How nice to see you," I say.

(ed. note: Junkiepants is real, and nowadays, viewable on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5_bHRlYxXw )

Thanks to a conversation with Junkiepants, I've been reviewing religious things these past two weeks. After sympathizing with her about a nutty customer who'd just been buzzing her that day, I began: "A very unusual friend of mine..."

"...all of your friends are unusual, Tom," Junkiepants poked. Why this love.

"...yeah I know. This one was especially unusual. He died in 1984. Before he died he said 'I'm crazy, you're crazy, but everyone else is even crazier.'" When I went home that day, I found e-mails about Simeon Toko for the first time in months, answered them, and decided I'd better read up on religion for awhile.

Junkiepants is just hanging around here tonight, her shift over. A young man she wants me to name "Fuckface" is also here with his guitar. Fuckface approves. I love the rest of these kids, too.

I'd thought of playing music with Fuckface this evening; he's in a folk-music learning phase, and I know lots of old folk songs. But I feel more like going home to work on this essay. Can't decide. The coin of coincidence flips: Fuckface's guitar strings are broken, banjo too, so no music. Writing, then? But the coin flips again: someone has money for strings. Music then. Junkiepants, Fuckface, Sledge and I take a walk around the corner to the music store.

I joke to Junkiepants. "Say, I'm making you famous again." I often relate her cleverisms to groups of friends.

"Seems you're making me famous every week," she retorts.

"That's right, every couple of weeks I try to think of a way to make you famous. That's because you're adorable. This time it's a chapter in this book I'm writing. It's about coincidences," I say.

"I know all about coincidences," she replies.

... and she's only nineteen.

The music store around the corner is closed. No music then. I'll write. When one doesn't know which side of the coin he wants, a good coincidence will flip it automatically.

Back to the shop. A double espresso. Cream pitcher just-emptied as usual. Fuckface, who is on duty tonight, fills it.

I sit with my espresso and someone brings in a guitar with all six strings intact. Music then? Nah. Fuckface takes it outside to play by himself. I'll walk home and write.

A Couple Weeks Later: When Do Coincidences Ever End?

I've just come back from a break from editing all this today. Humpty the guitar repairman and I have never made more than a nodded greeting before. Today I sat at the table next to his and he told me this:

He used to frequent another cafe down the avenue. Every single day he'd come in for coffee, and every single day the cream pitcher would be empty. It didn't matter what time of day, it had always just been emptied. It became a running joke with the counterpeople. This went on daily for about a year. Then one day it stopped, and never happened again. It was always full from then on. Had I ever heard of such a thing?

Maybe. It's August 17, 2006, now and the cream pitcher has been full every time I've used it since I wrote about it 2 weeks ago. I'd never mentioned the daily just-emptied pitcher to any of the counterpeople, or anywhere but this story. Just one of those funny coincidences. Funny that it had also happened to Humpty.

(Ed. note: it's now August '07, a year later, and the pitcher has been full every day, all but twice or three times since then)

Okay, now it's Friday, August 18 2006. Somebody asks what I'm writing about and I say coincidences. The coffeeshop denizens strike up a conversation about coincidences. I make notes.

Phyllis has a reaction to perfumes and cologne. She met a man she liked whom she'd met only twice; both times she had a cold and couldn't smell anything, she says. She couldn't tell he was wearing a cologne that would have caused a severe allergic reaction, nor, even worse, that he worked at the perfume counter at a local department store. Without having a stuffy-nose cold, she couldn't have come close to him... and now? Too late... the aroma of love lingers around him where Phyllis is concerned.

(The other night Phyllis mentioned the number "23," regarded with a superstitious respect. The following night I picked some lottery numbers. Pick 23 anyhow? Nah, that's superstitious. The key winning number that night was 23.)

Junkiepants tells me she was listening to a famous punk song, "People Who Died," when the phone rang and she learned a close friend had just then committed suicide.

Just as she finishes her story, Kurt walks in. Kurt's new in town. Junkiepants introduces us.

"You look familiar, Kurt," I say. "Do you have a brother who lives here in town?"

"People tell me that, but I've never seen him."

"He takes the same bus I do. We talk pretty often. He uses a cane 'cuz he's got a bad leg."

"I almost had to use a cane myself," says Kurt pointing to his right leg. A boyhood condition nearly left him crippled. Bill, the friend to whom I'm referring, who had also been reading the book of Revelation in an earlier coincidence of this story, had the same condition, also in his right leg. I learn in the course of conversation Kurt and Bill spend a good deal of time at the same library, but they've never met.

Junkiepants interrupts. "Tom, have you met Elvin?" No, how ya doing? Elvin says he grew up in Brooklyn.

"You should meet my friend Sammy from Brooklyn. He'll be around. He's laying low from a bad back lately."

"I've got a bad back too," says Elvin, reaching around to pat it.

Elvin continues his chat with Viola, and Kurt asks me about the book I'd left on the table. He mentions admiring Carlos Castaneda's books.

Kurt doesn't know we're chatting just down the street from the famed bus stop where Castaneda met his Native American Johnson, Don Juan. This is where Castaneda's famous (if often fraudulent) works began.

Kurt tells me a dream of angrily encountering his best friend who'd recently killed himself -- he hadn't heard Junkiepants telling me about her friend who'd died the same way. Funny thing, I reply, that's how my book starts.

disorganized notes below, sorry:

8/6 Coffee Shop, buy cigar first. There's Sledge, on his bike to the music store across the street to buy a set of strings. I cross the street with him. To our surprise, it's unexpectedly closed. We both buy cigars. He says he and Fuckface and Fuckface's dad each broke a string the other night. Again? Now to coffee shop. For the first time since I started coming here, the half and half pitcher is full.

8/7 For the second day in a row the half and half pitcher is full. Junkiepants mentions that while we were talking about coincidences the other day, Elvin and Viola were talking about a movie starring the action-hero Stephen Segal called "Under Seige." Funny thing, Junkiepants said Elvin went home that afternoon, turned on the TV, and the movie "Under Seige" had just started.

Funnier thing: I'd read a little about Stephen Segal the night before, in passing, while reading about famous religious cult murderers. Funniest: Junkiepants and I had been talking these serial killer stories; the next day, headlines blared from the news boxes sitting outside the coffee shop about a couple serial killers caught in Phoenix.

8/9 Aaaaaand it's full again. This afternoon the amusing satirical song "Hey Punk" by Frank Zappa came on the coffee shop stereo system. Sledge bounded into the room to tell me that he and Eldon, the shop owner, were talking about "Hey Punk" just the night before -- and here it is now! He adds that he'd only lately realized that this song was a satire on "Hey Joe," a pop hit 20 years before Sledge was born. Yes, I replied, doodling around with Sledge's guitar with the new string; I'd been sitting there trying to remember how "Hey Joe" went, just before "Hey Punk" came on.

So if that rascal Sledge had put the song on himself to fool me, it was too late. Even that set off a coincidence.

I hope you'll take a cue from this story and write a few down yourself. Amaze your friends and maybe be the life of the coffee shop. Mostly, amaze yourself. Don't be lazy or stubborn. It's as good for the mind as hiking is for the body.

(June 13 '07 at coffeeshop)

A coincidence is actually a little dream, concentrated a certain way, according to one's intents. [put in fact that I wrote Melissa 'cuz I dreamed of her] I'm in the coffee shop right now. Let's hope I can get away with one more coincidence story. I had a dream not long ago: I was great pals with the famous pop star Linda Ronstadt. I've dreamed of her twice in my life: once in 1983, and once just lately, where I told her that dream from 25 years ago.

Sitting here the other day with my usual espresso (the cream pitcher hasn't been empty in the 10 months since I mentioned it), a songwriter and english professor named Brian sat down at my table. We hadn't chatted in weeks.

Within a moment, as though out of the blue, Brian mentioned a chauffer's job he once had, where he drove the pop singer Linda Ronstadt to the airport. She seemed quite nice, Brian said.

Funny thing. on the way here on the bus I'd noticed a local paper with her picture on it. She's playing Tucson, her home town, tonight.

Funnier, I'd dreamed that Linda Ronstadt was quite nice. I told Brian a little story: not long ago I dreamed about her for the second time in my life. What a nice lady! Shortly after, "out of the blue," a co-worker mentioned that Linda's house was at thus and so location. It happened to be a few blocks from my own place. (maybe finish, maybe not...)

Who doesn't have a coincidence story? Brian began to tell me one. In late summer, 1990, he said, he moved to Binghamton, New York...

Hold it right there, Brian. I had to butt in and tell him that in August 1990 I happened to be in Binghamton for the first time. I did a radio show there for one of my songs that had gained a little popularity. Okay, go ahead.

Brian was in the Master's program there. It turned out his prof happened to be one of Susan M. Watkins' lifelong friends. I'd met this woman often by the time Brian did. In August 1990 I had just moved out of Sue's house to follow the next leg of my experiment in consciously following my dreams and the impulses, and "coincidences" they generate. That experiment eventually led me here.

And so here I am, writing in a coffee shop in Tucson, Arizona, which surely feels as real as rock to most of its customers, although it is at least half-dream to me.

What Coincidences Mean

Peeling off the Jung and the Freud and the What-Yer-Dreams-Mean lore left a more than fleshed-out skeleton of future events I would then encounter, sometimes in multiple versions. Paste the Jung and the Freud and the What-Yer-Dreams-Mean books back on, and the evidence disappears.

What does it mean when you dream of an old woman in her seventies, who is standing outside an old mine shaft in Sutter's Mill, California, who tells you "My daughter has been very ill" and wants you to help? Furthermore, what does it mean when you know that this mine shaft is full of fancy old Rolls Royces, bicycles, outsized memorabilia, and so on?

Harumph harumph! Obviously the young man has a deep sexual problem associated with wealth.

So what does it mean then when, 2 years after this dream, you're in California, a strange and eccentric woman unexplainably homes into you, tells you she's been very ill, one night mentions her family uses the old gold mines of Sutter's Mill to store keepsakes, later introduces you to her mother, who is in her seventies is exactly the old woman from that same dream two years before? (And just for good measure, you meet two beef-sized detectives hired to accompany the ailing daughter whenever she feels like wearing her 60 carat diamond ring anywhere?)

A deep sexual problem associated with wealth indeed. Shirley had had a full hysterectomy shortly before she snagged my company. I was as innocent as Li'l Abner with her through the whole episode, even while sitting between her and her boyfriend in the loudest screaming match I have ever heard over who got to buy the balloons for her birthday party. I was rewarded with this memory: I am surely the only biker-bar musician ever to have a limousine waiting outside with martinis. Plus the serious lessons as well, still operating.

What the above means is we who pay attention to nightly dreams at all have been looking for meanings in the wrong places. Dreams and daily reality are entertwined. They're no more separable than lungs from the air, even though we're accustomed to treat them as conflicting entities.

Laying the blame isn't nearly as fun as applying the solution, which is, remember your dreams and compare them with events in your life at the most basic level we have: the physical reality around us.

Mellissa Ferrick Does Seven Black Cats

2006-06-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

I found this one still floating around on the internet. May's well put it here, too. It's still timely and Melissa Ferrick is still great.

Melissa Ferrick does 7 Black Cats

Tom Dark

(Dearly Beloved Reader: why this article has turned out so long and rambly, I dunno. Why I still haven't completed it nearly a week later, I dunno. I almost never write like this. I write more like in parentheses here -- real pithy, even stubby. Guess I'll blame Melissa Ferrick for it. Yeah, that's it. Here's Part One:)

THE SEARCH IS NOT ON. All over America, record company executives aren't, repeat clearly, are not, looking for the Next Big Thing. Never mind what Courtney Love and George Michael have been saying, let me quote somebody I know (uh... knew): If Bobby Farrell, composer of 40's mega-hit "Harbor Lights" and a few other memorable pop grandpa tunes knows whereof he speaks, Big Record Companies are trying to squelch The Next Big Thing like King Herod tried to squelch Baby Jesus.

"Whatever you do," Farrell uttered mordantly to me one day, "do NOT accept a recording contract." They'll buy you cheap, he recounted, and treat you cheaper.

A promising singer he managed signed with Sony records against his advice. And now her carcass is on private view on a basement shelf, out of the way of their other promotions and hidden from competing Big Record Companies. She was working nights at a 7-11 in Albuquerque when Farrell told me the unpleasant denouement of this story. The advance they gave her didn't last long.

He said they're doing that with just about everybody. They'll hook you by the zipper, feed you a few shekels, and suddenly you are unsalable product, moldering on the shelf.

Once you comprehend that your career and artistic freedom have been mummified by Big Record Company arachnids, your heart skips a beat at how much lawyers cost to beg you off for being young and naive and greedy too. You'll be too old to rock'n'roll when they settle it. Madonna will have had her fifteenth butt-lift by then, and nobody will have ever, ever heard of you.

BY THEN BRITNEY SPEARS CLONES WILL BE RUNNING THE SHOW. Charming chunks of readymade female pubescent matter bubble perkily even now in a test tube in a secret Big Record Company lab in Singapore. They are chunks of the Next Big Perky Thing.

Female artists birthed of the common population are too prone to making non-perky songs. They aren't of proper genetic design. The world gene pool needs a new rendition of Sammy Davis Jr's' signature hit, "The Candy Man, " and artists like Melissa Ferrick ignore such necessities, so they fired up the ol' cloner.

It's really best that way. Little kids want happy musical sex candy to fantasize over, hairy old record company men want to give it to them, and if the economy doesn't consume twice its own weight in profits every hour we will all die and George W. Bush will get to vote for himself in every state.

Cloned "Britnoids" are designed to digest and retain important demographic behavioral data yet avoid monkey business like Sinead O'Connor Bic-lighting a photo of the pope on TV. These units will be guaranteed to obediently shake their lifelike teen-protuberances only to lyrics and music personally approved by a clone of Senator Jesse Helms. No more indecently opinionated young ladies for us, thank you.

Contractual arrangements dividing profits were made before they even switched on the cloner. This is the new future of music. Everybody who counts is happy.

You'll never meet these people who count. They bought their own islands with the money they made denting gifted young artists in their thoraxes and squirting in a paralyzing poison -- which churned their insides into a mush they then drew lustily back up their hollowed fangs, into their swelling, disgustingly furry bellies. Plus, they voted for George W. Bush, and they've eaten their mates.

SO WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T ACCEPT A RECORD CONTRACT. Unless you're really planning a career as an office manager. Then GRAB it and use the advance for a few courses in Business 101 at your nearest community college. Good deal.

OKAY FINE. In that case, artists who can't help but sense their own worth start their own record companies from the shoestrings up. The initial paperwork is relatively nothing, if there ever will be more to do.

I'm here to tell you that the hundreds of Insanely Independent Record Label productions I've heard, and the dozens of small-time, nay, miniscule-time projects I've helped on, represent less than a little lagoon in a vast sea of vital personal creativity. There are millions and millions of creative artists working out there who make up whatever they feel. You may conjecture, probably in deep spiritual ignorance, that most of this vast sea of independent creators is mediocre.

SO TOO IS THE SEA MOSTLY WATER. Great Creatures can break through the surface for air anywhere in it, and your yappering mouth can be shut by awe at a magnificent intrusion into your musical Candyland.

The vast surface of seeming mediocrity has broken frequently with Great Creatures sounding in the past few years (but really, Elvis Presley's story started no differently). Lots of nationwide hiphop began as cassettes sold from the trunks of the artists' beat up old cars; we won't bother mentioning Metallica, but we'll holler about Ani DiFranco, whose shoestring start mushroomed deservedly.

Ani DiFranco is what put my buddy Dee and me onto Melissa Ferrick. Dee brought some of her work over awhile ago; it shut my mouth for over a week. I'd heard one of Ani's songs 8 years ago, took the long way home to hear all of it on my car radio, and didn't find out her name until Dee showed me. My goggling over Ani DiFranco prompted Dee to flip a Melissa Ferrick song my way. Honestly, I haven't much cared about anything I've heard since Vartinna in 1993, and since an Ethiopian album I produced myself for an Ethiopian named Gib in 1994. But Dee is on to something.

Dee and I thought we might catch a glimpse of another Great Creature sounding at 7 Black Cats, on Congress St., Tucson, Saturday night. Melissa Ferrick is her own independent record company, tours around, and is supported by fans who love the daylights out of her music.

Do NOT believe the peppermint fairy tales about the overnight successes of those pampered little songbirds of the Trilateral Commission. How hard is it really to even afford your own house and your own car by driving from town to town, singing and selling your recordings? Hint: before Willie Nelson became the venerable old tax dodger that he is, he once walked out of the bar he was playing in for $30/night (they still pay that much sometimes IF you're lucky) and laid down in the middle of the road, giving the 2 a.m. traffic a good long opportunity to run over him. By then he'd already written a hit for Patsy Cline. This is just to show you what a fabulously rewarding field music really can be, all considered.

...OR... HOW ABOUT BUZZY LINHARDT? What do you mean, you don't know who that is? I met Buzz when he was 48, living on the charity of some friends, nursing 2 broken hips that had healed wrong and suffering from advanced glaucoma. By wild coincidence, he'd got the broken hips in a car accident in Trumansburg, New York, a little nowhere where I had just moved from... or nearby. He'd been traveling, doing gigs. No insurance. A friend recognized him begging prostrate from a NYC sidewalk, and towed him to a little room in an old hippie house in Berkeley, California, where I met him through a gay woman musician pal.

Buzzy said he never got a nickel for "Friends." It's a song about how you need friends to get along in life. He said Bette Midler's attorneys say she never heard of him. Buzzy tells everybody that. He also tells everybody they were lovers for awhile. As a grand finale, he'll show everybody the album wherein his band recorded (and credited him with) "Friends" and released it some years before Bette Midler did. Funny thing, too... you'll notice that Buzzy's song "Friends" and Bette's song "Friends" are exactly the same song. But hey, maybe Buzzy will die soon if he hasn't yet and Bette Midler's attorneys won't have to bother with pesky questions about it any more. Where was I? Surely I was on a more optimistic story than this. Oh yeh:

HOW WE CAME TO 7 BLACK CATS AND BOOSTED MELISSA FERRICK'S REVENUE BY $36: Dee asked me would I go with her that coming Saturday night to hear this performer. She'd downloaded a Melissa tune called "Drive" from the internet, which she especially wanted me to hear. It didn't work immediately. I hate downloading and I hate screwing around with computers a millisecond longer than I absolutely have to. So I went looking for the album and finally found a copy at Zip's.

I hardly ever buy CDs. I bought this one because I know something's up. Dee has been listening to a vein of music that could spawn a whole Next Big Thing. You never know. The "girl music" she's showed me the last few weeks is bristling and sparkling with tell-tale vitality.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2000, 5:39 P.M.: Dee stops in after work. I hand her the CD. Trouble getting the heat-shrink wrapper off. Solved with big nail clippers. Melissa Ferrick Album "Freedom" into CD player. Near-field speakers angled at 45 degrees toward couch. Samson Servo 240 amplifier, Yamaha ProMix 1 digital mixer. Medium volume, EQ flat. Start CD. No sound. Oops. Plug in external jacks. Okay. Start again. We settle in to listen.

RAW, UNCENSORED REACTIONS, song 1, "Freedom." (narrated more or less in sequential time): Uh-huh. Hate that acoustic guitar pickup sound. Don't plug the damned thing in when you're in the studio, use a microphone. Woops, you flubbed a lick. Anyway I'll just get used to it and listen. Lyrics about what, now? Wants freedom from a lover, can't think what's at the core of it, blames a fear of love's enthusiasms flowing and ebbing as it ever does; honestly it sounds to me like she's left the door open for PMS defense and that's why her lover would call her a liar. That's not very responsible, girl. Fine melody and delivery, though... I guess...

SONG 2, "Hold On": Whaaaaat the fuck? What is that sound?? Is it... intentional? Is it... a good thing? It sounds like some tracks were recorded through a boom box. Is it... is it... what is it? The melody sounds like that 60s hit "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight," by Bobby somebody and his partner. I wouldn't call it stealing. But if she meant to echo that song in hers, that's really very poetically clever. Good chorus, too... who's singing the harmony? Check album. Marika Tjelios. It's a little Beatlesque to Balkan, or some stripe of traditional Greek. Very original. The harmonies turn hauntingly beautiful as the songs play on.

"WHATTAYA THINK," proposes Dee already, the pair of us having listened in silence for the length of 2 songs. Not a good sign. Well, she sounds... really tough, I say. No... intense. She's really intense. I babble something about the peculiar mixdowns (and beef up the EQ). We both agree there's a touch of Ani DiFranco affectations so far.

I do hear this inimitable intensity, but it's a bit smeared by unnecessary vocal inflections and somebody screwing around with technical recording things. I don't buy the flattened-brow, snake-wiggling angry-mother voicings lately popular with a few singers. They obviously didn't grow up under my ma and don't know how to portray truly terrifying use of it... when it's not terrifying, it's kinda silly, like on the Morissette girl's last album. I don't mention to Dee that I really do want to like this Melissa Ferrick... to the point that I feel a twinge of conscience about what I think I'm hearing. Naw. She's not just an imitation. Naw. Can't be. Is she? Next song.

SONG 3. NORTH CAROLINA: Swwwwwwwoooooop! The beat and munchy riffs have opened the door and we're in the back seat now as Melissa drives us into North Carolina. Having been there for the same reasons, I imagine us crossing a railroad track in a beat-up little old North Carolina town on the way to a gig we don't really feel like doing. The three of us are going to fester in a musty motel with the TV on. Desolation and a maddeningly vague queasiness compete like a couple of flies buzzing the dumpster where our hearts have lately been dumped. How Melissa can turn the mute button on and still hear her "money making peers" talking through the TV, I don't know, but don't slam the brakes on it for that. Her song rolls us along, bone-weary, lost, and maybe we're just too bumbling not to've hurt somebody we loved back home more than we let ourselves believe.

The part of my mind still listening analytically notes the line "intensity has never been a problem for me." Aha, I thought so... she knows. This wasn't Asheville, was it, dear? But suddenly this album is becoming worth the price.

FROM HERE, DEE AND MY MINDS ARE BLOWN. The album is all intensely raw and beautiful now. Insistently unique and beautiful. The old folk-rockin' chords strummed through the too-high pitched guitar, the simple low-tuned bass and matter-of-fact drumbeats float and swim and fly in insistently beautiful original inner sonic colors. The lyrics trigger nearly 3-D imagery that dovetails with the simple music and compounds the emotional errors she writes us all about -- to the point that we can't deny, we've all been where those songs are and are going to go there again.

I'm over 6', over 200 lbs, and some kid asked me last week if I'm in Hell's Angels. I'm not, but Sonny Barger would think severally about tangling with me until he discovered I don't care about motorcycles. Add an overgrown goatee and picture tears trying not to well up in this figure's eyes over "The Stranger."

HECK, NO. Go buy it and listen to it yourself. Write her record company if you can't find it. The song emerged from the album like a Greyback leaping from the sea. "She knows!" I thought to myself. "She KNOWS."

HAD TO go see this lady perform live. HAD to.

END PART ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tom Dark single-handedly created the 'zine in the mid 1980's by talking some guy in Wisconsin into putting out a newsletter made by a copy machine and staples "For People Who Have Feelings They Don't Know What To Do With." He coined the term 'zine. By either wild coincidence or recognition that millions and millions of people have feelings they don't know what to do with, this one, called "Sumari Bulletin," spawned millions of inimitable imitators around the globe.

Mrs. Doty

2006-06-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

MRS. DOTY

The other summer I took a job that has left me thoughtful ever since. I'm always grateful for things that leave me thoughtful.

This job was to clean up a house lived in by a woman named Mrs. Doty. Mrs. Doty was about 80.

She met us at the door early that hot desert morning. The neighborhood was pleasant, old-ish for Arizona and well kept. Mrs. Doty was pleasant, a slim, relatively youthful greyed blonde, dressed unpretentiously in off-white summer slacks and matching blouse and a big brimmed straw hat. She mistook me for the crew chief, so began giving a few instructions about things she wanted saved. I said I'd be careful to watch for them. She appeared to be working outside, doing a little gardening.

This modest, sunny bungalow -- two bedrooms, living and dining room, kitchen, front and back porches, laundry room, workshop, bath -- yielded a cornucopia of homey things and memorabilia. Each item told a tale of minute events in a busy and interested life, casually scattered on and on into the house's past.

There were porcelain figurines -- elves and children and rosy cheeked grandmas and grandpas and animals; clocks of different kinds, collections of dishes and silverware, ruffled candy dishes, ashtrays, embossed glass tumblers memento of vacation trips, even a set of fine apertif glasses; candleabras, little electric chandeliers, children's toys, old record albums by long forgotten artists, and more.

And pens and pencils! Lots and lots of ballpoint pens and pencils in little makeshift containers. All had been used -- scattered about were tablets and notebooks, lots of notes, grocery lists, recipes, old letters not yet sent, letters not yet answered.

There were things for which a solitary senior housekeeper may be forgiven: too much clothing, "must drop it all off at the thrift store one day;" too much yarn for knitting waiting to get started; old newspapers, old magazines with important stories yet to be cut and pasted; an outdated telephone directory or two, long awaiting the trash bin.

And books! Books, books, books! Had I not a job to do, I could have spent weeks perusing them. Here was a tome by Attorney General So-and-So fifty years past, this or that President's memoirs, analyses by critical thinkers about forgotten critical situations going back decades, and yet more: classics by Mark Twain and Jane Austen and Pearl Buck and others, collections from famous newspaper columnists, mystery novels by Agatha Christie, romantic potboilers from before and after World War Two, even a few by our current famous potboilists -- I can't think of her name, but her novels are still for sale at supermarket checkout racks. Danielle Steele.

Here some old bibles, there various first editions of forgotten popular novels, probably worth money to a collector. My favorite find was a Webster's Dictionary. It had no copyright date, but the hemp paper, typeface and the style of grammar suggested antebellum... wow... before the War Between The States. Maybe Noah Webster himself had published that edition!

Mrs. Doty popped in and out of the place periodically, checking on our progress and hoping we club-footed cleaners hadn't damaged or shoveled out the items she hoped we wouldn't. She was most concerned about saving her paintings -- simple landscapes of New England and imaginary scenes of the Arizona desert, where she'd moved to in the 1950s.

Second in concern was her poetry, scattered handwritten on yellow legal pads in old boxes and cubbyholes around the place. Mrs. Doty was a lifelong poetess and artist and reader. The yellow legal pads yielded leaf after leaf of her experience and her feelings about it all.

All these fallen leaves from the tree of her life sat in a near-level heap of rubbish about three feet deep which filled the entire house from one end to the other. Cockroaches had burrowed long intricate tunnels through the mass of rotting papers and clothes and magazines and books. Decomposing matter under the surface of this blanketing heap had long turned to brown sludge, and below that, black sludge. Dead newspapers and magazines and clothing were mixed with foodstuffs, full containers of juices, unopened soda cans, toilet paper, even coins. Because of the high pile, there were closets which hadn't been open in at least a decade. The bathroom toilet had been buried under piles of flotsam for at least as long. When I finally got to clearing away enough garbage to open the toilet lid, I saw she hadn't flushed it last she used it years ago. Frail, now-ancient poops had more or less retained their shapes.

I yanked down curtains and threw open windows as wide as they would go. The cobwebs were little trampolines of dead spiders. The sealed doors and windows had created the most indescribable, horrid parfait of mini-atmospheres I have ever encountered.

On the top layer of fetid air was the stench of cat shit. Just below that floating stench was the aroma of rotting paper, and below that lazed the aromas of the detritus of anaerobic microbes, insects, lizards, and from the woman herself. She was still using her bathroom, emptying a plastic bucket onto the trash pile. Water leaking from the buried toilet had glued the masses of cockroach-riddled detritus and fecal matter into a black goo, a silent germ-hell a few layers down at the bottom, leached throughout the house.

Every two or three minutes, some gagging crew member declared loudly through his protective mask that he could not imagine how she managed to live in that place and breathe in it too.

My first task was to clean out the refrigerator. It was still running, still cold, humming like any refrigerator does. Dressed in a protective suit and hood and a mask, with Vick's Vapo Rub spread across my mustache to help suppress the odor, I took a shovel and cleared out enough rubbish to get the doors open.

The fridge and the freezer were still packed with foodstuffs. It looked as though Mrs. Doty had been planning a big party years ago. All the food was perfectly preserved: ice creams, little cakes, popsicles, frozen meats, frozen vegetables, various cheeses, puddings, soups, juices, milks, sodas. All of it was peppered lightly with dead cockroaches which had managed to slither through the rubber seal and die of tummy aches and hypothermia.

Nothing in this world compares to the odor of food that has rotted slowly over a decade or more. Nothing. The stench of food packed with preservatives, left in the cold to rot so peacefully that the artificial chemicals intermingle thoroughly with the organic nosegay of deterioration creates a stench no actors in a horror movie could convey. Tradition says Satan smells of excrement. He must be a naive fellow to propose no worse odor than that.

For the first time in my life, I learned the meaning of the word "swoon." Despite my mask and Vicks' Vapo Rub, the refrigerator-coffin's odor made me swoon. I nearly fell over backward. I stumbled out to the back yard and yanked off my mask to breathe.

I looked down. My protective booties had sunk into a couple inches of raw sewage oozing into the daylight from a long neglected septic tank. That and the all-pervasive aroma of decaying cat shit -- I can't say how many cats lived with her -- drove me further away from the house, but not from the rubbish; I tripped over a whole back yard of plastic trash bags full of god knows what in Tucson's 110 degree heat.

I took a few breaths standing at the edge of the backyard fence, went back into the kitchen and attacked the refrigerator-coffin again with my wide-edged shovel, scraping and dumping all this perfect-looking stuff -- and mummified cockroaches -- as fast as I could into my garbage can. The odor overwhelmed me again. I swooned again and ran out the door to avoid falling backward into the 3 foot deep grave of goo that was the floor.

After several bouts of shoveling and swooning I emptied the thing. The rest of the crew were shoveling away at the three feet deep crap in the living room; they too had to evacuate the house when periodically I'd pull things from the cold crypt, say, a package of fresh-looking chicken now meeting new air for the first time in years and reacting with it. I'd fill my garbage can full of the poison rot and lug it outside to the roll-off.

A roll-off is a heavy steel garbage container about 25 feet long, seven feet wide and seven feet high. It holds about one-thousand, two hundred cubic feet of flotsam and jetsam. Seven men filled three roll-offs to the brim with trash on the first day, and we still weren't finished. It would take nearly a week.

The crew chief, a great big man named Roy, slapped me heartily on the back for finishing the refrigerator task. Roy wouldn't be so jocular when he tried shoveling out the bathroom. He was an even bigger man to attempt that himself, but when it turned out he had to rush out the front door, tear off his mask and dry-heave every two or three minutes, the rest of us pitched into the job with him.

We were afraid to vomit. We might not have stopped.

We'd go home with the stench of the day stuck in our sinuses. No amount of hosing down, bathing, showering, toothbrushing, gargling, got rid of it. I tossed and turned through the night, the odor of that house still trapped in my sinuses, half-dreaming of shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, killing poisonous spiders roosting in the buried furniture, wondering what in the world that old woman was all about.

II.

WHAT IN THE WORLD THAT OLD WOMAN WAS ALL ABOUT

There's something about the cockroach that's eerier than most bugs. A million other species are uglier and more dangerous, but the cockroach, its skittering hordes emigrating across dirty dishes like pioneers guiding their mule teams to old California, changing its pristine nature into a noisy stink forever, presents a sight that for the better part of humanity sinks ineluctably into the spine, deeper than the dread of a poisonous spider or snake. It's subtler than mere dread.

Long ago someone did a study: if mankind finally scorches the planet with nuclear weapons, we won't survive, but cockroaches will, trouble-free. They were alive and skittering before men stood upright, goes the story, and man's upright thinkers think it will be skittering around just as exuberantly after we bumble into extinction.

The cockroaches in Mrs. Doty's house were about two inches long. Everywhere my shovel plowed into the heaps, they'd skitter out in all directions, some half-flying the way upset chickens do. They'd run to safety, then turn to stare warily at the gargantuan invader, wiggling their antennae in curiosity. It occurred to me that they were wondering how I'd taste.

Every drawer I opened brought a herd of leaping, flying wild cockroaches. Over keepsakes, over gloves, handkerchiefs and earrings and bracelets and old photographs and pens and pencils and dust kitties they clambered, silently evoking screeching violins up and down my spine.

I should have been working more swiftly, but as the flocks of cockroaches bolted for the safety of the corners of the ceiling, I'd look for clues in the drawers they'd pioneered, colonizing Mrs. Doty all these years. How was it she could sleep in that bed, an island dead-level with the sea of trash she'd made around it? How come the neighbors had never noticed anything strange about her all these years? I hadn't either.

She was popular with her local church group, friendly with her neighbors -- many of whom stopped by and asked what we were doing and whether or not Mrs. Doty was all right. Apparently, none of her friends knew this about her. But at some point, the stench emanating from that house compelled the next door neighbor to complain to the city and this brought us.

I'd read about this kind of behavior some years ago -- I don't know the psychological-lingo for it, if there is any other, but the pleasant woman I'd met at the door of that reeking old bungalow must be what was called a miser. Much buried in the rotting paper had been collected from trash cans. As the heaps grew higher, she'd trample over them to get to get to her bed. Why would she grab all this trash and hold onto it like that?

Hmmm. Here's an old application for a prayer-benefit from the Reverend Ike. I remember that charlatan. That's too superstitious for a Lutheran, which is what the other pamphlets on the dresser suggest Mrs. Doty is.

And there's an old photo of a pretty blonde woman and a little boy... who are they? Daughter? Grandson?

The yellow legal pads with her poems and reminiscences are scattered through the house. Finally, however, I open a wooden box where some pads are stored specially. I read one of them.

"Dear God, please let my son live," it goes, "please let my son live. I will do anything you ask. Please let my son live."

The letter to God goes on to describe what her son is suffering from, who the blonde lady and grandson in the photograph are -- the blonde lady had divorced her son and taken Mrs. Doty's grandson far away. Mrs. Doty's son was suffering from a terminal illness, now made worse by the emotional stress. He's in the hospital, near death, at the writing of this letter between no one but Mrs. Doty and God.

Her letters to God mention her son by name, but perhaps for God's sake, she mostly refers to David as "my son." Don't take her son away. Please cure him of this brain condition. Through the pages of legal-pad pleas, she describes his progress. Some days she writes to God thanking him profusely, he's improved a little.

Mrs. Doty also mentions her husband to God. She could understand how God would have taken him just a month before, at his age and his stressful life as an aviator. But please Dear God, let my son live. Bring my grandson back to me. That explains her appeals to the fraudulent Reverend Ike.

Her handwriting is even and neat, intelligent and sane-looking. For that, her written words of anguish are as painful as anguish is. She has been robbed of her life with nothing to hang onto but her poetry and her paintings. In 3 months from the date of this letter, her son will have died. The year is 1985. Her husband died that January. Mrs. Doty has been this way for twenty years, not ten. She's been a shell of good cheer and neighborliness to all, while prowling the alleyways at night, trying somehow to fill her house from the trash containers with what was missing.

We clear away rubbish and pry a closet door open, revealing tasteful, pretty dresses hanging neatly the way they were 20 years ago. I pull a divan up out of three feet of solid trash and count four or five fat, healthy Black Widow and Arizona Brown spiders roosting in the upholstery springs underneath it. They're meeting daylight for the first time in their lives. They don't budge even though I'm juggling their home around. We don't move because we don't have to. What're you looking at, Bub?

Outside I hear Roy hollering. "Don't you touch me! Don't you touch me!" I go out to see this man about 6'2", 300 pounds, menacing an old woman about a foot shorter, probably under 100 pounds. It just might be comical if it weren't Mrs. Doty, pleading with him to stop throwing her paintings away. I step in and do that. She thanks me and tells me I have kind eyes -- she has always been a specialist in reading people's eyes, she says. Yes, she can tell I'm kind.

We pull a rocking chair out of the trash in the living room. It still has long-dried effluvia on the seat. Roy tells me that this was the chair where Mr. Doty died of a massive heart attack all at once. Mrs. Doty had either no time or no heart to clean it when her son too began to die. She mummified her house with trash, leaving the rocking chair as it was when her husband died in it 20 years before.

I'd pass this house now and then for a year or so, seeing no sign of Mrs. Doty. It stayed the way we left it, emptied, roughly cleaned. It still smelled of detritus. It never went up for sale.

HOW TO TURN KARL ELLER INTO AN OPPORTUNITY

2006-03-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

tom dark thoughts

(This'n here I writ awhile back 'cuz I read this "how to get rich like me" book and thought I wanted to look the guy over who writ it. I mean Karl, not the ghost writer. He put some fancy words in that old billionaire's mouth, all right, but not enough so as you wouldn't think he's on the level. So I writ this here. Passed it around. Karl reads it and tells me, "come on up to my office." I reply, "I ain't got no car." Karl says, "well, I'll give you a call when I'm in town, then." So now we'll see if he's a straight shooter or just another "bald faced liar" like one of my neighbors says. This is Karl's home town. People remember him. He's been in town since then. -- Tom)

HOW TO TURN KARL ELLER INTO AN OPPORTUNITY

Tom Dark

(A song I was humming the other day:)

There ain't no Great Socie-TEE, such as applies to you and ME,
When all that you can ever BE is just a lousy jani-TOR,
Unless your uncle owns a STORE, so watch the rats go
'cross the FLOOR, And sing a song about being POOR.

(Frank Zappa, "Trouble Every Day," 1968)

Why was I humming this song? It so happens I'm lately a "lousy jani-TOR" at a business college. The kids study how to make fortunes. They come dressed in suits for their business projects. I wish they'd be more careful where they throw their trash and how they poop -- but that's janitor talk. The college is named after Karl Eller, who bequeathed 10 million dollars on the University of Arizona for it.

On my first day at the job, I noticed the halls of Eller Business College were festooned with posters
bearing slogans by Karl Eller himself. The slogans turned out to be chapters from his new book, and there are boxes of them all over the place. Some of the professors have put copies on their office shelves.

I found INTEGRITY IS ALL YOU'VE GOT and Seven Other Lessons of the Entrepreneurial Life (copyright 2005, Karl Eller, McGraw-Hill publishing) in a staff lunchroom.

I've never read a "Be $ucce$$ful Like Me" book. Having fallen from high estate to janitor-hood (which isn't too bad, really), maybe I should. So, over a period of days, come lunchtime (one coffee, with my precarious budget), I read INTEGRITY IS ALL YOU'VE GOT.

Yup, I've tried entrepeneuring. Still want to. One can get awfully cynical about it, grumbling from the mud beneath the bottom rung of the ladder of Success. That said, it's still a darned good read.

Karl grew up next door to the University of Arizona, across from where the mammoth football stadium now stands. He was fatherless and his mom was poor as a churchmouse. He struggled every step of the way, from selling dime Cokes to students all the way to getting his and his beautiful wife Stevie's pic snapped with a beaming President George "Dubya" Bush, right at the top of that ladder.

In between those events, Karl took a decades-long financial bull ride, horns-first -- one that few rodeo cowboys might survive. Lots of grit, a little luck, and he turned a nothing billboard company into a multimedia gold mine. He was bucked off into failure, cheated by a dishonest self-professed "SOB." Then he rode a chain of convenience stores to the top in glory. Then he was disgraced by his own admitted mistakes and accumulated a heart-stopping 100 million bucks of personal debt to boot. Then he jumped back on the bull again, going back to the business he knew and loved, to the tune of a billion bucks or so. Somewhere in there, he became a motion-picture magnate. Finally, he's tippy-toe on that top rung where only silver-spooners usually squat.

The writing is very personable. It's warm and friendly, intelligent and candid. Not many pages in,
he makes you sorta want to look into his favorite career, the billboard business, for yourself. I wound up really liking this guy, Karl Eller. I'd say "Hi." I'd like to shake his hand.

In comparison: a rebellious professor at Karl Eller biz college posted a list of how-to-succeed rules by Bill Gates on his office door. I paused with my vacuum sweeper to read 'em. "Life is not fair -- get used to it," sez Bill.

As the story goes that Bill stole his ideas from early business partners, this must be Gates' implied way of dealing with Life's alleged unfairness: steal. Not so Karl. On the contrary, Karl advises straight shooting all the way, if you want to stay in business. I wouldn't care to meet Bill Gates, and neither would the mass of wags who've been posting bitter Bill Gates jokes on the internet for a decade now. He deserved that anti-trust suit, and probably more. But Karl? Howdy, neighbor. Siddown!

Karl Eller comes across as a great guy in a financial wilderness, and that's the point.

History alone judges who the great leaders are -- the ones who turn history on edge with freedom movements and landmark discoveries -- but in between the great leaders, we have the great guys, the ones who backslap at barbecues and whisper words of hope to those who have none. They seldom know whether their words made a difference, but they try anyway. The great guys seldom even know why they succeed when they do, so they search for reasons like integrity and perseverance, as if such qualities mean a damn in a world where Bill Gates can make billions on stolen technology. Still, you have to give it to them because they try to pass along whatever worked for them. Usually, what worked for them is luck and the fact that they they believed in themselves enough to keep trying. They believe in the trying, and in the fun of the challenge. Karl Eller is that kind of great guy. His book is worth the read, if for no other reason than to see a great guy win, after all. (And are there dark questions to be asked, between the lines? Sure there are. But read and determine for yourself.)

This friendly book by a self-described "kindly old tycoon" is indeed inspiring, take it from a janitor! In fact, I've learned something from the chapter that says Creativity is Seeing What Others Don't.

Funny thing. I've seen something Karl apparently didn't, just a few pages into his own book. Unfortunately, I can't do anything about it right now. But Karl can. I'd bet the holes in all my donuts it's a multi-million dollar billboard winner. I can put it in seven little words, Mister. Drop by your college and I'll whisper 'em to you.

Still, I do wish his students would be more careful with their trash. Perhaps a slogan for his next book: IT'S ALL IN THE AIM.

(Tom Dark is a freelance editor, music producer, and janitor.)

Some Fine, Fine, Fine Words about my MUUUUSIC.

2005-12-10T14:04:00.000-08:00

JJ, a typical ordinary person just like you (unless you're not female), writes:

Psssst .... you wonderful, wonderful man. You are a
FLAMBOYANT SEXUAL CREATURE, which I can say
unequivocally, without ever even having stood in
your vibe. It's all over your writing, which comes
from your complex heart/mind/body/spirit thang, and
it is pure perfume.

What's more, your music (I misspelled that word ...
on first type, it came out mustic ... HA!) is even
erotic. How can a tune about pirates in high office
be considered sexy, you ask? Glad you asked. I
speak as a woman whose major e-spot is mental, and who sometimes has a hard time coordinating that with the usual ports of sense entry ... touch, sight, smell taste (ditto) and the other one accessed
by your music, sound. You squeeze not only the main one, but another, all at once ... artistic
intelligence, or harmonic brilliance, or lyrical
sumptuousness ... however they get rolled up
together, I can't figure it out without losing the
goody. Whatever ... it's the combination that makes
me wiggle in my seat and wanna meet that guy! And
you KNOW I'm not the only woman wired up this way.

(I reply, magnanimously:)

---Hell, woman, words like these will make me famous. I'll at least post them at me little blogspot. Yeah I've sent to various indy radio stations. I hear "brilliant" and "genius" and so on. But as Elvis said in Jailhouse Rock, "wheresa money?"

A Snippy Thanksgiving

2005-11-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

(I used to do a weekly thing called SNIPPY THE COLUMNIST. SNIPPY -- always capitalized -- was based roughly on a character in the Twilight Zone episode that went "get out of here, Finchley." SNIPPY always referred to himself in the third person, "to ensure the same objectivity toward humans as might a mortician." Other reasons may have been uncovered for this, however. Here's SNIPPY'S Thanksgiving Day blessing)

A SNIPPY THANKSGIVING

Tom "Snippy" Dark

SNIPPY accepted an invitation to THANKSGIVING DINNER on Thursday, where ETHNIC PROTESTANT FOOD was served exclusively.

ETHNIC PROTESTANT FOOD is a haphazard medley of biodegradable substances confiscated from aboriginal Americans in the 17th century and engineered over the centuries into the colorful forms it takes today. There is round red jelly-like stuff that comes from a can, little cubes of spongey material that come from a box, a mashed, sandy white matter which comes dehydrated in plastic bags and is reconstituted with tap water, unfrozen vegetable protuberances, and other such "trimmings."

ALL OF THE PACKAGING CONTAINS small print which says "BHT has been added to preserve freshness." "BHT" stands for "Butylated Hydroxyloltl Toxicolosilene." Small amounts of it cause the body to swell up like a MACY'S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE BALLOON.

THE CROWNING GLORY OF THE TABLE, a ceremonial rictus reserved usually for bargain-basement cafeteria stews and ETHNIC PROTESTANT HOLIDAYS, is called "a turkey." It is a large brown shape, about the size of a plump infant, formed of an encrusted meat-like substance. It tastes like vitamin-soaked wet newspaper, although SNIPPY noted no involuntary regurgitative action in swallowing some of it.

THE MEAT-LIKE SUBSTANCE is tightly secured around what could have been an ornitheric skeleton. The only extant depictions of "a turkey" in its alleged living state are found in children's drawings, which are inaccurate. It is claimed that this heated, crusty shape on the table once had feathers and said "gobble gobble gobble."

GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE, in any case, is the sound made by the ETHNIC PROTESTANTS seated at the table on this most groundless of government-surplus holidays. They make reubenish complimentary noises over the stuff while they chew and crunch and gulp and chug the table's contents down as though late for work. In some households, SNIPPY is told, the mistress of the table attempts to hold a conversation to drown out these noises and cover her embarrassment that three days' effort at tearing off boxtops, cutting open cans, adding tapwater to things, and so on, has come only to this churlish din.

NOW THUS ENGORGED, the male ETHNIC PROTESTANTS leap from the table and collapse in front of the TV which dominates the "living room," or digestatorium. The TV presents phosphorescent images of men in gaily-colored padded tights and helmets lumbering around heavily with an oblong "football." SNIPPY surmises that the purpose of this viewing is to compensate for the male ETHNIC PROTESTANTS' inactivity. They must lie dormant while the BHT causes their bodies to swell outward in all directions. They will nap for several hours, corresponding with the length of the "football game."

THE MEANING OF THIS ETHNIC PROTESTANT BHT RITUAL IS OCCULT AND UNFAMILIAR TO SNIPPY. SNIPPY'S digestive system disposed of most biodegradable contents of that meal 2 days ago, yet every pore in his body continues to exude unhappy salts which it has spontaneously composed to neutralize this BHT -- to dispose of it through non-ordinary means. SNIPPY does not feel his freshness has been preserved much this way, unless the ruddy swelling that accompanies allergic reactions can be said to make one's skin look more youthful.

THE HUMAN BODY requires several days to rectify itself of this holiday feast. That is why the holiday is often extended to four full days. This gives SNIPPY, ever seeking optimistic reasons for Man's Existence, speculation that the BHT Ritual is an important inoculation against the CHRISTMAS SEASON -- which THANKSGIVING seems always to incite. Perhaps without massive doses of BHT, the "flu season" which always decorates Christmas activity, might instead result in mass extinctions.

So long for now! SNIPPY

Brief Commercial Message

2005-10-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Corruption Ahoy!

2005-10-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

Ahoy, Maties!

Avast! Arrr! Batten down yer hatches and tilt yer grog to the Pirate Shanty for Our Times! Aarrr! This ain't no scurvy musick, like the simperin' whines preferred by sart'n land-lubbin' lib'r'ls we know! Aarrr! Nay, this humerous harmonie be gettin' hearty howls outta all sixteen men on any dead man's chest! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle o' political satire!

As ye know, thar ain't no more cruelly effective solution to the world's problims than to harpoon 'em to death with a few sharp jabs o' comedy. Arrr! With a hale and hearty belly larff, greed, mayhem, murder, an' social injustice soon be walkin' the plank to them sardonic sharks sneerin' up from th' briny deep below! Yo-ho-ho! Ike ike ike ike ike ike ike!

And so it be in that thar spirit which I now offer ye all a toothsome hand-signed CD of "Raise the Jolly Roger" fer the mere price o' 12 green dollers cash!

Shiver me timbers, did you 'ear right? Aye! Barely a fraction of a doubloon! Countin' inflation!

Why not haff o' that? My cutlass will pertend it didn't 'ear that scurvy question, mateys. But if I had, I'd say it's because I've added a treasure chest o' other songs so scandalous the CIA is prayin' you don't 'ear so much as the blarsted titles! Aye, the fun will close them AND the Vatican down! Aaarrrr!

Ticklin' them skulls and bones,

Cap'n Tom Dark

RAISE THE JOLLY ROGER

Tom Dark (copyright etc)

1.
Ahoy! We're the hale me-hearty mighty pirates as of yore
The fickle-fingered mother's sons of Babylon's Big Whore,
We'll steal your stuff and swash your buckles 'til they're stiff and sore!
We've sailed by today to say that Business is better than ever before!

2.
With our fancy new enhancements we do more than sail the seas
Our ships have names like Abrams tanks, A-tens and F-sixteens
E-Z payment plans will partly replace your rape and robbery!
As we raise the Jolly Roger o'er the Land of Liberty!

So pledge allegiance to the Jolly Roger if you please!
(Little sailor's hornpipe dance here)

We bring refrigerators and we bring new SUVs
Expensive sneakers, microwaves the latest DVDs
We'll fill your face with fast food 'til your fat falls past your knees
Then we'll sell you diet drinks and drugs and dope and more disease!

Make no mistake we're on the make until your final breath
So don't complain we'll cause you pain,
we could nickel and dime you to death!

Nickel and dime ya ta death!

Nickel and dime ya ta death!

Nickel and dime ya! Nickel and dime ya!

NICKEL AND DIME YA TA DEATH!

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!

3.
So if you've got a mean dictator who just hates it when you're free
We will crush this freedom hater 'neath the wheels of a Humvee
Then we'll raise the Jolly Roger o'er where he used to be!
And indulge your uncontrollable urge to buy a Democracy

And install new low-priced leaders for a very reasonable fee!

As the cannon's mighty roar keeps our business interests free!

And we roam from shore to shore, trying not to look greedeee!

As your resources get explored, for their profitability!

As we raised the Jolly Roger o'er the Land of Libertee

'Til all mankind will march in step with our ideologee!

So don't you weep, just stay asleep, it's all you're meant to be!

As we wrap the Jolly Roger 'round your calls for decency!

This message brought to you by pirates from the laaaaand
ooooooof
Liiii-beeerrrrr-
a-teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Tweedle de deedle de dunk!
Aaaarrrr!

write to tomdark10@yahoo.com

War, Peace and Hehpsehboah

2005-10-24T18:53:00.000-07:00

(More unusual people I have known. Oh, there'll be more. There always are)

War, Peace, and Hehpsehboah

September, 2002

Any human being, left alone, would naturally choose peace over war, especially one who has been through it -- face-deep into the shooting and bombing and the horror and the terror, that is -- and not just twirling a flag from some cozy front porch or political pulpit, coaxing others to die for one righteousness or another. Those of us who want peace now need to do something about it.

So what are we doing about it?

A Vancouver, B.C., woman named Hehpsehboah means to do something about it. She saw her family wiped out in the midst of war, despite her warnings.

At the beginning of September, 2002, with the help of friends, Hehpsehboah, 65, set up a spot in downtown Vancouver, braving cold nights and a downpour to begin generating a global peace movement right where she lived. She sat outside, speaking to people straight through the weekend, breaking only for a catnap here and there. She broadcast across a free internet service called "Paltalk" for 52 of those hours.

She spent the first day of her marathon weekend hungry; she eats only two little rice-cakes a day, but friends forgot to bring them. There were computer breakdowns and sabotages by vandals. A security guard went through her and her friends' pocketbooks, stole her last five dollars, and stole a copy of the book she had self-published, out for meager sales. She chased some pot-smoking teenagers out of one of the teepees that had been set up for the event.

The Vancouver media ignored her. They also ignored a peace march that had been scheduled that weekend, which was broken up by the heavy rain.

After the downpour and 3 days of non-stop speaking and broadcasting to supporters and catcallers, the peace gathering was over. Hehpsehboah went back to her apartment, $32,000 in debt to a friend for the tents and permits and no money for the month's rent.

No more than 70 or 80 people had gathered around to listen to her at any one time that weekend. Still, the windows at the nearby hotel had been open, so perhaps visitors had listened from their rooms. And still, Hehpsehboah was proud to point out a few individuals who came up and wished her well with all their hearts. "...if we could just shout to the world 'keep it going!'" said three women from Seattle.

Some who stopped to speak to her were war veterans, or soldiers on furlough in Vancouver: Canadian, Israeli, Palestinian and Angolan soldiers, each of whom had seen real combat and lived to deplore it and any further excuses for it.

Hehpsehboah said "Some of them broke down and cried, and told me 'this is the time more than ever before... people have to learn to respect each other, and to love one another, and understand there must be,'" she emphasized, quoting one of the soldiers, "'No! More! War!'"

One of the Palestinian soldiers had an Israeli wife. They had a baby, which prompted them to leave the middle east. He said "What should I have them do, cut my son in half?"

First attempt done, Hehpsehboah had no food in her house. No dog food for her 18 month old Pekingese pup, Qian Long, either. Finally, a friend volunteered to pay October's rent. By September 19, Hehpsehboah had obtained some food for her pup, but none for herself. Her longsuffering volunteer assistant, Katharina, gesticulating over the months of frustration and deprivation, unmet commitments and false promises, exclaimed "what ARE you doing this for, anyway?

Hehpsehboah replied "I'm still in a body, aren't I? I'm not dead, am I? So long as I'm still here there is a chance to accomplish this. If it comes to it, then I'll go out on the street and beg for food."

What an unusual story. As unusual as it is, and as impossible as the goal seems, it stands as a not untypical episode in the unusual life Hehpsehboah has led.

And what kind of a global peace movement is this? A pathetic gesture by some poor old crazy lady who watches too much TV news? "When I watch CNN, I usually smile," Hehpsehboah said. "I can see how they are slanting their news to make people think it's something other than it is, and I can see them hiding things from the public."

This lady has an uncanny ability to perceive when someone is hiding something. I joked to her that it must have been impossible to hide Christmas presents for her as a little girl. She said I was right.

When she was four, Hehpsehboah lived in the Netherlands, in the midst of the second world war. Her father, owner of a 400 year old brewery, was a leader in the Dutch underground. His little girl's remarkable talent proved invaluable to the allied underground: she could tell where the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe would be attacking next.

Her ability to sense the probable movements of the enemy ahead of time saved thousands of lives. Her uncanny accuracy made newspaper headlines across Europe. The papers deemed her "The Little Prophet."

One day the Little Prophet warned all not to take shelter in a nearby warehouse. They did anyway, including her family. The warehouse took a direct hit from a German bomb and all were killed.

The Little Prophet grew up in orphanages, where she was often severely mistreated, while her abilities improved with age. Not long ago an American paper nicknamed her "Nana Nostradamus," referring cheekily to her now-legendary ability to pronounce future events in her bubbly, matronly manners of expression... without concealing them in obscure rhymed quatrains, as Nostradamus needed to do.

Even a modestly skeptical reader viewing the past global weather predictions posted on Hehpsehboah's website might dismiss them as fake -- how could anybody be that good? But she is indeed "that good" -- so far. "So far" incorporates about 6 decades of phenomenal accuracy.

Karen O'tay lives not far from San Antonio, Texas. On Sunday, June 30, 2002, she took a drive to San Antonio, not expecting the weather to have anything to do with anything. She expected to drive back home that night.

"There hadn't been any forecasts of rain for at least the past two weeks," she said. "Nobody was expecting any. The TV weather reports said nothing. Then it started coming down in sheets. I was trapped right in the middle of Northeast San Antonio during the whole thing."

The whole thing lasted 8 days. Thirteen inches of rain deluged the area. San Antonio experienced its worst flood in 100 years. George W. Bush took a photo-op trip with his FEMA chief to survey the damage and ceremoniously declared it a disaster area.

Karen had remembered Hehpsehboah's prediction too late to get out of the way. Hehpsehboah had been the only one to foresee the disaster, from among scientists or seers. She'd said it would happen on June 30, and there it was.

An Insurance company in Chicago relies on Hehpsehboah's ability to foresee disasters. "I spent eight months with her in Vancouver," said John, who handles catastrophe claims, "and I got used to the fact that every time she predicted a major storm or an earthquake [anywhere in the world], there it was."

Hehpsehboah has been pretty darn good at foreseeing other kinds of disasters as well.

A few weeks ago on Saturday morning, September 14, 2002, she called to tell me that she had sat up straight in bed in the middle of the night -- she'd heard terrible news about the state of Kashmir, India.

Violence would be starting there within 8 hours, she told me. It could lead to a tremendous crisis. If this trouble in Kashmir weren't averted, it would result in an international crisis in about a week. Kashmir is claimed by both India and Pakistan, and has been the trigger of violence frequently since 1947. It had been quiet lately.

I checked for news reports after we rang off. Nothing. I e-mailed a friend in Kolkata. He wrote back immediately that, yes, violence had begun to flare in Kashmir.

That evening the first reports began trickling in over internet news services. The Indian government had begun to force voting among the Muslim population in Kashmir, leading to the deaths of two political candidates and 17 others.

The reports of atrocities and street fighting with the Indian army grew within hours of Hepsehboah's own report from her bed in the middle of the night. A week or so later, the temple at Gujarat was bombed by fanatics,resulting in rioting, killing well over 1,000 and injuring twice that many, creating international news.

"I am not a psychic," she declares, "I don't tell fortunes. I hear news from the Creator and I pass it on for the good of all who will use it."

It might take months to catalog Hehpsehboah's long record of remarkable accuracy. Doubtless, she would consider such an undertaking quite vain. Her stated purpose is simply to help people get out of the way of trouble, no differently than were her childhood efforts during World War Two.

Predictions, or prophesying, however, may not be her most remarkable trait. Ask the young man we'll call Jason, who walks around on two sound legs these days.

When he was a little boy, Jason was scheduled to have a leg amputated. The night before the surgery, the boy's father and an uncle took him from the hospital and brought him to Hehpsehboah. By 6 o'clock the following morning, they brought the little boy back to the hospital, his leg completely healed. The doctor stamped his imprimatur on this fact.

Hehpsehboah's past is also peppered with hundreds of such instances -- miraculous cures of diseases of all sorts diagnosed as terminal and hopeless by doctors. She is careless about saving letters of testimony; however, she has hundreds of these from grateful people whom she pulled from the brink of death, or from doctor's diagnoses of "inoperable" or "terminal." There are accounts of spontaneous healings at meetings, and "remote" healings of people who wrote or called for her help from a distance, as well as from those who attended her lectures.

News of her ability as a healer spread around the world to the extent that when she visited Brazil to meet Joao de Deus, the famed Brazilian mystic healer, he recognized her standing in the crowd, and brought her onstage to the cheers of thousands.

Like Joao de Deus, she refuses to make a fortune through exploiting the sick and the dying -- even against the advice of the famed religious healer, Kathryn Kuhlman, who once urged her to do just that.

Instead, Hehpsehboah, somewhat naively, has been exploited. She once spent some months healing people at a naturopathic clinic in British Columbia. While working 16 hour days there, one of her clients told her he could no longer afford to come. Surprised, she asked why. She then learned people were paying $125 for 5 minutes of her time. Repulsed by the greed, Hehpsehboah walked out the door and never returned. She did, however, continue with the client, who subsequently recovered from his daily epileptic attacks.

Where do these amazing abilities come from, then? Hehpsehboah says "from the Creator of the Universe." With that, she may describe energies from what one may call the spiritual realms, with which she has been familiar since her earliest memories. She subscribes to no religion and preferrs to point out the great damage the world's religious blunders have often caused the world.

Nevertheless, she recognizes the validity of the individuals who have been of service to mankind in quite tangible ways, whatever their religious background.

Take Padre Pio, the Catholic mystic currently under canonization process by the Vatican. Padre Pio was world famous for healing the sick in the name of Christ. He suffered the stigmata -- that is, the phenomenon of routinely bleeding from the wrists and feet and chest, mirroring the same wounds Christ showed the doubting Apostle Thomas, in the New Testament story.

Hehpsehboah said "the stigmata was very, very important for Padre Pio. He needed this phenomenon to reaffirm his own faith in the Creator of the Universe, and this is where his power to heal came from. "I tried the stigmata once myself," she said, "but I decided it was childish, so I stopped it."

The Vatican is unlikely to canonize Hehpsehboah, who claims Zoroastrianism as her personal religion, but when the good Padre met her years ago when she was still a young countess, he broke down into tears of recognition.

The North American First Nation people's organization named her "Thunderbird Woman." This means that, according to Native American prophecy among various North American tribes, she is the woman who would be sent to the planet to serve as a messenger directly from God. (Hehpsehboah's mother was a full-blooded Mi'qmak indian from Eastern Canada. Her Dutch father the brewery owner came from a long line of nobles.)

Not long before she was born, Hehpsehboah's parents-to-be had a strange visit from a priest, an astrologer, a lama, and a rabbi. They all told her that their new daughter should be named "Shri Shanti A Deva Dutta." This name means "God's Holy Messenger of Peace."

This is not to say that Hehpsehboah is an unceasing beam of unblinking know-it-all. She has been wrong about certain things (thank God), and she is frank. Here's a good example of this lady's frankness:

One day Hehpsehboah happened to meet the Dalai Lama in a store in New York City. After a brief chat, the Dalai Lama paused, and said quizzically, "Is there something you want to tell me?" Hehpsehboah thought, and replied "I think that you are like a bird in a gilded cage. You were picked as a child by a bunch of old men who thought you were a bunch of other old men. It is impossible to be happy when you live your life trying to be someone you're not!"

Who else would tell the Dalai Lama a thing like that?

Neither are her prophetic statements or remarkable healings Hehpsehboah's most conspicuous personal traits. She did not earn the nickname "the Mother Theresa of Canada" from the papers for nothing.

Over the years, Hehpsehboah has established soup kitchens and shelters and housing for the poor, never using a nickel of the donations for her own luxury. She has had, and often still has, indigent and poverty-stricken people sleeping on the floor of her own small apartment, eating her food, sometimes leaving none for herself. Her altruism has often gone to such extremes that, as an old friend recently complained to her bluntly, "you've let people eat you out of house and home, and strip you right down to the bone!"

In 1993, while busying herself with healing and with finding food and shelter for the impoverished (she sleeps only about 3 hours a night, and sometimes doesn't sleep at all), Hehpsehboah had a remarkable experience.

She describes it this way: "It was as though a very great curtain descended from the sky all around me. A voice said to me 'You have healed men's bodies for a long time, and now it is time for you to begin to heal men's souls.'"

And there it started, on a streetcorner in Vancouver protesting the latest, greatest war.

[Epilogue: Maybe Hehpsehboah's anti-war weekend didn't make CNN, but Bishop Desmond Tutu did call and congratulate her for it.]

9/22/11 I see by the stats a fair number of people are reading this article. If you're curious, Hehpsehboah can be found at www.thecosmicenergyexperience.com -- the site looks hokey, but she can't do anything about it.

Fat Old Man

2005-10-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

Fat Old Man

Tom Dark

Some days I feel like a fat old man. Some days I don't.
Some days I feel like a fat old man. Some days I don't.
Some days I will behave like a fat old man. Some days I won't.

I'm a fat old man... talking in my sleep, from three to five
I'm a fat old man... mumbling my mumbo jumbo about the universe... every night from three to five.

And while I mumble and I wonder, there's that gal there over yonder, listening, making sure I'm still alive.

She's a fat old gal... a churning urn of sweet concern.
She's lyin' there awake, listening to me mutter, taking careful note of every word I utter, she says sometimes there is truth in the nonsense that I blurt.

If some truth jumps out to bite her, while I'm lyin' there beside her,
I hope it doesn't hurt. Swing it, fellas.

(Inst)

We sail across the rolling silence through the middle of the night
I am the captain of the blankets, snoring orders left and right
With my spyglass on the sleeping seas in search of distant dreams,
If I mutter "Thar she blows," she knows that all I mean

Is that I am a fat old coot... talking in my sleep, from three to five
With the moonlight on our shoulders, anchored like a couple boulders, she will rock the boat to ascertain that I am still alive.

And I appreciate that -- and I should tell her so
But I'd just as soon she didn't know
Can't help it, though, even so,
I am talking in my sleep, I know,
So let the whole world know
That I'm just a fat old man.

That's all right honey, don't get up. I'm just goin' to the bathroom...

Thoughts:

LIVE from the Wooterville, Ohio, Lion's Club and Oddfellows Hall! It's the annual Father's Day dance and pot luck free-for-all! Bring a covered dish and canasta cards! Best cookin' on either side of the Cuyahoga! We're too old to remember which side this is. But come on a' supper, wherever we are!

This is a true song: Some days I feel like a fat old man, some days I don't.

I've been practicing to be a fat old man since I was fourteen years old, which, at this point, as of my birthday today, is not so far from forty years ago.

Depending when you finally read this, that point may have been well over forty years ago... maybe even a hundred.

If for you it is now over a thousand years since I began practicing being a fat old man, I've misjudged my own importance.

If all new babies look so cute to us old folks, how much cuter must babies not even due for a thousand years look? More neotonous molecules could not be imagined. If it’s past 3000 AD when you are reading this: hellooooooo, you adorable, adorable little sweeties, whirling in the air, as yet unborn!

I bet that a thousand years from now, your language sounds like "zip!" "vip!" and "boopbeepboop!"

Let it be written in the language of Zipvipboopbeepboop that I didn't invent practicing growing old. My best pal Paul Richard did.

Paul was practicing being a fat old man before we met. He got really good at it. He'd stick his belly out, splay his legs and grunt and snort and complain just like a fat old man. He could roll complacently down the sidewalk just like a fat old man. I learned how to say "Aaah, shit. Snuffle. Snort," from Paul. Lots of us did. We thought acting like fat old men was very funny.

Paul made a fat old monkeyshine that history should record for you teens in your zipbeepboop helmets and silvery space suits a thousand years away. One day after school, as we were seated in a tired old after-school teen hangout called Porter’s, Paul grunted out the latest teen hit song as a fat old man, dressed in the latest teen fashions. I fell out of the booth laughing.

"Come on baby light my fiiiiiiiiire," he grunted, like a hairy old man with a mountainous belly in a swayback bed singing in the middle of the night.

Paul said, "imagine waking up on a Sunday morning when you’re 70 dressed like a hippie clown singing that. That’d be real keen.” "Keen" was an outmoded word even then, a thousand years ago. Paul had a double sense of irony.

Maybe there won't be such a thing as "Sunday" in your time, unborn molecule kids. It was a day for going to church, and most of us had stopped going to church even back then. Most of us stopped going to church because we began to suspect it wasn’t who we really were. I hope people can still translate what Paul meant into Zipvipboop. He meant, "imagine waking up on the morning when you are most supposed to be who you really are, but who you make of yourself is a silly clown in a puffy polka dot shirt and striped bellbottom pants and square-toed shoes with high heels, singing about being sexy."

Are there still polka dots in your time? Are they now a sign that you know who you really are?

Yes there are least a thousand years left from now. The wicked world leaders we now have, a thousand years ago, are only temporary. If mentioned in Zipvipboop at all, they'll be amused footnotes about how humans most think they are important when they least realize they are clowns.

This information is presently top secret for most people. The government is hiding it. But a thousand years from now, you maybe probably know. Truth has a way of leaking out, if slowly.

"How do you get to the belly of the whale?" Paul asked rhetorically one day after school, smoking cigarettes and drinking soda pop in my room. "Just follow the Yellow Brick Road," he rejoined to nobody and everybody, staring out the windows of the upper floor of that big old Victorian house. This sounds crazy now, but a thousand years from now, you all probably understand.

I nicknamed Paul "the King." He committed suicide at age 19. He'd already thought everything a fat old man thinks, felt all a fat old man cares to feel and decided to leave the planet early.

One night I dreamed I visited an empty house. In it was a wizard. The wizard said the name "Paul Richard" to me, then turned into an old cocker spaniel and started biting the dust. I left the house, and like magic, there was Paul. We walked together a little distance, then he took one fork in the road and I the other.

Shortly afterward, in reality, age 18, Paul started mumbling jocularly that he wanted to be reincarnated as a fat old dog. They enjoyed life without permission or pedigree, he said. Yep, he said, in his next life he'd be a fat old dog. "Think I'll just rooooll over and die," he'd rejoin to nobody and everybody, imitating his fat old dog.

After slitting his wrists on three different occasions across the next year, Paul succeeded in killing himself. He'd stop by in dreams now and then in the same fashion we used to hang out together, now in dreams. One night Paul described what his death was like: it was all a black nothing; then he'd remember he was somebody and that it was a Sunday morning -- which it would have been, had he not killed himself. Time to get up, looking forward to sweet rolls, milk and the funnies; then he'd realize he couldn't wake up, he'd remember he'd killed himself. This led to a seeming eternity of horrific mournful sound and regretful feeling, after which, there'd be nothing again. This would repeat endlessly, remembering himself, trying to wake up, and realizing he couldn't. Although I was only an observer, it was terrifying to see what he described.

After a few rough dreams of him as these, he was doing well enough. He'd finally put the suicide behind him and grew up in some other reality. When things got lousy for me over the years, Paul would show up in a dream to cheer me up. By jove, I'd cheer up. Things did get better.

Paul hasn't visited my dreams in quite awhile. We tend to get lost in busy-things at middle age, too absorbed in them to be sociable, even when one of us is dead in this particular reality.

Insomuch as you may still be somewhere conscious of me, old King, I have given you a song with a fat old wife in it for the probability in which you achieved the fat old manhood you were practicing for. In this probability, you despised your mother and didn't want a girlfriend. You didn't even want to masturbate.

In fact, King, I wrote this song with Susie Narak in mind, who is really young, really really smart and really, really, really cute. Susie gave me permission to use her name. She can be your fat old gal in some nether-nether land.

I have a photo of Susie standing with Melissa Ferrick, which Susie sent me. I've taped it to the mirror in my studio. Susie looks innocent and unaware that she is more delicious than pie a la mode and as warm and fuzzy as a gerbil. Melissa looks like a kitty cat who has just found the key to the gerbil's cage.

I laugh each time I look at it, which is often. And so, I hoped also to make something that would make young Susie laugh just as goofily.

I love that photo.

I woke up in the middle of the night humming the beginnings of this song not long before my 50th birthday. Not long after, my friend Don Campau opened the door and discovered a whole lot of people standing there going "Happy Biiiiiiiirthday!" He too had just turned fifty.

And now, fifty was longer ago for us than Youth Today would like to know. You wake up and there you are.
Surprise, surprise, old fella.

Suicide Therapy

2005-10-08T22:05:00.000-07:00

(Oh, wait. Here's something else funny, too. I wrote this for a kid who was suicidal who thought he wanted to be a comedian. He was always repeating long bits verbatim from comedians who cuss a lot. Well... he repeated those bits kind of in the fashion that Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in "Rain Man" repeated Abbot & Costello's "Who's on first" bit. The kid looked at the bit I wrote for him and he shucksed away from actually trying it out... BUT. He was doing fine last I saw him; he'd decided to go to diesel mechanic school instead, seemed pretty happy about it.

Maybe some budding comedian out there would like to try this? If so, copyright Tom Dark, y'know.)

Props:

Real gun, real bullets in a box with powder and caps REMOVED. Bowie knife, hidden. Notebook, hidden. Hunter's jacket with lots of pockets to fumble around in.

Bit: attempted suicide onstage.

Ladies and gentlemen let me get right to the point. I'm a jerk. An idiot. I'm a creep. A fool. A doofus. I'm goofy. A shit-head. A fifth wheel. A total failure. A big fat prick. Also a shitty little prick. An arrogant nobody. A loudmouth know-it-all. I'm living a lie. Guilty as sin. It's my mother's fault. But she couldn't help it. I was an ugly baby. She was an ugly mother.

(Pull out gun, put to to temple). People don't like me. Nobody should. I don't deserve it. They were right. I'm an asshole. I'm glad they laughed at me. I deserve to be laughed at. Go ahead and laugh now. That's what I'm here for. Ready? Here goes.

Grimace. Squint. Tremble chin. Look emotionally convincing. Pull trigger, nothing. Oh yeh. Heh heh. Forgot. Bullets. They're around here somewhere.

Guess I was just nervous... I forgot to load up, folks! Just a sec. Fumble around in pockets. Pull out various memorabilia, like maybe a "dear John" letter from girlfriend, etc. Pull out ammo box. Take out a bullet. Show audience. Explain why this is the best brand of bullet to use for close range. Be technical. Load gun while chattering apologetically. Show audience loaded chamber. All set? Ready? Good. Point to temple. Grimace. Tremble. Grit teeth. Pull trigger.

(Nothing). Woops. Check chamber. I know what it is. These bullets have been sitting under the counter at the Army-Navy surplus store for a long time. They've been improperly stored (give a little lecture on how to properly store ammunition)So maybe the powder's wet or something. (Move chamber. Click smartly back into place. Grimace. Pull trigger again. Nothing. Pull trigger rapidly, repeatedly, grimacing while working into a fury like you get when your computer keeps crashing. Mumble goddamfuckingetcetc, incoherently.)

Throw gun to floor (have somebody take it for safekeeping). That's just another example of what a loser I am! And what a loser I am for putting up with myself! (wait 4 slow beats)

I guess you're wondering why I decided to commit suicide on stage here tonight.

This is a college town. There's a lotta smart people in this town. I wanted to be a smart guy. Smart people sit in coffee houses and write depressing stuff in their journals. You can't sound smart in your journal unless you write depressing stuff. So when you die, somebody will read your journal and feel sorry for all the bullshit you had to put up with. "Awww, jeeze... we... we didn't know... if only we could apologize for being such... (both fists clenched in the air)... assholes!"

So I decided to keep a journal and write depressing stuff. What could be more depressing than riding on the city bus? Here's what I saw on the bus this week (read from notebook):

"Monday. There's a guy with no legs. It took 5 minutes to load his wheelchair onto the ramp. That's depressing. I'm depressed"

"Tuesday. A guy sitting in front of me is chewing some brown stuff and then spitting the brown stuff into a jar. Chewing on this weird brown stuff and he's spitting it into a jar. Once he spits this brown stuff into a jar he stares at the brown stuff he spit into the jar. Every time he spits into the jar, he stares into it. The jar's half full. Getting nice and gooey in there. I can't stop watching this. I'm gonna be sick. I'm gonna get some brown stuff and spit into a jar.

"Wednesday: A completely tattooed stripper. Completely. She gets off at one of those buildings on the main drag that looks like it came in a plain brown wrapper. She's going to wiggle her tattoos in front of a bunch of high school principals who come in wearing hats on their laps. She's going to take off her clothes and wiggle those tattoos and she'll look like the Night of the Living Dead with a pussy.

(To audience. I think that's depressing. Do you think that's depressing? No? How about you? Yeah, it's really depressing. I don't know what's wrong with that jerk. This is depressing stuff.)

"Thursday: A crazy guy sitting in front of me looks like he just came out of a Popeye cartoon. He's having a boxing match with the air. Every ten seconds he jumps out of his seat and starts punching the air. Then he sits down like nothing ever happened. Maybe he just got back from Guyana. Damn big mosquitos down there in Guyana. He's got no teeth. Maybe they sucked out his teeth, too.

"Friday: A guy with no face and no hands gets on the bus. No cheeks, no lips, no nose, just eyes and a hole [note: all this is true material. But we're not making fun of disabled people here.] So what did his ma tell him before dinner? 'Wash your face and ha -- er... wash out your straw, hon... '"

You know why there are disabled people on this planet? God put them here to remind the rest of us what assholes we truly are. We're a species of asshole from the dirt in the Garden of Eden. Of the genus dinkus assholius. Subgenus Biggus assholatua largae.

We are complete, total, universal, whining, whimpering, squealing, complaining, simpering, sniveling, bitching, complaining, self-loathing, no holds barred, instructions on rear panel, batteries included, self-contained, all-repelling ASSHOLES.

Here's John. He's got the use of a few fingers and he can talk and that's all. That's it. No legs, no arms, can't even move his head. He asks people to move his head for him when it gets stuck looking up at the ceiling. They move his head back down for him. He gets through life like that every day. I like John. I go, "how ya doing, John?" and we'd slap hands if he had a whole one.

"Fine," he says. "How about you?"

I'm doing lousy. Lousy. Phhhhhhhht... I broke a lace on my sneaker. I've got a zit. My girlfriend left me and I'm not rich enough and I want a new car and I hate my job and I haven't been laid in three months.

So John looks at me like "So that's what happens when you have legs and arms that actually work?

" This guy's just fine and I'm an ASSHOLE with arms and legs that work. A complete, total, universal, whining, squealing, complaining, bitching, simpering, sniveling, complaining, self-loathing, no holds barred, instructions on rear panel, batteries included, self-contained, all-repelling ASSHOLE.

AAAAAAAASSHOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLE. AND I'M SORRY.

(check the time)

Shoot, I'm late. Okay, I'll do it just like the japanese do it. Hari-Kari. Maybe talk about hari-kari and the tradition. Pull out the great big knife.

Then stab yourself -- make it plain you didn't do it very hard, just enough to prick your belly. Spend the denouement bobbing back and forth going "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!" like you're surprised just a little pinprick hurt this much. Leave stage going "Ow! Ow!"