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The Sacred Heart of Your Buckshot “I”

CEE

    The lessons of History, teach us only what we take away. There exists no “must”, in this. Learning, as all, is personal. If there is no “normal”, my chosen facet, is Mine. En example, the hoary school film showcasing Maurice Ogden’s poem, “The Hangman”, a cautionary tale against incursion of government oppression trampling human freedom and passersby “allowing” it to happen. Well written, WW2 blowout. NSDAP under the beds. A real fight, if you take it up as a McCarthyite cry. You’d be told McCarthy was the Enemy warned against. Which defaults to some oppression being good and some being bad, and maybe we argue into morning’s light, calling it the push of “no one should force anyone, or sit by and watch another forced”, which is half a click less stupid than “Be it resolved therefore: War is Bad.” But a push, a draw, a 38th Parallel North, all right, it has its benefits. I struggle with my rights stopping an inch from your nose. I’m thrilled to the marrow, yours stopping an inch from mine. Only, they don’t, depending on how you define rights. There’s something called cable, and something called the WWW. If I lived alone, I would have neither. The reason you hear of CEE and read CEE and perhaps take a tranquilizer due to or create voodoo dolls of CEE, is the fault of Mrs. CEE.
    I throw up online and in adverted print, because she will not live in a house running only the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show”, Don Dunphy calling the Gillette fights, and movies predating “I did not have sex with that woman.” We have unspoken agreements, a bit tough for me, but navigable, as two people can be a love story, an island or a sitcom, but not a clique. You can kowtow or allow a ball in your mouth, but that’s a far cry from “going along with the group”.
    I avoided cliques, immune to peer pressure all my life, as I so lived in my head, I never knew it was occurring. And I’d watch the film of the Ogden poem, and as alienated Self, think, “But...that’s Not going to happen, and if it did, I’m not my brother’s cage cleaner. Societal power shifts, happen. Vox populi, is a mirage for purposes.” Actually, at 17, I’m sure I only thought, “What bullshit!”, but community responsibility in the 21st, translates only as policing your neighbors. Not protecting them. Seeing a parent swat their kid and reporting them. Finding out who didn’t buy insurance and reporting them (make sure you spell my name right—if it ain’t free, it’s a bad law). Sensing racism and reporting it. All this is “love thy neighbor”, Today, because your neighbor, the Other, is a congenital idiot. And he adopts stuff all the time, and goes along with it.
    As Jerry Seinfeld put it in 1995, “we have stupid people, who think they’re smart!” Yet these buy the goddammed insurance like dogs for the Frisbee, cast votes in response to nanny cliches delivered as peer pressure, and do without everything they’ve enjoyed ingesting, for the privilege of being a wrinkled sack of shit astride a dying world, a few more years...months...weeks...hours? I recall seeing the pictures of the first successful artificial heart transplant (opposed to the test work done by the Frankenstein of Cape Town, Christiaan Barnard), as a callow youth. I stared at the newspapers and TV feed of a dude hooked up to a Dunderback’s machine, the lone advertisement Jarvik Heart would ever need, and thought, “Why?!” and “How fucked are YOU?!” Why the craziest, most desperate shit in the world, rather than Mr. Death?
    The answer, which for me came much later than norm, is of course, “fear”. Same ‘why’ as letting The Hangman enjoy his work. Fear. Nothing else. If you maintain something Buscagliaesque, let’s us do lunch with Seinfeld. He can offer his variety of “I detest you” leers, while I insult your menu choices. Let’s be transparent on that score, while we’re at it: you don’t really like the tasteless shit you choke down. You’re just terrified of being inert material. You believe Chevalier’s tired quip, re: old age. It’s another thing you’ve nodded to. Because your friends said to jump off that bridge.
    How far, though, does your nodding extend? If, hypothetically, in an alternate universe, Charles Martel and his allies had been defeated at Tours in 732, and the Arabs and Berbers became the Future became sharia law as unquestioned...if the children of Ismael ruled all but dots on our globe, conformity makes perfect sense. A dullwitted maxim I read, online: “I have never learned anything, in a roomful of likeminded people.” Facefart users Love such pap, yet despite this, Others crave Others of their own gray matter’s tartan, so that in process of “Ein volk, ein Reich...!”, or Ireland just before the birth pangs of Fine Gael, utter absorption within a system, however scarily Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, represents normalcy. Though as we, greatgreats of grands of greatgreatgrands of grands’ grands of the Franks, do not exist in the Above stated model of Community, there therefore exists no proposition for permission of it, but in Maurice Ogden’s poem, exchanging Holy for Order and Sin for Crime. If you watch anything happen, nonfriend, unchecked, it becomes the Way of Things. The simplest stuff. Dandelions. Cute one day, a chore the next, necessitating professional thieves and their chemicals if you wait two weeks. Entrenched. Something you didn’t want, which won’t leave you alone. And Bruce Hornsby and The Range play out with “The Way It Is”, as a mouthful of Dante’s Inferno happens every day, every town, and is chatter for the dinner table. The masses ever adopt the lowest common denominator, much as our household’s cats never learned one another’s GOOD habits or proclivities, only those which catapulted me out of my chair in the guise of William Hurt in Altered States.
    George Carlin, in The Day well joked of the deductive reasoning of The Establishment, “beer leads to heroin”, et al. A good bit. And well played, as we know nothing leads to anything, given power of choice. You may know me as scoffing at any addiction not physical in its compulsions, and we could argue about that, although we’d have to stop after awhile, as we had lunch with Seinfeld on deck...but, social choice? As observer, let alone adherent? Brutality as mortal as written with the finger of God (yeahyeah, shut up, that’s specious, you’re a nit, Torquemada’s centuries dead)? What do you think would happen to your internal processing, at the stage of Ogden’s model unfolding behind the Groucho glasses of universality? There’s no equivocation, nonfriend. The choices aren’t a spectrum. It’s
    1) Sieg Heil this Umayyad Reality into full being and write Charles Martel out of the history books.
    2) Play the role of the limp first person in Ogden’s “The Hangman”, then pee pants as you watch the prophecy unfold.
    3) Fight it now, throw down, Davy Crockett meets Arnold.
    4) Though sickened, Punt. Wait and see. You’ll know when to advance into this with a flamethrower...right?
    The decision, as all, hello, is personal. For myself, sociopathic and with the same regard for community I have for gum on my shoe, it involves Ogden’s silent man keeping a good thought until the bell tolls for he. Then, something 80’s and Peckinpah at the same time, and One Trick Bill-O pens “Killing CEE”...except the divine court probably wrote his epitaph, too, by then...but, you never know. Given a neo-Phil Dick world of “The Man in the High Minaret”, once larger protection of vast armies have knelt like busts on COPS, loudspeakers, radio and The Emergency Broadcast System advise we play nice with the new overseers, once troops Not Nice At All by the van line are in your vicinity and the fifth person you’ve heard say, “Fuck Off!”, has been machine gunned, after it turns into the truth of Eddie Murphy’s vintage bit, re: the mindless notion of slave revolt as individual belligerence...and then, 15 years go by? I grant, it’s surreal to consider capitulation, in a country whose emblem should have always been a middle finger. But, Dick’s landmark “...High Castle”, if nothing, shows a Bizarro America, one unabashedly about the naked animal survival I insist we live in, already. I hate pretense, and I hate awkward, polite horseshit, personnel directors who come off computer at Captain Kirk, “Working!...We...just...decided...to...go...a different...way...with it!”, when you know goddammed-well what you’re really saying, STOP LYING!!
    I’m all for every darkness lovingly rustproofed inside each of you, to be ‘whom’ you display as, provided the playing field is level. And in this black light, as any peoples conquered are only in toadying obeisance—but for a few true converts far freakier than the supplanting Other culture—then, in lowest tones or clicks and wiggles, handwritten code, Jim Carrey as Truman taken to the rare space he could not be seen or heard, all people would reveal truest Selves. Enough Hate Earth to make most vomit, but no-dross honest, so, bonus points. And the subjugated, delighting in crumbs, strained from neverending fear and stress, driven to primal on every scale but drilled yield of “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am”, are spectres. Suffering shades.
    America, 15 years after being driven down, “a nightmare version of itself”, a familiar quote, recall? As an enemy in this Ultimate Reality who made a lasting imprint, 15 years ago, said he would make of us. I doubt he planned on domination of a place so schizophrenic as we hit the pillow September 10th, we couldn’t bust Gary Condit and throw him off Miss Liberty...but more and more, with America in overdrive, caffeine and sugar substitutes, tech prompting we imitate its speed (I thought the dialog on The West Wing, was FedEx-idiot, but I’ve heard people who worked in Georgetown, say it’s real)? With one really hard shake of our canary cage, a quick bolt through the yard next door to the kennel, a worrisome incident to get all chickens clucking, and, if big enough—Hitler, on the subject of lies, dear Watchmen, if Big Enough—we’d never be able to shut the fuck up and stop stressing. Add to that the diversity already permitted, even 15 years ago? Diversity of POV, if nothing? We were marked as Basket Case Nation, I’m certain, long before I first heard about Y2K from a buddy and thought as I rode home, “How can people swallow this garbage?”
    How? Really? If we listen to Rome’s Cato, “Man, is a social animal.” Taken as true, it’s what I find most objectionable about the beast, as very few indeed, can resist repeated shit injections from the Other...my coin and usage of “Otherstain”, more frequent in the past, was derived from an anecdote of Buscaglia’s (of all people), the Japanese monk who slapped him and said, “Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet!” Yet, beneath stars and stripes and spy cams, all walk in each others’ heads until only dirt remains. Shitheaded, everyone keeps talking...again, my term, “babbleshit”. It’s hysteria as kaffeeklatsch, here. It was rarely a passing part of life, until made stick. It was made stick. We can’t get it off our shoe. As with mandatory school attendance. As with income tax. As only so briefly, my dear, sweet Prohibition. As not asking an applicant’s age, or even acting like humans do that. As with You Have To Rent To Someone You Don’t Want To, serve them, hire them. NOT kill them. Okay, okay. Are you sure that last one’s off the wall, though? Not that you’ll “have to” kill anyone, like this is an old Night Gallery shortie. Just maybe watch it happen. Just maybe have it happen to you. Just maybe say nothing, as that’s their culture. And yours. And mine. And ours.
    The Greatest Generation, were terrified until just about the minute the last Volkssturm teen yelled, “Kamerade!” and the Enola Gay opened bomb bay doors. A scifi book from the Cold War, shows why. Blow past our armaments, America as individual, is craven. You and you and you, are Gollums all, gobbling leavings because of high school cliques. Which, is pathetic. People mocked Sally Field, in the Long Ago, e.g. “You like me! You really like me!”, but that corn kernel is so desperately important to each of you. Like the sad man with his Tinkertoy cyborg heart buying a 112 more days. Conversely, if it represents the given groupthink, you’d die for it. You’d be stoned to death in public like something out of the Pauline Epistles, rather than seem prejudiced. I have enormous respect for effective suicide, but go for the Nathan Hale, for Self, not in bending to convention. For Self, not cringing from buzzwords. For Self, not your goddammed walking group. They’ll keep walking, the day after you die.
    If I lose the respect of the Other and a nickel, I have lost a nickel.
    If I die for Their perception, I just threw a ruby in the garbage.
    I grow a bit more ill, every few days. I refuse to die in a hospital, which I believe are sewers. As I cannot gamble against my wife’s regard for life, and as I will under no circumstances allow my freedom be stolen in any sense of the word, I warmly welcome 8th Century religious killings into our downtown, and hope they spill over to the infidel. Or a tax agent of another kind, comes knocking, that I might be forced to conform, Mutual of Omahawise. Or whatever ya got, Brando. Let it serve as my exit-statement, too much I confess, the playground’s “Can’t make me!”
    Ogden’s Hangman, a surreal character stretched Silly Putty to warn of a conformity all too real, was impossible in his godlike might, to resist. In this world, the rote, offline-one less colorful, resistance may or may not be futile, but I’m going for it, and to proselytize You, I offer CEE as Mrs. Reagan:
    Just Say “No”, to anything forced upon you by a non-cop. A non-judge. A non-government agent. Whether undercover Krishna in a van playing doubletalk misdirect, or unauthorized holy violence in your hamlet as 9/11 fallout, Just Say “No”. At least some of you will die for your efforts, headline or talking point of the day. I won’t claim you abet the hangman, if you blow this off and, say, allow sharia a place at the lunch counter. Or any thinking, laws or regime. It ain’t about any “enforcer”, never was. This Is Not Otherbased. Almost nothing, is. As all, this is personal. It’s You, Will Powers. Only You.
    I’m sorry Thomas Hobbes was right, that life in the natural state is nasty, brutish and short. But right he was, so, why cry about it? I’ll die in bed, but at least like Jim Bowie. As for the rest of you, calm. Don’t be afraid. The brief fragrance, is gone. I know; I loved it dearly. I miss it, too. Don’t accept what you can’t. Stand in the gap. Hold your position. Run your inventory, lock and load, then go. If any push boundaries sans options, come back like they’re William Zabka in the 80’s, but, hell with sand da floor. Grab that bastard sword. Or Eastwood’s harpoon gun, in The Dead Pool.
    —CEE

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