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Cheering Like a Biker on Speed

CEE

    As what I presuppose will be my final “Look! Isn’t this ugly?!”, regarding a monster called Man, it might perhaps serve us better, to discuss the monster’s castle. A haunted house in the Milky Way. Third from Sol. A blue droplet, become a tomb. A crypt, become crap. Or, so it is said, and for quite my lifetime. How our mud home has been made dirty, even beyond its sky. It’s ever ongoing, this bellow, the “Hey, Jude” of shaking a fist. Mainly via tubes we look into.
    Whether pimped by Orson Welles himself in The Late Great Planet Earth, or goggled at us via PBS by Jeff Goldblum during his 15 minutes, I, crass materialist, narcissist, disconnected to the point I’ll pump Michael Jackson’s “Leave Me Alone” to drown out the cries of Others, have watched. And paid attention. Listened, taken in. Absorbed. Scientists, often the same faces growing older, alternately amused and grim. Detailing—in layman’s terms—our depth of ooze into the quicksand. The reports are never precisely the same, and by that I mean, they don’t get better. No...The Portrait of Dorian Gray, tends to not improve. And by way of the good volk at msn.com, the update last year (one year ago, keep repeating that like a mantra), had it as generally held and stated within the Scientific Community, that, if all measures of preserving the planet were put into effect overnight...one YEAR ago...we could no longer escape catastrophic effects to the environment, before Earth as the Delta Queen even began to turn her ass around. That’s well Over a Year, now, as you read this, and I’ll roll the dice Nothing’s changed. I didn’t think it would, which is why I’m still so pissed about French fries being ruined. Newsflash: Health-committed Persons Don’t Eat French Fries.
    Humans are about hating other humans and trying to control them. Save the Planet, has too much healing and accord and community in the mix, and not enough lingering aftertaste from making someone else feel stupid...or making them pay money for some specific they didn’t obey well enough...or even onsite reeducation, which is considered rather plantation overseer, to persons made to kneel, a bad idea in a nation brimming with ordnance. No. The “happy” of making things nicer, is, if you understand this, social vermouth. Very few want much of it, as the gin of “making them _______”, is the good stuff. Though, it’s all been buzz, anyway—stupid, monotone buzz, from when a “drone” was a “low on the totem pole” bee. It’s something I’ve heard forever.
    We had an open landfill a few blocks away from my birthplace, after an interstate was pushed through when I was being born. I loved going there as a small boy and laughing, testing my skills at being the next Sandy Koufax, as my folks let me throw in our trash. TV kid, I never missed the PSA of the crying Indian. I thought it was ultra-cool. I liked the power the litterers wielded; it never occurred to me harming the planet was “bad”, as but for the rare story about or photo op by a posturing hypocrite, or some not-funded-by-anyone-else group of ragtags, I never saw real moves toward changing things...and on the occasion of any accomplishment, it stopped, then added its mass to the growing war of words. The smog index in LA, wasn’t beginning descent, until years after I’d begun stealing peeks at skin mags, and the pride kind of ended there. Like me, when playing a war game, never having a long range strategy. And voices, all along the way, cranking out the obit. Through usage, it lost impact.
    This topic, is today at the point of PPV, missing only the bombast of Don King, and those Green certainly deal the best abuse in debate...but, words, no matters swearing thick, no matter prayers or those of love, do nothing. A crushing statement, coming from a writer, but that’s my argument, per any Good Idea: Words and Only Words, are meaningless.
    Given the increasing “fast approaching deader than shit” agreement in the scientific enclave, the ongoing fight and requisite fingerpointing appears to be an end in itself. The YouTube vid of the old McGlaughlin Group, shouting, overtalking, half-pigs at the trough, half-asylum inmates, until the credits. Great fun. Place your bets. But leave the planet out of it, as Earth’s a nonrunner. Because a world’s worth of vomiting at one another, moves not a stone. Or a hunk of plastic. Or allows better atmosphere. Or freezes Time.
    Science, with varied specifics, more and more is Arthurian Round Table in its unanimity. And Bill Maher makes foolish faces and calls everyone who isn’t Bill Maher, “dumb”, as the panels gobblegobble, “people need to understand”, if-you-didn’t-attend-my-favorite-class-at-Johns Hopkins-you’ll-think-I’m-a-weirdo...and they of the Grass Roots (comprising most all persons I’ve ever known) sneer, spit, get angry, speak of firearms and use terms like “overedu-muh-cated idiot!”...which may give the Mahers and Silvermans and Oswalts a whole lotta spendin’ money, but again, cleans not one square inch. Meanwhile, whichever way, the ozone, urban pollution, the landfill issue, too hot so we fry, too cold so we freeze, waters rising or honey bees dying or unbreathable, plague-ridden air, the reality of devolution, deterioration, goes on. To an estian and existentialist like me, to common sense and pragmatism, to those who can still do math or take in a chalk talk, that’s Game. Nice fighting with you. Red or white, with your cyanide?
    Yet fatalistic logic, seems to not penetrate The True Believer, as I found out in Christian days, following Dr. Falwell’s “7-11 sells porn!” phase. Hardcore reality, is specious, please note. Right is right. (?) The insistence of fighting the good fight, from any corner and versus opposition of choice, is in a burning eye of zealotry, the crux. As a lifelong Prohibitionist, though annoyed, I understand. The trouble with holy wars as related to the devolution of Man and his lil’ spaceship, is that those playing for time, have already won. There exists no [MISSING FRAME] “Oooh, what a daring escape, that was!” for us. Certainly not for those arriving, nor those they lie down with nor those who arrive as a result. There’s no falling across the finish line, going the distance to prove a point, everyone is saved but the hero dies, or a decade to get the best and brightest to Bullshit Name Galaxy, that our legacy might learn, when we did not.
    No, as of even you reading this, we’ve arrived at the level of Kevin Costner movies, in terms of how shitty The Future will be before, in another Future far beyond ours, things can be then better, as Man will “know”. We’ll have arrived, y’see, and that you and I will never know this reality, which still involves the primitive and looks like Luxembourg, is not supposed to be of concern. Nor is the fact of this, given Vegas odds, not what’s coming, either.
    Blame games and assigning culpability, with the default to “yeah, but...!” held over from the playground or dealing with Mom are, as with my being dismissed for suggesting the Church could never stop Not the Church from ogling Miss April, as far as it seems we’re gonna get. And, we have again arrived at Man as murderer. This time, not because of Man as existing, but as bred. The point, is a simplicity rejected, by those who require more. As with anything, what persons “want” as true, is only that. So, let me speak of History:
    The writing of H.P. Lovecraft, the rhetoric leading us to realize none of us Really Knows the story of Earth, prior to the Antiquities...and we don’t, even Louis Leakey had to revise as he went along...for me spells out history books as legend, either the heroic things I read or the rewrites you’re getting, now. More and more, when we retreat backward enough, so no Daguerreotype can hold honest, anything becomes possible. And for my part, I believe humans as I’ve known them, Hate, and they condemn, they slander, and they deride. No one, Back There, ever lauded another with highsounding glory, if the story was untrue. Not in a world harsh with drilled lessons and severe penalties and death by your 30th birthday. In the mist, Back There, you often died, if you did not tell it straight.
    So, I believe Indians and Pilgrims made a timid attempt upon a certain day, a nice try, considering. I believe a middleaged general named Washington, knelt in freezing snow, speaking at The Beyond that a nation be allowed to be born. I even believe 183 crass, gauche, socially unacceptable and(or) uneducated, stubborn men, crossed a line, in sand or in metaphor, because in their conviction, they would not be told.
    I believe all kinds of things like that. The writing of Lovecraft, makes it worth considering. An image I borrowed, from my novella, FUM, of a giant door set into a mountain:
    “A world hinted at, what Earth once was, almost the only trace remaining. A cornerstone of what lay in shards of Troy, or the tortured thoughts of the writer, Robert E. Howard. It was real. It had been everything, and now was only this.”
    I believe that, in the Long Ago, Man was heroic, and legendary in his being. Human as a race, was capable and honorable and righteous and good. And final. Hammurabic. Utterly rigid. No quarter given or asked. A simplicity and a certainty and a way all understood, though language divide them. I believe this world was the World, until a conflict to decide its future, made zillions go away, all the way from “camps” ringed with razor wire filled with starving Others, to a pair of explosive suns making cities vanish in light. These things, were at the end of the fight of the universes. And the victors, themselves knocked Hell out of, came marching home. And married. And begat devils. Devils who, today, talk and overtalk and butt in and accuse, who explain in rambles and do nothing, who growl with menace and do nothing, who call names and pontificate and sneer and do nothing...who slander one another and line pockets, and sit and wait. Who beat breasts with their own “greatness”...while doing not a goddammed thing, then defaulting to Mom, how “they started it!”
    Devils. I don’t care what side of the debate. We’re all going to die, and you sit there, mouthing. ‘Cause, God knows, the play’s the thing, right? Your play. Where you win all the arguments.
    I close all social discourse, with a fast look at my 10-Minute Play, The Sinking of the Cumberland...
    A man and woman, lifelong foes, find themselves trapped in an airtight security room. They spend their last moments as they spent their whole lives, e.g. namecalling, derriding, threatening, assigning guilt. Both are “right”. The Other is a shithole, and that’s The Way Things Are. The play ends in black light, the pair on knees at center room, embracing, terrified as they shriek for want of air. Although not written as a metaphor, I want you, the Reader, to hold that image in your head, but replace the actors with you and your dearest Other. Now add one more image: Me, however you perceive me, raccoon coat, straw boater and a pennant that reads, “Beat State”, cheering, like a biker on speed.

    IMO, if there’s ever a Soylent Green, it won’t be “people”. It’ll be something rather less.
    CEE

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