It's a place where most healthy young men have been. . . . . or should be.

Taking a long look off into the horizon like Mark Hamil in the beginning of Star Wars and pondering his destiny in some far-off sunset, a chill wind blowing as he holds himself a little tighter and waits for the stars.

It is the archetypical quest-- the loping of the wolf. . . . . earth, wind, and fire.

They say if you want to do something for a living, you had better be prepared to do a lot of it. As I spoke to my hidden contact in the writing industry, whose name I will not give-- namely because he would be swarmed-- both he and I knew that this author, currently speaking to you from the written page, was very different. For one, he was a persistent bastard. And kept coming around. This could either be grounds for a court-writ injunction, or maybe he just had something to say.

Every time the author released a book, the boy gave a critique. He was upfront, honest-- this career writer had taught him a lot. In fact, was one of his early influences. He could speak "craft", he could map out "the technical", he could "cut through the mustard" and do more than blindly parrot blandishments that sounded like they came out of the in-house promotional department. He wasn't "a yes-man", a suck-ass, a groveler, an über-fan who owned every single edition-- signed, numbered, and bound in cloth.

And here was an author, perhaps a slightly-more-snertzy equivalent of Gene Simmons of "KISS", listening to me "jam" via e-mail message and tapping his foot. The real Gene Simmons had listened to Guns n' Roses' demo tape and offered to produce their first album.

As a rule of thumb, it takes about 10,000 hours of hard practice before it can be said "that one has mastered their craft". Far better to deal with one exceptional individual who put in his 10,000 hours than 10,000 "know-nothings" who only put in 1 hour apiece. . . . . trying "to get rich quick".

That's why most authors and rock stars don't want to be sent "demo tapes". Maybe they'll never exactly say "no", but this is mostly not to rip open "a shit-bag of ill-will" down at the local mall as Slash ambles by in a top hat, shopping for jewelry. That's why most Hollywood actresses let others handle their fan-mail and autograph requests.

And you can bet that you're double-damned if you don't include a SASE. . . . .

This author had taught me "the chops" like Slash dipping the guitar neck low down to Joe Perry in salutation in the middle of "Paradise City" in genuflection. And Joe Perry does the same to Keith Richards. And he owes his shit to B.B. King. . . . . and B.B. King owes it to Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.

It's a supreme moment like "The Ultimate Warrior" in the World Wrestling Federation gorilla-pressing an opponent over his head to the roar of the crowd. He made his sprinting entrance into the ring to a thumping heavy metal theme, shaking the ropes like a wild-man with an insane mullet of hair and wore the face-paint and streamers like America's sports-entertainment subconscious unfurled, Reagan-era nuclear rearmament and the bundled explosive libido of twin Polaris missiles: his rock-like arms. He spent years in the gym to get that body, jacked-up on steroids and discipline and manly valor in order to compete on that world-class level.

Even Arnold Schwarzenegger had a way of weighting the dumb-bells unevenly so he challenged his muscles in new and exciting ways that kept "his status quo" off guard and aloud him to put on the most bulk. There was a scene in his book, "The Education of a Body-Builder" when he and his buddy welded together their own set of weights and went out into the Bavarian forests with their girlfriends and spent the day cooking, screwing, and doing hundreds of squats until their legs exploded out like a bug's exoskeleton, a hopping insectivore with freakish power. You can bet that he bought all the muscle magazines to give him "hints" and "advice", posed constantly in the mirror to get "his pose down", but after a certain point you spend "less time studying" and more effort kicking your own ass "on the killing floor". After a certain level of expertise, he will not collect every last obscurity like an anxious geek but will settle for "a streamlined anthology" all in one place like either a meaty convenience or a tub of 'roids.

As the author and I conversed back & forth, I revealed a little bit more about my story and my struggle to succeed. He was impressed. . . . . and he noted how it was very strange how on one side of the bell-curve of those whom would be labeled "developmentally-disordered", there were absolute idiots then on the other end, absolute visionaries who had more untapped talent, if never channeled, then most of the world who either ignored them or didn't know how to deal with them "so didn't".

Not knowing what else to say, I vowed that if he got me "signed" I'd buy him a Les Paul guitar and sent him a graphic of 1989's "Sonic Temple" by "The Cult", a towering "statement" of mystic "soul rock" that set one to mind of River Phoenix riding barebacked across the desert on a Palimono pony, an Indian girl hugging her arms around his waist in a southwestern Mojave motif. There Billy Duffy stands with his Les Paul, his cowboy boots spread wide apart in a clean line of perspective, raising his arm in the air against a red and green-dotted background, his tangle of matted hair bent over his Les Paul in iconic pose in a rock star's scrappy leather vest and black cow-skin pants. A graphic of the singer, his eyes bound with cloth like a captured member of the I.R.A, leans back as he grips the microphone in agonied transcendence.

You had to be there. . . . .

However, I had to point out that neither one of us would cut a dashing figure in that outfit.

GAWWWWD. . . . . .

Back at Applebee's we snicker at this idea. A cheap circus, a cut-rate attraction, a man in a straw-boater hat and stick pointing people in the direction of "the big con" and playing on basic human foibles. However, it seemed as if "everything had been done already". . . . . the start n' stop of a mule coming to rest with his wagon and thinking of no creative way out of his weary, tail-swatting dilemma. Come up with a half-assed idea like selling dope out of an ice cream truck, and that didn't seem very likely though talk was cheap, your humor worse, and such scenarios "not bloody likely". Not unless you wanted to be ass-raped in jail. . . . . by chest beating King-Kong's letting out a roar that shakes the cell-block down it's foundations like the Southern gothic aristocracy turned-up on it's head, some grave shit-head like William Faulkner getting fucked up the ass by Nat Turner's cruder, more ignorant relative.

A mixture of loathing and apprehension sets in when police cruisers pull in with lights flashing, a traffic stop of one skinny, stubble-chinned "alkie" of a regular. The lights dance across the restaurant as the hired help press their noses against the glass, in despair that "one of their own" is being led off to jail with his hands cuffed behind his unwise back by whom may as well be the king's hooded executioners descending down onto a village and carrying a peasant off to "the chopping block".

Nevermind that this character was speeding to Applebee's, had an expired driver's license, and was wanted on an outstanding warrant for "who-knows-what", but this rabble of a bar lived in a terror of authority's sternness in an overly glad-handing atmosphere that was perhaps too quick to sympathize with the gripes of their customers, and ignore the hard truth that they weren't exactly paid to say "no" to those whom perhaps made a habit of ordering a drink too many, too often like half-friend/half-sleaze parking his skinny shanks on a barstool. Or any one of us here who didn't keep our baser impulses in check. . . . .

As the police drove away and the tension lifted, a table of blacks in a booth across the restaurant spontaneously broke into a soulful, finger-snapping rendition of "Happy Birthday" that sounded like a spiritual from the belly of a Delta plantation, the men rocking their bald heads back and forth in unquenchable rhythm. A petty arrest was not going to spoil their party and the restaurant erupted into cheers and applause at this "turd-blossom" of a night-saver. A server whose name I did not know-- her face twisted in a grimace of sorrow-- talked to a manager and then went back into the anonymity of the night where it was no stranger's business. Such was the thin film of separation that divided most of humanity and I went back to watching the basketball game.

GAWWWWD. . . . . .

One time I got into a Beavis-like situation when a simmering grudge from a decade before reasserted itself with my newfound sense of boldness when I played a prank on a girl who jilted me years before and mortified me to the brink of self-destruction, if not the whiff of woebegone skulls and howling spirits in a cartoonish motif that would have been hilarious if I didn't feel so disassociated from all of humanity. If she was the most beautiful, straight-laced, conventional bird in all the jungle, then here I was as a gnarled, whacky creature of a far-lower pedigree returning to throw shit at her and knock her off her contented perch with a squawk and laugh to himself. Well, no one no what to make of this-- if this was "a joke" or a leopard moving in to soon drag it's kill under a bush so the flies don't get it.

I was so mortified that I was seen as "this monster", that I dropped off a letter at the police station telling him to tell the girl in question that I was sorry. I'm betting he didn't. This incident bothered me, like the world holding up a mirror and showing me to be something I did not want to be. About six months later I mailed a letter to the girl explaining I was sorry.

No response.

Being the one who assumed "the best", the fact that she didn't send the cops was a good sign because I had made my letter very cute and endearing. I sent another one two weeks later because over the course of a decade, a man with a visionary way of framing his own quirky "take" on things has a lot to say and could never contain it in a simple, one-page letter.

That's when the sheriff knocked on the door and delivered the restraining order.

I looked down at the paperwork and knew in my heart that I wasn't "a stalker", but this was now in the official court of record. And if I tried to straighten this out, it would only get worse when people can no longer "hear" what you're saying but just see this strange blip on the radar that's talking to them like a surreal scene from "The Twilight Zone". The more he'd come forward like a ghost, the remnants of a shattered teenager a decade later who hadn't moved on very far, then the more she would step away. And eventually it would devolve into a situation in which we were both trying to mutually-destroy each other because neither one of us would "listen". She'd hire some smarmy lawyer to tar me as a villain, sue me for everything I own, and stick me in prison. And then myself, backed into a corner would become a self-fulfilling prophesy of the monster I wasn't and resort to guerilla warfare tactics, or home invasion when all they see is a big, hollering guy kicking down the door and carrying on like "Dirty Harry" giving a brusque lecture of "why he was above the law" and why her ears would "now hear".

This was bad, very bad. People could end up dead, namely me-- and I'd still look like the bad guy on the local news, if not in the full-color spreads of "TIME" & "Newsweek". And you can't expect THOSE liberal assholes to get at the bottom of anything. . . . . And once people found out the origin of this fracas, made all the stranger by a half-Jewish Winona Ryder fan with a jokey fixation on National Socialism-- namely a jilted high school crush gruesomely impaled on Valentine's Day when he stupidly sent a note from "your secret admirer" that ended up in a school-wide newsletter like croaking geek love-- they'd be laughing as my coffin was lowered into the ground. In this world of postal shootings, splattered dogs, and rictus grins, even someone as self-involved and emotionally-juvenile as Michael had the distance to step back and figure "that's not how he wanted to be remembered".

Perhaps maybe that's the ultimate reason why I never took my wrath out on the world like those cretins at Columbine High. . . . . people would laugh at my story. And what if I bungled it and was captured like "Curly" of "The Three Stooges", tackled on the ground like an understated, yet-dramatic reel of cable news footage cycled endlessly in a 24-hour loop?  I'd be more YouTubed than "The Star Wars Kid"! Motherfucker, I was his direct ancestor!

Let it go son, let it go. She's four years older than you, maybe you'll survive long enough to read her obituary if you don't drop dead from stewing mortification and the urge to go out like a Norse warrior carrying his unwilling blond-haired, blue-eyed beloved down into the Baltic underworld on the prow of a flaming ship on his final voyage into Wagnarian greatness.

Perhaps that quirky Jewish girl over there will understand your titanic need to be great as you raise her up on a pedestal and kneel like a Teutonic knight in a forest Cathedral of Nordic grandeur. She kind of "wanders off", not really understanding "The Sun Cross of Baldur" he offers her in a token of eternal allegiance. He knew enough not to palm off the Swastika, an occult symbol of prosperity though her counterculture parents were into scuzzy, Luciferian things . . . . . everything that was creeping, subterranean, and impure like so much Wiccan vomit. Her father would "shit" at his fascistic tendencies and would regard references to "The Order of Thule"-- even in jest-- with great wariness because most people of his radical generation could not grasp such things, so zonked-out all mentally, politically, and emotionally in a 1960's vision that has been "blown the fuck out into space" into the outer darkness with dead gods, forgotten religions, and the former lumber & wreckage of "Dollar-Store" collectibles he peddles at his kooky bookstore for inflated prices no one visits, except to drop off fervid love letters.

Bloviating further and taking a more serious tack, it's open warfare between various people with Asperger's Syndrome, different "outliers" set in their ways and struggling to survive in this drug-induced "fight-to-the-finish". Steroids or pot. Ritalin or LSD. Individualism or shared, collective, communal experience. To say that the philosophy of individualism is racist, colonialist, Eurocentric-- what have you-- is to live off the cream of your forefather's hard work and determination, what even gives you the space to criticize the system. The left does not work-- not very hard, at least-- and if they did they would be far less high-handed and culturally dishonest about the most basic facts of life in America today.

I am half-Jewish/half-Teutonic. That itself is a struggle of identity and will-- how to be heroic in an unheroic world. When you're too Lutheran to fit into the Jewish community and too Jewish to fit into the outside. Whites tend to be literal-minded, practical and as sad may it be to admit it, dumb-as-fucking-hay. They cerebrally comprehend what is right in front of them and move forward from there without deeper reflection like craftsman and builders, not necessarily thinkers.

But hark! Beware of the other side.

I think back to my "Ben Stiller" days-- when I felt like an overly-verbose, wound-up jangle of nerves and impulses, a sack of chattering bones and neurons and diseased corpusels that flew through the universe "like a crying wind", unable to find a home. But one must "find solid footing" and stand down at the bedrock and snarl back at the gaping maw and make peace with their mortality. Nietzsche with a smile, "Conan the Barbarian" with a grin. . . . . and burn away "the slime of self" that would ooze right through a sword if he tried to hold it. By bringing together the Teutonic and Jewish you can become something better than if either had stayed on it's own side of the ethnic divide and wandered around like two shit-races diametrically opposed. Aryan will. . . . . Jewish intelligence. . . . . behold "The Superman"!

That's less than most people can say-- Jewish, half-Jewish or about as kosher as the Pope. He sees those across the cultural divide, especially on "The Left" coast-- a rickety San Fransciscan horde of fine-boned freaks with slender features that belie less testosterone, a hand-flapping cyber-monkey scooting around the desert of "the polymory community" like CP30 with nuts the size of peas and the cosmic death-roar of an English maid in a bonnet, full of all the bright, wishful attitudes of "Mary Poppins" and the do-gooderism of the United Nations General Assembly-- an ineffective, irrelevant debating society of quibbling, dainty ass-fuckery and lace curtains.

And a "Starbucks" on every corner as they stick out their lip when they're out of coconut sprinkles, or try to nervously negotiate with the gods who has stingily provided this like a geek who has "hit a wall" or can scarcely believe his senses.

Perhaps they have not yet fully glimpsed nor appreciated the paleo-conservative "heart of darkness" and stronger "will to power" that grasps the lattè of whipped cream and coconut sprinkles and pours it out on the ground with slow, deliberate action like Arthur Schopenhaur, a bat-caggle of a vampyric 19th century professor of German philosophy making a point about "the will". Why, a bust of Herotetus on a stand-- the shadow of history falling upon his heavy brow as he looks down in a death masque, like holding up a handful of dust and watching it blow away in the wind. . . . .

"Screeeeeee. . . . ."

This is the squelching of the life-force, the death knell of the human spirit in our increasingly-unfree society, and though I certainly squint at Plutocrats pretending "to be my friend", I think the instincts of "Potter" from "It's a Wonderful Life" are fundamentally more sound than the judgment of dumb rabble who think the way they do because no one was strong enough to deny their baser instincts even as the government keeps them plump and barely-at-bay with "bread n' circuses", like rats feeding on the hoarded grain, waving their tails back & forth greedily as you discourage the hard-working and the system nauseously lurches on a pile of bad debt just as enabled by the liberals as it was by the so-called conservatives for the last 25 years.

At a certain point, "Conan" leaves the silly mob behind. He smirks at "The Supreme Court", apparently the highest existential authority in the land when petty grubbers simply don't hurry off with what they want. Law was made to be created on a consistent, sturdy scale of impartiality. . . . . not slapped-together on a rickety, case-by-case basis whose precedent is warped and twisted and creatively confused far beyond anything that the original doodly-fuck in a black robe ruled, bad idea after bad idea following after each other in a snaking line of implication like bowel cancer of "bad law" that is killing America, what has not been overtaken by cynicism and greed and mutilates what is left and still valuable inside of us. Nervous hand-wringing and staving off the inevitable only brings on a more awful, miserable death when we are constantly seeking "the happy end" above the noble one.

Our elites, of whatever persuasion, are constantly afraid of "the public finding out too much", of an ignorant, out-of-control mob pumping it's fist in the air like a dumb, glaze-eyed River Phoenix not understanding what he's a part of and getting shiftless, young motherfuckers to follow him. Of course, these elites do not quite seem to grasp that they themselves are part of the same ignorant, shrieking mob-- the wages being status and feeling comfortable superior, if not lining your pockets with a Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North fundraising appeal to we yahoos with a bust of Norman Schwarzkopf in our home office.

You find, however, that whatever the dime-store Franz Kafka question-- "who is crazy, me or the system" has been co-opted and used to sow even more confusion as "the big boys" feed off the trough and send you a fund-raising letter to join "The Cato Institute", a supposedly-libertarian "think tank" that is still firmly within the pocket of the system. And sometimes, when people try to step in and "solve the problem" through whatever kind of idealism and thinly-veiled "status-seeking" they only become "part of the problem" as I learned back in high school when I was like "Donald Rumsfeld" on speed and eventually "laughed out of class".

GAWWWWD. . . . . .

In this world it takes quite a dollop of humility and wisdom to move forward and to accept that "a Hollywood ending" is mostly a figment of, well. . . . . Hollywood. That happiness and contentment is a stop-gap until things shift around and we're back on "Square #1" like either shoeless paupers or Axl Rose who will soon be crawling back to his former band-mates after "Chinese Democracy", the 15-year epic "white elephant" project that got stuck in one's craw like polyester-laquered "Skittles", was a bust. Too bad that he invested his entire credibility and personal fortune into it like a tow-headed step-child or Beavis wandering through the tundras of Eurasia looking for a goat to stick his dick in. There is no "magic bullet" in the universe that miraculously "ties up all the loose ends" like a perpetual motion machine or "the stoolless cat" that doesn't need a litter-box.

If I could market one, I'd become a savvy trillionaire but would only be the carnival barker in a straw-boater's hat pointing a stick. To the extent that a very reviled man once wrote in his mega-selling 1920's dictated autobiography about "the big lie" theory of history, he wasn't much better when he turned around and became a carnival barker, though definitely one with meaner, seedier eyes and a fixation on blondes that even I find creepy. . . . .

There's always something to be said for making people look so ridiculous that they eventually "slink off". . . . . like another outlier I'm about to introduce you to.

Ray Kurzeil is a transcendent futurist, a quirky, odd-looking, "outlier" and nebbish, Jewish nutball who puts me on the level of a social Mozart "in people skills", who makes my shot of "making something of myself" look remotely credible if I can think on a level a bit less "boxed-in" than this revered "turtle-dick" who makes Bob Woodard of "The Washington Post" look like a stud and Howard Stern pass as a Middle-Eastern sex god in the temple of "Disco Duck". Anyway, he believes that "the singularity" is near-- a nebulous concept when man will become so grafted with an exponentially-advancing technology "that he will become a god" in his own right. Man already tried that. . . . . it was called "The Tower of Babel" and it was left in ruins, uncompleted, as man eventually wandered off in a discord of competing languages and world-views like the morons in Guns n' Roses after the "Use your Illusion" stadium tour.

Man will have the universe at his hands. . . . . to do whatever he pleases in a world of virtual man/machine/cybernetic infinity. Something tells me that everyone's going to be emotionally 13 years old and getting the digital equivalent of a 24-hour blow-job on the shitter, just like back in the beginning. Some stuck-in-shit types talk about "the greatness of pain", "how it defines what it means to be human" like a wide-eyed Hamlet holding out the skull of Yorick on an outstretched hand but is completely oblivious to the debauchery and waste going on right in his backyard.

Arthur C. Clarke foresaw the internet and computer revolution in his 1968 seminal work, "2001: A Space Odyssey" and seemed to think that thoughtful young people were going to use it to look up the works of Krito or study the history of Thuyclides, not quite anticipating how 99% skim off the top of this wattage and bandwidth to play obnoxious computer games and look at porn.

"Oh, my".

Joseph Campbell back in 1988 thought that humanity was on the verge of the greatest breakthrough of consciousness in human history.

"Oh, dear".

"SON-OF-A-BITCH!"

I rest my case on that subject, and will preach on the virtues of staying a little bit more "earth-bound" and less high on the ether of "New-Age" nonsense, which typically is "the old wine in new bottles". . . . . an excuse for a clit-rubbing orgy that raises the hair on the back of Midwestern farmers' necks like New York city financiers, "jail-birds", Romanism, and fast-talking salesmen. And especially "The Irish". . . . . never forget those filthy "shamrock scrappers" loudly presupposing things. Why, you'd sooner buy a fishing boat and sail to Havana!

You look at that second-tier girl back at Applebee's, the one with the head-band. Though she was not striking at first, she grows on you and gradually becomes the most beautiful woman in the restaurant. Especially when she smiles just so. Part of what makes "life worth living" is that we can't have everything at one time and it is the glory of being alive that our perceptions change and grow and we become more than we once were. Imperfections are what make life interesting, and it is certainly a novelty if something is done better instead of worse in our trickling age of yeasty piss-water like "Judge Judy" in a private moment of hellish wrath in her inner sanctum where she belongs along with Dr. Phil and those other merciless, shrew-hearted people for whom I wish the Greek irony of intestinal blockage and early retirement from our airwaves.

It took me time to appreciate that, a consciousness far above the days when I was a struggling youth in the most wretched of circumstances. When sugar cane gets cut, it still oozes and must dry in the sun for a while until it is truly good for building. Kids are too raw, lack a reckoning of proportion, and their senses aren't hardened with the knotted muscle of hard work that comes with a day's pay that is existentially willing to throw punch after punch even if it's not at first immediately successful. Give man infinity, and he would become a cruel king, a tyrant, a God destroying his subjects because there are no "checks & balances" to hold back the gorping mouth of irrationality and greed that wants to get the most for itself like Oprah on a ham or the sucking asshole of Ann Coulter's mouth like the most cut-rate, Teutonic bimbo even my inner "Beavis" wouldn't stick his dick in.

And in this society of "rock n' roll momma's boys", the terrible price levied on a society struggling with it's sense of manhood in a lost, and wayward age. . . . . I have to diagnose the problem as a society where our nation's fathers have not been stern enough for the last couple of generations. When they have settled for consensus, discussion, compromise-- instead of stepping in and knowing "how to lay down the law" rather than constantly "stepping back" and letting their boys run wild with no accountability. Broken concepts of "what it means to be a man", layered upon generation after generation have left us more crude, ugly, misogynic, and short-sighted than ever as some prosper, most flounder, and a small minority almost found themselves to sheltered and sensitive for this world, hidden from this world my father always knew but was not honest about when I needed a talk like this and instead wandered off into this strange journey for the past 15 years since I entered a long, long adolescence.

I could not explain any of this to Conchita, nor to Lea Thompson, nor to his poor ex-French teacher. There he would be, like a boy who drug home a tire because "he wanted to impress her or somethin'" and she would continue on making him a peanut butter & jelly sandwich like a baby-sitter, a young, vaguely matenral figure "that took care of everything" and reduced him to a child, a house husband, a second-stringer who would eventually fall into such apathy, sullenness, and depression that he'd leave and destiny's schemer, through the courts, would order her to pay palimony. Once more, it's the women "who hold everything together". . . . . this time at the laughing-stock of the courtroom like a madcap episode of "Judge Judy" where the gavel was not struck to please all the bored, fat housewives at home watching soap operas, calling psychic hotlines, or reading the tabloids to get a gander at Burt Reynolds' blurry butt-cheeks.

Yes, whatever the secret life of Rock Hudson or the pained death throes of Michael Landon, such was this world of mortality, unfairness, and woe. . . . . as certainly as the grotesque turning of justice as Winona Ryder was duly prosecuted for her foibles and her demented "New Left" father-- so foregone, disassociated from nearly all of humanity, bobbed around like a nervous bird and accused The Beverly Hills prosecuting attorney's office of being "the bad guys" in some kind of crazed, 1960's dialectic "backed into a corner" and acting the only way it knew how.

Well, FUCK YOU hippie. "Steal this book". Snatch my cock away in the night like "Rumplestiltskin" if you expect anyone to believe that horseshit. I smell fraud. . . . . I smell hypocrisy. . . . . I smell the nervous sweat of a Jew who never came to terms with his inner warrior, ghettoized as it was in the pales of Eastern Europe where if anyone showed the slightest hint of latent, sword-strong fathers the entire village was wiped out in a pogrom.

Big, dumb, angry Jews like me with a red beard that in greater odds, descended from a rabbi than a Viking named "Ragnar" didn't last very long and were drawn and quartered like William Wallace, though probably far more cosmically absurd than any kind of kilted Scotchman with all the countenance of a green-eyed, snarling leopard who backs up everything he says to the literal-minded hilt instead of "a teller of tales".

What he saw was a kindred, troubled soul he identified with. He brings her things-- at first, like a big, dumb, puzzled bear as she cries in the house, unable "to face the day". Then gradually he morphs into a fox, becoming infinitely more clever. Food, clothing, gold, rubies, even spiritual sustenance like the consummate trickster whose company can't be denied. You can't know "life" until you've been on the brink of death and can come back and tell people stories. A glint of truth shines off this fox's fangs, like a trail of saliva. The longer you stare at it, fascinated-- hypnotized-- then the stronger and more spiritually pure you will be when you break away.

Otherwise life is a meaningless cipher and temptation will lead you through the woods as you pick up on a trail of bread-crumbs, Oxycontin pills, over-indulgence, what have you-- until you're standing at the devil's door deep in a shadowed wood. You knock because there's no other place to go, and he sits you down and has you sign the worst deal of your life. And the question you got to ask yourself, boys & girls, is if you're a servant of God or of Satan? No one "cheats the devil", and he'll get you too. We rot in the hell of our own lives, just as certain as the existence that is to come. You can stand on Mt. Satan at "The Witching Hour" with thundering exultance, but that's "just living on borrowed time". Mountains crack and erode into nothing but "God, Eternal" does not.

GAWWWWD. . . . . .

I am not a fundamentalist nabob, nor a yelpin' dipshit who oughtta be sent howling down the road like a dog struck with a brick. It's people like that who only make our world "worse" and I sincerely invite them to go fuck themselves like a possum on a hot-dog rotisserie at the after-hours of some pukey carnival in the backwater of the region in which I live like tornados, floods, and the death of Dale Earnhart Jr. as nature answers with a dark rumble. There is little that is absolute, except for "Eternity" above laid down next to the world's impermanence of putrescent pursuits and some grinning frog of a man named "Fred" whose mix of fundamentalism and low-down hedonism "behind closed doors" would put him in a motel room with Jimmy Swaggart drinking from long-necks and watchin' the party like spinning pinwheels of the zany, "Watch it Go" mind with a couple of those orange children's "Hot Wheels" tracks the hookers can beat 'em with.

There are as many issues in the so-called "Absolute Truth" in the church as there was when a couple of geeks in their garage came up with "the personal computer" rally and knocked IBM right on it's ass "with revolution from below" It's the difference between something like "Reader's Digest" and the world of underground "zines". Make the distinction-- just because it's "indie" does not necessarily mean "it's good"-- the simplest, most stupid division of either/or thinking that makes those alternative idiots no worse than the fundamentalists they trash.

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")