The hard shit about wisdom — including, nothing is without its shadow
There are people in the world who walk through life imagining the worst for themselves, behaving as though the Universe was/is somehow set against them.
Their happiness, fleeting and tenuous as it always is, appears like the flicker of a candle’s light, only to be ripped away from them at any second by even a slight breeze.
And it IS lost that quickly, because they rip it away from themselves by looking for and finding, whether real or imagined, some energy or force, inviolable and enormous, stacked against them.
These people aren’t necessarily evil or sick or bad, they just are the way they are.
How come?
Who knows?
Bottle-propped babies? Middle child in the middle of middle kids? Born under a bad star?
They’ll search for understanding, always asking the wrong questions. In truth, they appear to just be born mistrustful and nervous.
You can see it in some babies’ faces, in their earliest expressions, only a few days or a few weeks old, this wariness towards life and experiences, as if they wished they could say,
“You call that baby bottle warm?” Or “My diaper is fulla shit and has been for several seconds. I’ll bet if this was my handsome big brother’s diaper you’d have changed it by now!”
The truth seems to be that as these people get older and as they become aged/elderly, this attitude doesn’t get any better, it only turns from a suspicion into an indisputable reality for them; “I always get short-changed and even when it doesn’t happen I’ll find some way to see it happening.”
There is no such thing as luck: sometimes the wind blows in from the north and it’s cold and stings your face. Sometimes it blows in from the south and it’s warm and delicious.
A glass half full and half empty is the same fucking glass.
Drink it or don’t, but don’t blame the person handing it to you.
God, who doesn’t exist, isn’t set against you, nor is anyone or anything else.
There is no such thing as karma in the idiotic sense that cruel people use the term to smile at other’s pain, as if some terrible tragedy is justified because it’s happening to someone else.
Nor is Karma real in the other direction. The Cosmos is not just waiting for the right moment to reward you for being such an A-ok kinda guy.
Nope, shit doesn’t work that way.
Life unfolds. Good shit. Bad shit. Friends. Enemies.
Let’s not make this any more complicated than it needs to be.
Here’s a glass; however much is in it, is irrelevant. All that matters is what you choose to do with it.
Halloween and the Curse of the Tomahawk Chop
Why is it so easy for people to be casually cruel?
I’m a lifetime baseball fan, but you’d have to be nuts to be any more than a nervous, wary fan when the Seattle Mariners are your home team; their futility and hopelessness are the exact opposite of the Houston Astros resilience and greatness. My wife has a simple dividing line, any pro team in any sport housed in a red state she hates and teams from blue states she roots for. I ride along with her most of the time. But the Atlanta Braves, despite Georgia’s turning blue in the 2020 election cursed themselves for us with their disgusting, racist, insensitive tomahawk chop. And the Astros, (despite being from the reddest fuckin’ state anywhere, ever — fuckin’ TEXAS,) became our default choice in this year’s World Series. So, last night was Halloween and we had our regular afternoon happy hour, (scotch and soda for me, chardonnay for Patti) and finished dinner before the first trick-or-treaters started banging the doorbell. Patti wanted to hand-out the candy so I got to kick back and watch game 5 of the WS. The Braves were up 3 games to 1 and would win it all with a victory in front of their home crowd, and before I even got the game on, The braves had hit a grand slam homer, top the first inning, to take a 4–0 lead. Naturally the Braves fans were tomahawk chopping their rightwing brains out. It was ugly, made even more intolerable by the nasty, horrifying spectacle of the Tangerine Imbecile’s pandering racist presence, at the previous night’s game, where he showed up solely for the purpose of doing the tomahawk chop because racist, asshole bullies NEVER miss a chance to show that side of themselves loudly and publicly.
Caveat #1: not all Braves fans are Trumpsters or tomahawk choppers, but the stupid, insensitive one’s ARE, ruining the fun for everyone else. So Patti is handing out candy and I’m checking-in and out of the game and in the end the curse of the indigenous people’s on America catches-up with the tomahawk chopping ass-hats of Georgia and the Astros climb back from a 4 run deficit and another deficit later in the game to beat the Braves and force another game, this time to be played in Houston where a tomahawk chop in the enemy territory of Houston’s stadium will like get yer ass kicked by the hometown fans.
Caveat 2: In truth, I don’t mind if the Atlanta Braves win the series so long as it’s NOT in Atlanta where many of their fans refuse to consider the selfishness of their conduct in their continued use of the tomahawk chop — especially in light of the biggest red flag of all, the curse of ETTD’s. This is, after all, ‘Merica where you can’t even take an hour long ride on a commercial airline flight without witnessing or being victim to an assault and battery. But once in awhile the good guys win and once in awhile the lesser of two bad guys comes out on top. Thus it is, and thus it has always been.
On the Happy Reality that I’m thru with Public Spectacles of Ego-driven Bullshit
How and why I’m done doing “readings” ever again
It’s dawned on me that I have no desire to ever read any of my poems aloud, publicly, ever again. Some of the poems I’m quite proud of and others I’m a bit embarrassed by for a variety of reasons. And many of them check both those boxes. Bukowski hated doing readings and claimed he did them only for the money. Because I did, literally, a thousand plus of such readings, from my novels for over a decade (well-compensated and to generally appreciative audiences) I always doubted and dismissed Buk’s claims. But realizing that he was both shy and private and even more of a misanthrope than me, I came to believe his claims of disgust at it all. Plus, the nature of poems being so personal, I get it Buk. I do. And, like you, I won’t be offering strangers a chance to watch me writhe on a pin under their thumbs any longer. The goal of writing is partly to be read and if public readings helped with that I was obviously game for those many years. That acknowledged, I’m happy that you’re reading this right now and hope you’ll read more. Some of the shit I write is actually really good. Of course, I could be a bit biased in that judgement. But you’ll only find out the truth by reading me because you ain’t gonna hear or see me prancing around sharing my preciousness with you, no mo. As it is written, so it shall be — (pretty cool biblical sounding shit, huh?) Eat yer heart out fellow-typers.
