Hey class,

For those of you who are fans of my story cycle "The Miranda Complex," there's a new installment now posted at the Mr. Smolin website entitled "Don't Make A Move." It's broken up into 4 parts only because of server software limitations; it's really meant to be one big-ass story. It's long and crazy, so beware. You can dig it here:

The Miranda Complex: V. Don't Make A Move

Hope you like,

shmo

The Fantastic Catch


I used to love playing catch with my dad. Thwack! The snappy slap of the Thwack! when ball hit glove smack in the Thwack! pocket was a godly sauce of sound always, whether I was receiving pitches from him with my Rawlings "Tim McCarver" model catcher's mitt Thwack! or just wearing my regular old Rawlings "Tony Conigliaro" model fielder's glove.

What was the magic of the Thwack! in a game of catch? Partly it was the give-and-take of me and my dad. And partly it was the non-action of it all, without goal, without rules, without intention, without winner or loser, without any predetermined end, without the garbage of artifacts, without reason or assertion or strategy. Just tossing the ball back Thwack! and forth Thwack! with my dad Thwack! Sometimes he'd fling a pop fly surprise over my head or deal me a tricky grounder ("Think FAST!," he'd shout), and I'd scramble to find the fly ball amid the branches of the sycamore trees on Citrus Avenue (we used to find it amusing that, in those days, Citrus Avenue was lined with sycamore trees, and Sycamore Avenue three blocks away was lined with citrus trees, kinda like that Greenland/Iceland thing) or try to snag the grounder before it veered under parked cars or went through my legs straight on out into the middle of Beverly Boulevard.

If I missed, he'd always admonish, "Don't try so hard! Let the ball find your mitt!" And when I got it right, Thwack!, the ball indeed found my mitt. THWACK! Just like that. And it was beautiful.

I wouldn't describe my dad as a Taoist per se, though one afternoon I found a book in his drawer, amid the meaningless slips of scratch paper, restaurant matchbooks, a deck of cards, a pack of Kent cigarettes, a 9-volt battery, those red rubber bands used to wrap the Herald Examiner, the keys to something or other, one stick of Juicy Fruit, my 4th Grade report card, the ticket stub from a Laker game against the Cincinnati Royals, a yellowed edition of the B'nai Brith newsletter, Canadian pennies, a bristle hairbrush, a copy of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask--the source of endless sneaky giggles whenever my sister and I would flip through it (one of our favorites was the chapter on "Bent Cock Syndrome")--, a few condom packets (before I even knew what they were . . . I remember in early childhood going into the bathroom to pee at dawn and seeing a jellyfish every so often floating in the toilet . . . I'd wonder what the globby creature was, pee, flush it down, and go watch cartoons), yes, amid all that racket of scraps Thwack! and doodads, I found a slim hardback volume called The Wisdom of Confucius and Lao Tzu, so I guess some of the advice my dad would impart about life and love had Lao Tzu as a basis, conscious or not. Thwack! Occasionally when my dad asked if I wanted to play catch I'd say no, usually due to some other meaningless pastime I preferred to pursue. Today I regret those missed opportunities to Thwack! sample dad's wisdom.

I remember one visceral wu-wei lesson I received when I was about 10 years old. The day I made "the fantastic catch."

That summer--it would have been 1971--I was having a great season in little league baseball at Gardner Park. Well, we all called it Gardner Park because it was on Gardner Street, but the official name was West Wilshire Recreation Center. Only the employees called it that though. Everybody else called it Gardner Park. There were any number of child molestors walking around that place. Also schizophrenic monologuists. Yeshiva buchers. And some crazy-ass dogs too, all mangy and stray. Dude, you never went in the restrooms at Gardner Park. You went into the Fairfax Branch of the Public Library just across the parking lot and used that toilet. You had to look at books for a couple of minutes first so the librarian thought you were a library patron, or if you were really in a hurry you could go right up to the librarian (who wasn't as nice as she seemed) and ask her where to find a book, like maybe Ball Four by Jim Bouton, and when she'd point you to the aisle you'd head that way but then detour to the bathroom, a hassle, yes, but it was worth it to avoid the rank smell and the drooling pedophiles and Manson Family canines in the park's facilities. Today Gardner Park has been swallowed up by the behemouth Pan Pacific Park, a fairly soulless splay of acreage.

It used to be a sanctified and dangerous place, Gardner Park. A funky haven for amateur athletes and moms with their toddlers and old Jews and weirdos from good homes and kids and adolescents of all colors, a real-life rainbow coalition occurring organically around the area's only public pool and the nondiscriminating bond of summertime and baseball and ice cream trucks and girls who talk dirty. A chain link fence separated Gardner Park from a vast vacant lot strewn with tumbleweeds and beer cans and abandoned lawn chairs. Bad-ass teenagers rode mini-bikes through the shrubs and wiped out on the broken glass and gravel and bled and smoked cigarettes and thought everything was simultaneously funny and meaningless. Across the lot you could see the Gilmore Drive-In at the south end--a favorite family oasis where my sisters and I would watch movies on the roof of our family's Chevy Impala station wagon (and later a black Kingswood Estate)--and the creepy, abandoned Pan Pacific Auditorium to the north.

Being 10 years old there, a child at Gardner Park, those were the first real independences, away from both parents and school, just you and the other kids, doing nothing, fucking around, being jokers, arguing about the Lakers or the Dodgers, using your allowance to buy stuff from the ice cream truck, like 50-50 Bars or Sidewalk Sundaes or Strawberry Shortcake or Kool Pops or Scooter Pies. I was often torn between enjoying the spectacle of the social scene in the Gardner Park parking lot and wanting to be back at home watching reruns of The Rifleman in the big black chair (it was its own world).

Sometimes I would sleep in the big black chair. If I got up before dawn, I'd amble into the living room, turn on the Zenith TV, curl up in my blanket and doze off while watching the early morning Farm Report, wondering who had a farm in Los Angeles. I loved that chair. My sister and I could both fit in it at the same time. Room for two during Saturday morning kid shows. You had to start your Saturday morning with H.R. Pufnstuf, the trippiest of tripped-out kid shows, and Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, which had its own brilliant witty weirdness, and Cool McCool, whose motto "Danger is my business" was repeated endlessly on the playground of Melrose Avenue Elementary School during recess and lunch where everybody wanted to be as cool as Cool McCool.

But my favorite memory of the big black chair was a strange night when the Angels were playing against the Oakland A's, on July 9, 1971, the night Tony Conigliaro freaked out during a 20-inning pitching duel. The game went on until 1:00 am, and my father let me stay up to watch it. We sat and watched the debacle together in the comfy-wonderful big black chair. It was the sweetest bliss. Even as Conigliaro batted his helmet into the stands and then flung said bat into the crowd before stomping off the field in some kind of psychotic episode. Vida Blue pitched a tremendous game for the A's, a 17 strikeout marathon the A's won 1-0. I didn't fully understand the Conigliaro drama being played out, only that it was kinda weird and that it had something to do with Conigliaro getting beaned in the eye years before when he was on the Red Sox, but the sweetness of the evening had nothing to do with baseball, rather it was the preciousness of sharing that comfy-wonderful chair with my father, two fleeting beings in holy concord.

I started out as a catcher in the Gardner Park little league. (My father used to tell me the sad story of how he had coveted a catcher's mitt when he was a boy in Cleveland during The Depression, and then he got one, a birthday gift from his mother, only to have it stolen the same day he received it). At the age of 7, I found myself coveting a catcher's mitt, an official Rawlings "Tim McCarver" model. The day I finally saved up enough allowance money, for some reason my parents weren't able to take me to Big 5 to get it even though they had said they would. I remember sitting in the big black chair watching professional wrestling on KCOP Channel 13 and crying quietly at the shattered expectation. The next day my dad took me to Big 5, and I plunked down $7.50 of my allowance money for my treasured catcher's mitt. I oiled it, strapped it shut with rubber bands, left it under my mattress for a couple of weeks, re-oiled and baked it. My father pitched to me Thwack! every night after the mitt had been sufficiently worked in.

At the first team practice I told the coach I wanted to play catcher, and the coach obliged. It was obvious; the position was mine; I had the mitt. I learned to strap on the gear, the leg guards, the chest-protector, the backwards helmet, the mask. I practiced crouching without cramping and making the throw to 2nd from that crouch and chasing down bunts and blocking the plate and giving the pitcher a reliable target. Once I got past the romance of the mitt, however, the reality was I didn't really enjoy playing catcher all that much. I could never get the timing of gear removal right when scheduled to bat in a given inning. If I took the leg guards off too early, inevitably the third out would arrive before my chance to bat, then I'd have to put the gear back on again, thus delaying the pitcher from taking his warm-ups; but if I left the leg guards on, for sure my turn at bat would come up, and the umpire would get impatient while I fumbled my way through unstrapping the gear and scold me about paying attention and being more prepared for my at-bat next time. I was pretty good at being a catcher, and I loved my Tim McCarver mitt dearly, but I wasn't feeling the fun. I wasn't feeling it. A recurring theme.

My baseball life found its groove when the team I played on, The Yankees, needed someone to fill in at shortstop, which I volunteered to do to get out of behind-the-plate duties. So, Ron took over at catcher, and I became the Yankee shortstop, a 4-year gig, ages 9-12, that earned me much reputation, and yearly placement on the all-star team as well as MVP status a couple of times. My first real niche. I became known for making diving-snags of line drives and tumbling stops of tricky out-of-the-way grounders and dead-eye throws to my pal Jeff on 1st base.

My first-hand lesson in the Tao came during one of those all-star games. That particular year, there was another good shortstop in the league who got the nod to play the position against Poinsettia Park, our arch rivals (a lot of my elementary school friends played there, and it always felt weird going up against them in such heated battle and then having to hang out with them at school a couple of days later). I was assigned to play right field, a position I was utterly unfamiliar with. It was pretty rare for balls to make it out to right field, so I took my place and hoped for no action. Alas, big time action came my way late in the game via the arc of a long fly ball with the bases loaded slugged by a corpulent left-handed hitter on the Poinsettia team, a kid who kind of resembled Boog Powell. The trajectory of the ball was clearly going to take it way beyond where I was standing, and so first I started backing up, keeping my eye on the flight, then, realizing I wouldn't gain sufficient speed quickly enough moving backwards, I turned, losing sight of the ball, and began running toward the right field fence of Gardner Park, an ivied tangle of vines. Turning my head over my shoulder and skyward, I re-spotted the ball in descent, though I had to negotiate between the ball and the approaching walll. The downward arc seemed just out of reach.

The Tao took over in that instant of hopelessness. I stopped looking at the ball, stuck out my mitt, and, just as I came up against the fence, in an event that came to be known around Gardner Park as "The Fantastic Catch," the ball simply dropped into my glove, THWACK!, just so, and the Poinsettia team and parents, who had been screaming with the presumption of a grand slam, fell silent, and the Gardner team and fans also fell silent, as I turned and held up the ball. No applause, just disorientation and flabbergast. One great big collective "Huh?" I made my way across the field and into the dugout from out in right field while a rumble of approval slowly grew as everyone realized what had happened. My teammates mobbed me, the coach hugged me, and parents shouted in the stands, "Holy mackerel, did you see the fantastic catch?"

I however stood numb and dumbfounded by the moment. Aware that I had done nothing. I let the ball find my mitt, that's all, Thwack!, a secret knowledge that made the moment bittersweet. I enjoyed the accolades, but I felt something of a sham for letting them congratulate me on this random grace of the cosmos.

And the game was not over; I was due up 4th in the bottom half of the inning. Not a particularly good hitter, though I walked a lot, I dreaded tarnishing the fantastic catch with a strikeout or some other game-blowing ignominy. Of course, when I arrived at the plate, the bases were loaded, the three batters before me having all walked. As I took a couple of warm-up swings in the batter's box, the Poinsettia catcher (whose long fly was in fact the victim of the fantastic catch) ribbed, "OK, Mr. Fantastic Catch, let's see what you can do at the plate," to which I didn't reply. "He can catch, but he can't hit!" shouted one of the players in the Poinsettia dugout (the dugouts were just standard issue wooden benches behind some fencing, nothing "dug out" about 'em). The dude who heckled me was this borderline tough guy I knew from school, Osvaldo, a classmate of mine in Mrs. Slattebo's class.

I took a strike and two balls, and before the next pitch, the Tao unwound me again; I stopped concentrating on the ball and the timing of my swing and simply met the next fastball on its own terms, sending it over the shortstop's head, deeply between the left and center fielders, allowing all three runners to score and landing me on third base. A triple. The next batter singled me in, and the Poinsettia catcher sweetly said, as I crossed home, "All right, Mr. Fantastic Catch, I guess you can do it all." I think I said thanks, but my shyness most likely made it inaudible as I trotted past him and into our dugout. He probably thought I was being rude. An ongoing problem of mine since childhood, one which continues to this day.

My parents didn't come to my little league games. They found it too stressful. That afternoon my dad arrived to pick me up near the end of the game, and later reported that, as he took an anonymous seat in the 1st base bleachers for the final inning, everybody in the stands was talking about "the fantastic catch," though he had no idea it was his son who had made it, until the dad sitting next to him pointed me out in right field ("that kid, right there, he's the one who made the fantastic catch"), bringing him a twinge of regret that he hadn't seen it, though he joked on the way home, "I probably would have keeled over anyway, so it's better I wasn't there."

When he asked me how I felt about the fantastic catch, I didn't know what to answer. I didn't give him the dad-satisfaction of hearing me say, "I did what you always told me, I let the ball find my mitt." The harmony of ball and glove and motion and flow converged to land that thing in my mitt. The sound of one hand clapping. I had nothing to do with it, other than providing the mitt and the suspension of will. I didn't interfere. I just allowed it to happen. I had enacted his lesson. It would have been so easy to give him credit for the magic he'd taught. Instead I sat inexplicably silent, defiant, a miserly bastard, withholding my gratitude, blasphemous Thwack! against fantastic catches.

"I don't know, I have to think about it for a while," I said.

"Well, think FAST!" my dad said and tossed a super-gooey Scooter Pie at me (which I bobbled and dropped). I picked it up off the car floor, unwrapped the cellophane, and chewed that Scooter Pie with joy and tears interior as we cruised east on Beverly Blvd through the bronze of August. The fantastic catch itself mattered less than the sublime drive home with my dad.

"Wait'll I tell your mom about the fantastic catch!" he crowed and slapped the steering wheel, "You like that Scooter Pie?"

Though I managed some other well-executed plays during my little league tenure, nothing ever quite equalled the moment of the fantastic catch Thwack! and the ride home munching that perfect Scooter Pie with the chocolate slightly melting on my fingers and my dad kvelling over the fantastic catch even though he hadn't actually seen it. The funny thing is, I can't even remember if we won that game.



          --Mr. Smolin, 6/21/08

Feeling down, friend? Feel like all four walls and the ceiling are collapsing in upon you? Feel like every step you make is a step in the wrong direction? Feel like every breath you take carries you that much closer to your final breath? Feel like the universe you're living in is a random accident of gaseous expansion? Feel like other human beings are way too mysterious and complicated to ever connect with on all but the most superficial levels? Feel inadequate to the task of being a participant in the gnarly realm of social discourse? Feel like people are laughing at you if, indeed, they are aware of your existence at all? Feel in your bone-essence you will end up old and alone? Feel like there's no way anyone will ever care about you?

If you're rumbling in the funk, in the lowdown blues, if you're tired of despair and that holiday sadness is creeping up on you as it always does, remember there is a path to the alleviation of suffering, a noble path, a road without maps, an anchor in the void. Put your imaginary ego away, put your precious illusions of separateness away, put your hung-up nonesuch away, and get your mind out.

Reach out for the one you love, the one you're about to love, the one you're crushing on, the one you worship from afar, the one you spend all your time with, the one you fantasize about nightly, the one you chose a long time ago, the one you haven't thought of yet, the one you sit next to in class, the one across the room you've had your eye on all night, the one you had an embarrassing dream about last week, the one you think about when there's nothing to read in the dentist's waiting room, the one you saw that time and went whoa who's that, the one you wish for when you blow out your birthday candles, the one you hold dear through every difficulty and setback and triumph and jubilation, the one you picture when you sing in the shower, the one who takes you over the moon, the one who stokes your celestial engine, the one who reminds you of everyone you've ever known, the one who has dogged your heart since time immemorial, the one who made you realize, the one who is the one, the one who taught you how to play with fire.

Doors are constantly opening all around you; it remains only for you to choose a portal. Will it be door 1 or door 2, the lady or the tiger, the pit or the pendulum, the devil or the deep blue sea, a rock or a hard place, one or the other, in or out, yes or no, all or nothing, truth or consequences, love or squalor, trick or treat, now or later, red or white, innocent or guilty, yes or no, smoking or nonsmoking, potato salad or cole slaw, Vishnu or Shiva, Skippy or Jif, smooth or crunchy, the Brady Bunch or the Partridge Family, Mary Ann or Ginger, The Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Weber, Coke or Pepsi, UCLA or USC, Democrat or Republican, heaven or hell? It remains only for you to choose a portal.

Dollars to dregs to doughnuts to dimebags, we are in the midst of a global shift, the imbalance of power an impossible fulcrum, like a see-saw with that lard-ass big kid holding his own end down and leaving everyone else up in the air, bane of the playground and bully with a behemouth appetite. But his big fat arsenal is weighing him down too, and he will inevitably succumb to the ravages of gravity. The bully ultimately bullies himself into submission. Friendless and alone his girth is a hindrance, a granite ballast, enough to sink him, a drowning descent, a diet of twinkies and pop-tarts and beernuts, a culture addicted to entertainment and consumption, a perpetual madcap savagery, a comatose cul-de-sac, a self-inflicted degradation, a humiliating defeat, the end of the American dream.

In this increasingly teetering freedom scene, baby, the global meltdown that seems to drive the ignorant toward an embrace of evil theocracies and rampant fascisms, those who keep a belief in individual destiny as a treasured vesture in their philosophic get-up must hold firm against the tendency to embrace fraidy-cat solutions to the daunting problems all about and ahead. The world is not simple, not black and white, not sacred vs. secular, not east vs. west, not liberal vs. conservative, not us vs. them, not the faithful vs. the heathen, not the believers vs. the infidels, not the sinners vs. the saved, not oil mongers vs. god mongers, but rather an interwoven and complex tapestry of inherently beautiful connectedness. In the midst of this uptight Manichean dualism, it's time for those of us who abhor the extreme and the vacuum, who resist simplistic mythologies that explain behavior with a biased child-mind in need of Nobodaddy, those of us who are dedicated to a direct experience of the world as it really is, not the way some megalomaniac mystics imagined it, not the way the shepherded many subscribe to ancient folderol, it's time for us to stand up and testify.

What is imperceptible, what is beyond or behind your sensory mechanisms is the very impulse-energy of reality itself, so grok the fullness, redeem the slippage, have a look-see at the degradation of the dimwit simpletons who dictate the business of life and hold the world hostage to primitive myth systems and ancient ignorance and primal fear, and realize your task is to subvert the backwardness of the lying creeps who hide behind scriptural dictates and other methods of social control. Face down all bases of judgment and commit yourself to a direct experience of a reality that knows nothing of Torah or Bible or Qur'an or any other portentous distortion of the universe; say hello to the rightness of the myriad indifferent phenomena as they swirl about you and are you every moment undisguised.

          --Mr. Smolin, 2/11/08

According to my web logs, the following phrases (typed into search engines) brought people to my mrsmolin.com site. I don't know what's creepier: the people who thought up these phrases before typing them into a search engine or the fact that these phrases brought them to MY website. I present the search engine entries almost as is, the only alteration being their organization into stanzas which I did just to be all arty and shit. If you can manage to get past some of the more abominably sicko ones, there's a treasure trove of wicked imagery herein ("saline bloated scrotum" is my personal favorite, though "hurling your bodies into the void" deserves special mention too I think . . . anyway, here):



beautiful whore in negligee
the gay nun a sacred clown
swamp buggy queen dunked
the toilet of venus
sweetheart neckless
i spank her ass sore rainbow
on my cow
mirrors astral cunt
farted as i fucked her

nude virgins tutti frutti
yoni massage gallery
chastity trap curious unable
doges fuck women
slave girl child raped in the anus by gorilla
scat panties to muddy salad
pressurized pussy farts
groin smell
funk tablature

betty rubble fucking wilma flintstone
fornicatrix
juneau blowjobs in solo pantomime
limbo cunt
rusty trombone sex
mother denial of incest
umbilical bondage thumbs

saline bloated scrotum
lapidary crystal penis
anal fissure
twenty thousand leagues under my nutsack
nude women humping a pencil

shirtless executioner scaffold
boys with boners
foggy lips
climbing fingerboard tendons
dude raunch wyoming
cowboy bebop free down lode

cooking shark you cunt rag
tapioca cactus asphalt
saxophone chocolate pig worms
demented elvis toys
abominable swamp slob
orangutan coffee cups
celestial sweaters
expressions of dust ruffles
virgin mobile secret code
hitler aria
barry white prophecy
crystallophillian undiscontinued semaphoric presubordination reedplot
the names of the planes of hell

troll shaman guides solo
mulberry hallucinogen
heady dank nuggets
hurling your bodies into the void
another world entire




Dang, there be some fucked up people out there, people.

Eighty-One




"True words are not beautiful;
Beautiful words are not true.
A good man does not argue;
He who argues is not a good man.
The wise one does not know many things;
He who knows many things is not wise.
The Sage does not accumulate (for himself).
He lives for other people,
And grows richer himself;
He gives to other people,
And has greater abundance.
The Tao of Heaven
Blesses, but does not harm.
The Way of the Sage
Accomplishes, but does not contend."




          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching







Scarecrow Jesus


I once had a dream that I was Jesus
Looking for a new perfection
In my death and resurrection
I was ready to ascend unto the main
They nailed me to a cross and left me dangling
My blood would not succumb to
What my body had grown numb to
Damn I should have slept with Mary Magdalene

But it was a lie
I wasn't Jesus
I was a scarecrow in a cornfield filled with skulls
But not Golgotha
No it looked much more like Kansas
It wasn't true
I wasn't Jesus
I was a scarecrow on display against the grain
Could've been a savior
If I'd only slept with Mary Magdalene
Scarecrow Jesus dangling in the rain

I once had a dream that I saw Mary
Grieving and despondent
Wondering what the Romans wanted
She was dressed all like a vestal virgin saint
She asked if it was cool being the Messiah
I said it had its credits
Though the one thing I regret is
That I never slept with you Miss Magdalene

But it was a lie
It wasn't Mary
It was a girl named Dorothy from the land of Oz
Over the rainbow in a cloud
Somewhere near Kansas
It wasn't true
I wasn't Jesus
I was a scarecrow made to gaze upon the plain
Almost a savior If I only had a working human brain
I might have slept with Mary Magdalene
Scarecrow Jesus dangling in the rain

There she prayed before me
Dorothy from the land of Oz
Asking me to take her
To whatever whiz there was
Then she vanished in a panic
Nothing but images remain
Now I'm wide awake still dangling
Scarecrow Jesus savior in the rain

I once had a dream that I was nothing . . .




This current circumstance, however, really has nothing to do with the time I dreamed that I was Jesus having his last few thoughts on the cross. Not the typical "Dang, dude, I shoulda slept with Mary Magdalene" type shit but more like, "Dang, dude, I shoulda kissed Miranda in the sandbox." Not even that really. I was thinking up a new sermon, even as my side bled and my entrails strangled me. I wanted to talk to my apostles about the insubstantial particular, the ego as color, how the sky isn't blue, how there is only light distributed and configured in just such a way as blue as green as me as you, just bending light manifesting itself as color, but never inherent, always only in motion toward a blending flow, but I realized I wouldn't have time because I was getting pretty close to croaking up the holy ghost.

Where were my sorry-ass apostles anyway? Probably circle-jerking onto Simon called Peter's store-bought matzoh. That'd be typical. And these were the losers who were allegedly gonna erect a church in worship of me. They've got the erect part down, for sure. I've got the horniest disciples since Buddha. Simon called Peter was born a boss, though. Dang, dude, the other day when we were getting rid of all the chumetz before pesach, shvitzing like a bunch of gentiles (and it was hot as a warlock's dick out too, dang, dude), Simon called Peter was all like, "I'll supervise" or some shit which essentially meant he just sat in the shade all day sipping on date shakes and thinking about pussy. But ya hadda admire the guy. I mean, man, Simon called Peter knew how to run things. I swore that once I was resurrected the first thing I'd do would be to make sure Simon called Peter got named as the first Pope because he was the MAN. Even if nigga din't feel the need to show up at my crucifixion. I mean, I was the dang messiah dying for everybody's sins and shit on the cross, dude, and he was out nutting on jew-toast with his gay-ass friends. Dang, dude. The once and future Pope. I'm just saying. He's like the fat kid from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. He shall be known to the world heretofore as Buzzy Lagniappe.

There was just nobody in this dream, barely even me as Jesus. And it didn't look like Golgotha either. The sky was a darkening purple. I was in the midst of fertility. The air smelled like earth and vice versa. At times I suspected I was dreaming. And just as I was thinking, "Dang, dude, this is what Eli Wallach must've felt like after everybody in the cast of The Misfits died premature deaths except for him," (he was probably, like, "dang, dude"), I caught sight of a human figure coming toward me, distinctly female. Mary Magdalene, perhaps? Brown hair and gingham dress like unto Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz or Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island. She had come to tell me of America's final collapse apparently. Barren prairies, fruitless plains, empty cities, ravaged land, forgotten promises, abandoned dreams, the aftermath of despair. I wept at the failure of our sunken republic.

And I weep still. This is not a dream. Wide awake now and dangling. The furry gate is visible from here.

"I know you from somewhere," I say to the farm girl. She reminded me of the girl From Zody's, I think.

"Death is always in the present tense, always now," she swears, "and so are we."

(i.e., All the way in the Is-ness business. An inseparable continuity. An eternal concurrence. It never stops being Today).

"At last, we've caught up with history," I gasp in fading conscience.

"It's just us now," the approximately human female confides, "The other people have gone away. I must go soon too. There's another who must guide you."

Now I remember. There's hardly any me left. 3 breaths to go maybe. Just as I'm beginning to recognize the landscape.

"Is this Los Angeles?" I ask without sound.

"Of course. It all ends up in Los Angeles, you know that."

"I knew it by the Tar Pits."

"Indeed, they await your submergence," she arises flying.

She's like a diamond in the sky now.

"How I wonder what you are . . . " I croak, thus bringing my earthly world to a close.

A shapeless voice lets me know the path ahead: I must follow this grandeur to the very top of a brand new garden. Joyously rapt in the exit lights, living a socket apocalypse, I can hear her coming. I know who she really is by having known who she was pretending to be.

The rider arrives festooned with the aura of Beatrice's glory, her chariot a carnival of shine, beckoning the holy soul away from its obligatory ghostwork toward a new biochemical nexus.

"Come to my perfect knowing," she says through her beatific face, "my crazy pilgrim, my prisoner: I am thy very language," she reveals in sudden fuckery to my blitzkrieg-ridden head, "your obsession since birth, and into death, just before the now, oh misty one, I am your words, the ones that never finish their mission, bubbling up like tar pits."

She draws me toward her motherly cuntship astride the portals. Visions of eternity pour me open.

I bound toward the river, willing to enter her through an alternate ancestry, unaware of my reluctant thrusts into her volcanic radius. "Come inside me," she offers, becoming both river and chariot, "Speak to the yet unknowing world in a way that's truer than sense, so that a portion of your Love will carry on," she recommends as she submerges me away from what I was, this lady of my tomb, and I resurface with an echoless mind, depths of empty mechanisms, with a soft hand guiding me into the white center of it all, where no things happen yet.

"You are perpetual and selfless," I proclaim in sudden dark recognition, born to a permanent wilderness, an eternally lonely zygote.

Retaining some ritualized tidbits of memory in the juggernaut transition, I resolve to obey the voice in whatever form, the original Shakti, to commemorate the paths we have to travel, separate and alone.

I have been a goliard
Shooting my scatological doggerel
Onto make-believe bellies
A vacant behavior directed
By a shameful aversion to humanness

But now is the end of a long dream
And I'm resisting the voice
Like the sound of many waters
Or a draft of moist wind

Somehow I reach another morning
Open to hoping
Because the sky is streaked with red
And it's beautiful

Attachments lose all reason to mean anythng. Destinations fade away into the wisdom of oblivion, into no time, into a reunion with truth, into a truly original world.

The rest is paradise . . .


          --Mr. Smolin, 10/23/07

Eighty




"Let there be a small country with a small population,
Where the supply of goods are tenfold or hundredfold, more than they can use.
Let the people value their lives and not migrate far.
Though there be boats and carriages,
None be there to ride them.
Though there be armor and weapons,
No occasion to display them.
Let the people again tie ropes for reckoning,
Let them enjoy their food,
Beautify their clothing,
Be satisfied with their homes,
Delight in their customs.
The neighboring settlements overlook one another
So that they can hear the barking of dogs and crowing of cocks of their neighbors,
And the people till the end of their days shall never have been outside their country."




          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching



Sometimes the Tao that gets spoken of is vastly different from the Tao that gets written about. One of my students gave a speech in class entitled "My Mama's New Volvo," though when she turned in the written text for grading it took on a whole different meaning due to one simple recurring spelling error:



My Mama's New Vulva


My mama's gettin a new Vulva. The Vulva she has now's all beat up and worn out. It's been in a couple of accidents too. Once her Vulva got rear ended by a Korean man with a big head. The second time her Vulva got banged by another Vulva that belonged to a Mexican lady who kep pointing at my mama's Vulva and sayin "It's not my fault we bang our Vulvas together." My daddy found out about that one and ooh he was mad at firs. But then he said he wished he could of been there so he could watch the two Vulvas bangin. My mama said "It wasn't nobody's fault. It just happened. Sometimes you can't help it you know? Now every time I look at my Vulva I gotta see it all messed up." She got a BIG ol dent on the side of her Vulva. My daddy says he don't like to ride in mama's Vulva no more cuz it's the wrong size now that she had all those babies. My mama's Vulva fits five, six if you squeeze in. Daddy says theys too many people all up in that thing. He says theys so many other people in mama's Vulva theys no room for him. And daddy also says my mama's Vulva smells bad cuz she don't wash it enough. But I don't know though cuz she washes her Vulva like every Saturday or sometimes Sunday. She does it right out in the driveway where erryone can see. Erryone watches when my mama comes outside to wash her Vulva. "You want some hep with that?" Mr. Peterson always aks my mama when she's washing her Vulva. "No that's ok, I like doin it by myself better" my mama always says back to Mr. Peterson "And I never known any man on earth who knows what to do with a Vulva anyways." My daddy is excited by my mama's new Vulva though. He says theys nothing like the smell of a new Vulva. I can't wait to get inside my mama's new Vulva and smell it. I'ma stick my face inside her Vulva and take a big whiff. Then I'ma crawl aroun in it. Her ol Vulva is red on the inside and black on the outside. I think she said she wants her new Vulva to be the same color as her ol Vulva. When I tol my mama I like her old Vulva fine she said to me "I'm glad you like my Vulva baby but Mama wants Daddy to like her Vulva too. Cuz he's gotta drive it once in a while."


For reals.

When I was 15 my girlfriend left me for a guy with a Volvo. I can't remember her name exactly. Janine maybe? She was left-handed and had 3 earrings in her left earlobe. The guy she dumped me for was a Senior, one of several dozen Jewish guys named Josh. Lots of Joshes at Fairfax High. The break-up happened suddenly. It was like one day she was feeling my boner through my pants and saying, "Oooh, what's that?," the next day she was telling me it's just not working out with us and she wants to be with Josh. I understood immediately Janine's decision to rid herself of my whole wimpy situation. Going out on dates with me meant being driven by parents, taking the bus, walking, or riding bikes. So it was no surprise when I asked her why she wanted to be with Josh and she answered, without hesitation, matter-of-factly, "He's got a car."

That phrase--"He's got a car"--lingers near the surface. One of those defining moments of inadequacy.

It was all so simple:

"He's got a car."

It will be spoken at the closing of America.

Wherever and whenever you are in the bloody chaos of a world losing its fulcrum, losing its axis, losing its bearings, losing its humanity, wherever and whenever you are, whether alone or accompanied, singled or coupled or grouped or mobbed, wherever and whenever you are, prone to seeking, grasping for answers, needing a reason, longing for love, wherever and whenever you are, making claims of understanding how the world should be, passing judgement on sinners and slackers and malcontents and wage slaves and other people just like you, wherever and whenever and whatever and whoever you are and whom you claim to represent, be ready with evidence, be ready with sensible solutions, be ready for anything, be ready to back it up with something other than rote allegiance to wherever and whenever and whomever and whatever.

Transcend gender and access your inner damsel in distress, in fetching expectation that some knight in shining armor will swoop to your rescue from this incendiary conflagration of freedom-loving souls victimized by missionary zealotry inflicted upon us by those who allow their irrational religious beliefs to trump their humanity, who seek to legislate faith, who use bogus, anti-human, world-destroying concepts like 'martyrdom' and 'holiness' to foist their hyper-violent narcissism upon the world and justify it in the name of YHVH or Allah or Christ or other such mythic constructs in an attempt at social control and strategic, life-denying, death-worshipping, juvenile, tantrum-throwing, pre-adolescent, superstitious fears about the randomness that comprises a direct experience of reality. It's a bitter, brutal circumstance living among a species that refuses to embrace the chaos. They only like God 'cause he's got a car.

Seek respite from the melty swelter, a buffer against the caustic hotness of a world caught up in rigid ideologies, vacant hatreds, ignorant paranoias, and mindless consumption. Reality is nothing but a canopy across the firmament, a frosted mug, a big phat bowl of luscious nugs, a happy home where anyone weathering the elements can find some necessary shelter.

Let some groovy music move you to joy and celebration. For all the mess the world's in, for all the uncertainty and precariousness that leaves us all hanging in the balance, for all the madness we can't prevent or control, for all the falling apart that appears to be the case in this vale of tears, let an oasis of our making stay the scary onslaught, let this unencumbered bliss exist as a reminder of your good fortune: You're alive in the world and you know it.

The sultry night air, the summer scrumptiousness, conjure thoughts of first love, that dawn caveman butterfly fluttering, your earliest recognition of beauty and truth, the first time you looked at a fellow creature and said wow, the birthplace of all your psychosexual mythology, the steamy cauldron, the basis of longing and nostalgia and bittersweet reminiscence, the source-point of unencumbered purity and unbaggaged adoration, before the realities of intimacy and its complicated struggles overwhelmed your fragile heart and brought bitterness and cynicism and fear into your innocent being, the knowing that it's 'cause he's got a car. Remember the first that e'er you sighed for, somewhere in the velvet July nightscape, up there in the firmament, separating the waters from the waters, a signpost to your selfless adoration of the beloved.

You know, how, like, when some enchanted evening you might see a stranger across a crowded room and the most oceanic eyes devour the space between and beckon like centuries to every latent hope, to every newborn dream, to visions of rivers and reverence and the evolution of human ingenuity. The subtle other, the view from elsewhere, the newly fumed beauty, all misty and ephemeral, prodding you to find a connection, a reason to get up off your infatuated ass and lower the boom, baby; ya see her, ya grab her, ya kiss her, you elevate your spirit fingers and testify.

No matter what your personal circumstance there remains a world beyond the neurotic self-obsessed nature of human tendency; there is ample opportunity for social intercourse pregnant with possibilty. Participate in the stream of life. Get out of your dark corner. Reach out and make contact with your species. It's easy. All ya gotta do is stand in that river. Take your place in the pre-chill night beneath a little slip of a moon, pondering the symmetry of existence, impossible loves, contagious laughter, the promise of autumn, the sweet immediacy of living in the present tense, the accidental magic of what's happening now: The faintest hint of fall signals a return to dormancy, and the scales of nature tilt, like the earth, away from the sun and toward a different kind of light, a slanted fantasy, a masterful backdrop for infatuations and other heart-spasms, the eternal longing.


Who's got a car?




          --Mr. Smolin, 10/16/07

Seventy-Nine


"Patching up a great hatred is sure to leave some hatred behind.
How can this be regarded as satisfactory?
Therefore the Sage holds the left tally,
And does not put the guilt on the other party.
The virtuous man is for patching up;
The vicious is for fixing guilt.
But the way of Heaven is impartial;
It sides only with the good man."


          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching





There used to be this cereal called Sugar Smacks which looked like little vaginas. Little vaginas in a bowl. It was the most glorious pornography to a 12-year-old. Every morning I'd be greeted at the breakfast table by little vaginas in a bowl. I didn't even like Sugar Smacks very much. But I wanted to have them anyway. It's an old old story. My sister referred to the cereal as "Sugar Snatch." I think the name was first changed to "Honey Smacks" in the anti-sugar '80s, and the cereal is still around. But now, to avoid offense to anyone, it's just called "Smacks." It still looks like little vaginas in a bowl, though. Afloat in milky white.







Who Knows What



Rabbi Hamlisch was talking to me about unholy fire and who knows what else, but I was preoccupied with thoughts of the soggy note from Miranda Savitch--a love-struck summons perhaps, a beacon from the burning bush--waiting folded and unread in my backpack. Was it about our weekend schoolyard trespass last Saturday? Her shivery whispers? Her darkly sparkling eyes, like crazy? My blushing bumblings? The genius of hamburgers? The shame of wanting? Our feet in sand? The corner of Curson and Curson? The sharing of solitaire? Or nothing to do with any of that?

The previous Saturday afternoon, during a game of spin-the-bottle in the bushes at the Tar Pits, Miranda and I split off from our group of fellow cool-nerd 8th Graders at John Burroughs Jr. High and strolled through the maze of Park La Brea to Hancock Park Elementary School, Miranda's alma mater. Having almost but not quite kissed in the aforementioned spin-the-bottle game, the conversation was, at first, awkward. She had suggested we break away mid-game, but she didn't explain why. We mainly talked about friends of ours who lived in Park La Brea--a carefully planned apartment community in the heart of the Fairfax area, as yet ungated circa 1974, one of those complexes wherein all the buildings are identical and the streets absurdly labyrinthine.

"I hate going over Misty's house 'cause I can never find her building," Miranda said, "it's like where the fuck are you?"

"Oh, man, yeah, last time my dad had to pick me up at Oliver's place he was totally pissed at how hard it was to find where Oliver lived. 'You can take the bus home from now on,' he was saying all crazy, 'because I am never under any circumstances doing this shit again.'"

"Your dad said shit to you?"

"Yeah. Ever since I said shit in front of him he's all cool with saying shit in front of me now."

"Whoa, when'd you say shit in front of your dad?"

"Back a while ago. We were walking the dogs at night, and these three unattended doberman pinschers turned the corner and started walking right towards us--"

"Nazi dogs."

"--Totally, and I said 'shit' right at that moment. My dad just said, 'Turn around slowly and start walking back toward the house.' I apologized for 'using the s-word,' and my dad patted my head and went, 'That's OK, son. That's what the word's for.'"

"For when you're scared shitless."

"No shit, yeah. But also for when shit sucks. Like my grandmother, behind her back we call her cooking shitalicious. That's pretty flagrant."

"Shitalicious. Sounds yum. You got away from the dobermans though?"

"Yeahyeah, they didn't really follow us at all," I explained as we stopped at a strange corner. "Oh, here, check out this intersection," I said, pointing to the sign that showed two perpendicular streets both called Curson, "this is where Curson crosses itself."

"Meet me at the corner of Curson and Curson," Miranda said, "what a great place for a date. 'Meet me at the corner of Curson and Curson.' I want to say that to somebody someday."

"You just did."

"No, I mean I want to say it and mean it."

"Nice, thanks," I faked insult.

"No, no, I mean we're already on the corner of Curson and Curson. so I don't have to tell you to meet me there," she was squirming her way out of it with undeniable charm.

I shook my finger mightily, "A curse on Curson!"I said just to be saying something (though I do admit I was hoping she would find it adorable. I couldn't tell if she did or didn't).

We stood at the corner of Curson and Curson, looking at each other in silent acknowledgement of who knows what. Miranda's eyes were a fireplace. They filled me with the shame of wanting.

"You do realize neither of us would have any idea how to find our way back here," I prophesied.

"Lance," she said.

"Ya," I offered my ear to her foggy silence.

"Nothing, just . . . ," Miranda scanned the landscape, "This reminds me of the crossroads scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow."

"Yeah kinda," I said.

"Now which way do we go?" she intoned quoting Judy Garland in the movie.

"That way is a very nice way," I said, doing Scarecrow, continuing the movie vibe. A flirting technique.

"Who said that?" Dorothy looked about bemusedly.

"It's pleasant down that way, too." Scarecrow said, pointing in the other direction.

Miranda didn't know her Dorothy line there. Neither did I. Kinda broke the spell.

"Of course, people do go both ways!" I went back into Scarecrow character, all Ray Bolger rubbery.

It was too late.

"So, which way DO we go? Curson or Curson?" Miranda asked as herself.

"I think if we stay left it'll take us to Colgate, but who the fuck knows," I slipped back into Lancehood, "Maybe we'll end up at Misty's building!"

Miranda laughed.

"You do a good Scarecrow," she said.

"Well, it's easy: I haven't got a brain--only straw. I can't make up my mind about anything . . . I am the fuckin' Scarecrow," I said.

"No you're not. You're just doing a good imitation of the Scarecrow. You're really someone else," she said.

"Ah, the Little Prince, right?"

"Wrong."

"The fat kid from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory?"

"Not Buzzy Lagniappe, no," Miranda joked.

"Um, Captain Howdy?"

"Stop, you're being silly now."

"Well, WHO?" I really wanted to know.

"You're Lancelot Link Secret CHIMP," she sang to the melody of the show's theme song. She moved toward me, brushing my shoulder with hers, making like she was trying to run me off the road or something. I didn't put my arm around her. I was probably supposed to right then. And I really wanted to. But I couldn't do it. I was scared of starting.

The spin-the-bottle game had been one of those dreaded suggestions that erupted spontaneously while all of us were just messing around at the Tar Pits. Lorelei Lux found an empty bottle of Schlitz beer, and I believe it was Dahlia "Dolly" Ferris who uttered, "Hey we should play spin the bottle" with which every girl agreed immediately (in addition to Dolly and Lorelei, Justine Balthazar was also there, Misty Winters, Sharon Rose, Claire Farnaway, Candy Stoner, and Miranda: the newly named Chick Clique). The boy contingent, less inclined to want to suffer the psychic discomforts of spin-the-bottle, included me and Gus Lagniappe, Chester Flinch, Claude Moss, Whitman Rust, Oliver Gelding, and also Dolly's newly official "boyfriend" (they had frenched) Freddy Snow, one of those bronze-faced, godly-looking Jewish guys with feathered brown hair parted in the middle, the kind of guy who'd grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer or a media executive if his ambition didn't get derailed in adolescence by cocaine and quaalude cocktails. He stood in stark contrast to me with my braces and zits and dorky jewfro. I'm fairly convinced he didn't like me very much.

And, dang, dude, Freddy Snow was hanging pretty close to Miranda for somebody who was officially going with Dolly Ferris. When he spun the bottle it stopped at Miranda, and Freddy didn't just lean across the circle and kiss her; Freddy pushed Miranda onto her back and gave her a long tongue-involved kiss, at the conclusion of which he turned and looked intently at me. "Dude," that's cool, right?" Freddy asked as he sat back down. Miranda looked at the ground. Dang, dude.

Candy Stoner's first bottle spin stopped at me. She crawled across the circle we had formed in the bushes near 6th Street, and kissed me on the mouth, attempting to french and yeah I let it happen 'cause it felt good and maybe I wanted to get back at Miranda or something. It had been like 4 months since Candy and I'd stopped being a couple, but the rhythm of the tongues was intact.

A general "oooh" permeated the circle.

"Aaaah-ha Sexes with the exes," quipped Oliver.

My spin, as fate dictated, landed on Miranda, who was sitting next to me. Following the briefest eye contact I leaned toward her, but as my mouth approached hers she turned her face and then sidled up to my ear and whispered, "Can we get away from here?" I pulled back and nodded yeah. We separated without kissing.

"Dang, dude, REJECTION in spin-the-bottle? That's dog," said Oliver.

"Why'd you do that, Mandy?" scolded a cross Candy Stoner.

"That's cold-blooded," Claire Farnaway rejoined.

"Actually, Lance and I are going to go somewhere more private," said Miranda as suggestively as her 13 years could muster, and thus began our romp through Park La Brea.

Another "ooooh" swept across the group.

"All right, Soylent Green, golita, Soylent Green," we heard Oliver say as we journeyed forth.

"Mandy, call me later, 'k?," Dolly shouted making the universal thumb-and-pinky hand-to-ear call me sign. I looked back and saw the girls huddle before turning my attention to Miranda and our sudden oneness.

We had followed the right Curson which led us to Colgate and the Hancock Park Elementary School playground. On that soothing blue April afternoon we had the entire schoolyard to ourselves. Oh, holy emptiness. Hopping the chain-link fence, we entered what seemed to me standard issue LA Unified playground: a covered eating area with tables and benches, 3 beige handball courts, a couple of tetherball poles, monkeybars, rings, and other climbing equipment installed over black rubber padding, painted four-square and two-square games, two kickball/sockball diamonds, a couple of basketball courts with 8-foot hoops hung with chain-link netting, and a bunch of hopscotch boxes.

(In 3rd Grade I threw up while watching Nancy Judenrein play hopscotch one morning before school. The puke looked and smelled like rotten eggs. My mother had to come and take me home. What I remember best about that day is that I got to lie on the couch and watch TV. The Los Angeles Kings were playing the Montreal Canadiens in the evening. I watched the game on the black and white television in our living room. Ross Lonsberry, "Cowboy" Bill Flett, Eddie "The Jet" Joyal. I loved that team. They were sacred. They sucked, but I loved them anyway. That's the nature of love, I suppose. I didn't feel sick at all. Just peaceful. Snuggled up and watching hockey. True holiness.)

I was not a Hancock Park alum. I had spent my grammar school years at Melrose Avenue Elementary School, right behind hotdog heaven Pink's. So, the Hancock Park yard was not buzzing with wonder for me, but for Miranda it harbored a fleet of beloved memories. I enjoyed learning about her past and her nostalgic thrall for that distant life of two years before. What was she like then?

"This is where Freddy Snow fell backwards and cracked his head open in 6th Grade. He was trying to imitate some Kung Fu movie guy--"

"--Bruce Lee--"

"--YES! and he tripped over this bench and cracked his head on the ground. He was awake but bleeding really bad."

I will admit a certain joy at hearing of Freddy's injury.

"Is Freddy a good kisser?" I tortured myself by asking.

"Well, you know, he's experienced," Miranda blushed and then countered, "How was it kissing Candy again?"

"She was into it, but the thing is I saw her with some older guy at The Exorcist, and he looked like he wanted to kick my ass. So I thought she had a new boyfriend. I couldn't figure out why she was kissing me for reals in the game."

"Dorkwad, that was her cousin Nick at The Exorcist. He goes to Uni. You are Mr. Gullible's Travels, totally," Miranda said.

I still don't know what she meant by that, but I pretended like I did at the time.

"Deafenly," I pulled out the favorite flirty tease, my mockery of her speech.

"Stop," she warned.

"Why did you want to get away from everybody back there?" I inquired.

"I don't know. I din't want to be there. With them. Right then."

"You din't?"

"Don't be a dookey."

"Did it have to do with Freddy?" I asked. Miranda looked down.

"No, not really, I guess," she mumbled.

"Candy?"

Miranda nodded a sort of yes.

"What about Candy?"

"She's just . . . going out of her way to be against me. I guess that's how I'd describe it. But we have all the same friends so I have to be around her all the time. And who knows what I did wrong?"

We strolled over to the Kindergarten yard, a fenced off area next to the Kindergarten classrooms.

"I remember being in Kindergarten," Miranda said, "I'd come in the morning and then go home and watch TV."

"I was in afternoon Kindergarten," I said, "I watched TV all morning, then my mother would make me a Swanson's chicken pie, and I'd eat it while watching Sheriff John. After that I'd go to school."

We climbed the little fence into the enclosed Kindergarten area. A copy of Paul Zindel's My Darling, My Hamburger lay carelessly tossed open near the sandbox. Miranda took off her Jack Purcells and the tennis socks with little fluffy balls dangling in back, picked up the book, and stood barefoot in the sandbox.

"How's the sand?" I asked.

"Mmm, warm-cold. Come try."

"Warm-cold?" I didn't understand.

"Yeah, the sand is warm from the sun but cold underneath once you dig your feet in. Warm-cold. It's yummy!" Miranda beckoned.

I removed my Adidas and sweat-socks and joined her.

"I can't believe elementary school kids are reading this," she said of the Zindel book.

"Yeah, and we're in the Kindergarten yard. Is it dirty?" I tried to grab it away from her.

"There's a lot of stuff in it they wouln't understand. It's about high school. There's a lot of stuff in it I din't understand, I guess, and I'm 13. Maybe it belongs to one of the teachers."

"Let me see it," I made another grab.

"No, it will give you ideas," she dangled.

I reached for the book and she pulled away playfully, sometimes almost letting me snatch it.

Miranda interrupted the struggle and looked over at the handball courts.

"I wish we had a handball," she said.

"So I could whoop your ass?"

"No, so I could show off my cuts and slices," she explained.

"Ah."

"And then whoop your ass," Miranda challenged.

"At Melrose Avenue we called them slicees," I said.

"Slicees?"

"Yeah."

"No way. That's lame."

"Yeah. Cuts and slicees. And I'd always get stuck sitting in line on the bench next to Wayne Paul Nader."

"Hey, what is that guy's trip?" Miranda wondered. "He says really creepy stuff to Lila Saddleback all the time, and she's always telling him to fuck off."

"Let me 'splain something, Lucy," I said in my best Ricky Ricardo voice because Miranda was an I Love Lucy freak. It seemed like another good flirting technique. (She knew every episode of I Love Lucy by title. Including all the shitty ones on the farm in Connecticut).

"'Splain," she mocked, Lucy-style.

"You know how Wayne is now?"

"Of course. Dorkus of the year. You went to elementary with him?"

"Yeah. All through. And he was always way out, like talking to himself and shit, even when we were like in 5th Grade. So, during handball we'd be sitting on the bench waiting for our turns, and if you were sitting next to him, he'd say to you, in this, like, fucked-up munchkin voice, "Tickle my legs," like all Lollipop Guild and shit, "Tickle my legs," and then he'd, like, tickle your legs a little, but in this majorly feeble way. It felt like a spider was crawling on you. I don't know, dude, it was fuckin' creepy. Dang, and he always wore these purple cords. Dang."

"Do the munchkin voice again," Miranda demanded.

"Follow the yellow brick road," I said.

Miranda reminded me of Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz sometimes. So the munchkin thing was more flirting. She laughed and asked me to do it again.

Miranda Savitch and I were in 8th Grade when we stood face to face barefoot in the sandbox and nothing happened save the warm-cold pleasance of our feet in sand, separate and together. Miranda had just turned 13. I was still 12, but on the verge, my bar mitzvah less than a month away.

"Why didn't you have a Bat Mitzvah?" I asked her.

"I dunno. My parents thought it'd be too jewy, I guess. 'We're just people,' they always say, 'we aren't anything.' We get presents for Chanukah and we go to my aunt's house every year for Passover but that's it. There are several trees growing in Israel in my name I think. People gave them to me on my 13th birthday even though I din't have a Bat Mitzvah." She put the book back down on the ground where she found it. "I want to go on the monkey bars," she shifted the focus.

"Oh cool. I love watching girls go on the monkey bars. Except you're not wearing a skirt. No fun."

"Lech."

"No, it's not like that. It's natural. It can't be helped. It's a thing."

"Do I want to know this?" she asked.

I shrugged. I waited.

"Well now you have to tell me," Miranda couldn't resist.

"All right, it's simple. The basic idea is this: Dresses and skirts were made to be looked up."

"That's perverted," she scoffed.

"But it's not. Perverted is when things are all sick and twisted. Like the stuff Wayne probably says to Lila, that's for sure some perverted-ass shit. But looking up a girl's dress isn't sick and twisted; it's just what you do," I attempted to defend my gender. "I mean, it's not even a sex thing really. You know Gina Dichlich, right?"

"The girl with the famous name."

"Yaya. Well, she went to my elementary school, too. In like 4th Grade a bunch of us would always watch her go upside-down on the monkeybars so we could see her underwear."

"That's pathetic."

"True, it's pathetic, but it's not perverted. We didn't want to have sex with Gina Dichlich. We just wanted to see her panties. Hopscotch was also good. And jump rope. Pathetic I agree with. But it's what we do. To everyone."

"Ew gross. Really?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Any opportunity. That's the thing I was telling you."

"Everyone?"

"Well, basically . . . "

"That means you've tried to look up my skirt," she gasped.

"TRIED?," I groucho'd my eyebrows.

"Oh I'm so--What's the big deal about underwear?"

"It's not the underwear; it's the promise."

"Huh?"

"You want the promise before you even know what the promise is."

"You mean like hope?" Miranda asked.

"Nyeah, sort of but not really."

"Or more like wish," she tried again.

"No deafenly not wish."

"Stop."

"Sorry. I din't remember."

"You are bad, you promised not to make fun of me," Miranda reminded me, slapping my arm.

"Wishes make me sad," I confessed.

"Everybody wishes," said Miranda.

"That's what's so sad about it. And also that wishes are always a disappointment when they come true."

Miranda was watching me talk. Who knows what she was thinking. I continued, "I also don't like getting presents. Whenever my parents ask me what I want for my birthday or for Chanukah or something I always tell them nothing. I don't want to want anything."

"Sometimes you're like a girl, Lance," Miranda said, oddly.

"I think it'd be weird to be a girl."

"Being a girl feels like the normal way to be," she said, "I dunno. Boys are the mutation. I mean, please, the male thingy, you know, it looks like a mistake."

"Seen many, have you?," I taunted. Miranda blushed and looked away. "You know that joke about the boy and the girl playing doctor?"

"Which one?"

"This little boy and this little girl get naked, and the little girl points to the boy's thing and says, 'Oooh, can I touch that?', and the little boy says, 'No way, look what you did to yours."

"Ha ha," Miranda endured the humor. She sat down in the sandbox and started mounding up the foundation of a castle. She had abandoned her plan to go on the monkeybars. "Hourglasses make me sad," she said. "What else makes you sad, besides presents and wishes?"

"Carnivals. I don't feel like I'm part of the human race when I'm at a carnival. I come from a planet that doesn't need carnivals," I confessed. "What about hourglasses makes you sad?"

"They make me think of everything I can't keep."

"Isn't there a big hourglass in your room?"

"Yeah, you remember? Neat. That was my grandmother's. I got it when she died. Another reason hourglasses make me sad."

"Kinda the same reason, huh?"

"Yeah, huh," she looked at me forever in that moment. "I want to live in a castle," Miranda said as she turned her attention to the sand and the erection of her fantasy palace.

"And so castles made of sand," I scraped the Hendrix tune with my nasal drone, "fall into the sea eventually . . . "

"Kinda like hourglasses . . . huh?"

"Yeah, huh," I echoed.

Miranda didn't know Hendrix.

"You know, the deserts get bigger every year?" Miranda said, "One day the entire earth will be a desert. But things can grow even in sand. That's what you have to remember. I love sand."

"Except in hourglasses . . ."

"Yes," Miranda Savitch offered up all intensity. She was wearing brown corduroy pants. I could see her brassiere through her blouse. And so arose the inevitable knotty eruption of cock-in-pussy thoughts.

"I think it's unlikely the entire earth will be a desert," I said with controlled breath.

"Unlikely," Miranda said, "I like when things are unlikely. If I'm thinking of the word unlikely when I'm falling asleep at night I always have the best dreams. "

"You know, I didn't know you were so weird, Miranda."

She smiled, "Wowie kazowie."

"What?"

"You called me Miranda."

"Yeah so? It's your name."

"You never use my name."

"I use your name," I insisted.

"Never."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Really? Never?"

"YES. And in fact if I didn't start conversations with you we'd probably never talk even." This was starting to remind me eerily of American Graffiti. I don't know why exactly, but it was. She was right, though. I never called her by her name.

"Dang, dude, I suck," I offered, "I'm sorry . . . Miranda."

"I like the way that sounds," she said.

Who knows what she meant by that. Miranda was beautiful.

"I thought it was funny in Ms. Bukkake's class when she said, 'Miranda is a moon of Uranus,'" I recalled, "I wrote it in my science notes." (Every time I looked at that phrase in my science notes I thought of Miranda's ass.)

"Ha, yeah, huh? Almost as good as when Bukkake said 'Uranus is mostly gas.' Yes, a moon of Uranus. That's me. Hey, did I tell you about Palm Springs?"

"I know you went."

"Yeahyeah, when I was in Palm Springs over winter break we stayed in this hotel called The Spa. It was weird because I was lying by a concrete pool--"

"A sea-meant pond," I said in my durndest Jethro Bodine voice.

"--Yeahzackly, on a plastic lounge at an air-conditioned hotel, but still when I looked up at the stars I felt like I was in the wilderness; I couln't believe how many of them there were, and I thought, dang, those are there every night and I don't get to see them, that sucks," she thought for a moment.

"You got to see what you're missing."

"For reals . . . " Miranda's mind meandered. "What was it like to be the first humans and look up there and see the Milky Way? Do you ever think about that?"

"Every night," I wanted to say but didn't. I just wanted her to keep on talking so I could keep on looking at her. And listening. I loved her voice.

"What did they think it was? Freaky," Miranda continued, "It's the best movie I've ever seen, the Milky Way."

"Better than Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory?"

"You would've liked it," Miranda said, and added, after a pause, "I thought about you a couple of times when I was out there looking at the sky."

"Only a couple?"

"OK, like 3 times. Yeah, no, like I wondered if you were also looking at the sky."

"I do that."

"Yeah, no, I know, no, but I wondered which stars you were able to see. Like maybe we were looking at the same one at the same time or something? I could see the whole thing but you were looking at the same sky and could only see a couple of those stars, right?"

"Like maybe four or five. Like Orion maybe on a good night. Or the Big Dipper."

"Yeahyeah," she was putting the finishing touches on her sand castle, "and so, Lance Atlas . . . here's the big question . . . were you looking?"

I had no idea.

"I look at the sky every night," was my honest but evasive reply.

"I love the sand and you love the stars," Miranda said, "you ever notice that?"

"Is that why I remind you of the Little Prince?"

"I dunno," Miranda shrugged, "but I will tell you my favorite line in The Little Prince though: 'What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.' That's my life motto."

"I don't get it."

"There's always hope, monsieur. Remember that. Things can grow even in sand."

"One day I'll figure it out, I guess."

"You're somewhere between the Little Prince and a blueberry," she teased.

"With a bit of chimp thrown in?"

"Yessireebob."

"My dad always says that!" I said.

"Mine too!"

"Dad's all know the same jokes."

"They learn them at Dad school," Miranda said with authority.

"Yeah, like 'shave and a haircut, two bits, right? And 'Pull my finger,' dang."

"Right, or how about this one?" Miranda said as she stood up. "Here, get up." I rose. "Shake . . . come on, hand out . . . Shake," she said, shaking my hand, "Spear," she said poking me in the ribs with her elbow, and then turning me around and sticking her knee in my jean-tight buttock, "kick in the rear." It was not the last time I would let a girl kick my ass. I turned to face her, and she held onto my arm.

We stood for a few seconds without saying anything.

"What?" she interrupted the silence.

"What what?" I returned and looked aside.

Miranda said, "What's that?" and pointed at a spot on my shirt. When I looked down she zipped her finger up my chest and onward across the height of my face, a fitting joke for the kindergarten sandbox, and, of course, I fell for it for the billionth time in my almost 13 years on the planet.

"CHIMP!" Miranda ran and hopped the Kindergarten fence, dashing back out onto the big yard. "Let's play handball," she shouted, though there were no balls on the premises. I followed her over to the handball court, and we sat on the bench as if waiting our turn to play. She was sitting side-saddle. I straddled the bench, facing her.

"Tickle my leg" she said in Wayne Paul Nader munchkin voice. I allowed the tips of my fingers to touch her courduroy pantleg and began these wormboy sissy ticklings which she swatted away several times playfully. "Lance Link, whatcha gonna do?" she half-sang. I wanted to run my hand up her leg and feel her crotch through the plush nexus of seams.

"What should I do?" I sort of lust-croaked.

"Follow the yellow brick road," Miranda said breaking into a nervous laugh. Did she know I wanted her on her back, legs spread, taking my cock in the sandbox, yessireebob? I placed the palm of my hand on her inner thigh at its lowest point near the knee. Miranda put her hand on my forearm, neither pushing nor pulling. But I wouldn't let my hand move any higher. Miranda looked at me with too much mystery to read. I was supposed to kiss her at that moment, I knew. But I didn't, again. I remembered a similar constellation of feelings in the moments before I kissed Candy Stoner for the first time, that earliest frenching. I didn't want Candy Stoner and kissed her anyway. But here I wanted to entwine tongues with Miranda Savitch. Her mouth was devourable, the voice that emanated from it a river I'd swim in, the mind it spoke for a magic lantern. But the shame of wanting, the fear of being seen as human left me sunk in paralysis. She'd think I was like everybody else. I wanted her to think I was above all that. The promise was lost.

"You wanna get a hamburger or something?" she said, gently pushing my hand away.

"Yeah, ok," I said, pulling back and getting up.

We retrieved our shoes and socks and made our way across Fairfax to Jack-In-The-Box. An overriding silence accompanied us, though once we settled down at a table, the heavy tension subsided.

"Genius," Miranda said, pointing to her Jumbo Jack, "this hamburger is genius."

"Mine's pretty good," I said, "It's the 'secret sauce,' that's what does it."

"No, this hamburger is genius," she spoke as she chewed, "You don't understand. I've been wanting this all day and it's like the hamburger knew and was just waiting for me to find it. I've been thinking about this hamburger since I woke up this morning and I didn't even realize it. Genius." She shook her head at the revelation.

"So," I said, "you liked that book My Darling, My Hamburger?"

"Yeah, it was good."

"But not genius."

"Not like this hamburger, no."

"A Jumbo Jack from Jack-In-The-Box," I said in my best Rodney Allen Rippy 5-year-old voice (which bore a marked resemblance to my munchkin voice), "It's too big 'a eat." Miranda didn't laugh. "What's the book about?" I asked.

"I don't know, relationships I guess. Mainly 2 couples with problems. They're in high school. I din't get some of it. I liked it though."

"What's the title mean?"

"Oh it's like going to get a hamburger is a way to get out of stuff that's too intense. Something like that. I don't really remember!"

"But you liked it."

"Yeah, it was good. But this hamburger is genius."

Miranda took a sip of my milkshake. Using my straw.

"You want to come over for a while?" she asked.

"Yeah, cool," I said, pondering the cock-in-pussy possibilities of the venture. I hadn't been to Miranda's house since our ping-pong debacle. Perhaps I would redeem myself.

We walked the few blocks to her house in the waning April afternoon. The house was empty, which stoked my horny commotion of course, and we settled on her bed, some distance apart. Miranda pulled two decks of cards from her nightstand drawer, one of which was a Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp deck. "Here, you can use this deck because you are a chimp," she said and began taking the other deck out of its box, indicating I should do the same with mine.

"Um, what are we doing?" I asked.

"I wanna play solitaire with you."

"I've never heard of playing solitaire with someone."

"It's fun. Oh, wait, music," Miranda strode across the room and pulled a Jim Croce album from her small stack of records right next to the big hourglass. Croce had died the previous autumn in a plane crash and had been splashing across the airwaves nonstop posthumously for months. It was one of those things where you kinda had to say you liked Jim Croce's music even if you didn't 'cause he'd just died and he was a nice guy and shit. I actually did like Jim Croce's music, but I knew people who didn't and were waiting for the day they could fess up. Miranda put on "Time In A Bottle" and re-joined me on the bed. As she was dealing her own hand of solitaire, she sang along:

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
Till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you

"This is my first time," I said.

Miranda looked at me quizzically, then looked back down at her solitaire hand and continued singing:

If I could make days last forever
If words could make wishes come true
I'd save every day like a treasure and then,
Again, I would spend them with you

"It's my first time playing solitaire with someone," I clarified.

Miranda nodded, still looking down, and continued:

I've looked around enough to know
That youre the one I want to go
Through time with

"It's cool to be alone and together at the same time," Miranda said without lifting her gaze from the cards.

If I had a box just for wishes
And dreams that had never come true
The box would be empty
Except for the memory
Of how they were answered by you

Alone and together at the same time. That was us. That would always be us.

"You can learn a lot about people when you play solitaire with them," she said over an instrumental interlude, then joining the bridge's return:

I've looked around enough to know
That you're the one I want to go
Through time with

She looked up from her cards. By the time the song was done, though, I had already reached an impasse in the solitaire game. Dead end. All my cards were spent. Dang, dude.

"That was quick," Miranda said.

"Dang, that's embarrassing."

"Aaaah-ha . . . 3 minutes . . . loser."

"Man, sorry. I'm no fun," I said.

"Oh, stop, who cares, I'm just teasing," Miranda said as she crossed the room again to pick up another LP. She held the cover up to show it was The Man Who Sold The World, David Bowie.

"I got this 'cause of you," Miranda said as she laid the needle on the title track. The opening trippy riff got kicking.

"The other day on KMET I heard a new version of that song that Lulu just did. That's on my list," I said.

"You have a list?"

"Oh yes, I have a list for everything."

"Pick a list and tell me what's on it."

"OK, um, Lulu's version of The Man Who Sold The World."

"List of records to get. Give me something harder."

"Burning bush, unholy fire, false idols."

Miranda pondered, then said in fake Italian, "Beats-a me-a."

"List of shit I have to talk about in my Bar Mitzvah speech."

"Your Bar Mitzvah's coming up soon."

"Yeah, three weeks. Are you coming?"

"Of course. I already know what I'm wearing. You wanna see?" She went to her closet and pulled out a yellow dress. She held it up to herself as if wearing it. It was short. The better to flash you with, my dear. I thought of the big bad wolf . . . the yellow brick road . . the burning bush . . . unholy fire . . .

"Lance, are you with me?" Rabbi Hamlisch's voice reclaimed my attention. "While Moses is communing with the burning bush up high on Mt. Sinai, down below in the desert sand there is unholy fire, right?"

I stared at the xeroxed words of my Torah portion without answering.

"Come on, Lance, concentrate. What is going on in this parsha?," Rabbi Hamlisch asked me.

"Nadab and Abi'hu are killed when they try to bring unholy fire to the altar," I answered.

"Anything else about Nadab and Abi'hu?"

"They don't care about the difference between holy and unholy."

"Very good. What you have here is a clear demarcation between the sacred and the profane. One of the gifts of the Torah is its recognition of this duality, and in some ways our only duty as Jews is to observe and respect this duality. Read the passage to me."

"And Nadab and Abi'hu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered unholy fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD."

"They go to the altar and don't perform the offering according to the prescribed priestly practice. Why would they do this?"

"Maybe they hadn't been taught the correct method?"

"They're the sons of Aaron, the head priest. Wouldn't they have been taught this by their father?"

"I suppose."

"What else? Skip down to verse 9."

"Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations: and that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean."

"What does this tell you?"

"Nadab and Abi'hu were drunk?"

"Precisely. This blurred their understanding of God's requirement that we put a difference between holy and unholy. You see, Lance, there's nothing wrong with unholy fire, but it's important to know the difference between the burning bush up high (he pointed to his head) and unholy fire (he pointed at his crotch) down below," Rabbi Hamlisch proffered, "it's important to know the difference."

Miranda Savitch in her short yellow dress was both. The Torah didn't help with that circumstance.

I continued, "'there went out a fire from the LORD . . . ', I dunno, that sounds like the fire came from God."

"Well, sort of, yes, in the sense that everything comes from God, but look further down, you see, their clothes are not singed, the skin is not burned. They are consumed from within by the very same unholy fire they sought to offer before the LORD. And so what does this mean?"

"It means," I tried to focus, "we all have unholy fire inside us."

"This is true, of course, but not the correct answer. And there's an extra lesson for you," Rabbi Hamlisch went on, "it is possible for something to be true and still not be the correct answer. But back to the Torah question: what does it mean?

"It means I have no idea."

You understand nothing, Lance Atlas.

"It means you have to pay much more attention to this than you have been. What do you want to say about this parsha in your speech?" Rabbi Hamlisch asked.

"I want to talk about worshipping false idols, like money or celebrities or Nixon. He's really the falsest idol of all. And Watergate is the unholy fire."

"Heh, that's good. But you do realize Rabbi Magnin is friends with President Nixon?" Rabbi Hamlisch warned.

"He is?"

"Yes, he even participated in the inauguration. Your criticisms will not be well received."

"Dang, that sucks," I said, forgetting the difference between the sacred and the profane.

"But I'm going to let you take that approach anyway, as long as you remove President Nixon's name and replace it with 'politicians' instead. And say they are the falsest idols of all, plural."

"I will do that. Definitely. Thank you, Rabbi Hamlisch."

"All right. Go home and get that speech written. I want a draft to read by next Monday."

"I'll have one for you."

"You're very distracted, aren't you, Lance? You look like you're thinking about who knows what."

"Yeah, I suppose."

"Let me guess. You're thinking about the fat kid from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory . . . what's his name?"

"Augustus Gl--"

"--Buzzy Lagniappe?"

"No, no, Augustus Gloop is the fat kid from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory."

"Are you sure?"

"Mm-Hmm"

"Then why did I think it was Buzzy Lagniappe? Funny."

"I actually do know somebody named Gus Lagniappe and we sometimes call him Augustus Gloop."

"Is he fat?"

"Well, he used to be, yeah, but we call him that because his real name is Augustus."

"I know," Rabbi Hamlisch returned to guessing who knows what I was thinking about, "How about the girl from Zody's?"

"The hell you say?"

"I've got it, last guess: Pussy?"

"Huh, come again?" I said, baffled.

"Baseball?"

"Yeah," (phew) "baseball. I thought you said something else."

"Think Aaron's going to do it tonight?" Rabbi Hamlisch asked.

"Yes. I bet it's tonight. I think the game's already started, actually. It's in Atlanta."

"Against the Dodgers, right?"

"Yeah, it'll be weird to have Babe Ruth no longer the homerun record holder. That's been the record since like my dad was born."

"Well, tablets were made to be broken," joked the rabbi.

"Heh," I tried to muster a giggle.

"Exciting stuff," Rabbi Hamlisch said with the half-cocked enthusiasm of someone who doesn't really care about baseball, "Go enjoy. Let's hope Aaron hits that home run so you can get your mind back on figuring out what to say about his two sons in your speech."

"Thank you, Rabbi Hamlisch."

"And don't worry, you'll be rolling in pussy soon enough."

I'm 99.9% certain he didn't actually say that. But I carried the image with me well into my last waking moments that night.

When I got in the car after the tutoring session, the Dodger game had started. "You already missed Aaron's first at-bat," my father said, "He walked."

"Cool," I said, hand in backpack holding the note from Miranda Savitch, "I'm glad I didn't miss the big one."

When we arrived home I saw, for the first and penultimate time, our television had been moved into the dining room. "It's so we can watch during dinner," my father said, "This is history. We don't want to miss it."

"I'll come sit in a minute," I said as I headed toward my room, "Call me when Aaron comes up."

Once in my bedroom I removed the note from the backpack and lay supine on my bed to bask in Miranda's handwriting. I carefully unfolded the soggy note (I had dropped it in the gutter waiting for my mom after school) to find the ink had smeared beyond legibility. The only readable text was:

4/8/74

Dear Lance, I hoped

The rest was an abstract monochrome watercolor, like the secret of Miranda Savitch's rorshach heart.

4/8/74

Dear Lance, I hoped

I looked at it 12 more times.

"Lance!" yelled my father, "Aaron's up!"

"Coming!"

"And dinner's ready!"

"'K!"

What did the note say?

I sat distracted at the dinner table, though I was watching when Hank Aaron swung on that 1-0 pitch from Al Downing in the bottom of the 4th and sent it over the left field wall. As was our custom, we turned down the volume on the national TV broadcast so we could hear Vin Scully call the game, and Vinny was over-the-top as he narrated the moment: "It's a long drive to deep left, Buckner to the fence . . . It is GONE . . . What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly Henry Aaron."

But for all of Vinny's hyperbolic eloquence, for all the social and cultural importance Aaron's achievement, it wasn't the big climax I expected. My father, on the same wavelength at that moment, said, "It's kind of silly the big deal we make about a little boys' game."

History is disappointing. A cauldron of false idols.

I blew off my homework and instead put out my lights and listened to my only Jim Croce album. His voice reminded me of last Saturday with Miranda. I pictured myself on the bed with her, playing solitaire, Miranda singing along with Jim Croce. I should have pushed her onto her back and kissed her, the way Freddy did. I should have climbed on top of her and felt her body underneath me. I could imagine myself going through with it. I took hold of my cock and began fantasizing about Miranda on her back on her bed, the jacking action happening in earnest, having Miranda Savitch, my mouth on her mouth, tongue to tongue, fierce and gentle, fierce and gentle, my hands entittied, my fingers inside her, and finally the blazoned image of my cock entering her pussy, lips and inward, through the furry gates, 'I'm fucking Miranda Savitch,' I thought, repeated to the verge of climax and torqued down several times before absolutely letting go mindfully inside her tabernacle, until I was utterly empty. 'I love you,' I whispered to the eyelid image of her. My fingers and belly were wet with first jizz, immaculate ejaculate. I came in unto myself and knew myself.

"Homerun!" I could hear the television repeating Aaron's big one.

Then the music of Jim Croce claimed prominence.

Yeah, I know it's kind of strange
But every time I'm near you
I just run out of things to say
I know you'd understand
'Cause every time I tried to tell you
The words just came out wrong
So I'll have to say I love you in a song

I wondered if Miranda could feel it, the jazz cantata I'd just imagined all over her, the unholy fire I had just lurched into her burning bush? (represented here by my dirty sock which was the only available receptacle for the unexpected mess). Was she seeing the same stars? Would she be able to tell tomorrow? Would she catch the shame of wanting in my eyes? Would she know what I'd done to her?

Unlikely

A fitting thought for dreams and masturbations.

Alone in the dark, I fell asleep to Jim Croce . . . and sweet images of the unlikely.

'Cause every time the time was right
All the words just came out wrong
So I'll have to say I love you in a song

I was afraid to make eye contact with Miranda the next morning because of my profane debauchery of the night before, my first consummated fantasy, my first cock-in-pussy cumfest. What if she felt it somehow? Girls, dude, you never know. They're born with weird-ass radars and other built-in surveillance systems we don't have. They can pick up shit like that. You know how your mother has eyes in the back of her head? She was born with those, dude.

Miranda sat next to me in Mr. Swanson's 5th Period history class. We called him Sgt. Carter sometimes because he had a similar face and haircut to the TV character from Gomer Pyle, and he had that same superball-tight closet-homo intensity too. Mr. Swanson stood daily, between classes and after Nutrition and Lunch, at the top of the main stairway at JB, busting kids for going "up" the "down" staircase. "Go DOWN, little boy," Mr. Swanson, could be heard to charge, "Go back DOWN!" Mr. Swanson was a superfreak who had a doll named "Baby" hanging from the ceiling of his classroom by a noose. Mr. Swanson was very attached to Baby, so it was psychic mayhem walking into his class that day, when Mr. Swanson informed us that Baby had been kidnapped and that the perpetrators had left a ransom note.

Swanson swore brutal vengeance on anyone who did harm to Baby. "It will be swift and definitive," he vowed.

"After I've handed back your essays I will begin a thorough inquiry into this crime." Mr. Swanson strolled the room looking for guilty faces. Everybody knew that Gus and Whit were responsible for the kidnapping. They had duped one of the custodians into unlocking Mr. Swanson's classroom door after school on the pretext that they had left their backpacks inside (which, in fact they had done in preparation for the prank). Gus stood on a desk and pulled Baby out of the noose. They were planning to fuck with Swanson and ask for $1,000 ransom, maybe mutilate Baby, like singe her hair or something, but eventually leave the doll in Mr. Swanson's mailbox in the Main Office.

Quite suddenly, I, rather than Baby, became the main attraction.

"Mr. Atlas, I read your essay. The one entitled 'And The Eye Came With It.' (Yes, that was mine. The title was a reference to a story Mr. Swanson had told about Magellan getting killed on the beach, how he got shot in the eye with an arrow and pulled the arrow out "and the eye . . . came . . . with it," Mr. Swanson had said in a really exaggerated Vincent Price kind of voice). "The entire paper is dedicated to the one story I told in class about Magellan and his death on the beach. That is not what the topic asked you to do, Mr. Atlas, you were to examine several factors which contributed to his death, so it is a failure in that regard, but there were two bigger problems with your essay. Would you like to know what those were, Mr. Atlas?"

"Sure."

"First, for some reason that is far beyond my ability to comprehend, although you are clearly writing about the death of Magellan, you refer to him throughout the essay as Galileo."

The whole class began giggling.

"Dang, I must've been tripping," I quipped.

Miranda rolled her eyes.

"Well you certainly have fallen, Mr. Atlas. And now I'm about to kick you the rest of the way down the stairs. If you had paid more careful attention to the assigned topic you would also have noticed that you were supposed to be writing about Balboa, not Magellan, the death of Balboa, Mr. Atlas."

"Dang. I always get them confused. The two Pacific Ocean dudes, right? Am I alone in this?"

I looked around for sympathizers. Everyone was stifling laughter. Miranda had her head in her hands.

"How did Balboa die, Mr. Atlas?"

"Didn't he die under house arrest for heresy?"

"No, that, Mr. Atlas, was Galileo. And so you've come full circle."

"Hey, I knew the names at least and the circumstances. I just couldn't remember which dude did what."

"Yes, well, Mr. Atlas, history rides quite a bit on knowing 'which dude did what.' But enough. Class, tomorrow as you know we have a test. And remember: If you study it will be crystal clear. If you don't it will be as clear . . . as . . . mud," Mr. Swanson said, "I'd like you to spend the rest of the hour studying for tomorrow's exam, and I will begin my investigation into the disappearance of Baby. Oh, yes, and anybody with information leading to Baby's safe return will be handsomely rewarded."

Once Swanson had handed back the essays (I left mine face down), he ensconced himself at his desk.

Miranda tossed a folded piece of paper onto my desk. It read, "Did you get my note yesterday?"

I wrote back, "Yeah, but I dropped it in the gutter by accident and it got all smeared. I couldn't read it."

"CHIMP!" she scrawled.

"What'd the note say?" I added beneath her response.

"Too late. You blew it. CHUMP!" she scribbled.

"Aw, that's cold," I returned. She read my comment, shrugged and stuck her tongue out at me. I couldn't tell if she was playing-angry or angry-angry. One of the great talents of womankind.

The following Saturday, Gus, Claude, Whit, Chester, and I walked over to the Piece O'Pizza on Beverly Blvd. near Fairfax, right next to the unsavory taqueria Taco Tal. (My dad always told us not to eat at Taco Tal because, according to him, the teenage workers would squeeze their zits into the taco sauce.) As always we made lewd references to the Piece O'Pizza ad slogan, "Had a piece lately?" which was displayed across a large sign in front of the restaurant.

Claude Moss boasted as we strolled, "I'm gonna get me a piece at the sock hop next month, nyeeah."

Student Council at John Burroughs had decided to have a "sock hop" instead of a regular dance in the Spring semester because "all the other schools were doing it." '50s nostalgia ruled '70s white-teen culture at that time. The sensation of being a character in American Graffiti was recurring with alarming regularity in my life.

Gus responded to Claude's claims of bagging pussy at the sock hop, "Dude, unless you're choosing to go outside the species, give up on getting any kind of piece 'cause, dang, dude, what human female would even come close to considering doing it with a green-toothed gay golita like you? I mean, you have like algae and paramecium and like trilobites and shit growing in your mouth. Who'd want her tongue climbing around that jungle of slime?"

"Justine Balthazar," prounounced Claude.

"Absolutely no fucking way," said Gus. "You asked Justine to the sock hop?"

"Yuh-huh."

"And she said yes?"

"Yerse," Claude bobbled.

"You a goddamn lie," Gus judged.

"Sit on it," Claude feebly retorted, raising his middle finger at Gus.

"Ooh, and now the Fungus can quote Happy Days. The heighth of cool," Gus taunted.

"Hey, I've got a date. That's more than Lance can say," said Claude.

"I don't want to go to the sock hop," I said matter-of-factly.

"Dang, dude, you can't abandon us," complained Whit, "you're closer to getting a piece than anybody. You have to blaze the trail."

Gus said, "You ever notice how chicks got their asshole and their pussyhole so close together? My brother says that's so you can carry 'em around like a six-pack of Schlitz."

"Or a bowling ball," Whitman Rust added.

"No, you need three holes for that shit," Gus countered.

"Nyeah, good one, dude," Whitman Rust said in compliment, "gimme five," and he held out his hand to meet Gus's slap.

"Hey, I've got one," Claude Moss said, "Why shouldn't girls drink beer at the beach?"

I offered the obligatory "Why?"

"'Cause they might get sand in their Schlitz," snorted Claude.

"Hey, Claude was accidentally funny," snickered Gus. "Schlitz," he said as he made the universal two-fingered holding-a-six-pack sign.

An instant code word was born.

Thenceforth one of our stock ways to crack one another up was we'd point to some girl and mouth the word "Schlitz" while making the holding a six-pack sign in reference to the lass in question.

"Look at me, I've got one in each hand," said Gus Lagniappe, hobbling along with both arms in pantomime burden.

"Lorelei Lux and Dolly Ferris, heh," quipped Whit.

"You look like Lancelot Link Secret Chimp when you do that," Chester Flinch teased.

We entered Piece O'Pizza, and Chester Flinch couldn't resist messing with the girl at the counter, an Asian lady with stumbling English.

Chester fake-scanned the menu and asked, "You got any pizza with beaver meat? I'm really craving some beaver."

"No, no beaver meat. Pepperyoni. Sausage. Tha's ah. Pepperyoni and Sausage go together good."

'Nah, you know what, that's not cool. When I come here for a piece I expect there to be some beaver available. False promises, dude."

We were squealing with glee. The counterlady was not getting it.

"Sorry, no beaver," she said, not realizing that her phrase would enter our horny-boy lexicon for years to come. "Sorry, no beaver," we'd say to each other at the most random times, always to guffaw and chuckle.

At the table, each of us chowing down our slice of choice, we settled in for a session of raucous talking.

"Why do they call pussy beaver?," Claude asked, "I've never understood that one."

"'Cause it eats wood, dude," said Whit, making a chompy beaver face. We giggled and snickered in the unventilated hotness of Piece O'Pizza.

Gus asked, "What kind of piece'd you get, Lance?"

"Pepperyoni and sausage," I said.

"Sorry, no beaver!" Whit twanged.

"How about a Miranda samich?" teased Chester.

"Yeah, so, how far'd you get with Miranda last Saturday anyway?"

"1st base at least with Monsieur Frenchingboy over here," Whit said.

"We didn't do anything. We just hung out and talked and stuff," I said.

"That's it?" Gus scoffed.

"We played solitaire together," I added.

"Dang, that's dog, dude," said Claude.

"Lance, you are such a fag, dude," Chester Flinch, "Miranda Savitch wants all of your hot monkey love, and you know it."

"I don't know shit. I can't tell. She sure seemed to enjoy frenching with Freddy during spin-the-bottle."

"Yeah but it's you she wants to go to the sock hop with," Chester added.

"No way," I said.

"HAIL yes, dude, I have this on very good authority, as in the Chick Clique," Chester said, shifting suddenly into an Aunt Bea voice, "Mandy is randy for you," grabbing my tit like I'm a chick or something.

"Come on, Lance, you know you've fantasized about fucking her," said Gus with startling clairvoyance (How did he know?), "so what's the big deal about getting to 1st base with her? Just grab her and kiss her."

"She's waiting," added Chester. "It's like duh."

"And then 2nd base!" said Whit, making the universal titty-grabbing sign with both hands.

Gus said, "Miranda's got some big ones, too."

"The Himalayas, dude," answered Chester.

"Which one's Everest?" joked Gus.

"Consult Atlas!," said Chester with unconscious brilliance.

"I bet when she's lying down they look like tostadas," said Claude.

"Dos titties," quipped Whit with exaggerated Mexican accent.

"What about 3rd base?" said Claude making the universal v-fingered tongue-flicking cunnilingus sign. (Last time we were in the school library, Gus showed us cunnilingus and fellatio in the dictionary. They became immediate favorites.)

"Nah, dang, dude, 3rd base is with your hand," said Whit, raising his middle finger and wiggling it up and down.

"Nuh-uh, you're both wrong," said Chester, "3rd base is . . ." he made the universal tongue-in-cheek fist-to-mouth blowjob sign.

Gus said, "All right, so whatever, let's just say that 1st base is tongue, 2nd base is titty, 3rd base can be either finger-in-pussy, tongue-in-pussy, or cock-in-mouth, and we all agree that the homerun is--"

All chimed in together, "Cock-In-Pussy!"

Gus raised his glass of lemonade, "Here's to Cock-In-Pussy!"

"Cock-In-Pussy," we all toasted, lemonades hoisted.

We didn't know what we were talking about.

"So are you gonna ask Miranda to the sock hop or what? We all know who we're going with. Even Claude has a date for fuck's sake," said Gus.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't really want to go to the sock hop."

"Yeah, but, dude, chicks dig that bullshit. You gotta do it. If you wanna pop the cherry," said Gus, "Don't be a gay golita."

"And you also have to pretend you're having a good time," Claude said.

"And then she'll be all over your body," Chester promised, "Cock-in-pussy solidarity, dude."

"How are you guys dressing for this thing? It's gotta be '50s, right?" I asked.

"We should all go in like tight white t-shirts with cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve and straight-legged Levis. Hair slicked back," Gus suggested.

"Yeah, like the Fonzie-dude in American Grafitti," said Claude.

"What Fonzie dude?" asked Gus.

"The one who's got the 12-year-old girl in his car," responded Claude.

"She's 14 I think, the one in Paul Le Mat's yellow car?" I observed, knowing who Claude meant.

"Yeah, Paul Le Mat, dude. He's cooler than Fonzie," Claude said.

"If we dressed like Paul Le Mat everyday at school we'd be rolling in pussy, dude," said Chester.

"You sound like my rabbi," I muttered. Nobody heard me.

Pizza chowed, lemonade swilled, Gus Lagniappe steered our course.

"All right, let's split the scene if you know what I mean," he said, and we all rose to go.

As we were leaving, Claude picked up a matchbook from the counter. He snorted, "Check it out," holding up the matchbook, which said on the cover: Enjoy Life: Eat Out More Often!. Everybody made the v-fingered tongue-flicking cunnilingus sign.

And Chester shouted to the cashier as we exited, "Sorry no beaver!"

My Bar Mitzvah was actually on my 13th birthday, April 20, 1974, an unusual day not just because it actually was my birthday instead of the usual "closest Saturday available" at a Bar Mitzvah mill like Wilshire Boulevard Temple in the 1970s but also because I share a birthday with Adolph Hitler, which always freaks people out anyway, but on that 4/20 I was being about as jewy as a Reform Jew could be. I would often joke that I was the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. His punishment was coming back as me, an American Jew. I stopped saying that once I figured out that nobody thought it was funny.

The ceremony went smoothly. I got through the V'yahavta and Avot V'Imahot and the lot without a glitch. I read from the Torah with only a couple of stumbles, and my speech was received well by most save the more conservative wing of my family and Rabbi Magnin himself who later castigated Rabbi Hamlisch for allowing me to do it. Everybody could tell my speech was about Nixon, dude. Rabbi Hamlisch was later dismissed from his Associate Rabbi position at the temple by Rabbi Magnin. I always wondered if it was my fault. The funny thing is Rabbi Magnin's sermon that morning was about how stupid the kosher laws are. "I eat bacon cheeseburgers when I feel like it," he told the congregation. I'd just spent months studying the importance of separating holy from unholy and the rabbi was saying that kashrut was bullshit. I could see Miranda's yellow dress from the bima the whole time. If she had sat in the first row I'd have been able to see up it. Alas, no. She sat in back.

I didn't want one of the hotel ballroom type Bar Mitzvah receptions that so many of my friends had had. Instead, mine was an intimate affair in my grandparents' backyard. I brought over my stereo and my favorite records. I wanted to be DJ at my own party. (I loved being the DJ. It kept you separate. Observing the party but not part of the party. You didn't have to interact and yet you were a presence at the party in your own way.) There were no decorations, no themed anything, no hora dancing, no hoisted chairs, no corny-ass rhyming-couplet-narrated candle-lighting ceremony, no retrospective slide show, no speeches. Just relatives and friends commingling in the yard and shmoozing. The guys all looked awkward and ridiculous in their half-tucked shirts and crooked slacks. The girls all looked perfectly assembled in clingy dresses and grown-up lady shoes. In 8th Grade, they already had their adult shit together; the boys did not.

Miranda made her entrance up the driveway and into the yard just as I had started spinning Redbone's "Come And Get Your Love." The rest of the Chick Clique ran to greet her and after air kisses and a hushed huddle Miranda made her way over to me and handed me a gift.

"Mazel Tov," she said, half-smirkedly.

"Aren't we jewy, today," I remarked. "I love the dress," I said as I laid her package on the gift table.

"Thank you. Are you relieved it's over?"

"HAIL yeah. I just want to play lots of music today and not think anymore about the Torah. Oh, here this'll be fun," I said, as Redbone came to an end, and I put on Steve Miller Band's "The Joker." The kids gathered on the concrete slab that would serve as a dance floor. Not actually for dancing but more for standing around and moving slightly and singing. You know, white people basically.

Some people call me Maurice
'Cause I sing of the Pompatus of Love

It was the most cryptic of all pop song lines in 1974. And we loved it. Especially the Woo-Woo guitar fill after "Maurice." You always sang that guitar part too when you sang the song. "Some people call me Maurice, Woo-Woo . . . " We didn't bother wondering what the Pompatus of Love was.

I'm a joker, I'm a smoker, I'm a midnight toker

None of us were tokers yet, but we loved singing that line too.

I wove together the group's favorites all in a bunch. "Bennie & The Jets by Elton John, "Smokin' In The Boys Room" by Brownsville Station, "Takin' Care Of Business" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "Billy Don't Be A Hero" by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, "Midnight At The Oasis by Maria Muldaur, "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks. I also couldn't resist playing Ray Stevens' novelty hit "The Streak." The fad of running naked through public gatherings, "Streaking," had found its way into mainstream media when a dude streaked across the stage at the Academy Awards 3 weeks before. We would later all pitch in a bunch of money to pay an intrepid classmate of ours to streak past the orthodox synagogues on Beverly Blvd. on a Saturday just as morning services were letting out. But that's a whole nother story.

Oliver Gelding brought Marvin Gaye's great Let's Get It On album to the party, and I spun a whole side of that record. It was during the Gaye album that the kids actually started doing a little dancing. At least to the extent that white people are capable of such a thing.

Miranda appeared by my side as I stood next to the stereo.

"Here, I brought you a coke," she said, handing me a cup.

"Garsh, thanks," I said all Green Acres and shit. "You like this song?" I asked. "Tin Man" by America was coming through the speakers at that moment.

But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man
That he didnt, didnt already have
And cause never was the reason for the evening
Or the tropic of Sir Galahad

"I prefer Sir Lancelot to Sir Galahad myself," she said.

"The perfect prize that waits upon the shelf, eh?" I shot back.

"Heh, deafenly . . . This song really sucks, you know?" Miranda opined.

"Yeah, I don't know why I'm playing it."

"I mean, what's it about? The Wizard of Oz? No. King Arthur? No. What the fuck?"

I put on the next record, a perfect thematic segue from "Tin Man "into "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," not just the song itself but the whole side of the album. After I got the tune spinning, Miranda tugged on my arm and pulled me into the dance area. I didn't really know where to put my hands or anything, but looking around settled on what appeared to be the conventional boy's hands on girl's hips. Miranda put her hands on my shoulders. Some of the other girls had their arms all the way around the boys' necks, but Miranda didn't do that.

When are you gonna come down
When are you going to land

As I held my hands on her hips I could feel the outline of her underwear and I began to get a hard-on. I wanted to run my hands all along her body, feel her ass, her sides, her breasts. I looked past her. Trying to keep my crotch from brushing against hers lest she get a grind of the aching bone. How soft would she be if I squeezed her? At moments the tips of her breasts would brush against my chest, intensifying the tumescence below. She leaned into me a bit in order to speak in my ear.

"I know why Candy's been being a bitch to me," she said.

"Why?" I asked.

"She thinks I'm trying to steal her boyfriend."

"I thought you said that was her cousin."

"I'm talking about YOU, doofus," Miranda clarified.

"Um, I'm not Candy's boyfriend."

"You WERE her boyfriend."

"For like 3 weeks, yeah."

"That means you will ALWAYS be her boyfriend."

"But she doesn't like me anymore."

"That doesn't matter."

"No?"

"No, you're her property."

"Forever."

"Correct."

You know you can't hold me forever
I didn't sign up with you

"That's how it goes then," I sighed.

"Yep," she said, "Once a girl describes you using the term 'my boyfriend' her claim on you is eternal."

"She's allowed to have other boyfriends, but I'm not allowed to have other girlfriends."

"Correct."

"Until I die."

"That's right. She will be checking up, yes."

My father was trying to get a picture of me dancing with Miranda. "Cheat to the camera!" he kept saying as he followed us around the floor, never quite getting the shot.

"Are trying to steal her boyfriend?" I asked. Very unlike me, actually.

Miranda smiled lopsided without looking at me.

"Right now I'm dancing with Sir Lancelot," she said.

So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl

I leaned into Miranda's girlbody, boner be damned, and danced for reals all the way inside the music. Dancing with Miranda made the whole world slow down.

The boys were on remarkably good behavior. Nary a mention of female body parts, obscene gestures, and other hornyboy sauciness. Gus said "Schiltz" and did the holding-a-six-pack sign in reference to my 75-year-old great aunt much to the repulsion of all who got the gag, and Chester Flinch blurted out "Sorry, no beaver" at an inappropriate moment when I was cutting the cake. But otherwise the guys gave me the model citizenship I had pleaded of them the day before. My golitas came through for me.

There was a handful of attempts to sneak wine while distracting the bartender, but he was used to the 13-year-old crowd. "I know your tricks!" he'd say as one of us would ask for a coke while another would reach behind the bar for a wine bottle. "I know your tricks!," he'd always catch us, laughing.

When Miranda informed me her mom was coming to pick her up any minute, I walked with her to the back gate. We stood half-facing each other.

"Thanks for coming," I said.

"Oh, no, thanks for inviting me," she answered automatically.

And rather than agonize any longer I convinced myself to blurt out, with a decided lack of romance and seductiveness, "You wanna to go to the sock hop with me?"

Miranda did her usual downward smile and answered with little pause, "I'd love to, yes," finally playing out a script she had written weeks before.

"Cool."

"Relieved?" she jabbed.

"Heh, I--yeah."

"You should call me or something," she said.

"I will."

"Probly or deafenly?" she asked.

"Deafenly," I promised.

"Cool." She turned around and saw her mom's car. Tamar waved. "Hi, Lance!," she shouted, "Mazel Tov on your Bar Mitzvah!" I waved back in thanks.

"Hey your mom's all jewy too," I said and then fell into muteness, finally bumbling, "Well . . . "

"You did great today," Miranda rasped, tilting swiftly toward my face and kissing me softly on the cheek, then just as swiftly turning away and scurrying toward her mom's car, yelling, "Bye, Lance!" without looking back. The sweetness of that moment would linger for adolescent centuries. Miranda had kissed me. I sort of stood and watched her get into the car, admittedly hoping for a flash of panty as she bent into sitting position. Alas, no. And when I turned back around to face the party, I could see the scenario had witnesses.

My pals didn't care; they were still busy trying to sneak wine behind the bartender's back. "I know your tricks!" But the Chick Clique was watching intently, all smiley and goopy-eyed. They'd also read the script. Hell, I'm sure they'd helped Miranda write the thing. This would be the subject of many phone calls across the girl network later in the evening: Miranda Savitch kissed Lance Atlas at his Bar Mitzvah. They are going to the sock hop together. Mission Accomplished.

At home that night, opening presents, I saved Miranda's for last. So after the stack of envelopes with generous checks, certificates for trees planted in Israel in my name, savings bonds, numerous books about The Jewish People, a couple of Cross pens with my name engraved, and a subscription to National Geographic, I finally tore the tissue paper off Miranda's gift: a book entitled The Inner Game of Solitaire and the new LuLu 45, her version of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World." Also enclosed was a piece of Little Prince-themed stationery personalized with the name Miranda Raquel Savitch, upon which she had written:

Dear Lance,

Cross this one off your list.

Love, Miranda.

That night, alone in the dark, I had Miranda Savitch in her yellow dress in my aunt's old bedroom upstairs at my grandparents' house. My imagination reveled in lusty conduct with the fantasy Savitch who wanted me to fuck her and uttered the demand audibly until a massive ejaculation and shame overtook my sleepy accomplishment. Lulu sang, "Oh no, not me, I've never lost control . . . " as I slid into unlikely dreams. I woke up with crusty kleenex still in my hand. This time I'd been prepared.

The month that passed between my Bar Mitzvah and the sock hop had its jagged edges. I didn't really know what our relationship was. The words "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" had never been uttered. We were each other's dates for the sock hop. Otherwise, not much else. I didn't know what to call it. I jacked off to fantasies of fucking her pretty much every night, but, of course, I didn't actually call Miranda at all on the phone. I was always afraid I'd be calling at the wrong time or I wouldn't know what to say if her mother or, worse, her father answered. And if you called somebody up "just to talk" (something I'd never done) what did you talk about? How did you start? So my response to the confusion was not to call. I dialed the first 6 numbers quite a few times, pulling the phone with the long cord all the way into my bedroom and locking the door. A couple of times I even dialed the 7th number and hung up when it started to ring. And though we hung out during Nutrition and Lunch at school it was always with the group. Some days Miranda was nice to me, other days I felt her unspoken scorn. When, on very short notice I was informed of a practice dance session for the sock hop at Misty's apartment in Park La Brea the next night, I opted out immediately.

"I don't want to practice," I said.

"Well, guess what: we're going to a '50s dance and we don't how to dance to that music, so you need to come practice with us," Miranda spoke in a tone that admitted no decline option. I was going. I just was. Choice was not on the menu. How do girls do that?

Once I was finally able to find Misty's fucking building (near the corner of Curson and Curson, actually), I was late to the practice, which aggravated Miranda's peeve at me, and Freddy Snow was there with Dolly, which aggravated my discomfort. Misty was going to the sock hop with Gus, but she was unable to force his presence at the practice.

Gus was my hero.

When I failed in my attempt to lift Miranda so she could straddle me as part of a dance step (it kind of looked like fucking when it was done right, but we never got to the spread-leg straddle move), Freddy Snow came over and demonstrated how it's done, lifting Miranda masterfully, lowering her, legs a-spread, onto his hips; for an unbearable second it looked like Freddy Snow was fucking Miranda Savitch. My humiliation was complete when I made another attempt at that particular dance move and Miranda waved me off with a "don't bother" glare. Our bodies simply didn't jive. Who knows what was the reason. I sucked was probably the reason. The rest of my energy that evening was spent swallowing mucus-thick back-of-the-throat tears invisible to the outside world.

The night of the sock hop, my mother drove me to pick up Miranda, and when Miranda opened the door I could immediately sense her disappointment with my appearance. I couldn't tame my jewfro into '50s jewboy ducktail and so my curls spouted freely. And my mom wouldn't let me dress tough-guy so I wore a nerdy v-neck sweater over a button-down shirt. I looked less like Paul Le Mat and more like Richie Cunningham from Happy Days meets "Clair"-era Gilbert O'Sullivan.

"Hi," Miranda said passionlessly.

"Hey. You ready?" I tried to be chipper.

"Yeah," she returned as if burning me in effigy. "You don't look '50s, " she eyed my pants, "Bell Bottoms? Jeezis, Lance."

My mother drove us in silence to JB.

The sock hop itself took place in the boys gym at John Burroughs. The gym wasn't decorated '50s, but the music was era-correct, mostly from the American Graffiti soundtrack album. It had actually been a crazy day in L.A. Earlier in the afternoon the LAPD had cornered suspected members of the Symbionese Liberation Army--the dudes that had kidnapped Patty Hearst--in some house in Watts, and the SLA people inside the house were shooting back at the cops. The boring-ass Nixon impeachment hearings were interrupted by on-the-spot live coverage of the SLA shootout. It was the 2nd and final time that my father pulled the television into the dining room during dinner so as not to miss history. The SLA shootout dominated all the talk in the gym. Lots of "Did you see that shit? It was like wap! wap! wap!" imitations of gunfire. Members of student council were telling people where to leave their shoes and to have a 'ginchy' time, but everybody else was going off on the SLA shootout."Keep Your Socks On!" read the sign over the entrance.

"Oh look, there's Dolly and Freddy, let's go say hi," Miranda said, almost nice to me, tugging me by the arm to the other side of the gym. Claude Moss had come with Justine Balthazar and they were already dancing. Gus Lagniappe was sitting in the top row of the bleachers with Whitman Rust while their dates Misty Winters and Claire Farnaway walked arm-in-arm around the perimeter of the gym picking up on the latest gossip and spreading it forthwith. Sharon Rose's mother wouldn't let her go, so she was home moping and waiting for her friends to call with all the dirt afterwards. Oliver Gelding, who was planning to attend with Candy Stoner, got sick the day before and wasn't there. Candy didn't want to go alone so she had tagged along with Chester Flinch and Lorelei Lux. Chester pointed to Lorelei's ass, made the holding-a-six-pack sign and said "Schlitz" under his breath as they all three walked by.

"Hi, Mandy," Dolly warbled, "Hey, Lance."

"My Darling," Freddy said to Miranda, and "Dude" (with an upward nod) to me.

"Hi, guys," Miranda chimed, "Isn't this great?"

"So far it's OK," said Freddy, "But I need to get dancing. Shall we?," he held out his hand, with dumbfounding surprise, to Miranda. Without a glance at me Miranda joined Freddy Snow on the dance floor. They were gone. For the rest of the night.

I spent the first few songs expecting the liason to end, but by the 4th tune I realized I was not part of Miranda's picture for the evening. I didn't feel like climbing up to the top row to hear Gus and Whit blab about pussy-this and pussy-that. Everybody else was dancing, except for Dolly. She sat in the first row of the bleachers. It was dark enough so that I couldn't tell if she'd been crying, but I bet she probably had been. I sat down next to her.

"Hello, Dolly," I said to her, perhaps the 40 billionth time she'd been greeted thus.

Dolly snorted and rolled her eyes.

"How long have we known each other Lance?" she asked, watching Freddy and Miranda.

"Well, we met in pre-school, so probably around since we were three."

"Westside Jewish Community Center . . ."

"Yeah, I remember that place," I said.

"Back then I didn't think I'd be sitting at a dance watching my boyfriend dance with another girl all night," Dolly said.

Freddy and Miranda were having a grand time, all bopping limbs and giddy smiles.

"Likewise. I don't get it." I said, "I'm so confused. She wanted me to ask her to this dance. And now look. What's her trip?"

"Mandy is Mandy. She freaks out about stuff. I can try to find out if you want," Dolly offered. "Obviously, I've got a reason to know myself, right?"

"Who knows what I did. I can't figure it out."

"Well, I know she's in love with you," Dolly said.

"No way."

"You have no idea, Lance. Believe me. She's all switched-on-bitch tonight, though."

"Dang, dude, I don't know, I'm in pain," I shared with Dolly. I wanted to go home.

"Don't forget it's my fucking boyfriend she's dancing with. We're in this together it looks like," Dolly said and held my hand gently.

"Yeah, huh. Buds," I said, squeezing her hand back. She put her head on my shoulder.

"If you ever want to talk about stuff . . . " Dolly said.

"Yeah, right. From my mouth to your ears to Miranda's ears," I said.

"No, Lance, really. Anytime. I can keep secrets," she said as she put her arm around me, "Westside JCC forever . . . "

Suddenly following a string of authentic '50s tunes the PA started blaring "Crocodile Rock" by Elton John, a '70s nostalgia pastiche of the '50s.

I remember when rock was young
Me and Susie had so much fun

It made perfect sense. There, in a 1974 gymnasium, amid a media swell of '50s imagery and homage, from American Graffiti to Happy Days to KRTH-101, teenagers living our parents' nostalgia, we were listening to a 1970s recreation of that bygone era. A song about nostalgia.

The music of "Crocodile Rock" was blaring from the shitty speakers, but I was hearing a different song. Elton John reminded me of my one and only dance with Miranda, at my Bar Mitzvah, to "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." That's the music that floated in my thoughts.

Maybe you'll get a replacement
There's plenty like me to be found

As I watched Freddy and Miranda dance, Lorelei Lux approached.

"Hi, Lori," said Dolly.

"Hi to you too," said Lorelei, "I have come to dance with Lance Atlas."

"I don't want to dance," I said.

"You will dance with me, Lance Atlas." Lorelei ordered.

"I'm planning to dance with Miranda when she's done dancing with Freddy," I explained.

"Interesting . . . " Lorelei pondered, "Your girlfriend is dancing with someone else's boyfriend . . . interesting . . . "

"Lori, stop being a crazy-ass bitch," Dolly insisted.

"I am speaking with Lance Atlas, not you, Dahlia Ferris whose boyfriend has been dancing with someone else's girlfriend all night," Lorelei scolded.

"Miranda's not my girlfriend," I countered.

"You need to see a doctor, Lori, really, get help, please," Dolly said.

"Come dance with me, Lance Atlas. They're playing Elton John . . . "

"Don't do it, Lance," Dolly half-warned.

I joined hands with Lorelei Lux, meandering onto the dance floor, and we began not dancing but spinning, facing each other, holding hands; the more intense the music got the faster we spun. It felt like 2nd Grade. What kept me from getting dizzy and nauseous was my focus on Lorelei's face, a face that would invade and overtake my future a few years hence. I saw it. I should have known the collision course ahead right then. A titanic failure in the making. If I looked away from Lorelei to try and see Miranda, I'd surely lose all balance in the blur and make a foolish stumble. I kept my eyes riveted to Lorelei's.

At the conclusion of "Crocodile Rock," Lorelei flashing a rare smile, threw her arms around me and whispered in my ear, "You understand nothing, Lance Atlas." Our embrace was interrupted by Chester Flinch, who said, "Sorry, no beaver," as he extracted Lorelei from my orbit.

Just two songs later the curfew closed down on the dance, and everyone was ushered out onto McCadden to await parental pick-up. Another ride home in silence concluded with our station wagon pulling up in front of Miranda's house.

"See ya," Miranda said as she opened the car door.

My mother turned around and said, "Lance, you be a gentleman and walk the young lady to the door."

I would tell my mother the story later and get her apologetic sympathy, but at that moment I did as she said. Miranda kept her back to me as we walked, and she quickly removed her key and unlocked the front door. She would have simply walked in and closed the door on me had I not stopped her--

"Hey," I said. She paused and turned.

I shrugged. She shrugged.

"I don't know, Lance. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings."

"What'd I do?" I said with a hidden whimper.

"Nothing. That about sums it up," Miranda said, "Nothing. . . " She backed into the doorway. "Bye, Lance," she said as she closed the door. On the way home my mother didn't ask me why I was crying.

Miranda and I didn't speak the last 4 weeks of school. Freddy and Dolly were still a couple, so the Freddy/Miranda thing didn't materialize as expected and obviously Dolly got over Freddy's dalliance at the sock hop. I asked Chester Flinch to go on a reconaissance mission for me, and he came back with the following report:

"OK, so I talked to Miranda . . ." Chester said.

"And?" I inquired.

"You're the hamburger," he said.

"Huh? What's that mean, I'm the hamburger?'"

"I was talking to Miranda and I asked her what her trip was, why she wanted to go to the sock hop with you and why she danced with Freddy all night and she said to me, and I quote,'Lance is the hamburger,' all serious and mysterious and shit, and I'm like 'What the fuck kind of Lorelei Lux bullshit is that?, please 'splain it Lucy?' and she, check this out, she goes, this is me being her, she goes 'It's like when you go to a restaurant and you see this big juicy hamburger on the menu and you think right away, like, 'Ok, this is what I want,' and then you like fantasize about how great the hamburger's going to be when they bring it, but then when they put it on the table in front of you you look at it and you realize it's not really what you wanted.' And so I ask her again 'What the fuck does that mean?' and alls she says is, 'Lance is the hamburger.'"

Genius, I thought.

"So I don't know what the hell else to tell you, man. You're the hamburger."

"I'm the hamburger. Wow," I said, without much air.

During the last week of the semester my yearbook filled up with signatures the majority of which ended with some form of the phrase, "Good Luck with Miranda," but when I reluctantly approached Miranda to sign my yearbook, I don't know why, just 'cause I couldn't imagine my 8th Grade yearbook without the most important person's signature in it, Miranda declined to sign it. She took the book from me, even turned to a page as if she were going to sign. But then she closed up the yearbook and handed it back without writing in it.

"You know what?" she said, "There's nothing to say."

"OK," I said, in all my accumulated wimpery, and walked across the quad in search of silence and solitude for my mucus-thick tears aback the throat.

On the very last day of school, I was purposely slow taking down my science project from Ms. Bukkake’s walls, partly feeling sorry for myself, partly avoiding seeing Miranda at locker clean-out after school, partly trying to get a glimpse up Ms. Bukkake's dress when she bent over to pick stuff up, and so by the time I got to my locker to clean it out for the summer, everybody was already gone. The hall floors were strewn with the detritus and desolation of term's end. Meaningless tests and worksheets and assignment logs and Pee Chee folders and pencil stubs and Cliffs Notes and tattered book covers fashioned from brown grocery bags and comic books and collages made from magazines.

There's nothing emptier than a school hallway after the last student has gone home for the summer. A haven for ghosts and ghouls and other souls in denial. And there I was. In the midst of the void. This was of course intensified by my own inner emptiness and utter bafflement as to who knows what I did to make Miranda Savitch not like me anymore.

Nothing . . . that about sums it up . . . nothing . . .

As I opened up my locker to pull out the last remaining papers and deliver them unto the muck heap, I found a folded note wedged into one of the slats. It was from Miranda. She wrote:



Dear Lance,

I'm sorry for not signing your yearbook. That was mean. It's not that there's nothing to say, it's that there's so much I could say. I realized and found out a lot recently. You 'probly' don't know what I'm talking about so forget it. I 'din't,' 'shouln't' and 'couln't' explain. Maybe someday when I throw out my tennis socks and forget all my inside jokes with myself you'll figure it out.

Love always,

Miranda Savitch

P.S. I Love You <-- that's a Beatles song you know, don't ever forget it.




I felt a rush of happy-sadness, similar to the warm-cold feel of sand.

I'd spend the summer sniffing for tidbits.

The living disappointment of a wish come true.






          --Mr. Smolin, 7/21/07

Seventy-Eight


"There is nothing weaker than water
But none is superior to it in overcoming the hard,
For which there is no substitute.
That weakness overcomes strength
And gentleness overcomes rigidity,
No one does not know;
No one can put into practice.
Therefore the Sage says:

Who receives unto himself the calumny of the world
Is the preserver of the state.
Who bears himself the sins of the world
Is king of the world.'
Straight words seem crooked."


          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching



Religious fundamentalists commit two grievous sins:

1. Faithlessness: They who proclaim the steadfastness of their faith are in fact of little faith when it comes to their "faith" that God's Will will be done on earth as it is in heaven and so they feel they must intervene on God's behalf, whether through violence or intimidation or threat. Whatever it takes to stultify the human love of freedom. Whatever it takes to suppress the wonder and the lust and creativity we were born with and replace our natural treasures with submission and shame and rote-memorization. Their idea of Paradise (Heaven) is an absolute monarchy.

2. Pride: They think God needs their help.


In a world where so many benighted souls are seeking the Answer, how about the more pressing issue of wondering about the questions. Answers don't teach us anything. Answers console our lostness, answers are a comfy blanket to protect us from the terror of the mystery. But Questions, QUESTIONS, questions hit us where we live, for the mystery is nothing but questions, the layers of the cosmic onion, without core, without kernel, without primary source, without first cause, without definition, without reductive and simplistic revelation, without scripture or divine authority, without drama. Question every answer.

There is no higher will that's gonna change the fate of the earth and the future of our species upon it. It's up to us, in defiance of the point of no return. The ingenuity that got us into this global environmental meltdown is the same ingenuity that's gonna have to get us out of it and we've gotta start a week ago yesterday, for the sake of our children and our grandchildren, for the sake of all ontogeny that recapitulates phylogeny. Perhaps the environmental crisis will be the very worldwide episode that finally brings an end to dogma and patriotism and the abusrdity of borders and cultures and religions and the other petty animosities that have stalled our natural movement toward unity all these centuries along our evolutionary path. Perhaps now we will set aside our fear-provoked hatreds born of ignorance and realize that our weird divisions and allegiances are insignificant in the face of the imminent catastrophe threatening us all regardless of what flag we salute, what deity we cling to, what culture we confuse with our identities as human creatures on the planet earth, a planet that knows nothing of borders and ideologies, which knows only life and revolution and onwardness . . . perhaps we will finally grok our smallness and join in hope for the well-being of our only significant mother . . . let us all rise up together and say yeah . . .

The heat is on and the globorific warning should be invoking horror like zombies and vampires and ghouls, oh my, but there is no yellow brick road to guide us, no Emerald City to get to, no Wizard to show us what we always already have, no, we have to do that part on our own, so come on munchkins, lock arms and skip to Ma RevoLUtion, lest we miss the chance for change, lest we never learn what lest means, lest we leave all this beauty wasted.

If you ever have the feeling that your days are like quicksand, like the way you're chased in dreams, and the landscape of your life is like the backdrop in a Hanna-Barbara cartoon, like The Flintstones or Huckleberry Hound or Quick-Draw McGraw or Yogi Bear, with the same tree, the same stone, the same crossroads over and over and over again, the ongoing recurrence, then use this sacred space, this available window on eternity, to help yourself to a dynamic horizon, the everchanging wasteland, born of your longing for infinite distances and the splendor of everything unfolding. Break out of your self-imposed captivity to the mundane, reach for the creature within, your winged self, capable of flight, in defiance of the impossible, soar too close to the sun if you must and relish the sensation of falling slowly into the midst of it.

As ominous clouds gather overhead like sooty cotton blossoms and the earth hurts on the verge of going kerflooey, gather your natural tendency to love, your penchant for hope, your unflinching commitment to beautiful complexities, and be a fortress against the storm before it pours, a force for glory, an agent for change. All the trills and tribalizations of life might be getting you down, or broken promises, or tumbling down some defoliated hillside and breaking your crown, but your task is to spite these little spirit deaths with inward mobility, like a saint among the fallen, like a perpetually selfless bodhisattva, like a wayward pioneer, like a philosopher king, like an archaeologist.

Take it from one who knows and give it to one who doesn't. Sift through the lies and propaganda and indoctrinations and spin-cycles and dogmas and sound-bytes and other commodified realities coming at you from all ends of the political spectrum, right left and center, and learn to filter the global glut of information for yourself, find whatever dollop of truth might or might not be contained therein and discard the rest. Say to the night sky whose ears are lordly and conscious, "Come back to love, people, come back to simple togetherness, come back to the golden mean, come back to rational discourse instead of insane violent diatribes, come back to sensibility, come back to diversity and a celebration of multitude and variety and hybrid vigor, come back."

Use your music like a bunker against against the onslaught of sand, the encroaching cultural desert, growing larger every year with its sterile neverwhere overwhelming the rich jungles of human spirit and thought and longing. We are retreating back to sand and vacuum. Build your bunkers, children, keep your blossoms safe, nurture all your budding love and passion, and when the time is right burst forth from your strongholds trailing vibrant life and the flowers of freedom, spread the message of unfettered expression, of an end to the repressive dogmas and spiritual imperialism of all faiths, and always always keep on running toward the light . . . which requires some measure of turning internally in order to follow the nimble and beatified fingers like signposts pointing the way to pointless perfection, past the orgasmic scaffolding of outward enjoyment and toward a duty-free bliss resistant to all puerile and narrow god-mongering that proposes violent death as a method of divine service, to the ignorant brainwashed zombies of this or that faith, whose thinking is fogged by dogma, shackled to the mind-forg'd manacles of ancient systems of social control, duped into obedience by an intellectually bankrupt clergy who perpetuate fictitious scriptures as guidelines for a society of imprisoned minions and preach death and execration to desperately empty-headed God-groupies. How do we put an end to the backward superstitions that today hold the human animal hostage? How do we find a future that celebrates the here and now and not the primitive tribalism of yore? How do we put an end to spiritual imperialism and the methods of threat and intimidation that seek to make everybody hide behind costumes and masks and veils and traditions which are nothing more than shallow habits of fear?

Are there any more questions?


           --Mr. Smolin, 7/14/07

Seventy-Seven


"The Tao of Heaven,
Is it not like the bending of a bow?
The top comes down and the bottom-end goes up,
The extra is shortened, the insufficient is expanded.
It is the way of Heaven to take away from those that have too much
And give to those that have not enough.
Not so with man's way:
He takes from those that have not
And gives it as tribute to those that have too much.
Who can have enough and to spare to give to the entire world?
Only the man of Tao.
Therefore the Sage acts, but does not possess,
Accomplishes but lays claim to no credit,
Because he has no wish to seem superior."


          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching




Check your paranoia at the door 'cause this is not a conspiracy, this is a random attack on your better sensibilities, a guerilla surge from the great big chewy nothing, that dream you had once about someone you shouldn't have had a dream about, all the secret longings that make you blush, the shameless public simulation of you in private asssuming your favorite atomic position and getting ready to drop the big one.

There are perpetual mythologies that attribute our separation from nature to a variety of sins and temptations when in reality the severance was gradual and imperceptible, a process of leisure, prehension, upright two-legged brainstem elongation, foreknowledge of our own deaths and evolving chemistry, over a span of centuries irrelevant to the individual circumstance. Perhaps we were even born into separation, and paradise is nothing but wonder and womb-memory. Proving this, of course, is as futile as proving the existence or non-existence of God or Godzilla or Godot. So concentrate on what you can know, and know it, utterly, there's your divinity right there.

It wouldn't take much for the basis of civil society to fracture and collapse us into barbarism. Military and monetary brinksmanship will always backfire on the Empire even at the height of its global influence. The hatred that stems from primitive ideologies, be they mythic or systemic, always underestimates the indomitable human longing for individual freedom, a primal impulse stronger than scripture, stronger than kashrut, stronger than sharia, stronger than catechism, stronger than any doctrinaire prescription for virtuous living. We need to be left alone with our direct experience of reality. We already know what to do with it.

I know the apparent inevitability of world chaos and the dissolution of civilization feels hopeless at times, especially when ossified God-mongers foist their stagnant theology with such violent animosity upon a world in which, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, "lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone," but I implore all you who love humanity, all you who reject the backassward primitivism and spiritual bankruptcy of religious extremists, no matter their version of the big lie, not to give in to despair but rather as guardians of the species to fight for a secular planet, the only chance for freedom to flourish, lest we devolve into swamp things all blind to the diverse beauty of human experience and infinite possibility, lest we bog ourselves down in the pit of easy answers.

Cozy up into the secret life of mindful pleasures, the origin of all paradise mythology, carefree bliss spent in perfect awareness of all that simply is, despite the wartorn world of territories and borders and spiritual imperialism and sordid corporate fortunes and endless efforts to console the bewildered pilgrim with caustic propaganda and doggerel posing as truth, yes, even so, we who choose to pursue loving kindness persist among the plunderers of such. We do so because we must. We must be vigilant because they're always hot to trod upon us, they're always counting on our despair and acquiescence, they're always looking to leverage our destiny, they're always working, they're always waiting, they're always always watching.

Does it feel like a tide is turning, like momentum is slowing, like inertia's reversing, like a firelight is rekindling its freeform glow? Or is this a media tease, a dubious illusion, a wee bone for those who are heart-starved and longing, crumbs for us who believe in the freedom to freak? And how does one tell in this age of infoganda and matrix saturation?

There is still wonderfulness despite the ugly bumpings of the sullied world, nation rising up against nation, faith against faith, a world degraded by the self-absorbed hubris of human certainty, a species blinded by God, a planet battered by mad attractions to a plethora of exclusive truths, all of them tragically and ironically false, a willingness to kill and die in service to these divinely deluded fictions, yes, despite the awful reality of existence there is, there is, there is, there is, THIS:

Something all groovalicious and prone to eternal perfection. Something giddy with girlness. Something selected from the anonymous swamp. Something defiant and unashamed. Something fermented in a cauldron. Something elementary like mitochondria. Something torn from a page of forbidden text. Something derived from enlightenment. Something only a mother could love. Something rancorous and akin to a barroom brawl. Something that comes tumbling after. Something awake to all eternal wonder. Something willing to look at Esau's foibles and reconnect the necessary questions. Something unafraid to shake its shame and state plainly, like, duh, obviously.

From pinnacle to abyss, from vertex to vortex, from citadel to catacomb, from mountain to valley and every canyon in between, all are invited to this sweet reunion of mind and body, of spirit and sense, of time and eternity, devoid of all protocol, all mythology, all artificial constructs, all false dualisms, and all despicable instances of manipulative trickery.

Let fall the loss and disappointment and sorrow of your immediate circumstance, albeit temporarily, and attach your wings to things eternal now, the good ol' great big chewy nothing, always there to console your agony, always there to insulate your being against the violent spasm currently gripping the world. The void is the basis of the material, the man behind the curtain, the wonderful wizard of Ozymandias, an eternal reminder of our finite presence here on this earthly plane. Ready yourself for change, for a massive transformation, for an evolution in consciousness, for the inevitable birth of planetary awareness, all ya gotta do is shift. Become a better species.

Feel the immortal tingling of a tablet hatched with random scratchings, a chaos dictation from out the burning bush and all its unholy fire. Let's continue in our progress until there's nothing left unmentionable, until every taboo has been conquered, until every form of moral absolutism swallows its own tail, until every certainty is called into question, until the next big blast in human consciousness lifts us above this primitive mythos and its myriad hatreds, until ideas become a playground instead of a battlefield, until love is the sum total, let's stand firm against the backward pull of scriptural literalism and its perversion of the wide and noble path.





          --Mr. Smolin, 3/7/07

The messiah's on the inside, your very own Love, not a mythic messenger from the sky come to spread a stultifying dogma, but the ever present interconnectedness of all manifestations of consciousness in its myriad forms, the sauce and the source, called by whatever name in whatever language, the decentered Self, not a basis for hatred and armed struggle but rather the fulcrum upon which all-in-all balances, precariously at times, but somehow constantly righting itself like the centerpiece it always is . . .

. . . in the name of that Namesake, Baruch Ha-Shem, let's make this world resolution for the new year:

May the coming revolution around the sun bring about a revolution in human consciousness. May we be able to reverse the trends that are leading us into darkness and ignorance and regression, away from this rabid embrace of antiquated scriptural dogma and onto an enlightened journey forward, with an acknowledgement of our sick planet and our sick societies and our sick religions and a determination to face the world as it really is, to fund sustainability instead of entropy, broad knowledge instead of narrow ignorance, education instead of proselytizing, equal partnership instead of global domination, personal growth instead of spiritual imperialism, love and forgiveness instead of hatred and vengeance.

Because ultimately, we're all in this together, kids, and we've all got one mother, she's called Earth, and she desperately needs our attention.

Let's resolve to be better children starting right now . . .





--Mr. Smolin, 1/2/07

Seventy-Six


"The living are soft and yielding;
The dead are rigid and stiff.
Living plants are flexible and tender;
The dead are brittle and dry.
Those who are stiff and rigid
Are the disciples of death.
Those who are soft and yielding
Are the disciples of life.
The rigid and stiff will be broken.
The soft and yielding will overcome."


--Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching



If we get out of this current global mess alive and are able to maintain some vestige of civilization thereafter, it will take a generation and then some to heal these agonizing wounds, these insults to the sovereign fate of the individual, these desecrations of the earth.

Therefore, yield with supple harmony to the way things go.

Shed the accrued anxiety and self-defeating pessimism of a world that is losing its conscience and climb the celestial incline, the path to abstract freedom, where you are no stranger to ecstasy, a godparent to the boy before the man came, where the autumn environment feeds your deepest longings for connection, where you don't have to be afraid, where superstition no longer binds the minds of countless billions, where compassion and reason and moderation and a realistic view of how human beings truly live their lives in the world prevents Godmongering crazy people from foisting their literalist agenda onto legislation, where liberty actually means something other than a corporate free-for-all, where the earth comes first, where the psychedelics are fresh as a messenger and that messenger is secular, where conquest is an aberrant labyrinth, where wine flows like water, and everybody hits like a girl.

Equilibrium is death. My statue is elated with a crop of grimaces, beholden to the very civilization it wishes to destroy with its involuntary stillness. Spontaneous violence threatens to disrupt the prejudicial fabric of our power structure, thus enabling the spread of chaotic awareness. Legions of domesticated soldiers stay prominently away from clammy smells associated with stagnant sexuality. They are taught to think of cinnamon all day.

A theory of everything is proposed by the few to the many, is rejected by the One, is invalidated by the shoddy science that comprises its research, and is then used as a weapon against the enemies of theater. Gobs of mean rubbery pillpopping script-doctors have infiltrated the seaside. The institution has thus gained cleverness but has lost the homely warmth that once granted it attractiveness. At least to those of us who chose this gentle edge centuries ago, when happiness was not unique.

I await a revelation like that of the first mirror, the day God dropped acid and saw himself, the inchoate rememberer of all that's yet to be. Reality is a triangulation of God's consciousness.

That which is most human in God is that which is most Godlike in humanity.

God is actually a product of modesty, the ancient shame of animation, useless as a bloody rag. Salty shorelines remind the innocent dreamer of his ongoing narcosis. The repeal of all laws governing churchbells has been a great cause of mandatory jubilation. So who's to blame the makers of legend, those who lied about seeing dragons and seamonsters, for doing what we all do only with more colorful panache and form? Let the mission fail. Admit no purpose. Allow no custom to overwhelm decisions in the instant.

Every black hole is itself a universe, just as every universe is itself a black hole. Multidimensionality will eventually resolve itself into a collapsed antic, a single temporary jungle of signage.

I have not been placed here to understand or interpret the real, merely replicate its austere beauty and attend to its complex hidden infrastructures, far more innate than realized on the regulatory surface of things.

What fascinates me most is not the journey but the derailment, the interruption of the flow that leads to a new kind of flow, a bastard track, where worship is not a purpose or a goal, where worship is the act itself played out like a sexy dance. Where is our plan? What is the source of nothing that arises? Why is the pendulum at a hang-still?

A renegade language permeates the brainflower I'm growing in the midst of my boneless thought-house. Denial cannot prevent the natural momentum of frustrated sexualities or the nauseating waves of loss that possess one with maudlin regularity, so that every celebration is a souvenir of inexorable intensity, an encapsulation of regret, disappointment, restlessness and futility, a sad impermanence, transient as our own dying sun divulging its finite energy to the vacuum soup of space.

We have learned how to view superstition as a socially acceptable form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a leverage that leads to an overdiagnosis of reality, a bratty sense of entitlement to answers, a rapacious desire for sunshine, a world that's smaller than originally intended, a dissolution of curves and shadows into a tyranny of line and light, a brash sterility (earth as waiting room), a passive mania for fun, a cupboard-dank discomfort, a late-term miscarriage, a staunch opposition to the chaos of predetermined truth (simple business), a costly trip around the perimeters of faith, a one-man show essentially.

Be forewarned, oh you who are about to enter the world, be forewarned of the negligent captain who steers your every fate, be forewarned of the hunt that will ensue following your obvious appearance as God in the flesh, be forewarned of all forgetting bound to trample you gone from what you always used to be, be forewarned of the shitty conditions a body offers, be forewarned of the goblins that dress as memory, be forewarned of the answers you'll fail to get, be forewarned of the open trench of volition, be forewarned of what the wreckage will weigh against your soul, be forewarned of the pages you'll turn in search of knowledge only to be thwarted by the lies in your way, be forewarned of the ocean of very interesting music that will catch you in its errant waves, be forewarned of the graduated moment that poses as many, be forewarned of a synthetic environment that scoffs at the nature of who you are, be forewarned of a compliant stranger who will one day kill you, be forewarned of a girl who works in stone, be forewarned of a pulse that finds every road, be forewarned of a glamour that isn't a version you've learned, be forewarned of bearded pioneers who claim to have seen the Lord's love communion, be forewarned of jive-ass turkeys who'll be more oppressive than the smell of hot tar, be forewarned of an insurgent populace that will rise up from the phonics of world political discourse and take you on a more pedantic trip. Be forewarned as you go.

Hold off the earth awhile. Never return to the whelming world. Forthright attempts at the fire of truth do not approximate the heat that pulls your ego into someone else's thrall. The bedrock interiority complex that refuses to communicate itself even to the willing heart. I must keep on doing this melange of characters until records are no longer being kept. Knowing that sometimes I'm wrong I pace all night in full comprehension of how big love can get, especially at the moment of death, a moment of remembering. The key is to make every moment a moment of remembering. Then a total enlightenment grows imminent. Life is the struggle between forgetting and remembering.

If there is to be a usurpation of the particular, the ego must first acquiesce to an acknowledgment of its own illusory nature until there is nothing left to acknowledge nor to do the acknowledging, a collapse in fact of the very basis of individual striving and strategy, where even the first longing self is extinguished like a drama, no longer valid or needing validation, an end to all questions, including God's eternal mind.

Walking with burdens of a misproclaimed God, a disguised island, a building designed to grow roots and someday, lives as a vegetable presence among its mineral siblings. Digital fillings fail to capture totality. The binary approximation listens only to extreme states, like a tempered scale, the infinite smallness of the Real, left between and thus unperceived, unlearned, unknown. Solidity entertains with its multiple convergences as if a ton of reflux were splashed on shambles of rotten glass. Deceleration of interdependence led the developed world to its final crisis. And now the verge has widened to such an extent that the separation between individuals has created an insurmountable isolation and deafness, a liberating cosmology for the deliberately curious, an implosion of monolithic political entities as they pass the zenith of their arc and begin to break apart. The great decay is the guiding mechanism of all structural systems.

All praise the name of contact. Praise the actual voices of people. Praise the capacity for understanding on the deepest levels these contradictory truths. Submerge and praise the curly void. Praise the swinging arpeggios of your desisting body. Praise the ego no longer an institutional issue but an ordinary activity not to be mistaken for any thing. Praise whatsoever is accumulated in the surviving memory. Praise the faintest light in the gladiator dream contest. Praise the corpulent details of your latitudinarian agenda. Praise even bothersome gadfly obligations. Praise the pain of your constant losses. Praise the enormity of damaged moisture as it gathers to a wrath. Praise the breath on pyramid walls. Praise the achieved vision of millions. Praise the energy building to a fizzle. Praise the brotherhood of death.

I concentrate on the face, brilliant and smooth, collected in the music. All else falls away, and there is only the sapid nightlight and an ideal thought shared. The kingdom of eyes redolent with surprise and impulse and circus fruit, popping talk that had to last, in love with the lavender gloaming, that rainless red-blue expectation. Life is the ride. A jealous reunion of rhythm and weather.

Sometimes I blink so rapidly the world looks like a hummingbird.

My costume requires no mask. My costume is the function of its very limits. When you see me in my separate smallness I am already disguised. When you hear me speak I am already lying. When you touch my dispassionate skin I am already only the decoy. Don't mistake me for Who I Am. This warning shall not be repeated. Mortality aspires to end itself and by so ending continue forever. It gives one a sense of the relative warmth of dying.

I'm to inscribe the inner realm. I'm to see fullgrown animosity threaten the spoiled air already. I am generally not dedicated to these crusades. More inclined to stay below. I look upon the wagging treebranch shadows. I reek of vegetable essence. Absorbed by attachment to the incredible. A place similar to earth. Conceived of a political escape where time is everything else. I keep thinking it's like falling in love with the Grateful Dead, like falling in love with nothing in particular. Going further inside the millions. They summon every conceivable dream, yet they endure the most brutal reality, no luxuries of romance or recreation, only constant work and a constantly alternating cycle of abuse and negligence.

Leave therefore your righteous commitment to being adored. Leave it at your destination. Leave it where the fake strangeness subsides. Leave it in a fire exit. Leave it for Martian anthropology. Leave it under the foundation of the world. Leave it with senility in a circus. Leave it in breadcrumbs that pigeons squabble over. Leave it in the endless riff. Process the latent silence of your hungry stamina.

I ache in vain. I busy myself with the errands of fate. Prevention of fantasy is the first step toward direct experience. Nothing to come between me and the nature of things. No drama, no lies, no strategies. A blind excursion into the plasma. Neither obvious nor obscure divine existence gives glimpses of its minions. Many long to be so esteemed. To be considered of that company. To be lauded by the gods. Stoking the violet heavens with my lash, I sell America an image of freedom. Fixed potential dooms the feeble exploit. Don't wait for you know what.

About to fall off the earth in my sleep, I turn my scansion outward before the twisted Self inside commandeers both the music and the message. I occur as wind. A bunch of mercury. Powerless to acquire a subject. A thousand pictures not worth a single word cross my eyes and are gone. I mourn their miraculous passing. So much art consists in what is lost. The loves that leave. A patchwork balance. The disengaged volume of life.

Stay at this plan. Don't allow venial bouts of self-loathing to disrupt the juggernaut forwardness of the transmission. You are the spigot for this panoramic spew. You are the vessel of delivery charged with bearing the unmoored language of God. Like an inverted blast, the words survive the implosive syntax. This is what the surgeon discovers behind the brain floating along crevices in the cortex. Territorial heartache in every ventricle. Buy into quiet light. A place to reflect, consider, chew.

Oh, I am a blip in the midst of this. I am the way-out nebula, estranged from the core, feeling a kind of radiating love for all sentient beings. I wish to pay tribute to the muse that's always new. I needn't ever budge from this perch in the meaningless center of eternity.

I am being hailed from a far galaxy. Driven support lights the end of days, trying to stay cheerful and bright, resuming the crane patience I feel is required for the common good, uplifted in simple ridicule, the freedom to betray our own interests in the service of higher annihilation. On stray the melodic children we've failed, dreaming of everyday music. There's nothing to use, no periscope to command up, no chapter to survive. Jail cannot hold us nor mountain lions nor snowshoes nor haircuts nor health. We are always outside the synchronized line of being. We are out of step with each other and everyone else. We are never in the newspaper. We suspect that a book is being written somewhere, a particularly wholesome compendium of the world's collective brow, that imposes myth upon our plain reality, that enters our emptiness and infuses it with some kind of silly meaning. This is a tendency we must constantly despise, prevent, revile, and bend back upon itself, so that this mysterious book views us as the plastic neurons we claim to be. If we must be remembered, let the chronicle reflect our primacy, our absence of mission, our insular structure. Let us live the fission predicted lest the critics of a future society be inclined to warp our paralysis.

And so I repeat the need for wishful thinking. And so I appeal personally to all those who would violate the message of silence: Join our sedate brigade of taciturn warriors dedicated to defense of the unmentionable, the deep stillness of just being together.



--Mr. Smolin, 12/2/06

Seventy-Five


"When people go hungry, the government's taxes are too high.
When people become rebellious, the government has become too intrusive.
When people begin to view death lightly, wealthy people have too much
Which causes others to starve.
Only those who do not cling to their life can save it."


--Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching




No longer inclined to fill the empty air with words, I retreat into silence. I build a brilliant white ship with no windows, no rudder, no engine, no existing fuel, no penchant for exploration or discovery. Crude walls block the view on all (more than four) sides of me. I fix my eyes on displays of empty space, implied crystal, ectoplasmic artifacts, vanished magic, presidential promises, eyelid movies, winter sun, burnt cellophane, jellyfish skin, carbon monoxide, broken bubbles, Cheshire expressions, imaginary masks, raw stock, a worm's-eye view of the sky, unicorn tears, the first worthless responsibility of Piltdown Man, double negatives, albino microbes.

Doubly rich with minstrel intuition (that colorless impulse from underneath which the deeper strands of narration emanate), I forge a scripture for the souls encumbered with the circus of God. There is a purposeful movement in monotony which, when perceived, may alert the person in question to resolve issues of chronic masturbation, distant immanence, morbid teleologies, thoughts gone bonkers, zoo children gallivanting across some fantasy of the useless future, auditory hallucinations of hell-choir and donations, of pyre and flintstone, dim progress toward constancy, amphetamine addiction, deranged prerogatives, fatherless longing, purgatorial naming sessions, unforgotten failures, the inability to engage in and maintain intimate relationships, logical avoidance of same, dropped allegiance to the major emphasis, troubles aplenty, voluble opposition to greenhorn interlopers, incorrigible chariness about verbal, social, sexual, and metaphysical intercourse, racial stigmata, tender elocutions alone in a nondescript lodging, parental guilt, nonlinear concepts that inhibit clarity, uncommunicative sullenness, and such like.

Nothing worse than hunger when there's enough to go around.

The self has no beginning. Certain crises wring the oneness away. The Self becomes the myriad personalities that act like drops instead of like the ocean IT always IS. Evaporate, condense, evaporate, condense. Ah, to stay gaseous like God, to evaporate for good, condense into finally being the atmosphere of everything.

Slightly pregnant with myself I set about the task of marking time for future reference. "It's how I'll always know where I am," I keep assuring the quarks that infest my being like a community of universes, a conflation of time and space, electricity and magnetism, thunder and lightning, "and thus somehow restore the natural unity usually depicted within the limited tendencies of language as an illusory duality."

Yes, this is the way a man should behave, as a renunciate in robes walking across continents without possessions or destined accomplishment, merely a lover of the Godlands, their bounteous topographics, mountain cathedrals, valley chalices, altar tables of red clay, transept pathways, the world as living prayer.

I renounce the world because one could go quite insane from the harassment. Gangsters extract protection money, politicians their own version of the same. The clergy threaten the soul with promises of a damned eternity in the absence of all paradise. Degenerate feeble hormones drive my kind to a private darkness. Totally ready for eclipses as they may. Freedom is a flightplan. The relief of change. One more horizon to swallow.

One almost would shy away. One might could. Because of the intimidation of fools and angry men, the blasted and the blessed of this insane situation. One would drop off. One would simulate hiding. One would get back in touch with one's inner robot. It would be though fruitless to wake from the solitude. Woe unto thee Hollywood! Shingles of property are prone to annihilate the moronic smog. But angel foam protrudes luxuriously from the dappled pages of an elegant whore's diary. And thou, Capernaum, don't want to hear the noises, the conduct, the improbable sensitivities, the garish conflict, the spontaneous heatwear, the Japanese tumble, the garlands of nectar around your flushblue waters, the vindictive conjugations dictated to you in midsummer nullities, the joking Pandora who spots imprimatur not so early as perhaps the fucking nightingale that keeps me awake till dawn, at which point larks and doves collude to further impede my slumber, the pickled rutabaga doffed in effigy atop the rickety bridge, the too too arrant soil, the way I look tonight in someone else's memory.

One would quell the rebellion by leaving us the fuck alone, ye overbearing Godmongers.

Inside language is a function that does more than communicate. How much of the total scheme of consciousness language occupies remains difficult to gauge. The measurement wouldn't signify anything relevant moreover. Merely sit statistically on a graph to be manipulated for whatever purpose of argument. So I revel instead in the funnel of words that pulls me to a bottomless drop. I am falling even now into spunky parlors of the dirtiest love, into machine sounds that predate amoebae, into scholarly investigations of sex, into a manifold flux the substance of which is a hub for heavenly lifting, into Bartleby's handkerchief, into the comedy alive with feeling, into spontaneous revelation, into candy furniture, into vitamin-brown sales pitch, into contumacious struggles with very sad girls, into monkey service to a divine manipulator. My ideal preference is a quiet place to sit alone with everything and watch what happens.

Classic synaptic dances hurtle me back into a discarded skull to scrape at the deserted interior, the brainless cave, an abandoned vessel, an external presentation that God makes to the word-happy world. This is not a scripture submitted for exegesis. This is not the mother of literature begging for scholarly analysis. This is the deep syntax of inchoate lore. This is a book of numbers.

This is some rarefied, self-referential, morally neutral, postmodern, whiteguy bullshit. And so I am right at home here, my sincere origin. This is my people, let go, tripping in the wilderness on magic manna, that psychedelic fungus, burdened with the cult of law, very paranoid about the cops who symbolically represent their parents, thirsty for java, never expecting to dance around a statue, in the desert sunset, ignorant of butterfly races, sauced beyond recovery, self-conscious about fucking too loudly, halfway dead, haunted rim creepers, they sit like infants, very consciously acting like the subjects of the scriptures they shall become, thus immortalized and in love with that perfectly absent future.


Deeper Than Thinking


My solo dream is to go
Deeper than thinking
Inseminate an alphabet
Deeper than thinking
Bite on monster flesh so minty cool so veritable so much
Deeper than thinking
Croon a lusty war ballad
Deeper than thinking
Assign children to find a tree of knowledge
Deeper than thinking
Catch the early sentence
Deeper than thinking
Heed sometimes a brilliant sidereal complex
Deeper than thinking
Recognize my alien origins
Deeper than thinking

Go deeper than thinking
Go down to the thing steeper
Deeper than thinking
Sophisticate the unhip swarm to the bliss
Deeper than thinking
Shout hallelujah in a group voice
Deeper than thinking
Admire magnificent jam lines
Deeper than thinking
Remember the why not
Deeper than thinking



Blank is the color of my true Love's mind in the morning when she forgets my smell, when my face blurs into a kind of melancholy loss, in particular, a mossy cog in her neurotic consciousness.

I long to empty my simmering wine into the permanent release of the monad delta.

It is easy to pretend you are listening. I hear my own brain say, "I am listening to you," so that my eyes will effectively communicate that I am listening even when, in fact, I am thinking, "You are beautiful," or, "I want to kiss you," or, "Let me look at you just one moment longer." Yet still my face can say, without help, "I am listening to you." This is a symptom of my disconnectedness, a condition of my ultimate solitude, acknowledged and forewarned. I can vanish like a master from every life imaginable.

The brute incompetence of the phallus is evident in its utterly destructive failure to create light. Only when reduced to an elemental charge, like electricity, does the masculine wavelength inspire. He goes hurtling away in a spacecar, a dutiful retreat into personal collage. The problematic hoax of intoxication, decapitated fantasies, reminds constantly of the war within, the green scramble to hurt by random willingness, a spring-dry crapshoot, with functional organs and the lidless vision of potential seeds. Your fears cast shadows on other fears. The basic motif is a severed artery, implying a lack of circuitry. The artist is a ghost who haunts himself, repelled by his own demonic lust yet drawn to the skanky cunt across the table, across the groom, across the dumbfuck dorky ocean, a roll of the dice away from what goes pop, what falls down and goes boom, a stampede of selfbait feeding the intrusion.

My romantic persona has always been a failure, always an apologist's dream, always a slow build to balking, always the story told to hundreds of early inhabitants of the animal earth, always insect bitten and anonymous, always fulminating dyspeptically within, always ringing eggward for a taste of tomorrow or never, always the end of a long silent argument, always the boiling heroine, always rutting the furniture, always eyeballing the surgical pantomime, always the proponent of nonparticipation in activities that do not speak of the essential, always the trance averted, always mistaken assumptions regarding the celibate proxy, always the creation of language that adds something to the one consciousness, always the primitive child looking for mommy, always a general mystery of sound waves, always a problem with the body responses, always planning to go for the big secret, always preparing to ask the big question, always pretending to really want it, always arriving midway through the best part, always minding the atmosphere in this only room, incessantly turning the ears of autumn into a death that's always the same.

Something is necessarily lost in the dismal charade of relationships, some promise presumed, a neverlasting passion for the idea of a soulmate. Absence occurs to you always upon the morning of your coldest day. The unforgiving city lashes your temples to a raw plastic. Your skin feels like upholstery on your bones. Timeless ice sprinkles your wild gypsy hair. You are subject to the callous ray of death on such occasions. Your inherent structures crumble. The world is suddenly vastly different from the one you woke to, a concrete dimension without contour.



Haiku ..27


Little bird hopping
Where do you go when it rains
Unlike a turtle


I breed chickens for pencil neck geeks to eat in freak shows.

Just when it seems that panic is the only outlet, that the shocking blizzard of thought has finally ceased forever, just then a new skein of criminal images floods from the bunker, from the penitentiary, from the madhouse, from the schoolyard, from the chasm, from the brainstem, from the heartroot, from the dickweed, from the truckstop omelet, from the foreign invasion, from a collision of words, from the static mulch born to serve, from the sprung vacuum, from the dust under rugs, from the charlatan's magic bag of tricks, from the mouths of babes, from the dungeon of love, from the grid circuit, from the halls of Montezuma (or is it Moctezuma? I can never remember), from little acorns, from plasma reserves, from bipolar imbalances, from dog and pony shows, from here too internally, from circus wagons en route to the next bathysphere, from downstairs in a bucket of slop, from a reminder of all the dumb luck, from the bottom of my own artistic interregnum.

Indelicate movements go trolling for quarrelsome and easy anonymous sex, wondering how to fly, how to impersonate the birth of Eve, how to clip some vibrant gloss off the reptile underbelly of fear, how to find one's impermanence and hold it fast, how to bottle fermented insects, how to speak to others without conscience, how to figure out the procedural nightmare, how to invoke progressive evolution, how to emanate sounds of love, how to browse without buying into the wicked game of success, how to gather emotional sterility, how to plan wide peripheries for my convex learning, how to emancipate all codes and grammars, how to cope with time moving irreversibly forward, how to build roofs over symbolic grace, how to plunge headlong into barley, how to beat the seizure of lust, how to comfort the indigent with a dose of unprocessed glue, how to freak out by inches, how to stay awake through insufferable machines that go hum, like Binet's lathe, how to break the monotonous cadence of electronic mantras, how to jump from history before the balance reverses, how to endure the lack of magnetism, how to fasten a soft rod to a dry hole, how to spend my time here so that it'll shine with difference, how to give instructions, how to produce a fruit worthy of Godsauce, how to smile once more after so many centuries of unspeakable grief, how to let it all happen like a miracle.

It is common knowledge that French women drip like insects, common knowledge that supernova daisies recreate the act of birth, common knowledge that increasing numbers of muscle advocates are coming down with influential versions of history, common knowledge that diamond mines rain on cloudy perdition, common knowledge that railroad tinctures pine breathlessly about minuscule chambers of the nose, common knowledge that domesticated rampages hurt worse than the wild frenzies one dreams about while sick, common knowledge that the party of the first part begins the story of where it all comes from, common knowledge that hustlers never sleep enough, common knowledge that meanwhile in the bunkers beneath the world a popular concert attraction enveils herself like a locked church, common knowledge that wrapped in the folding stairwell is a child of mythic bestiality (a monstrous ordinary meeting of brown over bronze), common knowledge that presentable turnstiles visit instances of doubt even when the heavens reckon a clemency is in order, common knowledge that heroic journalism doesn't do shit, common knowledge that the problem with context necessarily skews the whole arcane syllogism, common knowledge that impartial juries are not possible, common knowledge that portals of chance implode the novel, common knowledge that a narrower square will make things human, common knowledge that rats infiltrate quickly, common knowledge that the left nostril receives divine transmission with greater fidelity than the right, common knowledge that a strong harmony can abide many faiths at once, common knowledge that fortune frequently fucks with the impassive future perfect, common knowledge that doors to other balustrades await the patient traveler, common knowledge that Venus is a subterranean building, common knowledge that coffee products instigate fits of paroxysmal rapture, common knowledge that war is the summary of a startled anyhow, common knowledge that factions among the stakeholders are invariably confident that their emphasis will prevail, common knowledge that uptight patriots are afraid of chaos, common knowledge that perceptions shrink in comparison to all the medicine withheld for times of crisis, common knowledge that starblown tribesmen kick the trundle out of indigent frustration, common knowledge that shrimp don't smell their enemies coming, common knowledge that sorrowful bruises impress negligent elders, common knowledge that a lagoon exists somewhere devoid of robot life, common knowledge that ghosts don't forget.

Be the people who detonate the empty vehicle. It is your job as you to be the empty vehicle. The aborted season is an empty vehicle. The missing appetite is an empty vehicle. The simple sentence is an empty vehicle. The childish nonsense of language in a funny room is an empty vehicle. The Broadway surcharge is an empty vehicle. The building's elastic propeller is an empty vehicle. Money for love is an empty vehicle. Timely correspondence in order to prove one's diligence is an empty vehicle. Casual romance is an empty vehicle. My scrotum is an empty vehicle. Nights in the library are an empty vehicle. The dictionary of ideas is an empty vehicle. The definition of the is an empty vehicle. Satori is an empty vehicle. Sheer psychedelia is an empty vehicle. I think I like that empty vehicle.

Listen and keep on listening and remember to keep on listening and keep on remembering to keep on listening.

Renew your dedication to the spoils of fading selfhood. Don't follow in the stark white footsteps of the Aryan invaders. Say, "Our fodder whose art is heavy, hollow be thy game. Thy kingdom come before she's done on earth as a pleasant heaven." Destined to share forcefully the undiminished and faithfully transcribed wealth of God-thoughts in time. More primordial than either classical or romantic.

There's no earthly way of knowing . . .

The spirit of the day is an exhausting fever sick with the kitsch of its own pretense. I bow to it ceaselessly. Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. This is only the boneless explosion of hope and echoes. This is the primary circus. This is a version of everlasting You. Prostrate in desert wind. Utterly blind to some rumor called your past. And here you are in this lump of junky dust. Your itinerary for years. Take it all to a pool and drown it. Make the full mine implode like sand until the planet abandoned goes barren.

I am the gyrating orb all chaffy unproductive. Tricked by the beat into stopping by.

Returning to residual boredom I vow to escalate the drama of distraction, my windowless wilderness.



--Mr. Smolin, 11/11/06

***NOTE: This chapter of Around The Tao In Eighty-One Whirls was originally posted a year ago, 10/29/05; however due to an editing error, I am re-posting it here now. Eventually, I suppose, it will find its way back into sequential order. In the meantime, enjoy re-reading this reminiscence.


Forty-Four

"Fame or self:
Which matters more?
Self or wealth:
Which is more precious?
Gain or loss;
Which is more painful?
He who is attached to things will suffer much
He who saves will suffer heavy loss
A contented man is never disappointed
He who knows when to stop does not find himself in trouble
He will stay forever safe."

          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching


It all started with The Wake.

For it was in this setting that the temptation to pursue fame and wealth cross-examined the desire to express the Universal Self with untainted vision.

The year was 1978.

The Wake was a band that never really gelled musically yet gave birth (in the life-mind of each member) to an aesthetic, an ethos, a commitment to the seriousness of artistic integrity and strict obedience to the Muse. In some ways the Muse was the city herself, Los Angeles, our playground, our mystic mother, our keeper of secrets, our perfect January, our elusive striptease, our reminder of graveyards, our wet pavement, our bookstore perfume, our celibate laboratory, our afternoon cabaret. In other ways the Muse was usually just some girl, the one you see when you sing.

We didn't believe in the myth of America.

We believed in Art.

Especially this precept:

Everything must be meaningful . . .

There were five of us: Me, Ron, Stew, Viken, and Eldad.

I don't think we ever fully enjoyed playing music together. But we intensely appreciated the discovery and stimulation of one another's company, always an expansion of consciousness, always. The music was less important than the conversation. We could have been doing anything, sitting on the beach at night, driving the length of Sunset Boulevard, going out for coffee at the Los Angeles International Airport, seeing X or Fear or Marvin Etzioni's band The Model or whoever else play at Hong Kong Cafe in Chinatown or Madame Wong's or Blackie's on La Brea near Pink's or later the Anti-Club (I never went to The Masque), downing endless cups of wretched dishwater coffee at Norms on La Cienega or at Ben Frank's up on Sunset, combing the used LP bins at Aron's, when it was still on Melrose, whatever, it didn't really matter, we were in perpetual high gear. The band simply gave us a cool context for voracious discourse.

And while I was busy coping with the fact that my songs weren't any good . . .

We got high and read James Joyce to each other and listened to Kraftwerk's The Man Machine and Brian Eno's Before And After Science and Patti Smith's Horses and Rodney Bingenheimer and watched Saturday Night Live waiting for the maybe one funny sketch in any given episode and argued punk vs. prog and spent numerous hours hanging out in my parents' kitchen and in the living room whispering waterfalls of art-talk until dawn and went to see foreign films and classics at the New Beverly Cinema, the very rocking revival house in our neighborhood. Once a bastion of gay porn whose marquee would announce such titles as Jailhouse Cock and The Sergeant & His Privates, film freak Sherman Torgan turned it into the dingiest, most uncomfortable piece of heaven imaginable. It became our intellectual Mecca. Many of my favorite films were first seen in that theatre: Annie Hall, La Dolce Vita, Taxi Driver, Death In Venice. One time Stew gave a standing ovation to the Taxi Driver trailer. Another time Ron fainted at the end of Death In Venice, overwhelmed by the power of myth. My friend Lisa worked there that summer and was able to get me in for free. Summer of 1978. A sublime pocket of time. I had committed myself to devout asexuality and avoidance of love. It was a delectable freedom. Although I had a horrible job working in the stock room at Standard Shoes, my evenings were devoted to movies, reading, and music music music. Eldad also worked at Standard Shoes that summer.

The Wake did make SOME music. I sang and sometimes played piano and occasionally played guitar (often with the volume off) but mostly sang and wrote a lot of the tunes. Ron sang and played piano and wrote the rest of the tunes. Stew was a superstar guitarist, like Robert Fripp-meets-Duane Allman, who would later become best known for his singing and songwriting. Viken played the bass. And our drummer was Eldad, who later become best known for his mad jazz skillz on the vibes.

Originally this group of musicians had been assembled to play on a demo I was making to showcase the new tunes I'd been working on, pieces which were huge leaps up from my high school songwriting. "Manifest Destiny And Beyond" was the first of that batch, with a chorus that went:

Manifest Destiny and beyond
A coast to coast voyage home
Permanent circle
The plane I search
The void I roam

I had that grand pretentiousness of which 17-year-old artistes are so often possessed.

You know: Everything must be meaningful.

Yes, I used to be young and pretentious.
And now I am no longer young.

Know I'm sane?

Other songs included such titles as "Frailty And the Naked Wrist," "The Divine Tragedy," and "When Shall We Be Free," about as pompous an anthem as has ever been written. I had also penned a sweet androgynous love song to Laraine Newman from Saturday Night Live. I am quite embarrassed about that one. But it feels good to admit that embarrassment. The stinkiest of the whole stinking lot, that song. But at least I was striving for something. I wrote "Laraine" sitting by the little motionless creek at the back end of the La Brea Tar Pits (The The Tar Tar Pits). I played spin the bottle once near that very spot, in 8th Grade, but I didn't get to kiss whom I wanted to kiss. Always the same mistake.....We all went to Fairfax High together but didn't all know each other. I knew Eldad. And Ron had been my best friend in elementary school, then we fell out of touch by going to different junior highs--he to Bancroft, I to John Burroughs. We ended up at Fairfax again together and spoke now and then, but the friendship wasn't really powerfully rekindled until the 11th Grade, in Battaglia's English Lit class, where we bonded over the intellectual goldmine a-happening in that room. It was my playing the new tunes for Ron one day that summer which prompted his suggestion that I record a demo. Ron in fact produced it. Eldad brought Viken and Stew into the picture, neither of whom I'd met before the first rehearsal. Viken was a warm, witty Armenian from Lebanon. Philosophical and cuddly at the same time. He LOVED to argue about music, and that was always a blast. And Stew, of course, became a pivotal being in my consciousness almost immediately. There was the spark of genius in that lad, still too coy to step forward, but slowly getting there, slowly learning to proclaim his artistry out loud. Today he rules the universe.

Stew didn't drive, so someone (usually me) would go pick him up, and it wasn't uncommon to learn, upon picking him up, that his equipment was actually at three different places, and so then you went around to gather his gear at the three different places, but, without fail, one of the guys at said 3 places wasn't home, god damn it, but, hey, no, it was cool because Stew always knew another dude who had something he could use instead, and so, of course, then you went THERE. Getting him home was occasionally a longer, more complicated story. Rehearsals happened in between. And he always split our brains open at those.

The demo was fine for its time, though I'd be afraid to listen to it now. The band didn't really become a band until we added Ron's songs to the repertoire. Ron was a brilliant songwriter, an especially inventive melodist with a penchant for symbolist poetry and Bertolt Brecht. He was writing real pop songs while I was laboring over these precious majestic ornations. And, of course, Stew's prodigious guitar work brought essential ingredients to the mix.

Our fist gig out was at The Troubadour in April of 1979. A virgin journey for most of us, at least in a venue of that stature. It felt like a train wreck, my first big taste of going nowhere. I try not to think of that night too often, otherwise I revel in its ugliness too much, the realization of having no talent. And yet we continued to play in order to be together.

And from that Troubadour gig came this one freak's interest in us, a dude who claimed he had a record company. Our meeting with him was distinguished by its disappointed promise and overall weirdness. His name was Freddy Swimps, and he called his company Some World Records. He was a rail thin black guy whose voice was like Kermit the Frog doing a Dudley Do-Right impression. The plan was to play a set for him, at Eldad's house on Stearns Ave. in the Carthay Circle area. We played a good set, actually. I had just introduced a quirky new song called "Art For Sale," and we were having fun with it. We also did a reggae version of "A Hard Day's Night."....I had another new tune called "Stained Glass Windows," which I did just solo piano. I wrote that song for my friend Vicky, who, at the time, had suffered a nervous breakdown and was in the mental ward at St. John's. I had the bizarre privilege of singing the song to Vicky in the common room of the ward, playing on a funky old upright piano. The mind-tripping thing is that when I sang the chorus, a bunch of the patients sang along, having never heard the tune before, but they were like right there innat shit, I mean in full freak-part harmony. Know I'm sane? The lyrics went (check it out):

Stained Glass Windows

Conscious dreams are dying young
Dream your conscious dreams
Along the threadbare seams
A ragged patch of promised land
The gardens been outgrown
Rip what has been sewn

Shattered stained glass windows
Congregations sing the blues
A ball of conclusions
Hesitate before you choose
You've got a lifetime left to lose

Conscious dreams are dying young
Attraction brings collision
Indifferent precision
True clowns dont speak and seldom rhyme
Alienation is a style
Laugh without a smile

Shattered stained glass windows
Vital memories tightly spun
Given life earn living
You might curse the damage done
Youre not the only one

Conscious dreams are dying young
Better learn to pay
It's graduation day
Conscious dreams are dying young
Buried as infants this morning
It's the third world warning
Shattered stained glass windows
Congregations sing the blues
A ball of conclusions
Hesitate before you choose
Youve got a lifetime left to lose

Shattered stained glass windows
Vital memories tightly spun
Given life earn living
You might curse the damage done
You're not the only one

OK, so, blame it on my youth. I was just 17. But, man, the sound of the schizoid choir made my nipples hard. That rainy night in the St. John's mental ward was the best performance of that song that there would ever be.

Following our set, we sat down with Mr. Swimps and had some amazing Israeli food Eldad's mom had made (she was a gifted visual artist, a painter of great sadnesses, the saddest being the sadness of transience and mortality).

"I really like the rock sound a lot," Swimps drawled, "but when you get right down to it, I'd have to say that classical music is really my pet peeve," by which he meant that he loved classical music most of all, of course, and at which we worked to contain (miraculously) our cannibal laughter. We might have been young and barely educated, but we knew that he had used pet peeve incorrectly, and we were bursting with stifled amusement. Stew's reaction was to lie on his back under the coffee table and make squawking bird sounds, in each squawk the existential agony of someone who'd rather be anywhere else but in the hellish moment. In the kitchen, Eldad's father kept banging a bottle on the counter, over and over again, while we were desperately attempting to connect somehow with a clueless dude named Freddy Swimps and maintain straight faces at the same time. Eldad kept running into the kitchen all agitated telling his father to stop banging the god damn fucking bottle already. Eldad would return to the living room with exasperated countenance, and two minutes later the banging would recommence

This Swimps character went on to explain with grandiloquent posture, "And now that I'm your producer, you can just go ahead and start calling me Freddy Bear, 'cause that's my official producer's name," something we had no intention of ever doing so long as we all should live

But wait, there's more: he then outlined his master plan for us: "Here's my idea. We're gonna go into the studio, and it'll take us about four hours to make the whole album," and other such nonsense like unto projectile vomiting

Up to that moment, we had latched, at least a little, onto the lure of wealth and fame, the prospects of a "record company" releasing a Wake album. But suddenly, in the instant it took each of us to realize Freddy Bear didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, the fantasy vanished. Things got testy when we laid this truth out to him, that he, uh, didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, and he departed in the proverbial huff. Our kishkas had been knocked silly

What a waste of hope

That night we stayed up really late talking about that slimy feeling of smelling (and liking the smell of) wealth and fame, even though it was all an illusion. Our collective impulse was to err on the side of integrity, even though it had all been a joke, about as unfunny as Archie Comics

There's a lot more to say about The Wake, but those visitations are nesting elsewhere in the continuum. You will come across them here and there as we traipse the Tao

But until then, here's how we all ended up:

Viken became a dentist and has dedicated his career to bringing proper dentistry to Armenia, a true hero

Ron went on to form his own cool band Attack Group and write music for Nina Hagen under the name Ron Dumas.

Stew stayed in music, too

So did Eldad.

And, well, you know who I am
Or you think you do.

Everything must be meaningful.





          --Mr. Smolin, 10/29/05

Seventy-Four


"If you do not fear death, then how can it intimidate you?
If you aren't afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot do.
Those who harm others are like inexperienced boys
Trying to take the place of a great lumberjack.
Trying to fill his shoes will only get them seriously hurt."


--Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching



Before All Of This Happen


Taken super loosely to the hangar
Bolted to a syringeal machine
Abased for what I am
What I long for
What I circumnavigate

What I pressure into
Becoming like a beefshod deity
What I am alert to
Even as the nitric plague
Descends like scrappy voodoo

What I pounce on tonight
In the gumbo scissor
What I chasten partially
Dressing bust
What I am present at unconsciously

What I manage to process
What I dip into when the moon is red
What I calve alone
Until a giraffe string
Pustulates my inchoate face

What I generate helplessly
From the misty sombrero corn
What I define as the syntax of death
What I bargain sweatily
Against midrange officers

What I see in the Godsingle morrow
What I stomach abidingly teaload vain
What I compute with tricky sensitivity
What I gobble gobble gobble
Together rainbow everyone

What I smell like after all day teaching
What I incorporate into the treason
Of my neckprime sunsets
What I collect behind the panacea brothel
What I tender amid old sweet vines

What I am honestly harboring
Tastily in the pink of my pocket
What I swear to the immanent power
What I shit in the condominium rec-room
What I heat to unblending perfection

What I run after dream after dream
What I knock out pretending
To great but silent rest
What I trim from the sallow
Interplanetary foundry

What I am before all of this happen



Life is a cage. And I am in it willingly. Abiding by the necessary restrictions. There are those who would complain about the freedoms possible yet denied. Those are people doomed to exist in sadness. Instead of seeing the mystic incision of the cage. Don't forget how small the universe really is. You will have a lot of problems coming back should you decide to try other space-times.

Piranha sandwiches are provided for the visiting dignitaries from Rome. Waiting for the empire's next epileptic Caesar. He'll make good on grand-mal promises to rock the known world. We in the holiest region decline our status as territory. God is the only landlord. This is His occupation government. These reprehensible sentries slobbering all over our women. Soon the purple will pall. Soon the genius of our people will ascend from oppression. No machinery or intimidation can penetrate our steadfast fate. The messiah is here. That he is so ordinary is an alluring testimony to the purity of God's design. God really has become just like us. In all of our ugly mediocre smallness. He too is tormented by attraction. The complexity of the physical plane. Major violation proceeds like fermenting in His ears; He lets the itchy bother subside as any good seeker should.


Variance


Breath arrives
And with it
The lean descending force
Of God Rocks

Breath departs
And with it
Every Michaelangelo
Circle fright



The young puppet learns to tolerate boredom. Boredom in fact becomes a necessary discipline in the experience of chronological eternity. Oh to be timeless, to be eradicated from watching, to be historically reft, to be comfortable using chopsticks, to be asleep in a shady grove, to be classless and banal, to be on the easy thoroughfare to moksha, to be announced as a living tree, to be early for the apocalypse, to be jingling with astonishment, to be the secondary squeak in a bicycle horn, to be a bag of tobacco strapped to a cowboy's ass, to be alert as hell, to be way tired, to be thrilled with ocean exposure.

This is what God goes through, like a hoop, like a managed care facility, like the moon's hammock, like crazy, like proof of another dimension scraped from the rusty water spout, like a man about to jump from way up, like crazy, like the head that's dizzy spinning, like full blown trees, like inspired frenzy chewing on a balloon, like the piquant aroma of senile ear wax, like menthol estrogen, like crazy, man, like a talking follicle dropped from Mt. Baldy, like a candybar milkshake, like antibiotic failure, like crazy, like demented coffee at indoor garden shows, like properly abrogated hangnails left to ferment in a vat of animosity, like crazy, like crazy, like crazy.

And this is different from seeking truth or enlightenment. One looks elsewhere for wisdom, the search, and by so doing ignores the ever present divine consciousness which is one's constant home, albeit a home whose walls defy perceiving and whose boundaries are often mistaken for freedom. There's that cage thing again.

This encumbered generation pals it up with autocratic authorities, who live debauched lives in opposition to the very constituency which elected them, a population reliant upon moral example for its own orderly behavior, which, when left to the current vacuum, dissipates into angry conflict, thus creating distance among people whose only natural tendency is to be happy, though faced with such impossibility they retreat into a depraved loneliness, never actually approaching the mountaintop, nor the guru upon it, who might initiate the willing pilgrim with unflappable concentration in God-mind, having shed petty settings and gone directly into the blank menace, but the sound is too hellish to consider elaboration, whether mental or sexual (or a disastrous convergence of the twain).


The Weaver


She has woven wind and water
Inside eyes of utter fabric
Engaged a permanent ether
Of ceremony luscious green
And every essence in between
Becomes the warp of the weaver
I grow more and more ecstatic
As from the window I watch her

She has always been a weaver
Everything she does is looming
When she's ready to discover
Her true calling may-be freedom
I will gladly help her see some
Of that over which she's hovered
All these years distressed exhuming
Like a schizophrenic cleaver

Then she'll weave us both together
In a natural tapestry
Fused with children and attraction
Fused with grass and wood and roses
Fused with moon and Jewish noses
She who's always been my glad distraction
The weaver at her loom I see
Her sitting there free forever


Reality is a dance of being. All around among and in and as us the creatures play rings. Copy dust onto your engorged phallus. Retreat in dismay as courageous crews of holy warriors attach themselves to assorted secular institutions sucking out the Godless energy of will and replacing it with the spirit-fire of surrender. A new waking community dedicated to the fully realized awareness of divine reality pushes the habitually immoral influence deeper into a ditch, there to spend the night in rabid seclusion.

The vicissitudes of any given individual star may be admired by silent vigil on one's back in the dark. In that sky no lips exist to descend on you and kiss you brashly almost biting. No wide lesbian haunch will chance past in search of Her. No separate faces in fact appear to look back. The ultimate frustration of Narcissus is hunting his own image in that massive black ass of heaven, a drear unreflecting velvet yawn, by its very make-up consumptive, never compassionate, never an entity to enable vain selflove. She is there to make you feel small. She does and you do. But then in that smallness is your integral position in the Big One, your very unique contribution to the every. You wait for sensitivities. You embellish the slightest accident with beautiful meaning. Why me, you tend to wonder in this brick oldness. You can't be talked out of it, no way. Mop those floors until the rudimentary dawn. Give it all up for safety's sake. And a memory of freedom. Nary a compromise will be made. Until one among us rises.



But Sirens Frighten


The spirit is an opening outward
By jury of chance the open collection
Turns yawning to its family

An angry hunter furls
Decadent end of empire
The last of America

Cracks in the main
Have ruptured beyond salvage
The essence has leaked thither

Into a confused sea
Wherein the identity
Manages to merge away

Incompetent government appeals
And raids only hasten the decay
Too fished are these delicate waters

Grotesque endeavors embittered from the start
Tonight is gambled on a rook
Putting seats in the cage

And anticipating what next





--Mr. Smolin, 10/16/06

Seventy-Three


"Being over bold and confident is deadly.
The wise use of caution will keep you alive.
One is the way to death,
And the other is the way to preserve your life.
Who can understand the workings of Heaven?
The Tao of the universe
Does not compete, yet wins;
Does not speak, yet responds;
Does not command, yet is obeyed;
And does act, but is good at directing.
The nets of Heaven are wide,
But nothing escapes its grasp."


--Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching



All loss is the loss of paradise.

The elementary jazz of your inner seepage is longing, in this cycle of renewal and repentance, for a method of understanding the complexity, of finding a comfort in the cold, of living like a renegade in the creeping police state, of finding absolution for your self-imposed guilt and shame, of coming to some kind of symbiosis with a world you can't fully relate to but in which you have to live, though it is irreparably perforated.

With the only thing left of summer being the heat, as nature goes storming toward dormancy, let's prime ourselves for heavenly ascendance, beyond all dogma and discourse, beyond petty tenets and silly superstitions, beyond scripture, beyond denomination, beyond any approximation of exclusivity, beyond Manichean dualism, beyond orthodoxy, fundamentalism, and all forms of knee-jerk literal understandings of our symbolic, metaphorical attempts to know totality, beyond the saddening expanses of land where the bodies on all sides lie in perfect equality unencumbered with the small-minded loyalty that felled them, joined as one in death, on contiguous battlefields, sacred places to reap our guilt and bury our sins.

The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder, like rocks of Apollo lobbed groaning from the gnarled unknown hands of a common Trojan at the lurid cuirass of mad Diomedes splintering as they strike Mr. Angeldust himself, murderer of sleeping Thracians. A pathetic attempt to lessen the legendary ruthless brute. The kingdom of God is like unto a nameless warrior. Chalky inhalation seethes with spearhead a split second and darkness covers the eyes of the human being. Rendered forgetful by virtue of nonspecific heroism. The poet doesn't name him and so he lapses into misty oblivion. Just another innocent victim of narrative choice. Claims of "doesn't follow" show up on the Superintendent's desk the following morning. "What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?," he smarts, "this fucking war took place three thousand years ago. It's more fucking persistent than Viet fucking Nam."

It's a fine line between heroism and treason, and you have copied that line faithfully by hand, straight as a playboy, drunk as a teriyaki marinade, proud as a moorish turban, lucky as a plane crash, determined as an ivy tendril laughing at cracks, bewildered as a maggot hatching in a cadaver, stupid as the footprint on Venus, righteous as the condensed breath of a dirty cactus, rich as the final gumption of a suicidal druid, fat as the shaking hills of Antarctica, demanding as the processed cheese food left to rot in a would-be assassin's mattress, coarse as the beetskin determiner garbling a sanitary algebra, fresh as the hot vomit of a puppy's first gulp, soft as the ruined gillyflower's green juice, demonstrative as the darkened reticule of biblical catastrophe, black as the gum under Benjamin Franklin's coffin, sick as the synthesis of pigeon and birthday, devoted as the chintzy Ubermensch, convincing as the complete journeys of a toadstool, difficult as the metallic tangerine, shiny as the coyote's evening fart-stream, gentle as the microphone taped to an imbecile's broom closet, void as the mirrored spirit, tired as the millhorse at noon, chosen as the bride of a muffin inspector, scary as the tough-ass hungry canyon.

If only I could be drained of all my scary information, loosed out of hell to speak of horrors. My crystal blue inscriptions are designed to capsize the ordinary. Who is known for gigantic circus let him step forward and assume responsibility for the insurgent values of today's shopaholics. They demand ever more stimulating environments in which to indulge their addictive contribution to the American economy.

I remember how much I hated being a child among children. The school playground was like a too sweet collage of George Washington's falsely indentured mouth, every circumscribed sound that escaped the revolutionary gullet of that weirdo general swiftly gravitating toward a chaos of informality. I present your bodily functions to the world, ladies and gentlemen, because they are the quickest way to laughter. Humor has not been budgeted for in the coming fiscal year. There will be people who disappear from embarrassment. But I say let them. Let their estranged malice grow immune to orgasmic tendencies. Let their miscommunicated loves dwindle to an ashy semblance of cobweb remnants, no more glossy pictures of beautiful sinning creatures made to plummet the angel sense in everyone.

Never to have had is the gloomy fortune wrung from tepid nights alone or even together. Never to have had a concentrated burst of birthing the next cosmic involvement. Never to have had a vision of the druid truth. Never to have had a communication through broken glass. Never to have had an ambrosia breakfast at the celestial vertex. Never to have had a body bludgeoned from quantum fuckings. Never to have had rascal exhibitionist escapades along summertime riverbanks. Never to have had any sumptuous opportunities for complete awareness of the bug-eyed geometry that supports the world from behind an invisible music. Never to have had the chance to say to your perfect other "you are my perfect other." Never to have had children. Never to have had (having had without really having) a meaningful discussion about the artist formerly known as God. Never to have had an early bliss continue. Never to have had television dreams. Never to have had sex with elephants. Never to have had the exact ratio of experience to ignorance quantified properly. Never to have had a flower fulfill the promise of an ideal beauty. Never to have had the climb of your life. Never to have had whiskey barrels of polar steam or evidence of a higher power. Never to have had cement rainbows make you feel like being an earthworm for a while. Never to have had a portion of your day be set aside for sacred worship. Never to have had a guru find you. Never to have had a brash masculine appetite overwhelm the fear of failure. Never to have had the gift of a praising poem. Never to have had blind passion for the wrong reasons. Never to have had occasion for happy accidents. Never to have had bruises from falling out of majesty. Never to have had pink squirrels approach and say hello. Never to have had a walk across the continent. Never to have had spread before you the implicit map of Jupiter. Never to have had the stuff above your eyes become part of the incredible surface. Never to have had scummy love in a stinkhole. Never to have had bloodbaths in your own backyard. Never to have had the courage to compensate for quiet moments by singing out loud a spontaneous hate song. Never to have had a believable government. Never to have had distinction beyond the finite gruel of the body.

If you wish to meet these hidden ratios they descend from the inner workings of their own minds every few hours to take hold of something sharper than morning breath. At that vulnerable moment you might capture the sexual attention of a vagrant spendthrift. But only long enough to confound your nightly fantasies of her ecstatically loving your pounding thrusts at her internal circle. Better to have never locked eyes with such a one who smells like a mermaid and threatens to birth your beastly myths with pugnacious disregard for any existing contract language which prohibits and penalizes in fact the violation of your sovereign soul.

Do take heart then that the wedge she will never open up to you would have certainly destroyed your ability to love the world and think about it rationally. We have nothing with which to produce a realistic female form. So perhaps you'd better improve your remembrances of the asses you ogled. They can survive forever in your animal hothouse. They are always happy to be fucking you. They are strangers to boredom no matter the quantity of repetitions. Rather repeating is the simplest friction to master and condone. Heave yourself onto the hallucinated female version of you. Go for it.

Garland-bearer, oxherd, prior to all conditions, put down your mental pen and watch without the intrusion of language, without your special mania for naming things, without a hunger to fuck every opening, without the distraction of a body, without purple twilight poesies, without the illusions of place or bread or culture or accomplishment. Simply delve into the construct and disassemble each constituent particle until all that remains is fire and light. The essence of God is firelight. Isn't that so much better than emptying your testicles into Kleenex?

Jump to moonlight, oh treasured demiurge. Flex thy fit fancy for our generous benefit. Many false prophets do predict the end of days. Forge the real world without end. Before sidewalks and petroleum refineries, before gunpowder and chemical dependency, before shelter, before privilege, before property, before skunk dances, before tyrant lizards, before lava, before the gaseous pop, our wonder is waning. We rock hard our places. The sedges are dead to separation. We are virtually together but not actually. We only know how to speak via language, the slowest medium of exchange. The dreamy circus of our days belies a most horrific sorcery. Hear another parable: Provident occasions shuffled into the procession of minutiae limp in catastrophic mewling anonymity. So many, most, are unaware of the grand tale unfolding just inside the long eyelid that is our locus. The size of the penis has become the measure by which all endeavors, their failure or success, are judged. Any possible chance of waking would be reasonably appreciated. Zeal rewards the acolyte with aphasic plantation. This derangement may be carried spectrally to some bogus realm thus promised where in ignorance the devotee resides enslaved.

Positive charges metabolize faster, but negative charges inflict more important destruction. Then of course there's my integral nether charge:

I the neutron born to fondle calmness, I the man-planet born to support all orbits with my gravitational backspin, I the fanciful ampersand born to facilitate connectivity and flow while remaining stationary as a brain stem, I the orthodox uniform born to concatenate oblique beliefs into a coherent epic scroll, I the awestruck pedigree Homo Erectus born to include shockwaves in my stooped over coughing fits, I the scholarly conduit born to specialize in masturbatory fantasies that render common sexual relations unfinishable, I the sculpted god-form born to appear more constant than bronze, I the winter picnic born to visit discomfort on all intended pleasures, I the grainy dregs of miracle soup born to conjugate tongues of mud, I the morose party-pooper born to sleep in the doghouse, I the anonymous clerk born to be an amorphous blob in the scheme of things, I the brittle ecosystem born to exhaust myself entirely, I the prison pincushion born to harbor the desperate white swallow, I the fondest song-cycle born to warble stories of all avatars, I the soft column born to pick at pustules, I the flaccid member of everyman born to humiliating shame, I the first person singular born to latency and virtual containment, I the minister of big sophisticated vehicles born to speak of finite fossil fuels, I the brotherly sustenance of love born to complicate an already jaundiced war, I the property of dust born to encapsulate nations and alleyways, I the mockery of fate born to satirize regret, I the solid commodity born to stipulate unreasonable terms for a return of the same, I the energy of cyclones born to separate memory from presence, I the bonkers instructor from summertime born to teach that everywhere is coming all over, I the milestone reduction born to amber assonance, I the juicy thighs of some chick born to be licked and kissed, I the self-loathing ethnicity born to follow itself back home, I the indiscriminate killer born to insipid innocence, I the philosopher-apologist's handbag born to incorporate ideology, I the festival terrorist born to generate attention through death, I the suicide machine born to run, I the desultory solo born to elude any sense of dramatic climax, I the broad ship born to carry hormones from pituitary to panorama, I the uninvited guestbook born to jiggle sapphire accordion keys beneath the music from a farther room, I the presumptive lord of peaches born to turn back and descend the stair, I the choir of naysayers born to prefer an adventitious doom, I the spark of diminished life born to be obediently small, I the glossy marathon born to find active debilitation, I the abrogated monarch born to disseminate curious bafflement, I the headlong boulder born to roll away from Sisyphus when he thinks he's all done, I the waxing desert born to overcome the adolescent loam, I the vagabond masterpiece born to pretend a mystical polar ache, I the retinue of magnetism born to revile the populace with my reverse charisma, I the final bagpipe born to exhale one last lonely sigh.

I am deader than Mr. Bojangles' dog.

Therefore, I teach only the silence at the center of all things. I exist from this standpoint as the silence, the very impulse-energy of Reality itself. The steps to enlightenment are as follows: One hears of the silence at the center of all things through some teacher or teaching, a radical work of art, a hunch, a hintuition. One experiences direct awareness of the silence at the center of all things, albeit fleeting. One begins to live by the principles of the silence at the center of all things out of a desire to recreate the previous blissful experience of it until the process is gradually internalized and ultimately constant. Life becomes a prayer. One lives as the silence at the center of all things having recognized oneself in utter identification with the silence at the center of all things, so that the illusion of individuality expires and there is only perfect existence at one with the silence at the center of all things, the very-impulse energy of Reality itself. One teaches with spontaneous vehemence of the Real, of the silence at the center of all things, the very impulse-energy of Reality itself, never fluctuating from perfect selfless freedom.

All ya gotta do is kick your tendency toward habitual parasite entropy and commit yourself to an infinitely renewable symbiosis. Take your place in the great open-source network of all reality, the foundation of consciousness, called by many names, but always only one, Adonai Echad , the ultimate version of you, and nothing more than that, the presence of everything, a bliss awareness, extending outward in all directions.

Open wide and say awe . . . some . . .



--Mr. Smolin, 10/2/06