What It Takes to Go Another Day

(Blog author's note: I alter this fabulous and perceptive author's titles not out of disrespect, but respect at the unexpected and prescient phrases, themes, and ideas that catch my eye in his brilliant essays)

"Walking Away from the Smorgasbord Table into a Finer Land

by Visible

If we don’t know who we are, we can’t be sure of what we do. That’s one way the world gets messed up for everybody else because it’s always somebody else. It’s not my fault; it’s your fault or the San Andreas Fault or Fawlty Towers.

Some of us knew that all those coke snorting market guys in the ‘80’s were an indication of a world gone wrong. They’d go out to lunch and order $2,000 bottles of wine just because they could. I have no idea if they could tell the difference; had someone slipped them a bottle that only cost $200 instead and I don’t think they cared.

It was a lot like those Saudi’s that showed up in LA around the same time and bought all those houses in Beverly and around and painted pubic hair on the Greek statues and asked those in the know, “What do you offer when you entertain here?” Someone told them, “Cocaine” and so they set out chafing dishes full of it (this actually happened) and if you were watching you could see people making off with it in whatever containers they might have at hand. Somebody didn’t have a clue. But when you don’t know who you are or where you are or what you are, you don’t know what you do.

Some of us saw the potential in the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Some of us were there. Some of us saw how the CIA and assorted ill intending players inserted other chemicals into the mix and some of us saw what happened at Altamont in ’69 and so on and so forth.

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise what this has brought us to. Of course we made sure to put everyone who wasn’t part of the ‘in crowd’ into prison for going into business on their own when it should have been obvious that the drug business was a government operation so… a whole lot of people went to jail.

This monster of unbridled greed finally eats itself I suppose. We’re seeing it happen now. The band keeps playing and the MSM has all these Jon Benet Ramsey/Super Bowl distractathons going on… Obama’s got his Blackberry. Nero probably still has his fiddle and a deep unrest is percolating through the hearts and minds of the great unwashed.

Some of us are ‘seeing’ this while most of us are ‘watching’ this and Queen Apocalypse pulls her skirt and shows a little leg at the Darktown Strutters’ Ball.

All of this reminds me of that Sufi tale about the chicken. A master had three disciples and he gave each one of them a chicken. He told them to take the chicken somewhere that no one could see them and kill it and then come back. Fairly soon, two of them returned with a dead chicken. It was hours later when the last one arrived still holding a live chicken. The master asked him what happened. He said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. Everywhere I go the chicken sees… ’’and will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” And so on and so forth.

So here you are today with the house falling down. Small timers and wannabe big timers who got in your way or wouldn’t pay the toll are in jail for doing what you have been doing all along. Certain nations, with the most powerful militaries in the world, pummel the smallest and most defenseless people they can find. Hey… Israel even has time to go mucking about in Dafur. I bet that’ll take all the Bob Marley off of the boomboxes on the camels and Jeeps.

The system is in free fall. Is it hard to spot who caused this? Nah, you can just go around with a clipboard and write down the names of the people being appointed to fix it and… keep an eye on the people who appointed them and don’t forget who they replaced. If you ask any of them they will tell you it all started with the guys before that and they’re just here to clean up the mess.

I’ve said this a number of times but I wind up repeating myself. This is a movie. What this is, is showbiz life where you get to see what happens to people who believe in and follow the people who are leading them to slaughter. Maybe you are smarter than that and you see what’s going on and it doesn’t surprise you that there are more people on stage than there is in the audience.

According to the people who cooked up this steaming pile of shit, we need a cool cucumber of a long tall drink of Lincolnesque water to burble us over the waves. Now they re going to tech this and tech that and even they know it won’t happen in nothing flat. It’s going to be a long hard grind of taking that much more from the great unwashed who never got to sit at the Fat Pig Smorgasbord Table in the first place.

For all they know they are the thing being served. This may be the reason that I don’t eat pork. Somehow, I think this has something to do with taking a girl’s virginity and then reconstituting it into extra virgin olive oil that melds beautifully with the radicchio and arugula. I would like to see that because turning chickenshit into chicken salad is a magical art and I enjoy theater. However, I suspect most people enjoy theater more than I do. So you probably won’t be sitting next to me when the film begins.

I’ll be way out in the grassy area dreaming bout Hawaii.

Paradise is possible but people fuck it up. Who does this? I don’t. I don’t “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.” But somebody does. Paradise is in the midst of all of us and tangled in the tears of ruin and rot and here comes a flood of tears… “is that all I got?”

Maybe it is simple and maybe it is complex… whatever got us into this fucking mess. It kind of looks like we ran out of love before we ran out of things… all of us are not like this. I suspect that most of us are not like this. But this is like this and someone tell me why that is. Someone tell me why this is…

Something is wrong somewhere and it affects every one of us. It hurts the ones with a conscience. It doesn’t affect the ones without a conscience. I don’t know how long you can go on being bamboozled by, “there it is again.” But me? I know when to say “when” and that was a long time ago. I don’t understand the road you want to follow so I got a road of my own and I suspect there will be enough of us somewhere, somehow to step away from all the insane, lying and thieving and killing and torturing and tormenting of others and ourselves all day long day in and day out forever and fucking ever and I may never see Hawaii again and it is only an idea in my mind from a dream I had that died in my own destruction but I do believe someone will find it someday, some way, some how and I wish them the very best of it.

I do not think you will find it in doing the same tired fucked up things you did last time. Last time keeps becoming next time until it almost looks like humanity is eternally whipping itself in the ass as trudges up and slides back down a slippery hill with tired oxen. It would make all the difference in the world if the driver wasn’t drunk on himself and asleep at the wheel.

I would like to gently shake your shoulder and say, “Darling, it’s time to get up.” But you have been ridden hard and put away wet and I don’t think you get it yet but you will… you will. It will dawn on you. Sooner or later, sooner or later happens. For those who care, I will say that you do have what it takes to go another day and another. Keep your fire bright, tend to the ones that you love and carry on. It is always darkest just before the breaking of the dawn.

Something New

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