aw shit...

It finally posted after I flipped off the screen for 45 seconds while holding my breath for 4 minutes so as to rid myself of hiccups by oxygen deprivation.

Books in a Time of Fucking Hiccups

Tagged.

Total number of books you've owned:
2,800 would be conservative. And I bought all of them thoughfully and usually for the lowest possible price in a used bookstore in the Bay Area. They are all in storage. I mostly watch television now or do blogging. (There are some nice ones above).

Last book you bought:
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It's like my fourth copy because I keep giving them away.

Last book you read:
Maugham Malraux's the Coffeehouse Diaries.

Five books that mean a lot to you:
1. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Arguably the most important book written this century which no one reads. It did win a Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
2. Love in the Western World by Denis DeRougemont.
3. The Second Coming by Walker Percy. The only love story between a man and woman in the last 500 years not based on the Romantic Myth.
4. The Precarious Vision by Peter Berger. No one has ever read this but me. It is brilliant.
5. Anything by Thomas Merton, Anders Nygren, Flannery O'Conner or, er... okay...maybe just a few works of Soren Kierkegaard. Anne Lamott is great but not dead yet. May she live to be 110.

So there you go. And thanks to Talleulah for tagging me. She is a vixen.

Leaded or unleaded?

I use to joke with my friend Dan (before he got cancer) that he should sneak up on me and put a ballpine hammer in my head...without my knowing it...sneak attack...game over...for me.

Swift...efficient...easy.

Well. sigh...Dan never got his chance because he was killed quickly by cancer. Swift...efficient...not easy.

He was a sweet man.

We use to joke such because lif eis not easy. In fact, at times it is hell and a damned bother.

I do not agree with suicide, but I understand it.

Okay...today's post...

Leaded or Unleaded.

I am leaded. (thus the ballpine reference).

There are illicit drugs and precribed drugs. They are not often so different but it does not matter.

We have been playing (under doctor's supervision) with my brain soup.

It is not so very good.

I am leaded.

And if you know anyone who goes through this they will tell you the same. Trade-off.

I got to sleep through the night last night.

But I am heavy-lidded and look like an idiot today.

Trade-off.

I mean, if my girlfriend met me for the first time today she would run yelling and screaming. I would be manacled immediately and viewed like a foreign object in a wrestling ring or Robert DeNiro after a prize fight or, worse, after being peiced together as a monster.

But I digress.

Normally I am a really cute guy. Really.

(That and I do dishes.)

So I feel HEAVY today because we are trying new medications to deal with my obviously demented brain (as much as you find it entertaining...read Otto Rank).

It is not as bad as it was last week. That was like "Oswald and Ghosts".

No...this is like having someone sneak up and slam a ballpine hammer into your skull...only you live.

You are slowed (I mean, c'mon...ballpine hammer in your skull? that's gotta cut down on some motor skills right?)

And it is embarassing because wherever you go people point "Hey look at the ballpine hammer in that guy's head!"

It's hard to hide it.

You try and find a good cap...a baseball hat...always a wooden handle sticking out and some slight crainial ooze.

So the alternative is to try new drugs.

They feel weird.

You feel leaded...heavily so. IT also feels like someone is grabbing the back of your cerebral cortex and doing hand exercises. Your eyelids do 30 pound reps but do not feel "buff".

You wonder about the perfect crime. The one where Dan, knowing he is doomed, is utterly free. He creeps up with the Ballpine hammer and he laughs just as you do.

All is peace.

Crush da enemies...watch TV..listen to Conan

A brief excerpt from Conan O'Brien's latest RANT... prepare to wee yourself.

We will also see a stunning increase in the number of televisions per household, as small TV displays are added to clocks, coffee makers and smoke detectors. Manufacturers will even place a small plasma screen inside car airbags so that accident victims will have something to watch while they wait for help. Toddlers' bowls will have a television at the bottom, and children will be encouraged to eat all of their mush so they can see Morley Safer. Televisions will even be placed inside books and, before long, books will evolve into no more than hundreds of small flat-screens stapled together. Reading the opening chapter of "Moby Dick" will include watching 10 hours of "Gunsmoke."

Fucking hilarious..and sexy too.

One of the best Cultural Anthropologists out there on popular culture is Lindsey of The Immoderation Girls. Check her out.

Ah...Frank

"Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy."
~Frank Sinatra

Art is...

Just read several blogs this a.m. All made some mention of the essential role of art.

Look at two of these statements...two pensees...

The job of art is to chase ugliness away. ~ Bono

Art is the last defense against death. ~Andre Malraux

What are we to make of these statements?

Well in some ways they are saying the same thing.

To re-cast it we first have to admit that death is inevitable. Hemingway said "All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you."

So Art will not defend us from death. Ugliness? Perhaps, but not death.

What it defends us against is meaninglessness. It is, as Ernest Becker pointed out so fully in The Denial of Death, a hopeful protest against meaninglessness and death.

And it works. Van Gogh still lives and walks among us. So does Hemingway, and Becker. Some day the human race will mourn the loss of Bono. It is inevitable.

So in the same interview, wanna know what Bono also said about art?

Our definition of art is putting your head above the parapet, and be ready for the custard pie. I happen to love the taste of it.

There is a man who truly understands.

Add your comments and questions. Have fun. It's your only dime. Use it.

The Abyss 2

“The Infinite Abyss” ~Pascal

Wow.

I am not an “infinite abyss”. Very limited abyss-wise.

I just cussed out a Capital One Tele-Matrix-Attack-Person on the phone.

I feel a little bad.

I am just grass...a vapor. The grass blows back and forth but is gone, er...later.

I am not an “infinite abyss”.

I am a mini-abyss at best.

True…

Still this God dogs me.

God pursues for reasons I cannot fathom. Not the dead god of the Fundamentalists...but the One we all sense at times is just around the corner...spying like a gleeful parent.

Did Pascal ever consider that somewhere in God’s own nature God wants or wishes to take God’'s Own "Immutable Objectiveness" (if it exists) and utter fullness and GIVE IT in love to any who will take it?

The Wager Part 1

Another Pascal argument was his famous "“wager"”.

It goes like this. If you wager all on God and he turns out to be True, then you win. If you wager all on God and He does not exist, you have at least lived a good life.

Either way you “win”.

Hmnnn.

I love Pascal, especially the Dutton edition of Pascal. The Penguin edition sucks. Almost like two different Pascals...Dueling Pascals.

Anyway, Pascal rocks (Dutton). But on this “Wager” he was an idiot.

Paul of Tarsus mocks him 1600 years earlier (is it 1500?).

“If Jesus is not raised from the dead we are, of all men (and women) most to be pitied.”

Paul. That party animal, also says that if the J-Man thing is NOT SO, better to “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.” He quotes contemporary Greek poets. He hangs out with those who wanna explore.

I encourage this too. Always read poets. Read Pinsky and Snyder and Ginsberg. Read Mary Oliver and William Everson.

But make no mistake, St. Paul sends Pascal’s argument home in a blazing pine box. (oh that was cheap!).

The Abyss Part 1

“
"The infinite abyss can only be filled by in infinite and immutable object...that is to say, only by God Himself”" ~Pascal

Pascal'’s infamous “God-shaped vacuum” argument.

Well you can sell that today because we ALL suck. No one seems unclear on that.

Period.

Pensees 4

Love is the core.

The Greatest. So says Paul. So says Jesus. So says God.

Paul was the first plagiarist. No modern “saint” could ever get away with suggesting “castration” of the hyper-religious. You have to admit, it would stop their breeding.

I was born in the wrong century for sure.

Pensees 3

I weep like a 12 year-old. Hard. Bitter hard...when I watch the scene in Chariots of Fire when the man runs like an animal full of faith, hope, love and abandon under the harsh Scottish sky.

I cry because he is doing what he was created to do and we do not.

Pensees 2

I wanna do three chapters on what is wrong with all these mega-churches and their self-absorption and the greed and how Jesus has been made utterly symbolic and commemorative and has been simply lost while He simply seeks the lost which is all of us.

Do you have a chapter? Who damaged you and who led you to faith, or hope or love?



I wanna do three more chapters on how modern Christendom continually collapses like a black hole into the ever present imploding star of Gnosticism and Legalism gone bad.

But I’m not gonna. It’s too obvious.

So how do we move forward?

Well, I guess it would be in faith and hope and love in a Christocentric universe.

Pensees 1

A Call to a Christocentric understanding of the Universe that is based in Faith, Hope and Love.

The universe is Triune...it reflects in various ways its maker. I offer no proof. It just is. Run with me, or watch TV. Channel 3.

Paul saw that not much we associate with remains after death, Not much ultimately matters after matter as we know it ends.

Faith Hope and love...these three “abide”. They continue. Sure, maybe they change a bit, but in their new form they are still the same...faith hope and love.

These are three lenses we can look through here and, then later.

So why not now?

What are your three lenses? Can you name them?