Archive for the 'Comics' Category

Hard Harry Is In

Published on September 1, 2008 in ..The Dude, Comics and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

Hello my Kantian Kitties, come and let me stroke the soft fur of your moral absolutism as you snuggle on my lap and wait for me to Vito up by telling you all the things I can not do. Oh Kittie don’t be afraid. I know it’s a mess in here, a tragic wasteland where a good Kittie could get lost in the rubbish. But I’ve been too busy to clean. Busy keep my friends close but my enemies closer so don’t disrespect me Kitties, Buena Serra, Buena Serra why do you disrespect me like this?  You come here wanting me to do murder but you can’t fix all the holes in my mind so run along undertaker, go and bury me softly in this world.

I wonder if Vito’s boy abhorred what he had become even as he embraced it’s imperatives? I wonder this as I too walk my monkey strut across my driveway after I’ve had a brother in law named Hope strangled by a henchman I call Regret. And still you purr sweet pretty Kantian Kitty because you don’t believe in their god. You still believe in your Kitty god because he’s yours and everybody loves to stroke a good kitties sweet spot and call it god.

Oh listen Kitty there’s a storm brewing outside my window and it’s not just in my head anymore. Clouds are amassing, thunder rattling the horizon, the only thing rattling my horizon Kitty, bad kitty don’t get your hackles up, you’re safe inside and there’s a big bowl of comfort in the corner and it’s made of the atoms between you and I so take comfort in being you and not I and if I talk too hard I know you’ll claw your way to freedom ’cause you’re a good kitty and the excavation has begun. See I have the claw marks on me fresh and vivid, unlike the past, which is blurry and faint giving way to this meandering wait for an ignored obituary I won’t read either.

Good Kantian Kitty, good for you for all the right reasons, not fear or hope which keeps you from scratching each others eyes out is it? You’ve been given your shots full of Categorical Imperative; only for some reason I don’t trust all you good kitties and wonder if you’re still rabid with survival, kept tame by an idea as fragile as the law.

But shhhh, shhh I shouldn’t talk too hard: I’m obtuse like a crazy prophet, obdurate like a bad idea grown big with time. My Cultural Revolution has begun and you’re a Maoist pig Kittie, a Kittie contradiction since you’re also a bourgeois son of a bitch landlord. But if I stay homeless long enough you’ll have nothing on me. My head is naked and cold, Winter’s coming and the warmth of flesh is denied; but one gets used to being cold and alone. There are places to hide in the dark which has no morality except for what we bring into it so there’s always our human confort in our ideas even if my ideas and yours go separate ways. THere’s no Kittie god in the darkness of the hollow tree so I’m leaving my light saber outside to rot away in the storm with all the other Kittie god keepsakes. Maybe that’s just because we need two to joust and the hollow tree admits but one just as the hollow man admits but none.

Oooh I see judgment in you eyes again Kitties; that’s not fair, you’ve been indocrintaed and don’t even know it. We’re all so immune to this disease as long as we don’t eat the apples hanging from the hollow tree. But I have Kittie. I had to and even if it was my loneliness which brought me to the tree it doesn’t make the tree any less real. THe apple still gleams red and apples can get harder to eat the older you get. An old man’s teeth are no weapon for the truth. And perhaps I’d have been better fiding the tree later and take in its fruit in bits and pieces with a carving knife to assist the slow deliberation of the wasteland behind me. But even good Kitties have to find a place to be snug and warm and that was mine even before I knew the tree was hollow and I could go inside and play Space Invaders on a radio tuned to 1983.

THat doesn’t make sense but neither do all good kitties hanging idols on their collars and calling it home. A good tree can still come with cable and as long as we have that we’ll always have each other because in the end we’re both good kitties. Your shots are just obscured because you didn’t get them in the head and a cold and naked head reveals all. But the Dr’s don’t tell us the truth: the shots don’t last forever kitties. Disease will claim us yet and at best all we can really hope for is to become someone elses hollow tree, one grown out of our scattered seed, one in which a memory will pour like water onto the future and a molecule of matter or a meme of idea will speed branches towards the empty sky.

Just don’t go inside your own tree yet kittie. It’s dark in here. Now run along. Go play with the other kitties. I have a wasteland to contemplate before it gets too dark.

George Carlin Is Dead

Published on June 23, 2008 in ..The Dude, Comics, Humor and Life. 4 Comments

We’ve lost a few notables lately but this one hit me harder than the rest. Harder then even I would have guessed. Tim Russert’s death bothered me, Sydney Pollack’s was regrettable, but in Carlin I’ve lost a kindred spirit with all apologies to George for even bringing spirit into any discussion about him.

But as he would have pointed out himself, who cares, he’s dead. He’ll never know.

I remember getting HBO as a kid and stumbling onto Carlin’s concerts. It was like finding verbal porn without the scrambling. Not just because he cursed either but because there was a guy who spoke in ways I could understand. I got him. Even when I was young I had the sense of hearing someone speaking honestly for one of the few times in my life to that point. I was always sensitive to the bullshit around me right there in my own family and I looked forward to every new Carlin HBO concert like an old friend passing through town who was one of the few people I could really talk to and understand.

I remember having this idea as a teen that golf courses and cemeteries were a stupid waste of space and that they should be torn up for the homeless. Then shortly thereafter a new Carlin HBO special came along and he did a routine about both and of doing just that. It solidified whatever specious link to the guy I thought I had. He probably wouldn’t have suffered my stupidity more than anybody else but in my mind there were a lot of parallels in our thought and a mutual understanding. And as he would have probably agreed, all we probably really have is what’s in our head.

When I was an altar boy I stood on the alter of a mostly empty church but for a few other altar boys and less than holy malingerers and actually used the mic to do a couple of Carlin lines. As well as some show tunes. I think George would have appreciated that.

Now we live in a comedic world that embraces Cable Guys named Larry and Jeff Foxworthy. Just one more reason I wish I were young again. And George Carlin was still here.

Carlin got a little mean the past few years, still had the edge but lost a bit of the smoothness and humor. Can’t say as I blame him. Besides the state of the world he had suffered longer than I, he had lost his wife about a decade ago.

Got to wonder why he didn’t look harder for her though.

See that’s the kind of thing he’d say if someone mentioned losing a loved one. He was a died in the wool atheist. He went on about the platitudes people throw out there when someone dies. I agreed though I sometimes give in due to societal pressure and use some of those banal death tropes myself. He said that after someone said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” after a death he’d say, “Sure, you want to come on over and paint the garage?”

And his views on god have been irrefutably proven the past week. When Russert and Carlin go and Bill O’Reilly and Amy Winehouse live on any intelligent god either doesn’t exist or sucks so much it isn’t worth my notice.

He loved language and used it in his comedy artfully. He loved truth and hated bullshit and he cut right through the latter to try and mine the former for whatever humor and relevance it contained. He’s gone now and he himself wouldn’t want anyone saying silly shit like he’s looking down on us or he’ll always be in our hearts. Probably the best testimony I can give is that I feel like running out and buying a bunch of his comedy albums. That’s the only immortality he thought possible and unlike most of us, he achieved it.

From classics like the 7 Words, the Baseball-Football comparison, and our accumulation of stuff, to his more esoteric and harder to handle material, I will continue to listen.