only the comedians are free

this is something my wise friend marilyn pointed out during the greatest lies of the past few years. no wonder, whenever i see her at barnes & noble, she's browsing the HUMOR section.

to me, this did seem a bit frivolous and cruel. aren't the wars and subterfuges in our day worth serious consideration? mustn't we weep for the wounded, succor the helpless, cry for the suffering? alas, that's what most of us do, nothing. we love to feel pity while reading the morning paper over eggs benedict. yes, it's very much like complaining, and complaining, and complaining, all way to the bank.

lately, it's become overwhelmingly obvious we don't know what's going on behind the scenes in the wider world. banks eat up banks, countries continue to trap other countries into wars they can't win. the real dangers hidden behind the false declarations of nation states and censorship have never been more effective and dissuading than today, despite the popularity of certain internet leaks, which so far haven't told us anything we didn't already know.

true, i've always maintained it's wise not to fret over things you can do nothing about. the cynical commentator n.n. taleb: you have a real life if and only if you don't compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. alas, nietzsche submits civilizations die without intense inner competition. it's enough to make you throw up your hands and emit HIS LAUGHTER OF THE GODS. unfortunately, human beings make very bad divinities.

so, i come back to my friend marilyn's assertion: truth can be found in the stand-ups (they're called that for a reason) and the cartoonists. kings of lear's time kept a fool close by. and why? to keep them on the beam, to reveal those who cringed and flattered. skip politics, self-improvement, the vampire novels, they only get swollen on your blood. go for a transfusion to the cartoonists.

latest photos: www.pbase.com/wwp/neg2

and www.pbase.com/wwp/coffee i will have more to say about schopenhauer later.

taking advantage of chance

what a great talent this is! visiting my sister last week and walking around her town of mill valley, i realized she could strike up a conversation with anyone. that made me incredibly envious. it brought back my travel days in europe when i chased women. how did i do it?

and a moment ago, reading the haiku poet buson, i realized he and all the others of his ilk - basho, shiki, issa - opened themselves up to chance, mostly in the form of travel; they had the ability to be surprised anywhere, anytime of day, by almost anything. yes, we live by chance much more than we appreciate.

my favorite flavor of the moment, a cartoonist by the name of macleod. he's written a book called ignore everybody, and 39 other keys to creativity, a wall street journal best-seller. bored in his life of a new york advertising exec, he began whiling away the time in bars, drawing cartoons on the back of business cards. then he initiated a blog http://www.gapingvoid.com/ the rest is history.

one of his recommendations: find something you can do creatively, anywhere, anytime. haiku a great example. taking pics with your camera phone another. here's an event i stumbled on today while having a double espresso at barnes & noble:

www.pbase.com/wwp/lens

when i heard the announcement over the loudspeaker, i thought, 'maybe a photo op.' and perfect since kids doing broadway songs a delight.

yes, i'm in love with my droid x. all my other cameras look like cameras, and i can't check my email or chat on them. the expensive stuff gives a finer traditional photo, however i'm tired of trying to compete with the big boys. besides, i've always like rough edges, in women and in art.

we're all renters here

private property changed the world, that's for certain. suddenly, faithfulness in marriage and dna became big issues. barbed-wire fences, surveillance cameras, prisons, they all sprang from the seeds planted.

and it's amazing to me people buy houses with the illusion it belongs to them. first, it usually belongs to the bank. secondly, you spend enormous amounts of time and energy to build your castle or cave. the hidden expenses boggle the mind: leaky roofs, overflowing sewers, frayed wiring. then you have to furnish it, change it, furnish it again.

my mother constantly bought a new/old house to fix up, getting it cheap and blowing her life energy decorating the walls and moving sand. once she had the perfect little stone house atop the oakland hills, a fantastic view of san francisco bay. my god, i'd kill for it now. did she keep it? of course not, the money invested in a track home where she didn't have to climb steps.

she did spring from the depression generation, her desperation for solvency understandable. had she bought rentals it would have made sense. these house the sanest of us. as my friend marilyn once said, 'life is a choice between taking a trip and buying a house'. and steve martin in father of the bride loved his house so much he might have expired from the want of it after selling.

all our wealth based on this market. if you haven't seen the movie inside job, i recommend it. the last crash based on an inflated economy instituted by no money down. that plus deregulation and the bankers off and running. MAKING HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY LIKE SNIFFING COCAINE WITH A THOUSAND DOLLAR BILL. yes, the filmmaker backed up his assertion.

alas, americans, being basically gamblers when it comes to business, never seem to get upset by financial skulduggery! sexual indiscretion by congressional leaders, that's another story. we're passionate about illicit passion, maybe cause it can unseat the mighty and bring them low (down with us).

is there safety in property? that's a question you have to answer for yourself. squandering what little time we have to gain a bit of comfort, most of us can't deny it's worth it.

here's some in-house pictures from thanksgiving:

www.pbase.com/wwp/thanks

www.pbase.com/wwp/din

for the love of aphorisms

maxims have always delighted me. one of the best i ever found on the wall of a berkeley men's room: the price of freedom is loneliness. i couldn't have said it better myself.

this an old tradition. quips of the roman martial famous since his time: Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst. or, A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere. of course, they get nastier and more ribald.

cynicism definitely part of the fun. the consummate maximist la rochefoucauld difficult to top: some silly people know themselves for what they are, and skillfully turn their silliness to good account. or the man who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks. this master attributes everything we do to self-love, and he's got many an example to prove it.

okay, i admit it, i've written thousands, especially after reading nietzsche for the first time. here's a whole collection influenced by him:

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/pretexts

and part of my reasoning this: most authors/intellects remembered for one sharp statement. true, shakespeare penned thousands, coined all kinds of words. no one with any sense would try to compete with him. still, he didn't say everything the way i would. for example, here's a summation of life:

life is one long improvisation.

simple enough, hard to disprove, and the way i've lived. here's another hard lesson i've learned.

all the problems of love come from not asking the right questions when they need to be asked.

that's right. doesn't do any good after the relationship dead. i wonder if i can make some up on the spot?

emotional blackmail means making someone else responsible for your feelings.

you can crow if you're a crow.

the only coin you have to spend: time.

okay, not great on short notice. and you have to write thousands to get a good one. here's another post:

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/zen

with a brilliant editor i might sound like a genius. (no maxim intended.)

the sister and the madman

early on, wrote a lot about the artist/poet going mad - van gogh, nietzsche. actually, at times, i felt an alienation so profound it seemed to be schizophrenia. in london one christmas i sat in my room, watching the dial of the meter going round and round. japanese tourists in the deserted city took pictures of the dirty thames. a man sitting across from me on the tube transformed into a chicken, very like the famous scene in chaplin's the gold rush.

i visited an army psychiatrist on the san francisco presidio where we lived. 'i'm sure i'll go crazy,' i said, 'if i have to go into the service.' he didn't blink. obviously, he thought i'd do fine. i did and i didn't. coast guard boot camp the worst experience in my life. i learned what it was like to be a slave. however, i read the new testament - only religious books allowed - and survived.

the only reason for drunkeness onstage: a release from inhibitions. and i believed insanity served the same purpose. much later i gave a talk in an english class on the difference between creativity and delusion. my conclusion: the insane repeat themselves over and over again, the same phrases, the same images. the poet, on the other hand, flows in and out of the unknown. true, some have been crazy, gone crazy, or been made crazy. these weren't their productive periods, the images too arcane for the rest of us.

i'd forgotten the pleasure i once indulged, reading the works of nietzsche. and today i picked up the walter kaufman translation i read long ago. friedrich really a psychologist:

Happiness lies in the swiftness of feeling and thinking: all the rest of the world is slow, gradual, and stupid. Whoever could feel the course of a light ray would be very happy, for it is very swift.

one wonderful thought plucked out of many, this brought to mind the play i wrote about nietzsche while living in berlin. here's a speech from it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9WmP4D_mmY

and i've just posted a few pictures which might suffice as illustrations:

www.pbase.com/wwp/neon

good cop, bad cop (emotional blackmail)

or blindsided by attraction. that's seems to be what happened. i asked my friend marilyn about it. she said, 'whenever you get that amphetamine rush, watch out. usually it means you've found someone like a family member who's going to give you what the other one never did.'

alas, my mother did use a lot of sarcasm and threats of abandonment. 'if you don't like this hotel, you can go to another one.' 'gee, that's almost good.' and so on. at the same time she could be very encouraging and supportive. back and forth, back and forth. if it shakes up a criminal, it will certainly unnerve a kid.

but why should i be attracted to the same kind of punishment again? am i merely a latent masochist who let's s&m disguise itself as romance? it could be worse, of course. once on a plane to new york, i sat next to a black fellow who worked in a san francisco brothel. he told tales of dentists who like to be whipped and ridden like horses. he volunteered to show me pictures. at first intrigued, i gradually grew disgusted and refused his offer. yes, i have an intermittent seamy side. luckily, it doesn't last long.

you can't violate the muse. a few years ago, a friend sent his manuscript for a new novel. he'd gone through a terrible divorce and couldn't as yet see how he'd been responsible as well for the mess. and so his new manuscript, set in a hospital, treated every woman character harshly. not surprising considering the last published novel ended with the estranged wife as the heroine who rescues him literally from a himalayan cliff. putting her on a balustrade, he had to eventually push her off the precipice he'd survived!

yes, the promise of being saved, the religious element of 'falling' in love. the human and the divine get all mixed up. the virgin mary transforms into kali, both with way too much power. no wonder all those old movies from the thirties start out with the lovers-to-be hating each other. there's nowhere to go but up.

a zen monk states, 'marriage is a fighting arrangement', and richard bach in pairing attempts to teach couples to be fair combatants. this last book tells the tale truly, how it is. no pain, no gain. ALL THE TROUBLES OF LOVE COME FROM NOT ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS. there you have it, my words to the wise, one of which i'm obviously not.

the family: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU_cCJpxec

various versions of happiness

funny, if you have to ask 'what is happiness?' you may never have experienced it! on the other hand, none of us really knows what 'normal' is. the code in whitefish, montana, definitely not that of san francisco. (a movie i remember with a lot of affection: leaving normal. two women in a vw bus flee nebraska and end up in alaska homesteading.)

and it seems like happiness equally vague and transitory. it happened to me the other day, sitting in costco, eating chicken bake. i looked at bright lights above in a criss-cross of steel as though they were stars in heaven. all the decayed and growing people passing held my interest. i didn't flinch or look at the ground as i often do. what i thought was: wow, it's amazing to be so relaxed and at home in the world.

if that were normal, would i know it as happiness? i have realized one element always present with happiness: feeling at home and comfortable in your own body. morphine must help the dying to experience a moment of bliss. when i visited my friend randy in the hospital this summer, his state didn't seem so bad. i came away feeling death not nearly so bad as i had thought. after all, i suspect we never know when we're dead!

that morbid thought aside, i do have to admit over all contentment comes from realizing your five-year-old dreams, the early ones before school and puberty twist us into knots. for example, in whitefish i'd stage one-person shows for the neighborhood, wrapping myself in a white sheet and declaiming to the crowd. what the content might of been completely escapes my memory.

lately, i've been taking advantage of youtube, posting the movie 'mother thunder' made in 1973 by a bunch of neophytes. it's lovely to see my young body before time has done it's worst. i read a poem 'spaceships', entitled a video 'the performance artist' with my mother's voice from the grave detailing a bit of my youth, and mused a bit on 'berlin' and 'therapy' from a series of autobiographical writings written in 1989. i've yet to sing one of the songs i've written, but that's coming.

http://www.youtube.com/user/smokysun1?feature=mhsn

so, the circle begins to be completed. happiness? maybe. that remains to be seen. at least the technology has caught up with my childhood.