Tag: “Bob”

Cult of the Hidden Joke.

Sound Advice

LIKE MANY LATE 20th/EARLY 21st CENTURY Westerners, I have seen a lot of music in my day. This makes me prone to “ohrwurms,” as the the Germans call them — “earworms” — those annoying songs in your head that JUST WON’T STOP excuse me.

A new weapon has been unveiled in the fight against unwanted brain abrasion. Simply point your browser to http://unhearit.com/ for Unhearit.com: Get That Damn Song Out Of Your Head. They’ll instantly give you a catchy tune that’ll knock the one in your head right into next week. (This week, of course, you’ll be hearing the one you clicked on, unless it sets up one of those standing waves where you contemplate Tolstoy’s white horse for twenty minutes before going about your business. Me, I’m going to put on a little Schumann.)

First-Step Messiah

CONSIDERING THE GREAT POTENTIAL CONTAINED in most human beings, and the difficulty we have getting started on projects, perhaps we might accordingly revise our notions of messianism. The Re-(or Un-)born King may not set things right so much as give us the tools and gumption we need (or point out that we’ve had them all along). After all, getting started is the hardest start to any project. Perhaps we just need a little push and can take it from there.(1)

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(1) Disclaimer: This being Monday morning, I tend not to believe in a literal Messiah. In fact, I tend not to believe in a Messiah at all unless as metaphor or if I have a really, really bad headache. But “believe as thou wilt shall be the hole in the Law.”

For The Kids (A Mini Rant On NorCal “Spirituality”)

“There’s so many choices here, a man could half-starve before picking breakfast.”
— Ol’ Thinkypants

THAT MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY WILL NOT long endure whose members celebrate every festival but their own(1). C’mon people — whatever your tradition is, it got Grandma and Grandpa over here, fed them through wars and afflictions, and kept them and your folks together long enough to produce you. Don’t you want to know their secret? So dust off the shelf, pick up whatever’s yours and have at. It’s yours by right of succession through love; It only lives in that way when someone qualified is at the controls — and that’s you!.

So don’t dabble — delve! and remember what Ol’ Thinkypants says: “Drink deep, or don’t even spit.”

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(1) Written after reading one more Sunday-papers account of a ritual-appropriating church and reflecting rather sourly on those who embrace something else due to ignorance of their own. (Informed choice I got no problem with.)

Things Missed (80s)

GENERIC FOOD. FOND MEMORIES OF shopping the Lucky’s store in Concord c. 1981 wherein a vast wall of white and yellow cans, boxes and bottles severally proclaimed “COLA.” “CIGARETTES.” “CHILI.” “DOG FOOD.” “BREAKFAST CEREAL.” “ART.” (That last is ironic, but if they’d only let in Andy Warhol and a big Sharpie we could’a had us a time.)

(For that matter, I also miss “Repo Man.”)

Being Here, Doing This

THE GUY IN THE BACK seat of Cash Cab
is heavily into the Neo-Beat Chic
(hip snap-gnosis, deprecate gesture):
Shirt buttoned horn rimmed open face serious sandwich,
And I guarantee he’s wearing
although I can’t see them
scuffed brown oxfords.

O my tribe, my freakish tribe;
freaks and smarters, lovers and waders;
It seems sometimes we’ve been us all:
timorous t-shirt wearer
ardent bandplayer
elder statesman
louder advocate
interoutcast
audient
spotlighter
extra.

And I know this, him, us, the shoes, all and none, because:

Mine are in the bottom of the closet,
road-kissed soles of a tale that’s its own telling
ready and waiting
and definitely
on the bus.

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