Thursday, November 26, 2009

Elephant Therapy

I learned through a friend, (which is really a miraculous statement in itself.  Imagine the utter importance of a human if they can be both trusted and teaching simultaneously) that elephants have the same complex emotional structure of human beings.   Apparently, when bounty hunters fly over a herd, they’ll shoot down all of the Proud, Leathery, Gray, Stalwarts for their bones. The ivory.  The calves, that is, the babies…  Their children grow up to have post-traumatic stress syndrome.  A mentally debilitating  And socially devastating experience. Won’t somebody please think of the children before we take all of their teeth and sport some fine and fancy Piano keys?  Some imprisoned elephants randomly mutiny, trampling all of the workers under the big top.  And I think that is as a good a reason as any-


To stay away from the circus.


So here’s what I figure’s next.  These traumatized babies, they aren’t very smart.  So we’ll take them all to the zoo.  Each one will have a small pen in which it can run around and shit.  Literally.  And then this guy will come along and he’ll be named Zookeeper Max for this experiment.  Zookeeper Max comes up to projectbabyelephantone and remarks “Hello there, child.  I have brought you your food for the day.  And this animal dwells in its only existence, a corral, with not a single recognizable object besides a small black and white
Panda Bear.


The elephant wouldn’t know it’s a panda bear, obviously.  I mean, how is an elephant supposed to recognize a bear, when would they ever even see each other?  So this calf will mostly see it as a symbol of comfort.  Every morning it would wake up and Zookeeper Max would hurl tons of food and water into his pen.  It would be mostly grass, but probably random other vegetables and maybe a burger or something if he eats meat.  This baby would grow and be happy, and every day he’d recognize this panda bear who would be chilling on the other side of the gates.  The elephant would think, “friend.”




And then in the middle of the night the panda bear would get very sick because he accidentally drank mineral water and he was supposed to only have fresh distilled water.  And the panda would puff up and moan and roll around and panic.  Zookeeper Max would run down the hall, needles in hand.  He’d run into the room and hit that panda with its Epipen “so fuckin hard it’ll be ‘comin back to life’ to Yazoo.”  And Zookeeper Max would try and try and there would be no helping it tonight.  Ming, or Chan or Chou, or whatever Zookeeper Max named the damn thing would die a brief, painful death.


Zookeeper Max would cry.  As he’d drag this poor carcass across its cage, projectbabyelephantone would wake up.  Mortified, he’d watch as his only friend is dragged away lifelessly in the arms of the great feeder, Zookeeper Max.  What is a baby elephant to do?


He snaps.  Tusk first into the gate.  The gates crumple under his awesome adolescence.  Zookeeper Max is shocked; he flails his arms over his head, a futile block.   A tusk slams Zookeeper Max into a wall.   Baby elephant will not follow his guiding hand any longer.


But--
Now what?


Now the escapee is a little dot in a big zoo.
And if it’s good enough for him, its good enough for me, too.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Ringing in the Holidays

Snowman

    I'm less than five years old.  I have to be at least three.  It's winter, and I'm still living in my first home.  It's a brick townhouse perched at the end of a long row of brick townhouses. 
     We moved out of that house on my fifth Halloween, and I was Wolverine that year, so I know for a fact that I had to be less than five during this memory.
    It snowed.  The whole neighborhood is white and fluffy and the hill outside of our house is a sledding paradise.  I want to make a snowman.  I want to make my first snowman ever, so I ask my father if he'll teach me.
    "Daddy, will you make a snowman with me?"
    "There's not enough snow."
    So I go to the window and I look outside and I say, "No, there is a lot of snow."
    I run upstairs and my father helps me get my winter jacket and boots and gloves and knit hat with a little bobble on the top of it.  I love that hat because I feel like Waldo from Where's Waldo.  It wasn't red and white, but the bobble was classy for a four-year-old.  I put on these waterproof snow pants that are designed to keep me dry and warm when I roll around in the snow, but I hate them because they strap over my shoulders like suspenders.
    We go outside.  Now, I'm not sure if it was because of the way the snow drifted overnight, or because my father didn't want to be seen building a snowman with his child, but he decides the best place to build a snowman was behind a dead blueberry bush to the side of our yard. 
    In the summer it always had a bluish tint to it, and it covered the power box for our street.  I would often hide in the bush and use it as a fort despite the fact that my parents repeatedly told me it was dangerous to play near the neighborhood's source of electricity.
    My father helps me roll up balls of snow from the side of our yard and one of our neighbors yards, and we stack up three perfect snowballs.  One, two three, and we have the basic anatomy of Frosty.  I'm proud of our work, and I poke button holes in his chest with my finger.  I ask my father if we have a carrot and coal.  He says no.
    "Do we have anything to put on the snowman?"
    He takes my scarf and wraps it around the snowman's non-existent neck.  I'm ecstatic.  I stand on the tiptoes of my rubber boots and attempt to poke holes in his head for eyes and a nose and a mouth.  Before I manage this, my father pulls me aside.  With his thumb he presses two eyes, a little nose, and a pleasant smile onto his face.  It is, at this point, the proudest winter day of my childhood.
    I tell my father how excited I am to show our creation to Mom.  He frowns and says, "No.  Don't tell your mother we made this."
    I'm confused but I oblige and step back a few feet to revel in the satisfaction of such a perfect, spherical, five-feet-two-inch snowman.  He needs a top hat, definitely, but we don't own one, so he'll just have to make do with a cold head.
    We stand there, my father akimbo next to our creation and me only a few yards in front of it.
    "Alright," he says.  "Time to knock it down."
    "What?"
    "Knock it down!"
    I'm dumbstruck.  It was my belief that snowmen were meant to live out their natural lives and then melt at the end of winter.  Apparently, this is not the case for our poor frozen friend.  I'm incapable of reasoning.
    "But he's smiling."
    My father's jaw hangs open for a moment.  Then he blinks.
    "Okay.  Now tackle him."
    "How?"
    "Just run at him and throw your arms up and knock it over."
    I wasn't an overly sensitive child, but I was a coward.  Whenever the dancing vegetables came on Sesame Street I would run away and cry.  I think it was the singing baritone broccoli that really bothered me.
    But I'm standing here staring at this snowman that took all of a twenty minutes to make.  Our snowman is still smiling.  He has no arms, though I had intended to find some.  To me, this was my personal Prometheus.  My masterpiece.  A dream realized.
    To my father, it was football practice.
    "If you don't knock him over, I will!"  My father is a hard ass.  I know he's not bluffing.
    "Wait!" I cry.  "I'll do it!"  Something inside of me was convinced that if I, and not my father, destroyed the snowman, then this would all be worthwhile.  I told you, I'm incapable of reasoning.
    I remember breathing.  The wind carried my breath, and as I started clumsily sprinting towards our creation puffs of cold vapor breezed past my eyes.  I was racing towards my newest friend like a linebacker on a mission and as my awkward boots lifted from the ground clumps of wet snow stuck to my heels.  We collided.  The snow stung my skin and my eyelashes were caked white.  I remember lying on my face, ashamed.  The deed was done.
    I roll over and the clouds from the night before still haven't left.  The sky is gray and still and archetypically January.  I eventually reach my feet and dust the snow from my shoulders.  My father is laughing.  A little ambivalent about the whole situation, I smile in an attempt to please him.
    "Alright.  Let's go inside.  Don't tell your mother."
    "Why not?"
    "Because she'll get mad."
    So we trudge back twenty feet indoors and he helps me take my boots off.  My mother calls me from my bedroom to change my clothes.  I scamper up the carpeted stairway and stomp into my room soaking wet.
    "Did you have fun?"  She smiles and gives me a hug.
    I laugh and tell her how much fun I had.
    As she helps me remove my sweater she asks, "So what did you two do?"
    I stare directly at her, silent.  She asks me again, "So what did you two do?"
    "We made a snowman."
    "Oh really?  Where is it?"  She is still smiling.
    If I had to tell the truth, I figured I should do it with pride, "I knocked it down!"
    She slaps me.  Right on the ass.  I get spanked for playing in the snow.
    "Why did you do that before I got to see it?"
    "Dad told me to knock it down and not tell you!"
    She spanks me again.  She isn't smiling.  She flips me around and points her finger, "Don't you lie to me."
    I'm shocked.  I didn't want to knock it down in the first place!  I only did it to please my father, and then my own mother gives me a spanking!  Of course, I can't explain this to her.  She didn't believe me, and that's all I know.
    I can't remember if she talked it over with my father.  I can't remember if she apologized.  I know my father never apologized for making me destroy my first snowman minutes after we had created it.  I wasn't too scared to be honest, I just wanted to make the man happy.
    I'm not sure if my parents even discussed the snowman, if it mattered to them.  I did learn something, though  From that day on I knew that if I ever came to a crossroads where I had to choose between love and orders, I would always choose the former.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Fuckin Commie Hipsters

Once in a while I actually learned something in college. Sitting in the pews of a non-denominate chapel I listened to a terrific Philadelphian poet give some of the most valuable advice I’d ever acquire in my quest to becoming a writer:


Never get more than seven hours of sleep.


He offered more, but that little statement implies so much. Starve yourself rabid. Allow dreams to brew and try to ignore the spider webs dangling from the blue prints. Let no day go by when a white page is not inked with some sparkle of truth or beauty or trash. An excellent poet, he was, and I value his work over some of the most coveted pens in the world. On a winter night in a dead mining city in Johnstown, PA, when the weather was frigid and wet and all day long I tore movie tickets and brewed heaping trash bags of theater-style pop corn, that which motivated me was a washed-up, AARP-card carrying, long-unsuccessful beat poet in a glass and pine chapel somewhere near the border of West Virginia. He was not a good public speaker, and I was ecstatic.


I went to class. My roommates, my friends, they got stoned and mastered video games. Their kung-fu got to be much better than my kung-fu. Nevertheless, I went to class on said winter night in late January. I relished the five minute breaks in our two hour classes. I smoked my cigarettes. I chatted with fat pimply girls and weird film majors that would never see their careers take off. It was all very depressing. Blue, blue, blues.


One way or the other, I knew this was as beat as it would all get. Chilling up on a mountain with a tuition paid for by my father, listening to some rednecks write poetry about being a police officer on Cops… I just knew that if there was more, it would never be that ironically beautiful.


Halladay said, never get more than seven hours of sleep. He said that in times of his greatest doubt and confusion, he’d written his best work. To that, I am largely reliant upon faith. Sometimes, however, it works out well. A day of writing can be as exhausting and liberating as a day of bricklaying. The rush never captivates the experience, but afterwards, you look over the roads you have paved or the monuments you have erected and there is the most exhilarating sense of accomplishment ever to be experienced. The poet’s spoken words are rarely evocative. That said, if the poem can evoke anything, then it is a success. They should cast doubt. It is the goal of the writer to settle scores. In writing, the words can be truthful or beautiful or utter garbage. Text can hold so much power, but it is largely reliant upon poetic wording in order to exact the appropriate emotions. The truth is valiant, whether glorious or hideous. Beauty is passionate. It titillates the senses and demonstrates great form. Garbage, as one could assume, is the flotsam of the fingertips. It means little alone, carries no weight in infinite numbers, and just barely satisfies the poet’s primal need to create.


Either way, it’s hardly enough just knowing that there was once a great writer from Philadelphia who spoke at a lonesome university in south west Pennsylvania. I’m up late now. It’s almost two and I feel that I have much longer to go.


At some point I realized that all the Beat kids were missing something important. All those communists and collectivists and anarchists and socialists and evangelicals and especially those apathetic pothead hipsters, they all carried a spine fused from a new generation of passion. They raged against machines. They smashed pumpkins. They had bad religion and they were ready to claim they hated all of those bands. Beat, they were not. They knew the Beat. They’d “read their Kerouac” and they’d snubbed their noses at Bob Dylan every once in a while. What annoyed me, what really grinded me down to a pulp and got me to realize that I did not want to be Beat, was when I realized that these people, these masses, these peers and friends, would have ostracize the Beat as soon as they’d meet it.


This sheer angst, this violent opposition to individuality, this blatant display of intelligence being wasted on, what, a college education, discontent with their promised future careers, and misery? This was their whole plan: Every rebel, punk, beat, gangsta, yuppie I ever met, it all revolved around revolution and war and a strategically illogical solution. The evil corporations had to go down. The government has to step in. The government needs to butt out. The government needs to control. The government needs to abandon. The government must expand. The government must centralize. They all had different ideas and they all dreamed big and they all lacked focus. Every time I got into a discussion with any of them, they spoke like poets. They talked of ideals and morals and the wave of the future. They evoked powerful images and gathered violent tensions into one big ball and let it turn into a bullet at the end of the page that said
END HERE.


I wouldn’t do that to you, reader. I’m not writing poetry right now. Before I stamp the save button for the night, I must summarize the important connection between that which is Beat, and that which is Capitalist.


The Beat is a label. It is a definition. It is long dead in society, masked by a new image of counter-culture. The war on Capitalism is not Beat. The war on Religion is not Beat. The war on Drugs is not Beat. The war on Terror is not Beat. A war on anything, anywhere, is not Beat. Such a concept is vulgar. A peoples’ war demonizes one side and idolizes another, ultimately disposing of all discussion and controversy and anything which may serve the public.


Another great man once wrote a list of people who should be dragged out into the street and shot. He included the obvious choices, like fascists, of course. But the last denotation was, appropriately, “people who write lists of people who should be dragged out into the street and shot.” To claim that all Capitalism is evil merely because the certain method is corrupt falls much in the same line of thinking that a person who has a cold sore in November must sleep around.


Frequently, these Punks will thrash against anything which seems to provide for a reasonable future, as if living for anything but the present is amoral. I cannot ascertain where such a prejudice comes from, but I am certain it was not their laissez-faire decision to purchase their band shirts at the local shopping mall and not, say, Wal-Mart. The fluidity of today’s logic is likable to yogurt. It flows neither quickly or clearly. The rationale behind Capitalism is that of relativity. It is not the judge’s understanding of the law that brings down the verdict, but the communication of relative emotions between the jury and the lawyers. Capitalism, unlike socialism, requires relativity in order to function at a personal, private and free level. In order to make a personal decision between two people, there must be a contract that is approved by each party as beneficial. This is a relative decision that stems from personal self-interest. I’m not saying anything new.


Long story short, I came to this decision while I was peeing:
Without relativity, one cannot have a relationship. And without relationships, people stop coexisting peacefully and begin to fear. As their fears and stereotypes and prejudices become more applied to daily life, they become hateful and ultimately violent.


We can see this, today, with the careful dynamics at work between what is peaceful and liberating, and what is peaceful and enslaves. It is a fine line that requires constant darkening. In the past, when faced with poverty and war and famine and plague the growth and height of civil rights and democracy and a free market was marked not by the bombs that were dropped, but the poems that were written.
We must revisit the blue prints, and once again, we must trace the lines.