Suspicious Chatter

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A Thousand Words

How did I feel the first time I looked in the mirror and saw myself?  I don't remember.  I have looked in the mirror thousands of times since, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with disgust.  As the years roll on, disgust has become the deadly mirror demon I daily face.  I know that I look like a middle-aged man.  If I lost forty pounds, I would look like a somewhat younger middle-aged man.  I still have my hair, I haven't gone gray quite yet, but there is something that says maturity in the face staring back at me.  My face is the face I know best.  I have grown old with it.  I have not seen it age.  The process has been slow.  It has taken me 43 years to accomplish this remarkable feat.  When total strangers look at me, something in my face tells them I am no longer young, and not yet in my dotage.  When I walk down the street with Amanda, people sense that we can't be lovers (which we are not), they don't imagine we could be friends (which we are).  They see in her what we sense as youth and they see in me what we sennse as middle age, so they assume I am her father.  She calls me Daddy sometimes as a joke.  I am old enough to be her Daddy, not too old to be her friend, too sad to be her lover.
 
Yesterday I received the most depressing email ever: a set of pictures from my 25th high school reunion, which I did not attend.  I wonder if I would have gone if the reunion had been in August, when I normally visit New England.  I don't know.  What would I say to those guys anyhow?  I haven't seen them since 1983.  We were all young men, 18 years old and just beginning life.  I never made a close lasting friend at Deeerfield.  I am fully responsible for this failure.  There were a few guys I quite liked.  Maybe the assholes I disliked are decent men now.  Maybe they have forgiven me for my many dickhead words and deeds, and perhaps they would have liked to see me again, too.  Can the past be forgiven and forgotten by people who never cared enough to hold a grudge?  I would have liked to see Charlie Cost again, the man I admired most, but he killed himself after his freshman year in college.
 
Zippy Zales!  Long time no see.  We thought you fell off the planet.  What kind of work are you doing?  I'm unemployed.  Are you married?  No, I never got married.  Got any kids?  Nope, no kids.  Do you still play the trumpet?  No, I gave that up after high school?  Do you still act?  No, I gave that up after grad school.  So what have you been doing with yourself the last 25 years or so?  That's kind of hard to say.
 
There were a frightening number of bald and balding men in those reunion pictures.  A heck of a lot of gray and graying hair.  Everyone looked fuller, bigger, changed.  Older.  They were all smiling and drinking beer and having a gay old time.  They had their children with them, and their wives.  Some wise soul decided to mark each picture with a name.  Without that name, would any of them even be recognizable?  My brain boggles as I attempt to reconcile my vivid memory of these teenagers with the aging pillars I see before me now.  I wonder how many of these gentlemen feel successful and happy.  I wonder how many of them had to fake it, to put on a good show.  I wonder how many lied.  I wonder about all of my classmates who stayed away from that reunion, if they avoided it like the plague, and why.
 
When I walk through the mall with Amanda, I feel like an old man revitalized.  When I gaze into the mirror, I feel like a grotesque aberration.  When I saw my aging classmates drinking beer in still life, I felt endlessly sad.
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My broken record, still breaking...

Scholars have been searching for the historic Jesus for over one hundred years.  They jury is still out, and it will always remain so.  The more time passes, the more facts become legend.
 
Have you ever had an argument with two other people, and then you all got together a few days later to hash it out, and you can't even agree on what was said and done?
 
On November 22nd, 1963, hundreds of people in Dealey Plaza witnessed the assassination of JFK.  They heard and saw what happened.  They took pictures.  They filmed it.  Some of these people are still alive today, remembering and dismembering the facts.  Hundreds of books have been written trying to explain what took place.  Memories have changed over the years.  People will be arguing over this issue for the next hundred years, maybe even longer.  I personally think that the Warren Commission explained everything adequately in 1964, but there will always be people who prefer the idea of a conspiracy.  As more time goes by, the actual facts will be forgotten, and the myths and legends will take over.  People will chose to believe whatever they desire, whatever appeals to their sense of history and their particular view of politics and government.
 
Hitler has been dead since 1945.  Hundreds of books have been written about him, trying to explain what he did and why.  No two writers completely agree.  Only 63 years after his death, Hitler still seems like the most evil man in history.  But what will people be saying about him in 600 years?  Will he seem kind of old-fashioned and quaint and irrelevant, like Attila the Hun?
 
Muslims will tell you with absolute faith that they know everything there is to know about the life of Muhammad and the writing of the Koran.  But it all happened over 1300 years ago, and no one knows a damn thing.  Documents cannot be trusted when they are written (and re-written) by brainwashed people who are trying to convert you.  For centuries, it was forbidden for Muslim scholars to criticize the sacred Islamic texts.  Now they are finally doing so, and we are finding out what an unholy mess it all is.
 
The New Testament is just as much of a mess.  The Gospels contradict themselves.  They contradict each other.  They contradict what we think we know about Roman and Judean history, not to mention common sense.  The Book of Acts contradicts the Gospels.  The Book of Acts contradicts what Luke says about Paul and what Paul says about himself in his letters.  There are letters attributed to Paul he could not have written.  For centuries, there were five brief "historical texts" not written by the Gospel writers that supposedly mentioned Jesus.  All of the these dubious extra-biblical texts have now been discredited.  They don't seem to be written by the same people who wrote the original texts, they are not in the same style, the mentions of Jesus are vague, and they don't fit into the context of the writings themselves.  In short, they seem to be phony interpolations, added by Christian propagandists decades later.  When  I was reading the New Testament, certain minor details jumped off the page.  They were just too real to be fiction or mythology.  They must have happened.  And I believe they did.  But in their entirety, the many versions of the Jesus story simply don't add up, and I believe they are all based on two things: resurrrection stories about the many savior gods that were circulating for hundreds of years before Christianity began, and the many lives of the many messiah figures that were being told in Judea around 2,000 years ago.
 
Jesus Christ is not a real Jewish name.  Jesus is a Greek name, created by the Greek writers of the New Testament.  Christ is a Greek title, meaning "the anointed one", or messiah.  If there was actually one man who did and said most of the things attributed to him, his name was probably Jeshua, Yeshua, or Joshua.  He may have lived in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, or all over Judea.  But I believe he was many people combined by memory and imagination into one.  I won't bore you with all the details, because there are plenty of books out there which can do a bettter job of it, but there are so many things about the Jesus story that simply wouldn't or couldn't have happened.  To give you the most glaring example, one of the Gospels claims that dead people rose out of their graves just as Jesus died.  The three other gospels don't mention this amazing detail.  No historians writing at the time mention dead people rising out of their graves.  Don't you find this just a little bit ridiculous?  It clearly never happened.  It's bad fiction, told by children.  Sometimes the New Testament writers simply got carried away, and forgot how suspicious evil little atheists like me can be.
 
Just in case you think I may be prejudiced because I was brainwashed to believe the Old Testament, I will tell you that that even older document is the most tedious, the most morally objectionable, the most contradictory, and the worst edited book in history.  It is, in fact, like its New Testament sequel, a series of books written by many people over many years, much of it stolen from Babylonian sources.  Genesis has been disproven as myth by astronomy and biology.  Joshua has been disproven by archaeology.  All of the dumb Jewish laws have been discredited by modern morality, hygiene, and common sense.  Geology has disproven the universal flood myth common to all cultures.  The book of Job drones on and on and on about the mystery of suffering, and never provides a satisfactory answer.  Jews were probably never slaves in Egypt, and not one shred of evidence has been found to support the book of Exodus.  Jews with a Zionist axe to grind have been searching hard, and they will be searching forever, in vain.
 
If you believe in a creator God who designed the whole universe, does it really make sense to believe in one tiny desert holy land, in one violent country?  Shouldn't every place in the world be equally sacred?
 
There is very little reason to believe anything in the Koran, or the Bible, or any document written so long ago about people who may have never lived on earth.  Even if it's all true, even if the things that contradict each other are all equally and impossibly true, we won't ever be able to prove it.
 
Even if God is real, and Jesus is his son, everything in the Bible may still be fiction.  Even if a Jewish prophet and healer named Jeshua really existed, everything written about him may be a lie.  Even if everything we pitiful humans have ever thought about God was wrong, he may still exist, in some transcendant way we cannot even imagine.  If this transcendant being can never be understood, why should we bother praying to him?  If he designed the universe 13.7 billion years ago, I thank him for a job fairly well done, and I ask him, what have you been doing with all of your spare time, Mr. Watchmaker?
 
Agnostic scholars don't make any definitive statements about the existence of God.  Some of them believe that Jesus the man really lived, and some argue convincingly that he never did.  Christian scholars believe, or claim to believe, that God exists and Jesus is the savior of the world.  They provide evidence for this in their books.  They use passages from the Bible to defend other passages from the Bible, circular reasoning which only convinces the already converted.  They cynically refer to the extra-biblical mentions of Jesus, knowing full well how these texts have been discredited, knowing full well that their ignorant and misinformed readers have no idea how dubious these texts really are.  Ignorance persists and spreads as preachers preach to their deluded choirs.  These "scholars" are no better than fanatical creationists who get themselves advanced degrees in biology even though they are opposed to everything science stands for.  They know that evolution won the battle a long time ago with overwhelming fossil evidence, but they are satanic men who fear the facts, and they are half in love with worn-out sacred lies.   
 
If the Old Testament had really worked, there would have been no need for a New Testament.  If the Christian message had worked, there would have been no need for Islam.  Religion has failed to make people happier, failed to make them better, failed to convince.  If any of the ten thousand religions, cults, sects, political regimes, or moral philosophies actually worked, we wouldn't be living in an existential toilet bowl.  No matter how they try to live, people keep dying, so the myths and pipe dreams persist, because there will always be a new generation of desperately scared humans who find life bewildering and death terrifying.
 
If the twelve disciples were still alive today, and they were all 2,000 years old, and if they had seen for themselves the invisibility of God throughout the last twenty centuries, they would be shaking their heads and sadly wondering, "Jesus told us he would be coming back soon.  Where the fuck is he?"
 
This is the essential disconnection between the active, present, caring, punishing, and rewarding God of the Bible, and the utterly silent God we have with us today.  This is why people live and fight and kill and die for their particular God.  Not because they have sincere faith, but because they have no real faith at all, only a profound desire to ward off emptiness and despair.  The 9/11 hijackers didn't really believe they were dying and killing for Allah.  They were just suicidal killers, looking for and failing to find something...anything...to believe in.
 
You could easily throw away every sacred text ever written and keep just one precept which can be found in every religion: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  If people lived forever, there would be no need for gods.  If people were capable of following the golden rule, we would be living in heaven on earth.
 
Humans will always believe what they want to believe, never mind the facts.  To many people, faith is all-important.  Never mind logic and reason and history and reality.  Faith is what they value.  It doesn't matter to the faithful if God seems to be either insane, evil, apathetic, impotent, or non-existent.  They blindly, foolishly, and pointlessly trust in him anyway.
 
To my mind, religion is the cliff we desperately cling to when we are living, and faith is the dirt left under our fingernails as we fall to our deaths.
 
For most of us mere mortals, imagination is more of a curse than a blessing.  A few lucky geniuses are able to write brilliant novels or paint gorgeous pictures or compose exciting symphonies.  The rest of us are stuck with the lame, the banal, and the unsatisfying: bigfoot, little green men, angels, and demons.  For thousands of years, the masses have dutifully smoked their opiates, but the pain never goes away.  The placebos have been worse than useless; they have been dangerous.  We are all in need of a new drug dealer. 
 
Liberal believers warn us not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  They ask us to ignore the many horrors perpetrated in the name of God, and focus only on the positive aspects of belief.  I have to wonder if any baby has ever existed to enjoy such a lovely bath.  I maintain that we need to build a new bathtub, fill it with fresh water, and lower a brand new baby into it.  We should call this baby secular humanism.  We must put all of our faith into this life, and face our inevitable personal extinction as bravely as we can.  The whimsical gods have failed us, and proven themselves unworthy of our devotion.  The question remains: are we humans any better than the non-existent gods?  Are we worth the effort it will take us to endure?  When we weigh in the balance what we have accomplished with love, art, beauty, reason, and science, do these things compensate for humanity's passionate love affair with hatred, violence, ignorance, arrogance, and evil?  If human beings were shallow and egocentric enough to create God in our own pathetic image, and if most of us are incapable of living without this infantile illusions, does it really matter whether or not we can survive in a world without God? 
 
Is the kingdom of mankind truly within us?
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A Lovely Loophole

Some people said he was born bad.  Original sin maybe, or bad parents, or maybe something in him that was just naturally hateful.  He went to church when he was young, but it didn't take.  Whatever he may have learned about charity and mercy and love, it didn't take.  I suppose they could have beaten mercy and love into him, but I don't know if that would have worked either.  He liked to hear about hellfire and brimstone, people screaming and getting tortured for ever and ever.  You could see an enigmatic smile on his face when he heard about the tortures of the damned.  Did he believe those stories, did he think he was going there himself, or was he simply laughing at the poor fools who imagined they were going to heaven?  Who knows what went on in that sick twisted mind. 

He started out bad enough, and just got worse.  When he was too small to hurt people, he lit fires and strangled puppies.  When he got big enough to pick on people his own size, he avoided them and found the most tiny and the most helpless souls to brutalize.  Nobody knows exactly when he began his career.  As soon as he was clever enough to gain the trust of little children, he started molesting and torturing and raping and killing them.  He did it for years, traveling from town to town, avoiding the arms of the law.  Nobody knows exactly how many victims he notched onto his belt.  Some people say dozens.  Some say scores.  He was an equal opportunity pervert, you understand.  He didn't discriminate against any race, color, or creed.  If a child took his fancy, he got that child but good. 

You can just imagine how they screamed in the end.  Screaming for their mommas, screaming for their poppas, screaming for God and for the sweet mercy of Jesus.  But no one ever came running, no one ever managed to help.  The moms and the dads desperately wanted to save their own, but they couldn't.  I'm not smart enough to know if God and Jesus could hear that screaming.  I'm not smart enough to know if they tried to help but couldn't.  I'm not smart enough to know why such things happen in this world.  Something about free will I guess.  Something about faith.  Something about suffer the little children to come unto me.  The Jewish kids cried out to their God, but he never answered.  The Hindu kids cried out to their gods, but they never answered.  The Christian kids cried out to Jesus, but he never answered.  The atheist kids cried out to no one at all, so they died with nary a hope in their hearts. 

Anyway, the law caught up with this child killer at last.  Maybe it was karma, or maybe it was just a matter of time, but they found him in the end.  You should have seen him laughing his ass off in court.  He laughed at the judge, he laughed at the prosecutor, he laughed at the parents of his many victims.  He even laughed at the man trying to defend him.  The killer pleaded not guilty.  He said there were no mitigating or extenuating circumstances.  He did what he did and he done it, end of story.  No apologies, no remorse, no throwing himself upon the mercy of the court.  The jury asked for an execution and the judge granted it.  The judge never bothered to say, "And may God have mercy on your soul."  The killer said, "Every one of you fuckwits is on death row and you don't even know it.  Some of you will be dead before me.  I'll see all you damn fools in hell." 

I've heard stories about this killer on death row, where he spent the last three months of his life.  Believe you me, they aren't pretty to tell.  The guards there say he jerked off to high heaven and kingdom come, passionately and without restraint, loudly calling out the names of his victims, reliving every cruel deed again and again in his twisted mind.  They say he wrote letters to the parents of the children he tortured and killed, telling them how their children suffered and how they screamed for mercy before they died, and how they got no mercy at all.  Then the day of the killer's execution came, and something extraordinary happened.  The killer got down on his knees and prayed to the living God for mercy.  He got down calmly and strongly on his knees and begged for the bountiful love of Christ to come into his heart.  That's how the executioners found him in his cell, minutes before they strapped him into the electric chair.  Humbly on his knees, his righteous face awash in penitent tears, accepting Lord Jesus as his personal savior.

As my grandpappy used to say, It takes all types to make a world.  Just like my gramma said, The things people do in the name of the Lord.  And like my momma always used to tell me, If Jesus was alive today, he'd be rolling over in his grave. 

Yes, sir, it's a strange world, I'll give you that.  Those Jewish kids he raped and killed?  They denied the Christ, so they're burning in everlasting hellfire right now.  Those Hindu kids whored after other gods, so they're burning in hell, too, poor things.  But the killer?  Well, he's in heaven, I imagine, forgiven for his sins and washed in the blood of the lamb, standing in peace and joy by the left hand side of the Lord.  He's got himself some everlasting glory, I guess, right next to all of the Christian kids he raped and killed.  I'm not an educated man, so I can't even imagine what on earth that killer and those kids are going to do in heaven together until the end of time.  And those atheist kids, raped and killed on earth and tortured forever in hell?  Well, to say what the judge never said to that killer:  Please, Lord, have mercy on their poor helpless ignorant souls.

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Which God do you believe in?

Which God do you believe in?  So many to decide between.  Do you believe in the one chosen for you by your parents, or have you invented a brand new God of your own?  Perhaps you don't believe in any kind of God at all.  What's wrong with you anyway?  Are you un-American?  Are you trying to tell me that this life is all there is and all there ever will be?  No second chances, no reincarnation, no resurrection of the body or the spirit?  Do you view everything as random and chaotic and devoid of morality and meaning?  Oh, I see.  Life is a strange and mysterious mixture of good and evil, beauty and ugliness.  And if you are lucky, you will live a long happy and healthy life, you will love and be loved, you will find a meaningful path on your own and follow it as far as you can, and when your inevitable death comes, you will face the extinction of your body as bravely as possible, and you will thank the non-existent God for getting a shot at life, however brief that may seem to be.
 
Do you believe in a very specific God that can only be understood in a very specific way?  Is your God a Roman Catholic God, for instance?  Oh, well.  I guess the Jews are screwed.  The Muslims must be deluded.  The Buddhists are surely satanic.  Even your fellow Christians, the Baptists and the Mormons and the Greek Orthodox, who almost worship the same God, almost in the same way, even they are unsaved, and going to hell.  It's very hard to imagine such a specific deity, especially when you take into consideration the diversity of belief on this planet, not to mention all of the poor space aliens living in the Crab Nebula who have never even heard of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.  You have to wonder why God would create such a gigantic mysterious universe and then spoil all of that wonderful mystery with a few shallow and disappointing explanantions.  You have to wonder why God would save a few million of his children every year and send the rest to hell.  That God seems rather nasty to me, and I wonder if spending an eternity in heaven with him would even be worthwhile. 
 
Do you believe in a personal, warm, touchy-feely, new age kind of God?  Do you believe this God lives within us and without us, every minute of the day?  He is everywhere, he loves everyone, he cares about every creature on planet earth, and all of our fellow beings everywhere in the universe.  He knows everything you think, everything you want, everything you have done.  He forgives you for every sin, and he loves you unconditionally.  This God would never create a place like hell to punish bad people.  Maybe purgatory for particularly nasty people, so they can gratefully wash away their crimes before joining the rest of us good folk in an eternal heaven.  What an innovative thought.  Vicious child molesters wash away their sins in purgatory and then join their victims in heaven, and all is blissfully forgiven.  Yes, wouldn't it be nice to believe in such a kindly benevolent understanding compassionate God?  But look at the world, my friend.  Look at all the horrors of the world.  Man-made horrors.  Naturally occuring horrors.  Sure, we pitiful humans have tried to come up with reasons to explain why the world is so awful.  We talk about free will and the fall of man, and we cling to our faith in spite of everything.  But we have explained nothing.  In the end, we cannot reconcile the idea of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent deity with the daily crushing evils we all have to face.
 
Do you believe that God is simply beyond all human comprehension?  So utterly transcendant, this God will always remain a mystery, and we will never be able to understand his will, his motives, his desires.  He is not even a he, or a she, or an it.  He cannot be labeled in any way.  The uncaused cause.  The unmoved mover.  This deity created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.  We don't know how he did it, and we will never know.  He stands outside of time and space, and he has always existed, long before he decided to create time and space.  He didn't need another deity to create him.  He has always been there, and he always will be there.  If you believe in this God, you have to ask yourself, do I need to worship him?  Is there any reason to pray to him?  Does he even care that I am alive?  If I can never understand who he is, even after I die, why bother thinking of him at all?  Has this God ever once concerned himself with the affairs of humankind?  True, it was really quite nice of him creating the universe 13.7 billion years ago, but what has he done for me lately?
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A Portrait of the Autist as a Young Putz

I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up.  I also wanted to be a gastroenterologist.  When I read the book Jaws at the age of ten I decided to be a writer.  I wrote a short story called Bear Kill about a bear that attacks and kills people.  My mother told me it was too much like Jaws.  I got in trouble in Hebrew School quite often.  I called a friend of mine a homosexual.  The rabbi confronted me and I lied.  I said that I had called my friend a homo sapien.  When I was eleven, I began to question the existence of God.  I don't know why I did that.  Feminine intuition?  I was a kleptomaniac and a pyromaniac when I was young.  I used to recite the Witch's chant from Macbeth to my camp counselors in 1975, and they thought I was out of my mind.  I have always had a rather touchy relationship with honesty throughout my life.  I cheated my way through seventh grade math and paid the price for it in eighth grade.  I used to think prep school ruined my life.  Now I know that I ruined my life.  I have a really bad memory.  I remember way too many bad things.  There are total strangers who insulted me decades ago and I still can't forgive them.  I may lack the forgiveness gene.  I do not understand the concept.  I have strange dreams at night.  I am brain damaged from drug abuse and old age.  No one will ever really know about my dreams.  They fade away.  Most of my life will fade away, too, when I am dead and buried.  People may hold my life against me, but they cannot touch my dreams.  I try to keep my friends and family and lovers separate.  When I am in a room with my best friend and my girlfriend and my mother, I want to crawl under a rock.  I do not suffer from split personality, but I undergo a subtle shift in persona to suit the occasion and the company.  I go for months and sometimes years at a time without getting laid.  Sometimes I think this is a terrible waste.  Sometimes I think this is quite as it should be.  Testosterone is a blessing, and a curse.  In general, I don't care for humans very much.  In general, I don't care for myself very much.  I used to be relatively thin.  Now I am fat.  How did such a thing happen?  I barely every watched television in high school and college and graduate school.  Now I watch television a lot.  Sometimes I like baloney.  Sometimes I don't.  I would like to leave my brain to science so they can see if there is anything wrong with it and then let me know what the problem is.  As a rule, I don't like breast enhancement.  Half the time, children are sweet and cute and charming.  Half the time, they are satanic.  I like to watch pretty girls make out.  That's sensual.  I have known four men who died of AIDS.  A guy I really admired in high school killed himself after his freshman year in college.  I don't know why.  Dinosaurs are just about the coolest things alive.  When I really like a girl, I want to kiss her on the lips.  When I don't much like a girl, I prefer not to kiss her on the lips.  I sweat a lot, more than a man should.  Someday I would like to win an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.  I don't believe people most of the time.  I think they are basically full of baloney.  I am often full of baloney, but usually I am aware of that fact.  I would like to be more self-deluded, but it's hard work.  I enjoy moderate temperatures.  Too hot and too cold both bother me.  In this respect, I am like Goldilocks.  Sharks are almost as cool as dinosaurs.  At times, cooler.  I don't care for random nonsequitur stream-of-consciousness blogs.  I believe in structure and organization.  If a writer wants to be taken seriously, he should communicate efficiently and make himself as coherent as possible  Usually, I get tuna sandwiches at Subway.  I used to like pepperoni and sausage on my pizza, but now I tend to order vegetarian.  I dated two vegetarians and tried to date a vegan, unsuccessfully.  I hardly ever recycle.  Some day I will have to invent a unique way to feel better about myself.  I have lived in the same apartment for over eighteen years.  You could fairly say that I am both stable, and unstable.  I used to be a really good speller.  Now I am not.  My memory is going, but not fast enough.  If I didn't have books to read and movies to watch, I would die of boredom.  That is why I hope I never get captured by the Vietcong.  If you become Manson's therapist, do you say things like, "Just be yourself, Charlie, and people are bound to like you?"  People shouldn't pick on Wickipedia.  You can find disinformation just about anywhere these days.  I think seals and dolphins are beautiful creatures.  Insects are significantly less beautiful, but I respect the heck out of them.  Death scares me.  I am attached to my animal body, however ugly and useless it may be.  Arms and shoulders are very lovely on a woman, and quite underrated.  I am head over heels in love with a young woman right now, but she is not in love with me.  Such is life, bittersweet.  The good folks at Safeway think my name is Mr. Foster.  A psychotic woman who lives near me thinks my name is Owen.  If I ever commit a notorious crime, my defense attorney will call these people to the stand and there may be a mistrial.  I know that I am in love with this new girl in my life because I drive a lot to be with her.  I drove a lot for Katie Walsh when I was mad about her.  I fear cars, and I hate traffic.  I only like driving in the middle of the night on deserted streets.  If I drive in rush hour traffic to be with a girl, that's proof I am smitten.  Right now, while I am typing, I am waiting for the girl I adore to call me.  It is an awesome and wonderful and torturous thing to be in love.  Wow, here's something real freaky.  I just had a short visit with my beloved and I think I fell out of love with her.  Just like that.  Amazing and depressing.  Nothing is real.  I always suspected that.  I am as alone as I have ever been in my life.  I used to think that only beautiful women could control me, but actually many ugly women have gotten under my skin, too, and they are just as cruel and just as crazy as good looking women.  I see clearly now, as I have seen quite clearly for many years, that my useless life is nothing but eating, sleeping, waking, shitting, showering, walking, reading, writing, over and over and over again, until my life finally ends.  I want to be cremated right away, as soon as I am dead.  No autopsy, please.  No grotesque coroners prowling around my obesity.  Come to think of it, I should probably crash a college bonfire party and throw myself onto the pyre, just like an old-fashioned Hindu wife.  Kill two birds with one suttee.  I am no longer a young putz.  I am middle-aged, assuming that I die in my 80's.  If I kill myself tomorrow, then I am quite old.  Putz is too harmless.  Usually I am something quite a bit worse than a putz.  No doubt some of you think that I have been wallowing in my misery out of sheer perversity, because I am too in love with my own angst.  My father encouraged me to see a therapist when I was 19, and I got some value from it.  My father and I did family counseling together a few times when I was 30 or so, I can't remember exactly.  My father was a depressed alcoholic who never stopped drinking, even when attending AA meetings.  I have no idea how he died, since there was no autopsy.  I will probably die of obesity, or diabetes, or a heart condition, or suicide.  One of my many crazy ex-girlfriends told me that we had to do couple's counseling.  I paid for it, naturally.  A judge ordered me to do anger counseling when I threatened this same ex-girlfriend's life.  I am still angry.  She is dead.  She killed herself last year.  Therapy can be useful for some people I suppose.  But I have tried it, and I don't think I am capable of any significant change, and I believe I am incurable.  Life is cruel, quite often.  Sometimes I wonder if this life is my fate.  Sometimes I wonder if I was born to this useless existence.  Was there something specific that I did wrong many decades agao that set me on this destructive path?  Is there something specific that I can do now that will redeem me, change me, save me, give my life some value?  How nice it would be to have real Faith with a capital F.  Somtimes I wonder if I'm a very old soul, or a first time soul.  There are things I seem to understand better than anyone else, and other things I can't grasp at all.  If this current soul is the only one I've ever had, and the only one I will ever have, boy oh boy, did I ever make a mess of it.  I had one of those horrifying moments today.  Since I was 21, I've had those moments about 20 times or so over the years.  That absolutely horrifying feeling in your very gut, in the innermost part of you, that tells you that you are going to die someday.  It is not rational, not intellectual, not at all intentional.  It is something that shoots into your very soul and stops you dead in your tracks for about five seconds.  Then repression takes over, and you can function again.  But those five seconds are like an eternity of dread and fear and anxiety.  The sheer pointless grind of it all.  Just imagine if I actually had a life worth keeping.  Just imagine how bad it would be then.  I am 43 years old this morning.  Usually I turn off my ringer on my birthday because I am too depressed to speak to my very few well-wishers.  Today I think I will stay home and speak to everyone kind enough to call.  I am feeling quite low and I think it would do me good to speak with people who care enough to remember my birthday.  I am in love with a girl who is not in love with me.  This is a very tough proposition.  Sometimes I feel like I actually dislike her, but that may just be the love talking.  At times I feel wonderful in her presence, sometimes quite awful.  I had a mature thought when I woke up this morning, about acceptance and resignation.  I have to accept the fact that I cannot control my own feelings, and I certainly cannot control the feelings of other people, especially beautiful young women.  To stay sane, I have to deal with the fact that some days I may imagine she feels nothing but contempt for me.  When I most need her attention, her respect, and her love, she may be in another emotional zone.  Ah well.  All my life I have desperately tried to cling to the most absurd, naive, romantic, and unrealistic view of love.  I want everything to be sunshine and lollipops.  No conflict, no enmity, no confrontation.  I realize now in my dotage that this kind of bliss is nearly impossible between any two human beings, and even more impossible between lovers.  I understand now that you can hate someone you are in love with, you can be bored by them and disgusted with them, you can want to be apart from them.  It's just the sad nature of the beast.  My word, I've dated women who claimed to love me, claimed to want to marry me and have my children, and these women made me feel like a piece of shit on a regular basis without even trying.  Sometimes I even felt as though they saw it as their right to put me down and degrade me, simply because we were in a love relationship.  As if that is a proper kind of revenge for "loving" another person.  Now I am crazy about a young girl who could easily walk away from me tomorrow without a sad thought.  Is it any wonder that my love for her is also filled with emptiness and depression?  What is worse, to feel as though you are nothing to a stranger, or nothing to a lover?  Last year on my birthday I was suicidal.  This year I am philosophical.  So, an improvement.  Well, that didn't last long.  I am suicidal again.  And nearly homicidal, too.  Until I met the girl I am in love with, I was suicidal regularly for the last few years because I had absolutely nothing in my life I could value.  After I met her, I was happy to be alive.  Now I am suicidal again, because she is so very much a part of my life, and so clearly not a part of my life.  I wait for her to call every day.  Sometimes she does.  We get together, and I realize I am spending time with her because she is the closest thing to a girlfriend I will ever have again.  But she is not my girlfrriend, not at all.  I'm not sure she is even a friend.  I am useful to her.  I am the guy she calls early Sunday morning because the three adults she lives with either can't or won't drive her to work.  I drive her because I have nothing better to do.  I drive her because it may be my only time to see her that day.  I am the guy with a car, and with money, and with the desperate urge to spend it on her because I have no other means to express my desire for her.   Would she like me better if I had a wife or a girlfriend?  Would she like me better if I had been a dick to her from the beginning?  Would she like me better if I assaulted her like her father?  She writes songs about her abusive neglectful father, just dying for his love.  What do I need to do to get her to write songs about me?   No.  There is nothing I can do.  I cannot make her love me, not with time, not with attention, not with love, not with money.   I was the nicest kindest man to her for four months straight, and that only made me contemptible in her eyes.  And then I was a dick to her for a week when my resentment became uncontrollable.  She wasn't impressed with my "dignified anger."  She was ready to discard me for good as soon as I stopped being perfectly nice and accomodating.  I wake up every night now, seething with resentment and desperation.  How did I ever sink so low?  Is this the fitting punishment for my many sins?  What a pathetic worm I am.  It is quite clear that women have always been the bane of my existence.  This is not to blame them for being what they are.  I am at fault for my weakness and my stupidity.  What if I had been an asexual creature?  Would I have been a great artist, and a happy man?  Freud would say no.  Freud would tell me that I didn't have enough talent and I didn't work hard enough to turn my morbid sexuality into romance and art.  I had another bad dream about this girl last night.  I never used to dream about her at all.  I spent so much time thinking about her in my waking life that my unconscious never gave her a thought.  Now she is in my dreams often, conflicting, confrontational.  I fear the inevitable end of this situation.  I fear what will happen if I continue to degrade myself in this way.  But what is the alternative?  She is the only woman who wants to spend any time with me at all, whatever motive she has.  Crushing loneliness or romantic humiliation.  Such a dilemma.  There are times when I forget how deeply I have sinned, and then I actually wonder why I am in such a sad position.  Most people have conveniently bad memories, or no conscience at all, or they have developed great rationalizing talents.  Soon enough I remember what I have done to deserve my place in life, and then I almost smile with recognition.  Yes, this is the way it is, and the way it should be, and there is nothing I can do to change it.  The phone is a wonderful mechanism for passive-aggressive behavior.  You can listen to it ring and not answer it.  You can turn off the ringer if the noise annoys you.  You can erase all of your messages without listening to them.  You can turn the volume down completely on your answering machine so you don't hear people leaving you obnoxious messages.  You can leave the phone off the hook.  You can put the phone down quietly as soon as the asshole on the other end starts getting confrontational.  He or she will think you are still listening to the abuse, but you will actually be in the other room, watching re-runs of the Simpsons.  You can slam down the phone to make a violent point, and you can hang up anytime you want.  The other person is somewhere else, and he or she can do nothing to battle your passive-aggressive behavior.  Thank you, Alexander Graham Bell, for your wonderful contribution.  A terrible and vicious absurdity hangs over my life.  The trivial and the significant are blending together and becoming indistinguishable.  It is theatre of the absurd, with bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, devoid of meaning and insight and even humor.  When I was 13 years old, I saw Devo on Saturday Night Live, and I was very scared.  I've returned to the same very sad and dark place that I was in before.  I am not sleeping enough.  I have aches and pains in my body that won't go away.  I am filled with pointless rage that I am too cowardly to relieve except in depressing chat rooms, where I hide behind my fake pictures and profiles.  I am no longer in love.  The girl I adored for months has been reduced to someone I spend time with for lack of anything better to do.  Most movies don't thrill me anymore.  My brain is unfocused and distracted, and I can barely read.  I am afraid to get a job.  What can I do when I am either too tired or too wired or my hands won't stop shaking and sweating?  I am obsessed with death.  I am surrounded by idiots.  I am an idiot.  Everything is quite useless.  When I was in middle school, my parents sent me to this professional advisor, someone to tell me where to go to prep school, and where to go to college.  Nice office, this clown had.  God only knows what he charged rich Greenwich retards for advice they didn't need.  When he found out that I had been typing since the 6th grade, he actually advised me to make a few intentional mistakes on my prep school applications, just so the admissions people wouldn't assume that my parents had typed my essay for me.  Wow.  I can't even begin to respond--28 years later--to such frightening cynicism and idiocy.  It wasn't until very recently that I even remembered this moron and his horrible advice, which I didn't take.  I met a horrible woman named Andrea back in 1994.  She told me several times that she still lived with her ex-boyfriend but they hadn't slept together in over a year.  After having sex with her for the first time, I got a call from...you guessed it... her boyfriend.  She had left my number in a place where he could find it, and he called to find out where she was.  Please explain to me why I didn't hang up the phone without a word.  Please explain to me why I didn't tell this clown to never call me again.  Please explain to me why I became flustered and guilty and actually felt the need to lie to this guy, when I had done absolutely nothing wrong.  Please explain to me why I didn't knock Andrea over the head with the receiver.  Because I truly don't know what makes me so bafflingly pusillanimous.  I feel quite isolated and depressed.  It is a terrible thing, to have no future.  These are the limits of my sad and shallow life.  Someone somewhere is curing cancer; someone somewhere is desperately in love with someone else, and that someone else is desperately in love, too; someone somewhere has faced bravely and boldly the absurdity of his trivial existence, and he is smiling calmly.  I am reading Faulkner, trying to get to know the man so I don't embarass myself when I teach him in a year and a half.  I am taking walks every day to prevent my obesity from turning into morbid obesity.  I am in love with a girl who probably finds me rather foolish and grotesque.  When I touch her, perhaps she has to force herself not to recoil.  I am not completely alone.  But I am essentially alone.

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A Cold-Hearted Sociopath Ponders the Nature of Love

What is love?  I do not know.  I have read books about love.  I have seen movies about love.  I have listened to love songs, sometimes with my lovers nearby listening, too.  I have said the words "I love you" many times.  Quite a few people have said those words to me.  I have never held a gun to anyone's head and demanded to hear those words.  They were voluntary, at least physically so.  The speakers were, as far as I know, sincere.  "I love you."  I take that phrase seriously.  Sometimes I say it under duress and feel ill at ease, like someone's watching, listening, and condemning.  There are two things you should never do: you should never get yourself baptized unless you believe in God, and you should never say "I love you" unless you really mean it.  But--and here's the rub--how does one know?  What if you have fooled yourself in some way?  What if you have been tricked by your own frisky loins?  What if you desperately desire to believe?  How can you tell the difference between infatuation, obsession, and devotion? 
 
Why do romantic comedies always end with the couples finally getting together in the end?  Are we supposed to believe that they live happily ever after?  Why don't we ever see them again?  Well, in fact, we do see them again, after marriage.  That is when romantic comedy becomes drama.  After the kids are born, drama becomes tragedy.  When people get married, how many actually believe that only death will do them part?  Surely they all know the statistics.  Do these couples imagine themselves to be special in some way?  Do they think they are immunized against conflict and disillusionment?  A few years down the road, and they will be asking themselves sheepishly, what did I ever see in that dickweed, why did I ever fall for that harridan?  They will wear their new contempt proudly like a badge, just as they had publicly displayed affection on their honeymoon.  They will be determined to show the world how very over that old lover they really are. 
 
Fifteen year old girls on myspace.com dutifully fill out online questionnaires.  The question is, who will you marry when you grow up?  Wishful thinkers will say "Johnny Depp" (who is 44).  The worldly wise will say, quite honestly, "I don't know."  And the self-deluded romantics will say, "Steve, who is my boyfriend now, and who will be my husband for ever and ever."  I freely admit, I am no expert when it comes to teenage girls.  I was never a teenage girl myself, and I didn't really know them at all when I was a teenage boy.  But seriously, are they kidding?  Do they really believe what they are saying?  Do they have to fool themselves into thinking this first love will be an eternal love because it makes them feel better about giving up their virginities to their worthless boyfriends?  Is love somehow more real if it lasts forever, until death parts us and we are reunited in a better place?  Is love somehow unreal, was it ever real, if it lasts only a few years, a few weeks, a few moments?  What shall we make of people who marry again and again and again?  Are they hoping that this time, at long last, this love will be true love?  What can we say about people who never get married at all?  Are they hopeless cynics, or wise pragmatists?  How do we feel when we see two people genuinely in love?  How do we know they are genuine?  Are we envious, skeptical, annoyed?  Do we wish them well, or do we hope they fall to pieces?  Do they remind us of ourselves when we were in love?  Why did we fall in love?  Why did we fall out of love?  Why did we fall to pieces?  Will there come a time in our dotage when we can look back on that time with fondness, or will we always be embarrassed and resentful? 
 
Why do lovers fight all the time, even when they are supposedly in love, especially then?  What makes love so attractive?  Is it the romance, or the conflict?  There are couples who say inane things like, "We have a great relationship.  We fight all the time."  Is this lunacy or self-laceration?  When I was studying Antony and Cleopatra as an undergraduate, I was bored by those middle-aged amorists.  "All they do is fight," I complained to the graduate teaching assistant.  "Well, they're in love," he responded, matter-of-factly.  Years later, I have no idea if that was an explanation or a non-sequitur. 
 
I have fallen in love with characters in the movies.  I have believed fully in their love for each other.  I have been fooled completely by Hollywood actors who probably hated each other.  Real people in real life cannot convince me as well as a bunch of gorgeous Hollywood phonies. 
 
My girlfriend in college told me that she wanted to marry me.  Was she lying?  I don't think so, not at the time.  Would she remember this desire now, or would she deny it?  I wonder if our three years together could be declared null and void because we both moved on to greener and not so terribly green pastures.  Another girlfriend told me that she wanted to have my children, and she was married to someone else at the time.  She wasn't on drugs, I promise.  I was head over heels in love with another one of my girlfriends.  Passionately, madly, out of my mind.  We were together for about two weeks.  Some people might say that doesn't even count.  For her, it didn't.  I didn't count, at any rate, not for her.  I doubt she remembers her callous cruelty; she would be astounded that I still remember her.  Do you know how you sometimes dream about insignificant people you haven't seen in decades, people who weren't even important to you when you knew them then?  I wonder if she ever dreams about me.  I wonder if she wonders why.  Does love count only if it is returned?  What an impossibly high standard that would be. 
 
I am in love, right now.  Really and truly.  I do believe this is the genuine article.  Just as I write these words, the object of my affections, the girl I most desire, is in the next room, writing Valentine's to other people, and speaking on the phone to another man, the guy she adores.  I am typing this blog, obsessed with her, while she obsesses about someone else entirely.  I am head over heels with my profoundly significant other who finds me only mildly significant.  I have told her how I feel, and all she can do is wonder why.  She doesn't think she deserves my love.  If it was someone else's love, would she feel more deserving? 
 
Are my ex-girlfriends smiling at my current predicament?  What do they all think of me now?  Two of my ex-girlfriends still love me; one of them actually treats me accordingly.  Most are indifferent; I am not even on their radar.  Some hate and fear me.  One of my former lovers is dead.  If she was still alive, she would probably hate and fear me--so much easier than hating and fearing herself.  I still love her, and I still hate her, and I still fear her, even though she is dead.  I am haunted by two women, one dead ghost from the past, forever beyond my reach, and one very much alive, here with me now, forever beyond my reach.  If that isn't true love, what is?    
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A Day in the Life

6:30 A.M.  The sound of my wife's impending orgasm jolts me out of a whiskey-ridden stupor.  She has mounted my early morning hard-on without so much as a by your leave, and she rides with vicious abandon.  "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God," she moans, and her ecstatic prayers rise mellifluously upwards, as if to greet the Savior's ears in Heaven.  Is the Good Lord pleased with her passion?  Does He sense her blasphemous oblivion?  My wife climaxes in a hot sweat, rolls over, mutters the words "Sweet Jesus" a few times, and passes out.

6:35 A.M.  Cold shower.

7:00 A.M.  As I consume a bowl of Count Chocula and 1%, a televangelist assures me that I am the worst kind of sinner, headed straight for eternal hellfire.  If he is trying to scare the living shite out of me, he has done his job well.

7:32 A.M.  Two Jehovah's Witnesses knock at my door.  I can tell right away they are Witnesses because they are both unattractive Asian women.  Part of me feels repulsed; part of me wants to pork them both at the same time, shish kebob style.  As they stand in the doorway hoping to be invited in, they point to passages in the Gospel of Matthew which allegedly fullfill Old Testament prophecies.  Then they flip back to the Hebrew prophets, and they look at me with beneficent smiles and say, "See?  Just like they said it would be.  The Messiah came!"  My God!  I never realized.  The New Testament is the first sequel ever written.  I tell these well-intentioned souls that I will surely think about what they have shared with me today, and then I stare right at the uglier Asian's tiny 32A's while licking my lips lasciviously.  The poor ladies sense my Satanic vibe, and beat a hasty retreat.

8:04 A.M.  Two Mormons stroll up to the door, passing the frightened Witnesses on their way out.  I can tell they're Mormons because they are strapping young blonde-haired blue-eyed boys barely out of their teens, dressed in white shirts, black dress slacks, and dark boots.  Sixty five years ago, they would have been fabulous poster boys for the Hitler Youth.  The Mormons and the Witnesses eye each other with brief suspicion, and I fear a Christian Cult Jihad on my front lawn, but the suspicion turns quickly to wary half-smiles.  The handsome Aryans whip out their obligatory Books of Mormon like well-trained simultaneous gunslingers.  They chant in unison, "I know this Book is true," and I realize they have been sent by the Elders not to convert my heathen soul, but to convince themselves more surely of something they desperately wish to believe.  The Book of Mormon is yet another Testament of Jesus.  The more gorgeous of these statuesque men from Utah tries to persuade me that their precious Testament is like another view of a baseball game, the third base line as opposed to home plate.  I counter with pseudo-cleverness, "Wasn't the World Series over with the Book of Revelation?"  He smiles indulgently, knowing I will be quite lonely and miserable in the fiery region.  He asks me to come to church next Sunday and get myself baptised.  I tell him that I believe baptism is more than a ritual, something to be taken quite seriously, and for a hardened pagan like me to endure that kind of immersion....Well, I go on and on, and my lips turn all rubbery.  The chief spokesman remains friendly; the expression on his cohort's face gets mean and ugly.  He does not like me, not one little bit.  They leave, unsuccessful.

8:54 A.M.  Time to catch up on some reading.  "Farewell to God," by Charles Templeton.  A former fundamentalist preacher and colleague of Billy Graham, Templeton has lost his faith completely, and now he calls himself a secular humanist, which means that he doesn't believe in God or heaven or hell or any kind of afterlife, but he still thinks existence is worthwhile, however brief, and he thinks we should be as good as we possibly can be, even though we all have one foot in the grave, from which we will never be resurrected.  I appreciate his honesty, but I can't get on board with the whole "be good for its own sake" philosophy.  I kind of like being a selfish piece of shit.

9:37 A.M.  Fascinating debate on P.B.S. between an evolutionary biologist and an advocate of Intelligent Design.  The scientist explains that life emerged on this planet rather randomly, chaotically, meaninglessly, and almost completely by chance approximately 3.5 billion years ago.  Over hundreds of millions of years, primitive one-celled creatures evolved and grew and became more complicated, thrived for a while, and then died out and drifted into extinction, making room for other life forms to grow and thrive and die in the same way.  As the living conditions on this planet changed, explains the scientist on my television, so the varieties of life changed, too.  Eventually, after eons of time, for no apparent reason, humanoid creatures found their own place on planet Earth.  We were small, dark, and hairy.  We were a bit like chimpanzees, only not so adorable.  We developed, we evolved, we became conscious, we became self-conscious, we imagined reasons for our existence, we embraced the convenient and reassuring idea of a Creator, who lovingly and purposefully designed us in His own image.  The scientist further explains that our planet is a relatively small chunk of rock revolving around a medium-sized sun in an undistinguished corner of a second-rate galaxy in an immeasurably gigantic universe filled with billions of other galaxies in which there may very well be alien life forms completely unaware of our tiny self-important human community.  In his brilliant rebuttal, the Intelligent Designer explains, "God did it."

12:25 in the afternoon.  Lunchtime at McDonald's.  A female Muslim terrorist smashes through the doors of the restaurant while I am choking down the last few remnants of a filet-'o-fish. The Jihadist's abdomen has been impressively decorated with homemade explosives.  She passionately declares her love for Allah, the merciful and compassionate, the one and only true God of the Universe.  She proudly tells the patrons of the Golden Arches that we are unrighteous infidels, unbelievers, Zionists, and imperialistic American shit-eating perverts, and we are going to spend an eternity in everlasting hellfire while she becomes one of 72 virgins in heaven indulging every sensual need of her magnificent brother-in-law Jamal, who blew himself up in an Arby's last week.  A plucky child of seven, overhearing these terrible predictions, and unwilling to die so young, tosses an overcooked Happy Meal in the terrorist's face, and she falls to the floor, incapacitated.

3:31 in the afternoon.  Naptime.  The ghost of Thomas Jefferson visits me in my sleep.  He tells me the Holy Bible is nothing more than the silly, outmoded, parochial mythologizing of primitive, xenophobic, misogynistic, Middle-Eastern men.  Jefferson calls himself a deist.  He believes that some half-assed Creator fellow set the world in motion just like a giant Clockmaker, and then walked away, unconcerned with the future of his work.  I ask him earnestly, "Should we bother praying to this Schlemiel?" but Jefferson dissolves and I wake up in a cold sweat.

7:54 P.M..  After a long difficult day, I am lounging lazily on a couch in the V.I.P room of Fascinations Showclub, an establishment for men.  I am sipping Jack Daniels and smoking a smelly cigar.  A Scarlett Johanssen look-alike sashays in my direction.  No words necessary.  She doesn't need to ask if I would like a lap dance.  My hungry eyes tell her all she needs to know.  She lowers herself down to my level, turns prettily in the other direction, and rubs her perfect heart-shaped ass up and down and back and forth against my forlorn aching crotch.  After delicately removing her bikini top, she looks warily in both directions before placing my hands on her glorious bouncy life-affirming 34D's.  My Lord and My God!  A sensual epiphany, worthy of the Irish Master himself!  The ugly Asian Witness was right, after all.  The Messiah has Risen, and She has come to save us from ourselves.

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prechious phfew thaoughts afther finnishing Shames Voyce's Finickey Wake

sum reflechtions and purseonale openonions on Choyce's monsterpiece

 
So what shall we make of Finnegans Wake?
Is it worth the time and trouble?
Did Joyce squander his talent, let down his admirers, and renege on the promise of Ulysses?
Critics have charged Joyce with irrelevance and pointless obscurity.
Detractors say that so much was put into the Wake -everything in fact- that the reader is left with nothing at all.
Traditionalists say that an author needs to make choices.
They say that trying to decipher the Wake is a bit like searching for a wet book of matches in a dark room with nothing but a broken flashlight to guide you.
They say the emperor has no clothes.
 
Diehard fans of Joyce disagree. 
They believe that Finnegans Wake was the inevitable next step in Joyce's literary career.
After changing the face of 20th century literature with Ulysses, after completely demolishing all past notions and preconceptions of what a novel could and should be, the Wake's experiments with language itself were the destined next meal in Joyce's feast.
If hoi polloi greeted the Wake with a resounding yawn, Joyce's admirers saw his final effort as a dreamlike sequel to Ulysses, Earwicker's strange book of the night to complement Bloom's book of the day.
 
I first encountered James Joyce when watching Annie Hall in 1979.  Woody stands behind a pompous pontificating pedant in a movie theatre, and imagines the personal ad that led to the pretentious fellow's date: "academic wishes to meet a woman interested in Mozart, James Joyce, and sodomy."  I didn't get the joke then.
In 1983, I was taking a high school fiction writing class.  We were assigned to pick any author's short stories.  A slim copy of Dubliners beckoned me on.  I knew nothing about James
Joyce or Ireland.  I had no idea what a "dublin" was.  The teacher warned me that these stories were challenging, but I was determined to learn about Mozart and sodomy, now or never.
I was 18 then, four years younger than Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.
Now I am 40, two years older than Leopold Bloom, and Joyce has called me back to Dublin many times over the years.
 
I read a short biography of Joyce in the late 80's, not Ellmann's massive effort.  This scholar (not Ellmann) loved everything up to and including Ulysses, but his admiration stopped there. 
He referred to Finnegans Wake as a monstrosity.  He believed that Joyce had lost his mind.  He suggested that you can be a loving Joycean without ever opening the Wake.  And I
believed him.
 
In 1993, I was on an airplane heading nowhere in particular.  If I hadn't been wearing a seatbelt already, I would have been stopped in my tracks by the sight of a pretty young woman reading, of all things, Finnegans Wake.  This was some sort of literary blasphemy in reverse.  She had some nerve.  Everyone else on the plane was plowing through The Firm by John Grisham.  Always the rebel, I was skimming A Time to Kill.  To my surprised admiration, this woman was not sighing in agony, she did not seem at all bored or confused, she wasn't
scrambling for a dictionary every few seconds.
She was calmly, slowly, methodically reading the most difficult book ever written.
On an airplane!
I filed a complaint with Eastern Airlines, but for some reason they never got back to me.
I was outraged.
 
And inspired.
 
I fell into a deep dark depression.  I was unable to read a word of any book for weeks.  Even the most simplistic grammar baffled my gaze.  I couldn't concentrate at all.
It was clearly the perfect time to open the Wake at last.
Which I did.
And I "read" the first 500 pages, relishing the pure musical language of Joyce's jaunty-jingly-jangly prose.  The strange poetic rhythms, the inventive syntax, the lunatic vocabulary.
I suspected that I was truly enjoying a work of genius, even though I didn't understand a word.
Oddly enough, comprehension became somewhat irrelevant.  The Wake was a word symphony, and liner notes would have spoiled the purity of the experience.
Reading the Wake out loud made me giggle; reading it quietly to myself put me in some kind of trance.
 
Read the Wake out loud to an infant, and he will be mesmerized before drifting off to sleep.  Whisper the Wake into the ears of a sleeping adult, and your unconscious victim will attain perfect understanding, but he won't be able to explain anything when he awakes.
Don't read the Wake to a 3 year old.  They are so jaded, cynical, and hyper-conscious, perpetually asking why why and why.
 
How did a completely conscious Joyce manage to create a dream language to convey the unconscious dreams, desires, and fantasies of a sleeping soul?
Some critics suggest that he failed in this endeavor, creating an extraordinary dream that no one could ever possibly have.
Fans will tell us that the Wake is every dream ever dreamed, all in one night.
Style is substance in the Wake; you cannot separate the language from the dream.
 
Of course, inevitably, the University of Arizona library beckoned.  I had to find out what it all meant.  I had to understand.
 
Imagine a group of scholars, actors, and directors discussing Hamlet.  Everyone in the room can pretty much agree on what happens in the play.  Who does what, and who says what.  So why do we still read the play and see it performed after 400 years?  Because nobody can agree on what it all means.  Subjective, psychological, and artistic interpretations resonate infinitely; Hamlet is always the same, and always radically new and different.
 
Interpretative scholarship of Finnegans Wake ups the ante.  No two critics can agree on what it all means.  Moreover, they can't even agree on what happens, if anything.  They don't
even know how to classify the Wake.
Is it a novel, an essay, a poem, a fantasy, a musical dream, a numerical puzzle, a literary experiment? 
Yes.  All of the above.
Some critics have attempted to find something resembling traditional "characters" and "plot" in the Wake. 
Others reject this idea entirely, focusing on multi-leveled wordplay, autobiographical allusions, puns, historical and literary references.  In every paragraph they find a rich living planet of meaning, in every chapter a complex solar system, in the whole book a baffling brilliant galaxy.
 
Why did Joyce spend over 16 years of his life on a book that few people would ever read, and even fewer understand?
Should we feel obligated to spend 16 years of our lives studying the book and trying to penetrate its layers?
You may very well ask the same question about Proust, Faulkner, Gravity's Rainbow, and Ulysses.
Every individual reader will have his or her own subjective answer.
If you are the kind of person who likes to do crossword puzzles on Sunday afternoon, finish them in a few hours, check the answer key, and move on with your life, you may very well find the Wake tedious and frustrating.
If you need to know whodunnit, when, where, why, and how, the Wake will not satisfy.
On the other hand, if you can imagine a crossword puzzle which extends up, down, across and into the great beyond, with an infinite variety of answers to each clue, and no definitive answer key to confirm your guesses, then the Wake will be your cup of tay.
And if you don't mind spending weeks of labor trying to untangle and decipher the many layers in a single paragraph, then dive in.  The waters are murky, but cherce.
 
I can remember taking a college freshman seminar in Joseph Conrad.  For a writer who began his life speaking Russian and Polish, Conrad pretty well mastered complicated English prose. 
The professor told us that she had spent the last 12 years studying Under Western Eyes.  A difficult book, to be sure, but basically English.  This thought sent a ripple of restrained
laughter through our pre-sophomoric minds.  We couldn't imagine anyone spending 12 years on anything, let alone a book.
Rabid fans of the Wake gladly and willingly spend twice that time trying to penetrate Joyce's final effort.
 
Joyce did not go mad in 1923.  He had established serious literary credentials with Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses.  He had battled censorship and indifference.  He had not compromised his vision.
Joyce considered Finnegans Wake his masterpiece.
He has earned our respect.  He has gained the right to challenge us as we have never been challenged before.
It's quite possible that no one would have published the Wake if Joyce hadnt written it, but who else could have done so?
The Wake can't harm you.  It may bring you good tidings of great joy.  And it don't cost nothin'.
 
Joyce published his work serially.
Many former admirers proved unkind, and Joyce almost gave up the ghost, but he persisted. 
When he revised, his answered the book's critics and detractors.  He gave them their satirical voice, and he answered with a sly mocking voice of his own.
Stanislaus Joyce called the Wake "drivelling rigmarole...the witless wandering of literature before its final extinction", and brother Stanny became a major antagonistic character in the
Wake, the worldly Shaun to his artistic twin brother Shem.
 
I envy the people who were alive and well in the 'teens and 1920's.
They got to experience Ulysses and the Wake piecemeal, in more easily digestible chunks.  They didn't have to hold Joyce's giants in their hands and swallow every obscure reference
whole.  Anyone reading the avant garde magazine "transition" from the late 20's on could take little baby steps into the Wake.  These lucky guys and gals knew Joyce's latest endeavor 
as "work in progress".  Nora Barnacle was the only human being on the planet that knew the real title, and it's unlikely that she gave a tinker's dam.
"Oh, rocks, Jim, tell us in plain words."
 
There is a long grand tradition of incoherence and obscurity in our glorious Western literary tradition.
We are somehow unsatisfied with the Iliad as mythic storytelling.  We sense a curious little empty hole.  And so we journey to what may or may not have been the "real" Troy, to discover what may or may not have actually happened, to penetrate the layers of Homer's fiction and tunnel through the "actual" walls and ruins.  We are determined to find the "Truth."
We are such silly humans.
 
Which translation of the Holy Bible reveals the actual word of God?
Which particular denomination has found the right path and the right prayers?
How can we trust any of the Old Testament, when almost every page has an untranslatable word or phrase, or an obscure ancient concept?
As Moses scales Mount Sinai, pork bellies plummet.
Then the Christians come along and write a sequel called the New Testament.  God has changed his plan; he is more kindly and gentle, at least for a while.  Ham sandwiches are perfectly kosher.
600 years later, the Muslims write the final, correct, and undistorted word of the Lord.  Delicious crispy bacon falls back into shameful decline. 
Finally, the Quran has blessed us with God's perfect message, uncorrupted by human intervention.
Oops, tell that to Joseph Smith and his new improved Mormon revelations.
 
Compare the many biographies of Joyce, and those of Nora, Lucia, and Stanislaus.
Can anyone be trusted to tell the true story of a life?
Is there such a thing as definitive, final, and authoritative?
 
Finnegans Wake brings us a new literary mystery for our time.  It may be another hundred years before all of the problems of the Wake can be solved.  This may never happen. 
 
Is the word of God more easily comprehensible than the word of Joyce?  Since 1939, a few academic feathers have been rumpled.  So far, no one has been killed in a Wakean jihad.
 
What is the true nature of Earwicker's "crime" in Phoenix Park?
No two critics will agree.  Joyce keeps it purposely mysterious.  Earwicker may have exposed himself to two young women, or he may have seen them urinating, or something else entirely.  Depending on your point of view,  Earwicker seems more naughty than scandalous or criminal.  Since he is akin to Adam, the father of us all, perhaps his fall represents Original Sin.  Maybe Joyce is writing autobiographically, representing how he exposes himself as a man through his writings.  Only the obscure language of the Wake shields Joyce from total exposure. 
Earwicker may not have done anything wrong at all; he may have merely dreamed of a criminal act, and since he is still dreaming, the act seems real, as well as the guilt and anxiety.
 
Who inspired the Wake? 
Dante, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Lewis Carroll, the Book of Kells, the Egyptian book of the Dead, and just about everything ever written, thought, or dreamed since time began.
 
Who has been inspired by the Wake? 
Samuel Beckett, Anthony Burgess, Thornton Wilder, Joseph Campbell, John Cage, David Hayman, and a bunch of avant garde writers that I won't list because I've never heard of them.
 
What's the difference between a typo and a pun?
Joyce spent over 16 years laboring on the Wake.  Draft after draft, research notebooks, manuscripts, dictation, typesetters, chronically bad eyesight, eye operations, dealing with his daughter Lucia's mental illness.
Some scholars estimate mistakes in the hundreds.
But how can anyone possibly create a "corrected" text?
How can you authenticate Joyce's intentions, and how can you discriminate between a typo and a brilliant pun?
How can we be sure that Joyce made a mistake, or if his mistake may have been an unconscious moment of brilliance?
And if some astute reader finds a brilliant reference or literary connection in a simple misprint, perhaps Joyce himself would be happy for the accident. 
 
Is Finnegans Wake the most colossal literary hoax of all time?  I highly doubt it.  Joyce had a wicked sense of humor, but would he spend so many years of his life just making fun of
pseudo-intellectuals and dilettantes claiming to like and understand his mad ravings?
!6 weeks perhaps, or maybe even 16 months, but not 16 years.  The man went nearly blind writing the darn thing.
He considered the book his masterpiece, surpassing Ulysses.
Serious scholars have spent years of their lives, their entire academic careers, reading studying and writing about the Wake.
Dilettantes are too lazy to devote so much energy to one book.
And if you are trying to impress people at a cocktail party, you lie about reading Ulysses, since people have actually heard of that book.
 
Finnegans Wake contains just about everything in the world between its covers.  It is polyglot, polymath, and polymorphic. 
The Wake can potentially appeal to everyone, from any background.
We all bring our individual interior landscapes to the Wake.  Our life histories, our educations, our literary backgrounds.
The Wake may be the world's most accessible book, since there is something in it for everyone on earth.
Everyone receives an invitation to the Wake.  You can stay, drink, and celebrate as long as you like.
The possibilities for interpretation are limitless.  There may never be a consensus.
The Wake celebrates cultural and linguistic diversity.  It is the most passionately anti-fascist book ever written.
 
If Dubliners is a study of paralysis -cultural, religious, and social paralysis- then the Wake illustrates the paralysis of REM sleep, where the body cannot move but the mind is freed to
travel in space and time.
If Stephen Dedalus announces portentously at the end of Portrait of the Artist that he will forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscious of his race, then the Wake reforges in everyone's soul the eternally recurring and continually recreated unconscious of Ireland and the entire world.
If Ulysses details the conscious thoughts of Leo Bloom, Molly, and Stephen, then the Wake details the unconscious dreams and nightmares of all humanity.
For Stephen Dedalus, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake.  In the Wake, Earwicker dreams comically of all history, almost wakes up, only to fall back to sleep and dream the same dream over and over again.
 
What is the best possible study group for the Wake?
One actor and one actress to read passages aloud, one Irish historian, one world historian, someone who has read every biography of Joyce, someone who has read all of Joyce's books,
a mythologist, a linguist, an Irish Catholic, a renegade Catholic, a fearful Jesuit, a wandering Jew, someone who understands Gaelic, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Russian, German, Danish, Norwegian, and English, a bunch of enthusiastic Joyceans willing to speak their minds and share ideas, and someone who talks in his sleep.
 
 
Finnegans Wake is immensely difficult, and hugely rewarding.
It is a monstrosity, and a work of genius.
It is a fascinating failure.
It is a masterpiece.
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Donner Pass

From the diary of Elitha Cumi Donner, 1846

Late Summer

...By the good grace of God, we finally emerged from the Great Salt Lake Desert.  I cannot describe to you the fear and the thirst and the weariness we have endured.  There has been nothing but trouble and delay on our journey, and we have lost several fine people already.  Dr. Lecter, good sweet soul that he is, volunteered to stay behind with the dead, to see them properly disposed of.  We would be utterly lost without him. 

Fall 

Now October approaches, and an early snowfall has stopped us dead in our tracks just as we had begun to hope for the best.  Dear sweet Mother tries to keep up our spirits.  She jokes that now we have plenty of water at least.  She tries to cheer us, but our hearts have fallen so very very low.  The surrounding cold has chilled us to the bone, and our stomachs tremble and ache with hunger.  We have run out of supplies.  The men have tried hunting for deer and rabbit, but to no avail.  We sit and wait and peruse our precious Bibles. 

A creeping boredom has possessed us.  Foolishly, I left all of my favorite books back at Fort Laramie.  Julia Child's Joy of Cooking would have given me such a deal of comfort right about now.  Father brought along some of my favorite movies, but we had to abandon the Betamax machine back in the desert so the mules would have less to burden their load.  Now I have no means to watch The Hunger, Babette's Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, C.H.U.D., or Alive. 

Father hates cell phones with a passion; he considers them, quite rightly, tools of the Devil.  In any event, we can't get a connection out here with the Sierras towering above our sad little encampment.  We have sent out a party of strong men, and we fervently pray every spare minute for rescue.  Meanwhile, each day grows colder, every night the snow continues to fall, and only Dr. Lecter seems to look even remotely human among us wretched waning skeletons.

Winter

The worst of our fears has been realized.  We have no choice.  The dead among us must keep the living alive.  Dr. Lecter spares us from the cruelest portion of the ordeal, thank he