It is Saturday night in Hickman County. I am far from home, one hour outside of Nashville, deep into the Tennessee hills. Fifty miles from the big city is another universe to me. My kids live here with their mother in this wilderness, but she is at work, so I am charged with bringing my 11 year old son to his baseball game tonight. I’m grateful to spend time with Carson, but I’m feeling a bit uneasy in Redneckville.
We turn off Highway 100 onto a long country road that leads us to a ball field surrounded by American-made pickup trucks. The name of the park is Wrigley Field, but I assure you nothing resembles Chicago here. As I step out of my Japanese automobile, it becomes obvious I am an alien here. Every man in the park is wearing jeans and boots on this smoldering 80 degrees summer evening. Their grizzled hides are tanned and leathery from years of labor in the sun at the local lumberyard & sawmill. Facial hair is the rule and I am the exception. The old men don thick sideburns under John Deere caps, and the young studs sport flashy rims on shiny trucks, trying to impress ripe girls with big hair.
I am wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Velvet Underground t-shirt. Odds are good that I’m the only person in the county familiar with Lou Reed’s pre-punk band as I hear whispers behind me of “Velvet what?” The fact that I am reading “Tropic of Cancer” is equally puzzling to the crowd for I am the only spectator perusing a book at the game. Faulkner and Tennessee Williams knew these people well, but, ironically, the same characters filling their pages never read their work.
The twang of incorrect grammar permeates through the wood-planked bleachers. Southernese is the language and can be difficult to interpret if you are not from these parts. “I e’nt pay’n ya no nevermind if ya don’t quitcha holl’rin, Bubba” – means: “I will not acknowledge you if you do not lower your voice, Jonathan.” There is something charming about the word “ain’t” until you realize it is being taught in backwoods school systems by teachers who equate the Queen’s English with hieroglyphics.
The home plate umpire is a colorful old man in an official MLB uniform who relishes his role of central focus and control. He meets each strike from the pitcher with a howling declaration, rivaling the most dramatic European soccer TV announcers. He fist pumps, knee jerks, and rings up batters with zeal amid cheering and jeering bumpkins, bringing amusement to a dull game between unskilled juniors who closely resemble the Keystone Cops each time a ball is hit and a chain reaction of comedy begins. Nonetheless, the parents treat the contest as a death match between hated rivals, shrieking at every missed opportunity, but the kids have fun anyway.
The game is now over. My son’s team won their first game after 3 straight losses. The coach honors his promise to jump into the nearby creek since his team finally won a game, so he is now soaking wet in full uniform. My son excitedly bounces around his jubilant teammates as they celebrate and laugh at their muddy coach. The losing team sulks.
Tonight was a good distraction, and I needed it, Hickman County or not. But it is good to be heading back to the city lights for a victory lap around Nashville and ice cream for the champion. There’s no place like home, Toto.
Talk about the unbearable lightness of being... I met a girl 20 days ago and we've had a whirlwind romance over the past few weeks. Surely it must end with my unstable romantic history, but this one seemed different. What was I thinking? I knew she was a world traveler bent on roaming the earth.
The weekend I met her she had an interview in Memphis for a government job that would relocate her to Washington, D.C. or New York. I filed that info into the dark chambers of my mind and tried to forget it. Today she got a call from D.C., and it looks like she could be leaving in July.
Why do I care? Well, I am crazy about this incredibly sexy goddess who speaks 3 languages (imagine French spoken in a Transylvania accent) at 28 years old and has already traveled Japan, Thailand, and most of Europe. She grew up in Romania, but spent her teenage years living in France. She is ex-military and was stationed in Iraq guarding the military courthouses in Baghdad. This lovely lady has swam in Saddam's palace pools and sat in the courtroom chair where he was tried before being hanged. She was also stationed at Guantanamo Bay as a guard, so she's seen some serious shit. She just got a job at Vanderbilt University as a cop and is understandably bored. Hence, a new job in a bigger city beckons.
So, I'm dating a cop... either opposites attract or I was unconsciously seeking a bailout friend on the inside of that fascist world where I don't belong. Still, her personality matches my own in many ways. We have similar tastes & humor. I absolutely adore her, but it appears she will be moving -- if not now, later, while I'm rooted in Nashville. I don't want to have to drive her to the airport in a month and say goodbye, so I'm better off ending it now. I'm already attached and heartaches are purposefully distant memories for me -- ripping off the band-aid now makes sense.
It was a great 20 days. Ouch, that band-aid fucking hurt.
I always liked the title of Milan Kundera's novel. Life and all of its absurdities are certainly unbearable at times. One of my Vox friends asked where I've been lately, as my writing has all but vanished over the past several weeks. The unbearable lightness of being has happened, that's all. I have met a wonderful woman, whose future I cannot predict, which makes me uneasy as I find her company permanently charming. I have another female friend who is unstable, beautiful and hilarious, and I find her equally addictive though in less romantic ways. Last night I hung out and drank wine, among other things, with an aging artist who can be best described as an eccentric hippie with a beautiful soul and a fragile inner peace prone to dark moods. Women have consumed all of my time lately, especially the one who has me considering the unthinkable: settling down.
The main reason for my recent departure from writing is the lack of interesting subjects to ponder. It appears I've written about every subject of importance to me, without resolving anything. Being is full of unbearable lightness, because each life is insignificant and every decision does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are light, hence, the unbearable lightness of being. I often find myself prisoner to these esoteric thoughts, which makes everything I write or read sound like drivel -- masturbation seems much more productive than debating the relevance of McCain. OK, your brother got married, your daughter had a baby, you got a promotion at work, and we are about to elect a swell new president who will change the world. Alas, who cares? Not me. As usual, I'm unbearable.
I moved into my new house this weekend. The neighbors are friendly. My home is charming. Everything seemed perfect.
BUT... that was before I realized I lived on an airport runway. I knew the house was a few miles from the airport, but before I bought the place I visited the street several times and parked my car at different parts of the day over the course of a few weeks to see if any planes were buzzing the treetops. I found no sign of planes -- none at all.
UNTIL... the day I closed on the house. I was handed the keys after signing a mountain of paperwork. When I got to my new home I was greeted by the thunderous roar of jet engines overhead. Holy shit. Another plane flew over a few minutes later. Oh, no. Then another. SON OF A BITCH!!! Then another. WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Later, I heard the dull moan of a train horn in the distance. I forgot there are railroad tracks nearby.
Welcome home, Street Vein. The Lords of Karma are bitches, and you have been a bad boy.
Fuck you, Karma.
In the distasteful world of pomp everybody hangs up a Picasso in a conspicuous place. How does my knowledge of decadence of modernism and the sad folly of Progressivism as a mood, as a stupidly obvious rebellion against my imaginary grievances, measure against my love of one hundred pounds of girl? What does it matter if I have arrived at great social & spiritual truths in my lonely room and in my writings and in years of careful meditation and psychological comprehension -- what is my art? My knowledge? My poetry? My science? -- compared to her warm tongue?
I cannot waste my time loving others when after all, "I am better than they are." Do you see the light in that? ... it is an unrepressed thought, and incidentally it is hardly a geekish exposure of self for the sake of invidious distinction. Yet it may be.
It is beneath my dignity to participate in life -- to work at a job like the others, to struggle in crowded places with all the others, to do or be anything like "the others" -- too much for me.
My soul has been nothing but a day dream so far, like a Hollywood movie. It no longer concerns me how bad others can be -- what concerns me is how bad I am.
The dead speak in silent voices. I hear you, Jean-Louis Lebris.
There is a fine line between being brutally honest and being an asshole. Or is there? Whose company do you enjoy more – the careful, easygoing diplomat who never offends anyone or the edgy wise-ass who always tells it like it is? Most of us live in the middle somewhere, trying to find that unhealthy balance between Truth & Bullshit.
The politics of BS are built into all parts of our lives, public and private. Whether feigning agreement with your inept supervisor's moronic idea at work or shutting down to avoid arguments with your spouse, life provides no escape from mendacity. Concealing your convictions is a survival technique, which, ironically, slowly kills you inside.
That’s why I am proposing that April Fools Day be transitioned into Anti-Bullshit Day. What would be more satisfying, a day of lame pranks or a day full of unfiltered truth? By order of Federal Law, all U.S. citizens must now acknowledge April 1st as a “no-penalty” day for those speaking the absolute truth as they see it. Bosses cannot fire their employees and spouses may not request divorce as a result of the chaos unleashed under this long overdue holiday from Deception.
Tell your coworker he smells badly and that you had sex with his wife. Explain to your boyfriend that his penis is small and he humps like a last place contestant in the Special Olympics. The truth hurts sometimes, but the potential for positive gains is enormous. Your office mate may begin to bath regularly and your spouse might work a little harder between the sheets. Either way, you’ll have gotten a few anvils off your chest. As long as we're calling it April Fools Day, let's go all the way. What a wonderful world it would be.
I'm not organic. I drink the tap water and it is good. I do not recycle; nor do I litter. I will leave Earth the way I found her: A dirty lovely wench. Roses in the garden, Marlboros in the gutter... both are beautiful to me. I do not think we shall save this planet. And, does this planet need saving from us... really? Seems a bit egotistical to me. Gore, who I admire, is a genius on the subject. He's been studying it longer than I've known about it. It is happening, no doubt.
The dinosaurs never saw it coming, but we do, and it scares the shit out of us. Self-preservation is a powerful thing. I believe we should be more responsible for future generations, but if you are asking me not to drive this we can't do business. You may as well have hopes of being cooled off by a mosquito's frantic wings on a globally warm day.
We are killing ourselves, alright -- with liquor, tobacco, carcinogens, and in-laws, but Earth is going to warm or cool without us. Relax, she's a big girl and doesn't care if we leave or stay. Besides, the people of the world are widely lazy, uncivilized (like me), and willing to destroy the planet for immediate pleasures. Let them eat cake, I say. Ah, but we're going down with them -- and there's the rub. The guillotine is ripe with foolish greed. The sun will fall one day and Mother Earth will shake our mortal debris like a bad case of the fleas.
But, if you campaign for the Environment, I shall support you. You are good people -- hopeful and bewildering. Don't give up on me. And for God's sake, see what you can do about gasoline prices.
Sincerely,
Your favorite bastard, SV
Okay, as if writing Huckleberry Finn wasn’t enough, Samuel Clemens’ life was an amazing journey, which included occupations as a printer’s apprentice, a typesetter, sketch artist, journalist, steamboat pilot, silver miner, travel author, novelist, lecturer, social critic, and more. Mr. Twain, between the ages of 18 and 22, had lived and/or worked in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati and New Orleans.
He navigated steamboats along the Mississippi, and traveled the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by stagecoach. He visited Hawaii, Europe and the Middle East. He lived in places like San Francisco, Buffalo, and Hartford... all of this in the nineteenth century when travel was archaic.
Twain witnessed the Civil War, watched it rip the country apart from his slave-state Missouri, and later socialized with the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Helen Keller. He was also a Freemason. He was an anti-religious, anti-imperialist abolitionist in the Gilded Age of hardcore religion and racism! He was considered one of the sharpest minds of his time, and any other, before or since. This was a fascinating man.
Quotes on Mark Twain:
"He was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs."
-- William Faulkner
"All modern American literature comes from Mark Twain. All American writing comes from him. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"The mark of how good '"Huckleberry Finn" has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page, awkward here, sensational there - absolutely the equal of one of those rare incredible first novels that come along once or twice in a decade."
-- Norman Mailer
"I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson. I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the royal blood."
-- H.L. Mencken
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Quotes from Mark Twain
“I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there was some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt.”
“And so, I am anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the American eagle put its talons on any other land.”
"Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it."
In his twilight years, gloomy over the deaths of family and friends, he said:
“I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”
I’ve been watching documentaries on Darfur, along with reports from 60 Minutes. The Darfur conflict is multilayered, involving tribal differences, oil interests, government corruption, global warming, and starvation. One side of the armed conflict is composed mainly of the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited mostly from nomadic Arab tribes. The other side comprises a variety of rebel groups, notably the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), recruited primarily from the farming non-Arab ethnic groups.
The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, has provided money and assistance to the militia, and has participated in joint attacks targeting non-Arab villages. The government is essentially funding the eradication of non-Arab Africans in Darfur, resulting in hundreds of thousands of rapes, mutilations, and displaced civilians facing disease and starvation.
The Sudanese Civil Wars (I & II) were precursors to the Darfur conflict. The two civil wars spanned from 1955 to 1972, and erupted again in 1983. The conflict officially ended with the signing of a peace agreement in 2005. It was one of the longest lasting and deadliest wars of the later 20th century. Almost 2 million civilians were killed, and more than 4 million were left homeless. The war is usually characterized as a fight between the southern non-Arab populations against the northern Arab-dominated government.
In early 2003, local rebel groups accused the Sudanese government of oppressing non-Arabs, and criticized their handling of their region’s environmental and economic problems – but tensions in Darfur have existed since the 1970s. The combination of decades of drought caused by global warming and overpopulation are among the causes of the Darfur conflict. Nomadic Arab cattle herders searching for water have to take their livestock further south, to land mainly occupied by non-Arab farming communities. Both groups are Muslim, but the non-Arabs are often viewed by Arab-Africans as religiously inferior. This Arab-African dichotomy was exacerbated in past decades after Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi became focused on establishing an Arab belt across Africa and promulgated an ideology of Arab supremacy.
Southern Darfur, like southern Sudan, is rich in oil. The Chinese National Petroleum Corporation holds the large oil concession in southern Darfur. Chinese soldiers are alleged to be protecting Chinese oil interests. This may be one reason the United States (aka: World Police) has not bothered to police Darfur... fear of fucking around with China’s oil supply. Darfur needs humanitarian assistance right now, not military intervention fueled by oil greed.
If you didn’t already know the details surrounding Darfur, it is not your fault. The New York Times points out that ABC News carried a total of 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts in 2004 as the genocide was fully underway; NBC had only 5 minutes, CBS only 3 minutes. This is what happens when network executives in charge of entertainment take over the news department. When you turn on CNN do you want to hear about millions of starving Africans and villages of mutilated bodies? Or would you rather see which Hollywood celebrity is in rehab this week? The media knows the answer. Edward R. Murrow, where have you gone?
- 400,000 - DEAD
- 2.5 Million - DISPLACED
- 10,000 to 15,000 - DYING EACH MONTH
Journalist Tom Brokaw called Americans of the WWII era "The Greatest Generation" in his 1998 book by the same name. While I greatly admire my grandparent's generation, I revere my parent's era, those who grew up in the turbulent 1950's, 60's & early 70's. The social upheaval of the 1960's alone made it the Decade of the Century.
Numerous political leaders were slain, while college students protested, activists marched, and citizens rioted in the streets. Jim Crow laws were being challenged, and women were burning bras and singing Hear Me Roar. This generation challenged EVERYTHING and created a far better society than previous generations ever imagined. Women and African-Americans demanded equal rights... imagine that. Roe v Wade and Title VII were landmark victories toward national enlightenment, while Watergate severed all public trust in government. The sexual revolution, counterculture movements, civil disobedience, psychedelic rock, and social unrest appeal to me -- I was born a generation too late.
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Street Vein said:
I told them I was a photographer for Field & Stream magazine and was doing a piece on Red Blooded... read more
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Street Vein said:
Yep, last I heard she was in DC heading to Florida. I haven't heard from her in about a week. read more
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Austin1234 said:
Wondreful post, did those fellas pose for you or were you wearing a concealed camera? read more
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probably for the best.... read more
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