One for you, one for me, one for the kids (3 things I wrote today)

My Scandal In Bohemia

She's my scandal in Bohemia.
Doomed, damned and beautiful.
And I, her guilty secret.
She loves me.

A Terrible Liberation

I don't know if I hate the world because I don't belong, or if I don't belong because I hate the world. Either way, I hate the world, and either way, I don't belong. It's a terrible liberation. But at least it's mine.

These Things Called Seasons

See kids, when I was a little boy, we had these things called "seasons." There were four of them. And each one had a specific temperature range and weather pattern. Like, you know how it goes from 70 degrees one day to 40 degrees the next day and then 60 degrees a day later? It was sort of like that... except it took MONTHS.

The Restaurant Bit

Another good piece that I cut loose:

HART
How was work?

PAULIE
It was crap. Jehovah's Witnesses are the cheapest people ever.

HART
Please not this again.

PAULIE
No, no, let me finish. Everyone says Jews are cheap, and that Indians are cheap, and, okay, yeah, sure, you know what? They are. But Jehovah's Witnesses? Make them all seem as frugal as Paris Hilton!

HART
I can't take you anywhere.

PAULIE
I'm serious! The cheap bastards don't want to pay for room service, and they don't want to pay the tip at the restaurant, so they all come down at once and line up to order their meals to go. All at once. The kitchen was total chaos!

SKIP
Paulie, you are like the klutziest person I ever met. How do you even work in a kitchen without falling onto the knife rack or landing face first in a burner or something?

PAULIE
In the kitchen I am as graceful as the majestic swan.

(He attempts a pirouette and knocks something else over.)

Shaggy Doggerel

I'm filled with trepidation
My soul brims with dread
I need it like trepanation
Get it? A hole in the head.

Time To Hate On Breast Cancer Awareness...

I feel like being inflammatory, so let's go to a topic that everyone seems to love this time of year: breast cancer. Why the fuck is breast cancer so important? Name another cancer that gets an "Awareness Month". Name another cancer that gets its own color.

And before you come in and tell me, Noel, did you forget that July is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, or, certainly you must know that chartreuse is the official color of Brain Tumor Awareness, or some other dumb facts you may pull out to back your argument up, allow me to make it clear that I could give a flying fig about the facts. All I'm saying is, if another cancer is as big-time and hoopledy-hoopla'd as breast cancer I must have missed it, because I never heard of it and I can't AVOID breast cancer awareness. The stupid Facebook memes about the bra colors. The special pink version of products. The pink ribbons. The entire fucking month of October. Just saying.

And why breast cancer? The most cynical hypothesis would of course be because it's the cancer that WOMEN get, angled just right to stimulate the save-the-princess section of the primate brain -- and then the reason why it's breast cancer and not ovarian cancer or the-gift-of-life cancer or always-right cancer is because men like breasts, breasts get their attention. Makes sense, in a cynical and awful way.

Except.

Because believe me, I already hear you revving up to dump a whole lot of boring facts and percentages on me. Lame! But I already KNOW that it's not just women that can get breast cancer. Men do too -- and not just fat guys with big floppy moobs, either, so you know it's real. But then... why is breast cancer singled out to be so fucking important?

Look, all I'm saying, because really I know breast cancer is a serious thing and right now I am in perilous danger of some breast cancer survivor chiming in with a creakily boring story of hope and inspiration who will make me look like I'm Darth Hitler for daring to doubt the serious nature of breast cancer -- all I'm saying is, lung cancer. Melanoma. Leukemia. Bad shit. They kill people too. Heart cancer. Did you even know heart cancer is real? Says here that it's rare -- but rare STILL HAPPENS. Bad shit. Where's Heart Cancer Awareness Month?

And then what about salivary gland cancer?

Colon cancer?

Retinoblastoma? I have no idea what that even is but it sounds pretty fucking hardcore. I wouldn't want to fuck around with some retinoblastoma, s'all I'm saying.

Cosmic Conscious Crackpot

There may well be a universal consciousness, but my hunch is that regardless the universe is not conscious per se. We are the universal consciousness, or at least the part of it that is awake. The universe is still waking up, but until the conscious entities it has created and become leave behind their individual egos, the process of awakening will not continue. This sense of separation from the rest of universe was a necessary illusion at a point in our evolutionary past, but it is an illusion nonetheless and the time will come when that must be confronted. That time is almost upon us.

This could of course only be half-right, because I am operating under the assumption that we are the only consciousnesses in the universe. I have yet to be convinced that anything weird happening on Earth cannot be explained in terms of the activities of the human brain, which is surely the most amazing and untapped tool we have. There had to be a point in time where consciousness only existed at one point in space. Somebody had to be first, and since I see it existing here and do not see it existing anywhere else I have no reason to assume that it’s not us.

The Mall

A scrap on the cutting room floor, from this project I'm working on:

(JOHN and THEO sitting on a bench in the mall. One is eating a pretzel, the other is drinking a smoothie.)

THEO
This it it? You just sit here and watch people?

JOHN
The most entertaining thing to watch in the world. Human beings, with their endless passions and melodramas.

THEO
That's crap. People are very simple. Like robots. They're easily led. In this case, the television led them to the mall.
(pause)
Except for them.

(THEO points to a group of teenage girls, fashionable and disaffected, laughing and texting and sipping their super-sized soft drinks at a table nearby)

THEO
They're here because school lets them out too early.

JOHN
(shakes his head sadly)
I see. You seem like a smart guy, Theo, but you sure look at things funny. What's so wrong with a mall?
(THEO attempts to interject)
Let me finish. The mall is a picture of human existence in miniature.

THEO
What the hell are you talking about?

JOHN
Okay, look at those kids over there, the ones you just pointed out.

(cut to teenagers again)

JOHN
They come here to hang out because all their friends come here to hang out, and all their friends come here because all their friends come here, and so on. They buy music, hair dye, jewelry. Luxuries.

(now JOHN points to a married couple in their late twenties walking leisurely, stopping to glance in a shop window)

JOHN
In a few years they’ll be coming here on weekends with their spouses to get away from the hell of the work week and the daily grind, maybe to catch a light romantic comedy and shop for some sensible shoes.

(JOHN points to another couple, mid-thirtyish. The wife is pushing a stroller.)

JOHN
Eventually, they’ll start bringing their own children with them, a whole new generation of consumers to keep the machine going.

(Now JOHN points to an old woman with curly short white hair in jogging gear power-walking.)

JOHN
Finally, in the twilight of their lives, they’ll come here on the weekdays, early in the morning. Retired, widowed, children all grown up and shopping in their own malls somewhere else, they’ll walk the mall. No shopping, just walking, because they have nowhere else to be, nowhere else to go. The tribal village has been replaced by a mall and no one even knows.

THEO
Huh. Paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

JOHN
So they say.

The Damned Thing

The skeptic dismisses it as coincidence.
The mystic calls it synchronicity.
The theologian refers to it as divine will.
The paranoid sees it as enemy action.

Forever Suffering (Cut-And-Paste God Knowledge)

From private correspondence, simply too good to leave for an audience of one.

If you're hoping to avoid pain and death, you're on a fool's errand. Life is pain and it ends in death. Okay, life isn't JUST pain -- but suffering certainly seems to be a key aspect to it. If you try and shelter yourself from it you wind up either completely unprepared for it when it comes anyway or so dissatisfied with your safety that like the Buddha you reject the whole concept of safety and declare all of existence to be an illusion.

I am also reminded of an old Sufi tale about this sage on a sea voyage. At some point during the trip the ship hit a really bad storm, and while the boat tipped this way and that, while the seamen were running around barking orders and unrolling sails and bailing out water, while the other passengers were terrified and whimpering and praying, the sage sat in complete serenity. When the crisis passed someone took him to task, asking "How could you stay so calm, knowing that the only thing between you and a watery grave was a thin plank of wood?" And he responded, "I was able to remain calm by reflecting that, at many times, even on the land, there has been far less between me and death." We are all of us at all times living in the shadow of the valley of death.

I knew a kid, my age, he was coming back from vacation summer after 6th grade. He unbuckled his seatbelt for a moment to turn and say something to his cousin in the backseat and at that moment someone hit them. Everyone else survived, he died in his mother's arms on the side of the road. A kid younger than me, one of my cousin's friends, out of the blue dropped dead at 15. Turns out he had some heart defect no one knew about.

I think the healthiest way to handle the idea that terrible things happen is to accept it. You can try to ignore it but still the horrors slip in like a thief through an unlocked window. You can embrace it and spread it, be a monster -- but to what end? You can despair and see that all of life is misery and give up. Or you can accept it as an aspect of life, see it for what it is, and use it to measure the rest of your time. Enjoy what you have because it could be taken at literally any moment.

It's like this: the world is a horrible place. When we came up, the last time we actually evolved, there was nowhere we were safe. There were giant animals everywhere that would catch us and eat us if we strayed from the pack, if we moved too far from the fire. Huge cats and wolves and wild hogs and giant bears and snakes -- watch the middle five hours of the Peter Jackson King Kong and you will realize that all these giant monster animals fears are almost an encoded race memory from a time when things like that almost actually existed. And, over time, we have shone the light of civilization, beat back the threat of bloody nature, "red in tooth and claw." Now when you hear about a giant animal killing a human it is probably an escaped zoo animal or the guy was some nut who tried to live with the bears. It's just not the same anymore. But somehow the state of fear and terror of the external world never left us even as we defeated most of the external world, and today we need to have just as much fear and terror, only it's almost all towards other humans and their artifacts and their actions. For better or worse we live in the world that the humans built, and maybe one day they will realize this and opt to change it into one with less need for fear and terror. This is, I believe, simply the way evolution works as we move from an animal's awareness to the awareness of whatever we will eventually become. Man is a bridge between the ape and the superman, a bridge stretched over the abyss, as Nietzsche said, and it is this abyss that you are attempting to come to terms with.

Good luck, kid, you're gonna need it.