In Twilight Regalia

I am not depressed as I write this. I emphasize that.
But it’s a deeply confusing puzzle to me, and my brain is tired of doing it.
I’m….. exasperated with it. Past the exasperation, I’m just kind of feeling like ow. It’s a dull ow ow ow ow that just keeps on all the time. My life just doesn’t fucking Fit.

This is the one of the more uncomfortable places I’ve been in life. I suppose it could be far worse; I could be very ill; I could have been in a plane crash and stranded or injured; I could have been abducted by a lunatic; I could live in Darfur and be starving; I could have been born with no arms; lots of things. I feel like the kid in My Life As A Dog (an obscure reference for some). (How many watch Swedish films…?) You
have to put things in perspective, the child thinks. You have to realize there are worse things in life.

But really, I can’t think of a time when I was less sure of the events and paths to be taken in my life than now. I have weird dreams about it; stuff comes out and even though I sleep, I’m not really resting. I wake up a lot. I get strange feelings of hopelessness once I wake up because nothing’s been resolved in my sleep; it makes me edgey. Age has something to do with it; when you arrive at a certain crossroads, you double-think all your decisions and having looked them over studiously, you’re pretty sure you’re an idiot just about then.

All the flaws are easy to detect in hindsight; the stuff you should have done, the opportunities you didn’t initially know were opportunities that you missed; the chances you now see were your only exits for various paths not taken that are now closed off to you forever. The people are the hardest part. You realize they changed in ways you’d never anticipated. Some of them didn’t even hang around that long.

All the people I hoped would be with me now live far away from me. The culture I loved and the surrogate family I thought I’d have is long split apart on three or four continents. I have a home situation that’s pretty tepid (very unexpected, I thought I’d have a happy progression or a fiery disaster); I have security, but it all depends on me rather than any help I’ve had, and could all fall apart in an instant should I get myself fired; ( I have daydreams of taking down this place and jumping off a roof, but I really wouldn’t know how to load an AK47, for starters…) I have looming dread of people I personally know becoming old enough to leave the planet; (what’s worse, me leaving or them?. Oh Them of course.) I have wierd aches that were never there before. I have increasing lack of confidence that I am keeping up with skill levels of anyone my junior.

I have an acute awareness that my personal view of life, with all its lessons and values, is becoming less valued by others with each day. And the days go REALLY FAST.

When I make things, I forget that for a moment, and I make a perfect object; something good to taste, something fine to see, something that howls when I sing it. I wonder if a distraction such as that is enough
anymore, since I now know it won’t be a career. It has to be for its own purity now, and I can in fact do that when I’m in pain…. so at least that’s a plus.

The furtive, constant thought that I mean nothing keeps flitting across my consciousness, What Am I FOR? and when I look at it, I think it out of existence, only to have it flit back across the screen. Being older means more mental maintenance I think. There is more to evaluate, and so everything seems to take longer, and steps taken are more secure, but locked in. And keeping away the ghosts is a challenge. I think people have children to frighten them off. I’ve not been afforded that option.

I can’t imagine yet what I can do to change the burden of my own self-conscious life on me — I feel like it must be lifted, but with what? My own self is not enough. My own thoughts just do me in. I need either rescue, backup, or a new incarnation.., or something.

Do I arbitrarily find women who are my age? (arg. I hate that. They are never like me, almost never.)
Do I just get a dog? Don’t I already have fish and small creatures that need me? Where is the thing/ person/ task/ adventure/ situation/ comfort/ raison d’etre I need?

And please don’t say God, I’m already up and down the block on that one.

I ‘m selling our table and chairs.

We had bought it before we’d decided we might get married,
back when we both had big hair.
I never understood when I was young how people could obsess over objects like furniture.
But I guess I’m guilty now, all these light years away.

I realize I’ve kept the little blondewood table,
with its side props that bang into your knees
and force you toward each quarter of the table instead of each half,
this annoying little wonderful symbol of a hope that didn’t come to fruition,
this awkward little holdout of my stubbornness,
all this time.

You got up and excused yourself, and
I’ve been through so many hopes with others since,
and you’ve been through two yourself,
and still I could not part with it.

We’d picked it out before Christmas,
and I remember looking at the ornaments and thinking of our future trees.

But everything’s so different now.
I’ve gone all lumpy and you’ve less hair, and here we still are.
We still share our tugs and pulls.
Our meteorite existence, plummeting past everything,
made me keep you,
molten down into priceless cinder
and this table, part of that.
This cramped little thing.
We still mingle conversations, dust, hopes that are different.,

And I realize with a breath
That you and I have tables bigger now than we ever would have then.
Daily we might have just collided, flower vases tossed to smash.

This way our family, our square, is bigger.
We added a few places. And now a new little one.
So you see, …

It’s got to go, and so
I’m selling our table.
This table is just too small for us anymore.
We’d need a mesa the size of the state of New Mexico now.
You old star.

Went to the Editors concert last night and encountered in the flesh what I’d only seen hints of when posting in recent times on forums. I mean, I knew it was prevalent on the forums in L.A., but I guess I was naiive as far as teens and twenty-somethings in the last few years. I thought maybe it was only L.A.?. This may only be an Angelino thing, but WHAT WAS UP WITH THE EXTREME RUDENESS LAST NIGHT? and then the backing off thing too? Here I must address a need for some MATURITY. It’s obvious you all need to know who made the rock all of you are bashing around to now.

1) To the Gay Redhaired Guy in the impeccable rust-Southwestern-weaving-patterned suit: You muscled your way in front of us after we’d waited for an hour to stand in a good spot. When I say to my spouse next to me, “Oh Great, now I’ve got a giant head in my view”, you turn around and FLIP ME OFF. In front of my husband, who is so completely surprised that we just look at each other.
RUUUUUUUUUDE.
When I add another un-swearing sentence about your rudeness, I get “Cunt!” back. Sheesh. WTF??
AND THEN THE BACKOFF: Even you must have realized you were having a hissy fit at our hetero-ness or maybe you were just having a bad day, but you later retracted and apologized and said you were sorry and out of line. Apology fully accepted. Don’t worry, it had already struck me as a raging-queen thing to do. Both the insult and the retraction together, I mean. Or maybe you were just worried you might have been beaten up in the parking lot by my unknown-quantity-looking husband, but not to worry, those days are long gone for us, because WE ARE MATURE. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING MATURE. YOU CAN STILL ROCK OUT AND BE MATURE. Besides, I had indeed taken note of your impeccable haircut and interesting suit, even when I was pissed at you. THAT’S WHAT MATURITY IS.

2) To the drunk/stoned Mexican bouncer-sized kid who SMASHED through with your giant sweaty girth (all the while threatening sloshing your beer on my head) into a gaggle of tiny blonde girls in front of me AND the gay guy. First you made a crack about how I don’t own this place and can’t stop you. (That was after you stomped one of the little blonde girls into a postage stamp completely unwittingly in your drunken barrelling. I don’t think you noticed her under your armpit.) RUUUUUUUDE.
THEN, you buried yourself further with the justification that I couldn’t POSSIBLY have cared as much about The Editors as YOU did and you doubted I even was here for them.
“Why???” I asked, quietly suffering the same shock as when someone first called me “Ma’am.” “Because I’m older?”
“Yeah, like you probably don’t even know the songs.” you said. (Well ok, then he’s honestly a fan. Challenge accepted.)

AND THEN THE BACKOFF: I then recounted some of the lyrics I liked best and you were actually glad, and in your drunken recovered happiness at my reply, decided I was then your good buddy and asked me if I smoked weed. After I declined all been-there-done-that, you decided to invite about four more of your drunken/stoner friends to weave in and out of my path DURING MY FAVORITE SONG. When your shorter friend blew pot smoke all over us all, I didn’t particularly care, but I cared when you jumped the barrier up front, got kicked out and came barging back through to your same position AGAIN (One of the little blondes tried poking you with a toothpick elbow, but her hair was probably more dangerous.) Then you idiots got the security guards after you and they dragged your pot-smoking friend out and all I could see through another song was security badge. RUUUUUUUDE.

The strange thing was, they never came back for YOU. You stayed in front, completely oblivious, bouncing, all hands in the air and singing every tune and endangering every bordering toe. It was here that I really couldn’t fault you. You actually were a huge fan. A big Mexican guy in love with the whitest, most poetic band I could think of. It got me all patriotic for half a moment: What a great place this is. You just never know who you’ll reach. I was a great fan at your age and note, big guy, I STILL AM.
BUT PLEASE GROW UP, BIG MEXICAN DUDE. DON’T STOMP ON US. DON’T BLOCK US. Offer to put one of those miniature blondes on your shoulders so they can see. And I hope someone calls you “old man” some day and it bites you in the ass, but hey, that happens to us all, just you wait.

And here’s the MATURE answer for us both: GET THERE ON TIME, DUDE. That way you can be there early enough to stay in the pit where you can mosh out all you like. If you’re not going to be MATURE, get a place for it.

3) To the guitar player from Louis XIV: I looked right at you from a couple feet away after the show and called out that you played great (because I was in fact watching you), and you proceeded to look at me like I was some kind of Amityville Horror. RUUUUUUUUUUDE. You too will one day face what I once did: leaving the stage for a life behind the scenes. Yes, I too play, and not too shabbily. I AM ONLY MATURE, that is all.

4) To the kid (or maybe just server-person-at-Verizon) who typed into the screen above us “What’s up with all these old people?”: RUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE.
Music is a transcendence. This will be your salvation in later years. Know this and never cling to the style you grew up with. Keep growing and you will breathe free and never really die. Spoken by a MATURE (and white) PERSON who knows what’s on your iPod, owns two and knows where the best rap is. (Yes there is such a thing.) DO NOT ASSUME, my dears. NEVER ASSUME.

5) To the literally seventy-something balding skinny guy POGO-ing his ASS OFF next to me for a while. YOU are AWESOME. When you left a little early, probably to go change your Depends, I was sorry to see you go. ROCK ON, pogo-man. You are an inspiration to us all.

The next day my back was jacked up from standing for four and a half hours straight. Do I want to go through this again? ::sigh::

Yeah.

What can I tell you, my sister,
my killer,
What can I possibly say.
I guess that I miss you,
I guess I forgive you,
I’m glad that you stood in my way.

—paraphrasing of
Leonard Cohen’s
Blue Raincoat

A long time ago we were a unit, my two-married friends and I and he that I loved.
We were two of us alike, and two of us alike.
Half were fat and half were thin.
We all had glasses — and two pairs, with points.
Perhaps none of them felt so connected, but I did.
Even in my dreams we, all of us, are together.
They still live so freshly in my subconscious mind that they are there in my heart, doing the mundane and touching dances of life, even in my sleep.
I worried about them.
We shared our drinks.
I worry now about them.
We laughed over things.
I still laugh.
I educated them.
We kvetched about each other.
I was educated by them.
I planned things for them. I cooked for them.
We ate, we shopped.
We travelled together to foreign countries and had adventures.
We had jokes only we knew.
We cared for each other’s animals.
We breathed each other’s perfume and smoke.
We watched our lives sprawl out like wrinkled bedsheets.

We lived side by side.
They were my family, in ways even they would never have imagined, since all of them had families in their pasts, and I not much.

There was a day in which
(and I never thought this would ever happen)
I knew I had reached an apex of my life.
It was the day that I was doing nothing out of the ordinary.
A perfect, not-extraordinary day.
I was carrying my laundry from my little cottage to their part of the main house, a basket in my arms, in late spring. Perhaps it was early summer even.
The sun was late afternoon, not hot. The air a bit dusty and slightly breezey. There were plum blossoms on a huge tree near the driveway blooming at their peak and just starting to scatter flurries in the warm wind.

I was trodding over the stones when I saw the sun in the clouds that were starting to develop a hint of early sunset coloring. Just wisps.
I was thinking about nothing, my pets indoors, my dinner plans, nothing much.
My lover’s music was pouring out my cottage door past the good luck symbol and door chimes and bamboo by each side of the doorway. He was just tinkering with something, as he always was, music washing over the afternoon while he was under the desk with some configuration. I never minded that he did that. It was a little bit cute, my mad scientist.

My friends were in their part of the house a few steps away, two smooth dogs on the dirty carpet, snoozing with a blink here and there. There was a computer game playing, and noises of exploding crafts coming out the door. I knew my dear friend was in there squinting at the screen, he was winning, as he was always. He always seemed to win.

I knew somewhere there, maybe on the couch, she was painting her nails.

I stood in my long dress in the driveway, pausing a moment, breathing in something unfamilliar.
It was rest.
I looked at the day, the shadows on the rocks in the driveway, and the sun getting lower in the west, and the green around the edges of the side of the cottage, and I thought, with no small surprise, that I was probably in the best place that could ever be. Peace was at last in my life. I was sure of things. I was sure of us. I was not alone. I was going to have a life after all. Maybe this was what one waits for. I remember smiling.
Then I tucked up the weight of my laundry and went on, across the yard, to the cellar, where the laundry was and went back to things material.

We lost it all when she threw away the marriage.
At the same time, he left me, for her, and all the things I thought were rosy dissolved into chaos and hurt again and the music was worse and hard and worse.

That moment had simply been a crystal ornament, a facet turned just so, just for a second, in the scheme of all the sunchange a life goes through.

And now, past all the noise, she’s come back. Wayward, frivolous, belle and dark, ephemeral, nightmare, daughter-like, Maya of darkness of our lives.

I am with a different man, chosen in haste, as wisely as could be reckoned, from a far and away country,
and we in a far and away city, alone together,
uglier, not the design once hoped for, but a good enough place at the moment.
He is another story.

And her husband ever winningly wants her back.
My friend, the one piece that never shifted, so hurt once,
him that I nursed through the wreckage, is now taking her back, his muse, and soon, the mother of his child. What soft abyss, what bliss, what storm is that? Where does it go?

What can I say to you, the one who took our lives with you?
Did I waste time hating you? No. Not much.
Did I cry over you? Yes. And the pain you brought us, yes.
Did I cry over the one I had loved, that you took? Yes, twice in great ways, and more in many small ways.
Did I hold you to your promise so much that I would hurt you? No.
Can I trust you?
Can I?
I do not know that still.

My dear, my itching unsainted fool, my sisterful of frills and empty folly,
fragile as a kitten, with claws, where do you climb?

Do I care for you as I did?
Do I want to answer?
Do I rejoice that you are back and want to stay?

The folds of my eyes do not sit high and smiling as they were,
but
my older hands are open on my lap.
Put something there for me.
Bring me red envelopes of your cleansed hopes.
Tell me why
and we will see.

I’m sitting in the snow of my desk with the desktop picture I have up. I don’t usually like cute stuff, but this is national geographic quality. It’s a very cute, furry, snow-dusted squirrel looking like he just got caught red-handed with a nut. His tail is at winter’s maximum fluffiness. He looks so perfect, quizzical look on his wiffling nose. The snow looks so fresh and crunchable.

I am already touching the little wiggly nose gently and saying pat pat to the little furry head and marveling at the little scratchy hands with grippy furred claws on his simple dinner.

Have a seat!
I say, and sit down on the cold dry packed iciness and wonder if I’ve stuffed my pants far enough into my rubber boots so they don’t get snow in my ankles when I stretch out my legs.

Have a seat!,
I think to him, and he pounces like a poof of powder onto the lap of my old blue wool coat (how small my hands are), looking this way and that, nibble, looking.
What a wonderful tail, I think, and I’m hearing
crunching behind me, which,
Sadly,
Turns out to be the printer,
And away I go
Back to the figures
And Numbers
And words
And
How I wish I could at least
see my breath in front of me, as it leaves.

It’s been a number of weeks of on and off panicked work and then a tiny rest. Jumpstart and then off again. It’s just the way the days fell this year, and the fact that I didn’t take vacation around the Christmas and New Year holidays.

Amid that series of sloth and go, we decided to see the new Sweeney Todd film. It’s one of the plays I’d not dressed nor seen (although I’d seen a couple scenes from it on telly), and so I was taking the movie more at face value. And I knew it had Sondheim’s music to commend it (A Little Night Music was a great favorite of mine as a kid — mostly for its quips). I had to see it just for that, even if Johnny Depp was attempting singing it. (And he did a great job of it too.)

The plot is simple: a barber with a beautiful wife and baby daughter are separated when the naiive barber is sent off to a prison labor camp in Australia on trumped-up charges by a jealous judge, who has designs on the wife. 15 years later, the bitterly deranged barber returns to London and hears his wife has died and the daughter is now being pursued in marriage by the same judge, who has raised her as his ward, keeping her a prisoner in his home. His life destroyed, he seeks out his old barber shop, now above a meat pie shop, and nothing but revenge on the judge with a razor will settle his soul.

When I began to watch it, knowing musical theater’s traditions, I wondered how Tim Burton would rectify the telling of such a simple and predictable tale to the current internet-minded, twitching viewers expecting plot twists, stuff blowing up, and slasher material.

The answer is, he didn’t give a damn about that. He gave it what it needed — a classical presentation, with a few of his typically macabre and humourous touches. It ended as a stolid, bleak fable, set in a twisted Dickensian London, with an occasional jab of laughter. Every scene was ornate as a mouldering Mrs. Havisham’s table — inkblotchy,filthy, every street corner filled with danger or dread, the skies sooty with the most grim lighting possible. Everything looks pregnant with doom. People are dressed in 19th century finery, but it all looks as if it needs laundering and mending. Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop is not just dirty and dismal, it’s overrun with creepy crawlies and burgeoning disease. When they sing a comedic tune about the qualities of the meat they’ll be using for her pies (comparing the various offices of men they’ll soon be grinding up for that meat), there’s not just a theatrical romp in their madness. There’s a gluey sickness to it as well. Tim’s tale is not just dark and funny — it’s …Dark-funny-and-then-we-slit-your-throat.

I can see why some audience members complained about gore — seeing spurting blood is always a bit unnerving, even when it’s cartoon red and syrupy, as it is here. For me, it seemed more sickening to watch the dull thud of a body landing upside down from three floors into the basement. There’s a reflex that vision hits. Ouch! Euh! Ick! But it’s important for him to show you the repetition of horror. Sweeney’s madness becomes routinely everyday as the murders pile up, and that’s just the point. He’s bored with all these corpses, waiting only for the sweet revenge. It’s a tale of how darkness destroys not only those victimized by it, but the purveyors of it as well.

I must see it again for the wonderful and haunting music, that makes me want to sing every next sentence in my head out loud. If you give it the right rhythm and push it in a little melodic circle, anything can ring like a bell pealing over and over in Sondheim’s hand. And visually, I have to see the sea shore sequence again — perhaps the lightest moment in the movie. In it Helena Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Lovett dreams of having a tidy domestic life by the sea with Sweeney, and the site of a grimacing, depressed Depp in a 1910 striped bathing costume sitting woodenly on a blanket in the sand is hilarious enough, until you see her in a red-striped number that looks like a Degas gone psycho. My only complaint with these two actors is that they’re both so pretty they almost don’t fit the tone of the tale. I could have seen Gary Oldman as
a sunken Sweeney Todd more readily, with someone like Courtney Love as Mrs. Lovett, putting more distance between the two in terms of class distinction. But then, could you see those two on a screen set together in filming? Not!. So off we trod.

I think moviegoers who are used to the common everyday life of CSI and CGI will probably be a tad bored, but it’s still a little Victorian jewel of a theater work.

P.S. Concerning the other well-cast parts in it: Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall are predictably slimey, but classic; Sasha Baron Cohen is a delightful and funny surprise; Jamie Campbell Bower is gorgeous and appropriately innocent to Jane Wisener’s amazing fragility; and Ed Sanders who plays young Toby is a fabulous singer.

I found a link for the earliest jazz tune I recalled from childhood, Ke Mo Ki, recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio. Their stuff was so catchy that years later when I began writing tunes of my own in my 20s, my sister’s quick ears picked up that I had integrated some Nat into what I was writing just by nature of being exposed to it.

Great stuff for little punks. Here’s a link to a vid that someone made. I have NO idea where they actually found the audio track, as I haven’t been able to find it.

http://www.livevideo.com/video/liamdude14
/FD5ED84E9EA64A98A5392A0709418A69/
ke-mo-ki-mo.aspx

And you wondered why I was so silly?.

I was just checking what the limitations of using a mac in South Korea might be when I found this very shocking article.
I urge everyone to take a look at the price of impatience and expedience.

And of course, there’s always laughing at Microsoft to be done.

But this surpasses both those points:
Please check it out.

http://www.kanai.net/weblog/archive/2007/01/26/0
0h53m55s

There’s a show called Mind Control that recently came out from the U.K., in which a mind control specialist, Derren Brown, plays with the concept of how suggestable we are as a species, and how puppetlike we in fact can be made, by him at least, within the space of a couple of minutes.

In his new show, sane, sober people have their mind read, hand over their car keys and wallet, and are willing to surrender diamonds for mere paper. I might have disliked him thoroughly if it were all “parlour tricks” like that, but he also brilliantly points at the collective mentality we have as a group: Groups of musicians are willed into playing a single song in unison by telepathic (really, rather empathic) means. And his greatest indictment of us as a sheep culture is showing how well-planted subliminal advertising works on the mind. If you haven’t seen this show, I urge you to. It will at first amuse, and then deeply disturb you. It’s a very strong cry in the wilderness for the divine, in a backhanded sort of way.

I think about that concept anyway a lot, due to my background, and I watch for shifts in world thought.

Recently, as a culture, we are particularly taken with physical death. There’s giant , pummeling obsession with death my country has developed since 9/11.

It was always sort of there lurking, particularly in the 1940s film noir days, but nothing compares with the recent CSI phenomenon and everything attached to it. If I were a psychologist from another planet I’d have to surmise that a shift has occurred. The question however, is what is its root, and when it actually began to develop as dominating theme that it is today.

I was measuring the ambient thought in my own experience and found the following, just in one days’ journey of time:

1) A marked increase in news reporting of death-related stories. But this has been going on for decades!, you might say, and you would be right. But the level of sensationalistic, emotionally cloying tone has increased dramatically in recent years. Since the murder of Jean Benet Ramsey was found so lucrative a few years back in terms of ratings, much more disturbing detail has been added to murder stories. Graphic descriptions, morbid absorption with perversions, pedophilia in particular, has become the rage. The state in which victims are found is tantalizingly flagwaved. Parents, particularly you will note, only attractive ones, are given considerably more air time.

2) Rape, a crime which used to be rarely uttered on the news due to its high shock level when I was a small child, has now become such a well-catalogued event on television that a judge in a date-rape case recently tried to rule that, prior to conviction, the jury was not to be allowed to hear or use the words “rape kit” or other descriptive phrases that have been commonly and firmly planted in our collective usage to mean an eventual, actual rape. He brought forth the idea that that would too quickly villify the defendant. The show Law and Order keeps this in high profile.

3) The “CSI factor”, now an actual term in the legal world, has reached a popularity so strong that not only are there three CSI shows and several others that hedge the subject, but actual average people are now participating in a reality show in which they are brought into actual homicide cases and compete with each other in sleuthing techniques.

4) The fucked up serial-killer tidal wave: It began in novels years ago but went from Silence of the Lambs into an explosion through Seven, The Cell, and now it’s all over TV too and they recently did the Zodiac killer, etc., etc., etc.

5) The obsession with death factors into our obsession with youth: Cosmetic surgery is at an all-time high. More than 100 shows a year are made around it — from makeovers like The Swan and all its spinoffs to the recent grizzly reality footage of Gene Simmons and his wife getting joint face-lifts and his childrens’ reactions. More face-lifts are done than ever before, more eye surgeries are performed on Asians than ever before, more liposuction is being performed than ever before.

6) The cult of physical fitness has become so powerful that not only is it finally affecting the FDA, it has had an alltime boom in newly created sports drinks. You might argue that vanity doesn’t really fuel the fitness industry so much as health, but again, that’s about … life and death, ne?

7) Physical vulnerability displays are at an alltime high: The doctor shows have come back with great success around Gray’s Anatomy. The last wave of doctor shows was in the early, pre-hippie 1960s. The phenomenon of watching snippets (pardon) of actual graphic surgery (no matter how authentically created by Hollywood’s wonderful special-effects teams) brings home to the mind the constant fallibility of the human body. One has to ask if this is healthy? Even when dialogue and interpersonal relationships are a focus on the show, this is the subliminal plane on which it’s placed.
Sex and the City spawned waves of televised sexual promiscuity in a ripple effect that factors into even the tidiest of shows. The sense that life is short and no holds should therefore be barred is an undertone in everything.

9) There’s been an equal increase in the holy and unholy, as well as the supernatural or mystical: Shows about God talking to Man (Touched by an Angel capped this and there were dozens more) and Medium and Ghost Whisperer and etc. pitch the afterlife as if it were a proven reality, while at the same time, vampire lore has developed so far as to be put into detective-story settings and children’s cartoons. Anne Rice bit the jugular and it’s been guzzling ever since. There’s even a doomed theme of death weaving through the Harry Potter series. And how large is that!?.

10) Hip-hop and gangsta culture were always down with death, and now a nation is hiding in hoodies and people like Julie Andrews are using the word “Bling.” Life is short, live fast: that’s the message. Guns are more used now than ever before on television, being viewed as the less violent alternative to seeing more shocking, direct physical gore. And this is long after the violence-on-tv crusading moms of the seventies have gone to their rocking chairs.

11) The evidence of attraction to Goth morbidity turns up in all kinds of places these days, not just television but everywhere — even to our high fashion runways. Black is again the new black. Corsets were evening gown bodices a couple of years ago. The rosary bead necklace and black crystals with heavy silver hardware is in now, with touches of vinyl everywhere. Right now we’re doing the Edgar Allen Poe romantic kind of thing even in the tamest of department store catalogs. Gothic crosses and skulls are out of clubs and on five-thousand-dollar couture.

12) One could argue that all this in 10 and 11 is just typical of a country that is known for being influenced by irreverent “youth culture.” But there it is: Youth. Remain young. Do not die. Do not grow old. Very Orlando, very Life Death Immortality Mortality.

13) “Animals are not your friends”: This message used to be “Wild Animals are not your friends” and people loved to be frightened by trained lions and tigers in circuses. Nature was previously expected to be in regular proximity to man, and only wilderness and incredible size used to factor in. Having subdued that as an environment and nearly exterminated most of our threats, there’s now an obsession with the Cult of the Shark, the Pitbulls are Vicious pitch, and the Killer Bees, Mad Cow, Bird flu, and other more indirectly related bug threats. This month was even Shark Month, and I had to flip past numerous pictures of people who previously had limbs.

14) They also actually showed a dead dog on TV (before it was euthanized) in a recent news program. I myself am appalled that that could be held commonplace prime time television — to show an animal alive and then calmly tell us all that it was killed? It went by without even the slightest whisper from the animal rights folks, because we’re a culture so primed for death.

15) Lacking threats around us that are tangible, there’s always ALIENS that could come and take over our bodies and hatch out of our incubating chests. This reached its pitch a while back with Alien, The Abyss, so many others I can’t recount, but there’s a gorier, meatier post-effect in stuff like Skinwalkers…. the sick factor is still there.

16) Vengeance films: There has never been such an acceptance of it. Korean films are king here, with Japanese a high second. Our films have taken notes from Ichi the Killer and Old Boy. Fatal Attraction was a more homespun American version.

17) Mob films: And while we’re on the subject of murderers, there’s the old standby, The Godfather, which was recently voted Number One Influential film on American culture. It is the most quoted, the most obsessed over, the most glamorized and romanticized. This brings in the specific element of cruelty. The horse head in the bed was an alltime high example, and it’s been echoed in so many forms — the latest of which is going to be the new series Damages (another Glenn Close work), which will likely involve dead dogs (see number 14).

18) Natural Disaster Films: There were a bunch of soapy versions in the 70s — Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, so many… But now they’re big special-effect thrill rides, far more realistically terrifying — The Perfect Storm came out and we’re STILL enchanted by them even as Global Warming (and the Amy Corp of Engineers) has given us the New Orleans flood, and the largest tsunami in history thrashed Indonesia. No people, really. They really ARE real. Hello~? They’re REAL. Now go donate some more money for cleanup.

19) Drugs: Never on TV have prescription drugs of all kinds been pitched so baldly at us — even with their hillariously rancorous descriptions of side-effects. The aging baby-boom population is growing old, and they are telling you daily that you are. Do you want to believe them? Should you? Oh nevermind, here, just take this. You want to stay young don’t you?

20) Non-death death, or rather, no birth: Never in our past have we been able to control the beginnings of life so completely. We can terminate pregnancies (don’t get me wrong, I’m no anti-abortionist), stop pregnancies with condoms, pills and devices, and now can even regulate women’s periods to the point of near elimination, something which I confess, gave me a bit of consternation.

21) We can clone, but choose not to thus far. And AI is still trudging along. There’s a pitch toward bodily perfection that hit a Robo-Cop tone (or maybe it was the Bionic Man or Woman) even without surgery. We aim eventually to rest in a state of perfection, un-aged, un-sexed, untarnished by even the most human of complaints.

23) I will not go into war and the celebration of war culture — because I have always seen that as too blatant a theme to be mentioned as a subliminal technique. Let’s just note quietly that Rambo and Saving Private Ryan were there for a reason.

24) I’ve also not discussed inclining suicide rates or the influence of willingly committed acts of self-sabotage like anorexia, which is on the rise.

In short, it would be prudent to realize daily that you need, as an average American, to

clear
your
mind

…of the CONCEPT OF YOUR OWN IMMINENT DEATH OR PHYSICAL DOOM on average, over 50 times per day.

Can you do it?

Are you aware that you must do it?

And most importantly, HOW?

Pick your weapon of choice, be it reason, prayer, Buddhist concentration, Hindu meditation, whatever you like.

Is man even actually material, here today, gone tomorrow? that’s up to you.

But know that what you’re up against is Madison Avenue and Hollywood, and not even what it used to be, and the collective THEY is watching how you react. They want to sell you death.

And my question for you to ask is: “Just why would they be doing that?”

These smarmy voices are on every channel, overlaying the noisy show of popping lights. They are all smiley and shiny heads in front of the fireworks as I click over them, snipping their festive moods in pieces.

It’s another Fourth of July celebrated by warming up leftover spaghetti and seeing some faint bangs and pops on telly. I’m comfortable, in a comfortable life, right?. But not without a price.

I can’t not know that, especially now, no matter where I sit. They keep showing this stupid helicopter against the backdrop of the flaring bursts just to cement it all. They actually fully intend to make me wince at conscious irony. It’s just another acid reflux moment. They give the government and the military and middle America its prescribed dose of Patriotism.

They play a dead Ray Charles singing O Beautiful (But Wait a minute!), a dead James Brown talking about eye to eye, station to station. A long part of an old speech of Ronald Reagan’s and that stupid cowboy song about being proud to be an American.

They play the anthem about the bombs bursting in air as we’re still doing all that, just the other way round these days, onto them for us; not on us and against them.

They do look like rockets bursting in air even when they’re singing about his truth marching on. His truth? always was a curious turn of lyrics to me.

I wonder about China, where the folks make the bright explosives — the noise originally made to scare away the evil spirits. For all the tons of them we send up, it never seems to work.

In that old Ronald Reagan speech his words echoed and wafted about keeping freedom safe for others, not just for us. But to me, except for the Olympics — where all can participate and be proud — the age of flags is dead in my mind, and that’s all that’s really going on in my government, our idea of a flag of freedom, always only our idea, of which we’re so smugly sure. I would feel ever so much better if they were celebrating someone else, someone who really supports true freedom.

I’d have to turn back to the country we originally ran from to do that. And to a handful of others elsewhere, everywhere, the ones living out of backpacks and bullet-riddled hotels. I would support the ones who look in the eyes of every checkpoint guard with steely firmness while their palms sweat. The ones who will make it there by tomorrow, even if they have to hire some driver who might take them where they’ll never be heard from again.

The day they shoot a volley of praise up for the BBC Radio or Radio Free Europe, I will stand up. I will be saluting then.

The day they list all the stringers on warzone insurance, I will be proud.

The day all the writers of actual fact in Darfur,
or the ones who have to smuggle their film cannisters out of North Korea,
or are hustled away in burkas through furious crowds in Gaza, are handed their due, and their words heard and acted on, instead of this mawkish faux allegiance to only one flawed government’s ideals,
that will be a day for fireworks.