Year: 2006

I always wanted to be the gun on the table in the first act.

I always wanted to be the mysterious stranger arriving in an unfamiliar town with a sack full of magic corn.

I always wanted to be the troll who lived under the bridge and the wise old man on the mountain.

I always wanted to be the boy who was raised by wolves.

I always wanted to be the voice in the croaking bog that sings the furthest into the damp morning.

I always wanted to be the voice that calls you back to this world.

I always wanted to be the match that lights the candle.

I always wanted to be the candle that carries the light down into the darkness.

I always wanted to be the old woman who swallowed a fly.

I always wanted to be the fly in the ointment.

I always wanted to be the frosting on the cake and the writing on the wall and the message in the bottle and the goose who laid the golden egg.

I always wanted to be the goat who spoke the plain, hard truth.

I always wanted to be the truth that would set you free.

I always wanted to be the keeper of your secrets and the secret you couldn’t keep.

I always wanted to be the bright ribbon with which your burdens were bound.

I always wanted to be the road to riches or the road to ruin, depending on who was traveling along me.

I always wanted to be the canary in the coal mine and the genie in the lantern and the key that opened the secret door.

I always wanted to be the ‘Yes’ that rose through the murk inside the Magic Eight Ball.

I always wanted to be the wind beneath your wings and the pot that called the kettle black.

I always wanted to be the first record you ever danced to.

I always wanted to be the pen that carried you gamely down the page on a night when you had no words of your own.

What did you always want to be?

For the last week I’ve been mucking around in this little magazine I picked up in a junk shop somewhere. The thing is called Reason, and it’s subtitled “A Monthly Journal Devoted to Psychic Science, Education, Healing, Success and Social Reform.” Come now let us reason, it says on the masthead.

The issue I have is from March 1915, and it’s a grab bag of the usual whack metaphysics of the time, including articles on auras, astrology, spiritualism, guardian angels, and the power of positive thinking. It’s also full of wonderful advertisements for such indispensable products as “spiritualist’s aluminum trumpets,” “schemes in dirt” (‘Tells how YOU can make a good living in your own yard’), “Eager Colon Cleanser,” and “Dr. Hector McLain’s Astral Ozone Inhalent.”

As odd and anachronistic as Reason seems on first glance, and despite its amusing quirks and obvious quackery, actually reading the magazine’s contents serves as a sometimes startling reminder of how little the obsessions of the middlebrow American fringe have changed in 90 years. In the pages of this odd little journal –published out of California– we find the beginning of a new age. Or, rather, the new age. Reason‘s contributors and advertisers are the clear forebears of today’s bowel obsessed and endlessly questing Chicken Soup for the Codependent Inner Children of the Women Who Run With the Wolves crowd. There are also obvious connections to the sorts of offerings you’re likely to encounter on the magazine rack at your local coop or spiritual boutique.

In Orison Swett Marde’s “The Life Attitude Furnishes the Life Pattern,” the author tells us that what we think, we must become. “Your mind becomes impressed with your self-estimate,” Swett Marde writes, “and your convictions govern your actions. Your small estimate of yourself will make a pygmy’s impress upon your conviction, and you will be barred from doing the work of a giant. You must think yourself a giant before you can do a giant’s work.”

God knows, I know full well the discomfiting –not to mention discomforting– feeling of having a pygmy’s impress upon my conviction, and I’m willing to admit the sound logic of the rest of the author’s assertion, and thus am willing to follow him or her the rest of the way: “If your life is ever transformed, it must be by your own mental effort, your own glory –the glory that comes from within, not from without.”

I also appreciate the advice W.T. Stead offers in a meditation entitled “After Death”:

But Sometimes is it best kindness to punish?

Yes, I know you are quite right in thinking that there are times when it is necessary to punish evil-doers; but as you punish, love! And remember that punishment without love is not of God. Have, then, a list, long or short, of the people you dislike, and run over them lovingly.

Can do!

In the marvelously titled “The Persisting Thought of the New Thought,” Dr. J.M. Peebles wisely counsels that there are prudent limits to the sort of seize-the-day bliss that is so often the sole goal of new agers and Grateful Dead fans. “A New Thought leader, and an esteemed friend said to us not long since: ‘I live, I think and enjoy the now, the eternal now, and that is enough!’” writes Dr. Peebles. “A lazy old ox, lying under a shade tree in a hot June day chewing his cud, could have said as much, but if there were infused with his front and top brain some moral intelligence and aspiration, he would naturally reach out beyond the now towards a well-filled manger, when the ice and the snow of the northlands mantled the fields in zero weather.”

Elsewhere in the pages of Reason Ella Wheeler Wilcox poses the million dollar question: What Are We Living For In This World? Ms. Wilcox, of course, has an answer at the ready: All of our political and industrial systems, all our straining after financial and social honors and successes, all our educational institutions, are for one purpose: To enable us mortals to find happiness with those we love; to give happiness to those we love, and enjoy their association.

If only people could truly learn to live with this higher purpose in mind, Wilcox believes, “not one in one thousand would descend to the plane of the grafter, the robber and the sensualist.”

She’s absolutely right about that, of course. She couldn’t possibly be more right, the poor woman.

Man is what he believes.

–Chekhov, Notebooks

Not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe you, has shaken me.

–Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The worst sort of liar, the most tragic, is the one you know is lying to you, but you believe them anyway, because you so desperately want to believe them.

Do yourself a favor: Be that sort of liar. Leave the more pedestrian shit to the amateurs and the bumblers. Because there are surely, at least from a historical perspective, worse things to be than tragic, and the sort of lying I’m talking about here is also a gift. It’s a gift that comes with all sorts of nice little angles and opportunities.

You really should open your fucking ears and listen to what I’m saying. This is some seriously good advice, believe me; I know what I’m talking about. I don’t have any reason to pull your leg, friends. My days here are numbered. And I’m not going to deny that I never quite had the talent to be one of these worst sorts of liars. I regret that, I really do. It would have made my life so much easier, so much more comfortable. I just didn’t have it in me.

I have, however, had the good misfortune to know a fair number of these people, and to marvel at their gifts. Oh, lord yes, I’ve been hoodwinked, and it’s cost me plenty. I never begrudged these folks their lies, though. I was absolutely complicit in the deception, and I envied these characters and their ability to pull the wool over my eyes.

They’ll burn in hell, of course, but I have to tip my hat to them all the same.

In the likely event that, like me, you find you don’t have the right stuff to be one of the more accomplished class of liars, I have some additional advice for you to take out into the world:

Keep your distance. Bar the door, lower your shades, and pull the hood up around your heart.

Whatever you do, don’t let down your guard. Don’t let anyone in –they might steal you. They might steal your soul.

Cover your ass. Don’t give anything away; hold it all close. And for god’s sake, don’t ever tip your hand. Don’t say what’s on your mind.

When you close your eyes at night, don’t wish for anything. Treat rainbows and shooting stars as exactly what they are: random scientific nonsense that is well outside the range of your limited understanding. Leave faith to the dangerous believers and the desperate lunatics.

Do not believe a word anyone tells you. Don’t trust a soul; that sort of weakness will only lead to damage and disappointment.

If you’re lucky enough to stumble across someone –some idiot– that has any of the aforementioned character flaws (and generally these people will have them in spades), take whatever you can get. If they’re fool enough to offer it to you, take everything they have.

If you’re going to be mean, don’t also be a coward. That’s a truly contemptible –and damnable– combination, and the purest definition of an asshole.

And, finally, mark my words: Do not, do not, do not get taken in.

When he pulled his Impala up to the gates of the cemetery it was after midnight. The place was locked up tight, and snow and fog were blowing in off the lake.

It was a huge cemetery right in the middle of the city, a beautiful place for what it was, large and well-kept and overlooking the water. He remembered standing at the grave during the service and staring out across all those gravestones at the sailboats that were gliding around out on the lake.

That had been August, the week before Labor Day. It had been hot and clammy, and he’d felt badly hungover and queasy in one of his brother’s old suits. He had thought hard and couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn a suit.

There was a small gathering of people at the cemetery that day, and he’d been embarrassed and angered by the turnout. He was also puzzled by the fact that he didn’t recognize a majority of the people there, including a woman with two young girls. Probably, he’d assumed, the girls had been classmates of his daughter.

The lock on the cemetery gates was one of those security boxes with push buttons. There must have been some code. The walls on either side of the gate were high, and made of stone. He put the white stuffed bear he was holding in his arms on top of the Impala and tried to scrub the vomit from the front of his nylon parka with fistfuls of snow.

He returned to the car, turned off the lights, and sat there for a moment finishing a can of beer and listening to Ray Price.

Then, in a burst of inspiration that emerged from out of his mind’s muddle, he eased the Impala up against the cemetery gate. Holding the bear in one hand, he managed to climb up onto the hood of the car. He tossed the bear over the gate and proceeded to scramble his way to the top, where there were sharp iron points that dug into his flesh. As he attempted to feel his way down the backside of the gate he lost his grip and fell halfway down to the pavement.

The cemetery was covered with deep snow. After tromping around for a time in what he thought was the general direction he managed to locate the gravesite. His ex-wife’s parents had paid for the headstone, and its plainness struck him as horribly inadequate.

He brushed the snow from the marker and discovered, standing there, that he didn’t have anything to say. He propped the white bear up against the gray stone and turned away.

When he reached the path and turned back for one last look the bear had already been entirely swallowed up by the fog and swirling snow.

“If you think you’re in command of a single thing in this world, little man, you are sadly mistaken, and badly mistaken as well. You are in command of nothing. Your brain is shot full of holes that reveal nothing but dark cataracts of ceaselessly roiling ignorance.”

The Devil tossed his chin in the direction of the moon, cursed, and spit into the gravel of the road.

“You call this a crossroads?” he said. “You fucking people want to call everything a crossroads. Why? Because it puts a little drama in your life? What do I know.”

He stood in the middle of the road and looked one way and then the other, swiveled on his heels and repeated the process in the opposite direction. The Devil shrugged, and lit a cigarette.

“Maybe this is a crossroads,” he said. “But it’s no metaphor. There’s never a metaphor involved whenever I make an appearance. Which means? Which means I have no interest in your soul. Zero interest. You know what a soul is? It’s a useless little bladder about the size of a grape, as expendable as your tonsils or appendix. No, sir, do I look like I’m out of my mind? I wouldn’t trade a stinking thing for your measly soul. What I’m after is that bigger meat behind your eyes. I want your mind.

“You people like to imagine that I’m some kind of deal maker, the proprietor of some forlorn open-all-night swapshop. That’s a terrible misconception on your part, friend, just another of those convenient fabrications you can’t seem to live without. Dispatch with that notion and you fuckers would run out of stories to tell each other in a hurry.

“And, wrong-headed as it is, that’s just fine with me. Fabrications, delusions, and –even better– bald-faced lies are nothing but good news to me, as they get you in hot water with The Adversary. Still, it rankles. It sticks in my craw.

“Let me ask you something: Do I look red to you? Do you see a tail or horns or a pitchfork, or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to brandish? Do I look so insecure that I need to wear some kind of costume to indicate loud and clear that I’m the bad guy? Here’s a little piece of wisdom you can take back to your people: Don’t be such damn fools. Use a little common sense, would you? Wouldn’t you think that incognito would be the way to go for a fellow in my line of work? I’d certainly think so, but no, you keep expecting this drama, some pint-sized dragon to show up at the crossroads in the middle of the night, gung ho to give you your heart’s desire in exchange for the worthless polyp you call your soul.

“Fat fucking chance. If you think I’m going to trade you a perfectly good guitar –let alone the ability to play the hell out of it– for that, you’re out of your minds.”

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

—James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

These angels do not look like angels. They look like old people, stooped and weary, clothed in the rags they have been wearing for centuries.

From a distance it almost appears that they are hanging their heads, but in actuality they are looking down, as they so often do, situated as they are at such a lofty remove from the old torments and joys of the earth.

They are standing together, huddled and peering down over the lip of a cloud, watching a bridge burning far below them.

A burning bridge is one of the half dozen earthly occurrences that is capable of breaking even the hearts of angels.

A bridge –all bridges– are essential symbols of the mission of angels, and the destruction of bridges is a tragedy that reverberates through the most distant and rarefied reaches of Heaven.

A burning bridge is even more tragic and lamented than a bridge obliterated through mere destruction or disaster. It is also, sadly, one of the few acts of human willfulness in which the angels are not allowed to intercede. The burning of bridges is an act of terrorism against Heaven, and reduces even the oldest angels to a pack of numb and speechless spectators at the scene of a disaster.