A Live Boy or a Dead Girl?

There is a thing I’ve learned. I don’t know where I learned it. I don’t know if it’s a good way to live your life. You could get in a lot of trouble with it but you can get out of trouble with it too. You may wind up a lifetime undecided in the game of life. You might not get anything done. There may be no certain conclusion to your efforts. Still, I wonder if anyone can say that they succeeded one way or another regardless of their methodology.

What I learned, though in a deeper sense than I can convey in this medium, is that there is always something beyond the conclusions you arrive at. I’ve found that you can begin to inquire into something and have the thing you are studying cease to be what it appeared to be originally. I’ve found that if you take two opposing poles they will create a third pole which will...and so on. I’ve found that unraveling a mystery often leaves you with nothing. Mystery is just a curtain moving in the wind. You still don’t know anything.

Paracelsus once announced that he was going to reveal ‘the first matter’. A collection of noted scientists, would be alchemists and sundry showed up. On the table was a silver food cover. With his usual drama, Paracelsus removed the cover to display a turd. His audience was not amused. Paracelsus was not lying however. His audience was just unable to make the connection.

Like I said, it’s my tendency to continue past the point where I think I have discovered what I was pursuing. Things are not what they seem. If there is one point that is certain it is that. And the tendency of people to accept things at face value is the source of considerable suffering on their part.

One of the strangest things I have witnessed over the last four years is how many seemingly rational people are behaving irrationally. I see journalists, public figures and the general public accepting the most absurd explanations for transparent horseshit. So I go looking for why. There’s a cost here. Being an apologist for bad behavior, constructing arguments in defense of the indefensible, agreeing to what you know is wrong, at the very least costs you your credibility, possibly your honor and your self respect as well. Possibly these things don’t possess the value they once did.

Take ralph nader. Please. Now, I’m familiar with ralph nader. I’ve met ralph nader. I’ve listened to him talk. Yes, he’s got quite a few facts and he’s articulate. But, as I’ve said, I keep looking. He says that both political parties are corrupt. Well that’s a newsflash and a half. He says he can bring change to a compromised system. I’ve seen better and brighter minds try that. Life as we know it is the price of doing business. You have to make a decision how involved you want to be. And you can change some things. But when you start adding up Golden Ages in relation to bad hair days well...

ralph’s not a factor this time around so it doesn’t matter to me what he’s up to. But one thing I notice is that ralph’s main adversary is the Democrats. ralph also is accepting money from republicans whose only interest it to siphon support away from the Democrats. When you confront him on it he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “they have a right to spend their money.” He’s very slick at not confronting a number of things that demand an explanation. I’ve watched him do it. What is it ralph, a live boy or a dead girl? ...Because nothing else makes any sense. Let’s be realistic. ralph could go to the Democrats and demand a high profile cabinet job, a czar position, a free range- at large position, attorney general. He can have any of that and he could do more from some of those positions than he could achieve as president which he will NEVER be. Is he stupid? I don’t think so. So what is it?

What is it that causes certain highly credentialed journalists to smear shit on their faces and smile before the world like they were bringing down the house at Carnegie Hall? What is it that motivates huge news organs, radio and television stations to blatantly lie about what is patently obvious? Why would they do this?

I’ve my doubts about Kerry. But if I were to choose between Kerry and bush it would be like choosing whether to have a King Snake or a Gaboon Viper in my house. It would be like deciding whether to leave my infant home with the family dog or my pet ferret. This administration has outright lied about every single thing they have done or intended. This administration has not followed through on a single thing they promised. They have bankrupted the economy. They have turned the world into a biker bar. Meanwhile, the American people and those who speak for and to the American people are lining up and saying, “can I have another one Sir!”

Alqaeda isn’t Alqaeda. Terror isn’t an army on the border. Meanwhile the administration is beating the bushes, crying from the rooftops, outright enlisting every disenfranchised crazy across the globe to sign up with the opposition. They’re wacking at hornets nest and telling you it’s the key to cold fusion. How can anyone in their right mind buy into this?

The sheer laundry list of failures and bad decisions dwarfs anything this country has ever seen. It makes no kind of rational sense, no kind of business savvy; no kind of any kind of logic do I see.

Alright, people are afraid, people have a religious virus, people fear cultural change that includes gays and people have things on their mind...but ...but... I am perplexed. I’ve seen slick operators. I’ve watched people get had. But how stupid are you? It doesn’t make sense. What’s worse, two guys having sex or global mass murder? What’s worse, the Wicca clan outside Winchester or the loss of your personal freedom as the cost of a promise to remove them that won’t even be carried out?

Some great cloud of strange gas seems to be blanketing the land. Is it the voices from the conning towers? Is it a spontaneous snake dance of overpowering estrus? Howdy Doody is shitting on Ritz crackers and passing them around and you’re eating it. I feel like I am from another planet walking among millions of hypnotized robots. There’s no mystery here about what is happening to you and you can’t be enjoying it so... why? Why are seemingly intelligent people telling you that what you see is something else? Is it just the money? Is it fear of Dixie Chick syndrome? Is it darkness within responding to the call of darkness without? Do hundreds and hundreds of people have a live boy or a dead girl in their bed? Something is making more or less rational people behave irrationally. Is something in your water? ...your food?

People, I don’t know if you’re just bone stupid or pathologically selfish. I don’t know if aliens have taken up housekeeping in your head. I’m still looking and I have some thoughts which I will hold for the moment, but... I want to tell you, you are headed in the wrong direction. I’m not at all confused about this. You are absolutely headed in the wrong direction. I know you don’t like to ask, you got that alpha male thing. I know you don’t want to look like a fool but I assure you that’s already an incontrovertible fact. Now before you really, really fuck up. Before you hit that highway abutment and the state police find you with the dead transvestite in your lap, before they sell the photos to the National Enquirer and show the video to your kids, before that... stop the car and go back.

Don’t wake up hating yourself in the morning... ...And if they did catch you with a live boy or a dead girl? Make some lemonade.