Blues for Monk

“Monk was my man.”

            It was late. We were in the tiny little studio apartment I’d rented as a camp-out spot, till a decent situation presented itself.

            “How does it come to pass that artists of that stature spend their lives scuffling like rats in the alleys?”

            “That is sin, my friend; that is the definition of sin.”

            “Who are the sinners?”

            “Always comes back to the people with the money.”

            “But having money’s not a sin.”

            “What you do with it might be.”

            “Have enough of it and you can do whatever you want and still come out smelling good.”

            “Are we just jealous?”

            “Shouldn’t we be? Haven’t we worked hard?”

            “You’ve got a point there.”

            “No one should be allowed to have too much money.”

            “How much is too much?”

            “Too much is more than you need.”

            “Good luck with that one.”

            “There should be a cut-off point. This much - and no more. Why should anyone be allowed to accumulate so much? Can you think of a single person who does something that’s that valuable?”

            “How valuable is that?”

            “You know what I’m talking about.”

            We sat in silence for a while pondering the injustice of life - a recurrent theme with a shifting pedal point.

            “Let’s listen to ‘Round Midnight’ one more time.”

            “I could do that.”

            Then we sat back and witnessed pure beauty.

            It almost made things better.

           

Blog People

“So I finally figured it out.” she said to me.

            “Figured what out?”

            “What all this shit is about…” she waved her left hand around in the air, dropping ash on the hardwood floor.

            “All this shit…” I waved my right hand about in a feeble way.

            “This stuff about the Blog People.”

            “Ah yes, the Blog People.”

            “They get their ‘friends’ to hit them up, and praise them, and start a snowball rolling. One ass licks the next, and pretty soon they’re all on the road to Blog Heaven.”

            “Blooog Heaven...so you say. What does that do for them?”

            “So I say. But I had a point…” She hesitated, and stared at the floor as if it would provide an answer. Then she rose up and brightly said, “but with all the people they’ve managed to recruit to their cause by endless networking, one looks at their content and sees very little…or at least not all that much…nowhere near as much as the impression they exude from their endless enthusiasm.”

            She fell back on the couch, exhausted.

            “One looks?…”

            “You know what I meant…”

            “Yes, but you didn’t answer my question.”

            “I don’t know what it does for them. It makes them feel better about themselves. I can’t answer for their delusions.”

            Life doesn’t have to be this hard, really.

            But for some of us it is, and I can only say that I knew exactly what she was talking about.

Bad Things

Bad things happen to good people.

In the bleary world of America in 2011

one might get a different impression.

Bad things happen to people because

they deserve it.

Bad things don’t happen to good people

who work hard

obey the rules

tow the line

until they can ply the whip

to get what they want

in order to puff

out their chests

in pride

that they’ve prevailed

over all the slackers

who weren’t quite so

narrow minded

and deprived of soul.

All those people

to pity.

In the wake of the rise to success

lie the ashes

of the bad things

that happened

to

good

people.

Luck

“Why don’t we ever have any luck?”

“Well, we have some luck, occasionally. Not big luck, but we have our little bits of luck.”

“But that’s not what I mean. I mean real luck, the kind of luck that can turn life around.”

“Very few people get that kind of luck. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it is the way it is.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it any better.”

“You hear a man stumbling down the street, screaming. You can’t place the voice, it’s not on your street. It’s off in the distance, but it’s close at the same time. He sounds like he’s in agony and needs help. You go to the door and listen to try to locate the pain you’re hearing, and as you stick your head out into the night it seems even farther away. You go back to the couch and sit down for a sip of beer. You’re lucky.”

It was quiet on the other end of the line for about a minute.

“Dad, are you drunk?”

“No, only a little buzzed. That was for real, I just heard that here on my street.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I don’t think it can be all that relative, you know? You’re lucky because other people are more unlucky.”

“I’ll bet you’re right, but you know, you can’t place any bets on the kind of luck you mean. Do the best you can at what you do and you have nothing to be ashamed of. Grab your little snatches of happiness.”

The silence on the line lasted even fewer ticks than last time.

“OK Dad, I have to go to the gym, I think I’ll hang up now, OK?”

“OK kiddo, you have a good time, got it?”

“I love you Dad, talk to you tomorrow hopefully.”

I carefully placed the receiver in its cradle and cocked my head to hear the sounds of the night.

It was as quiet as the grave.

Dying for your Country

Wading through the excrement of American tv is a never-ending fascination with frustration. It's bad enough that ream after ream and pile after pile of crap programming gets aired on station after station, but when decent, or even very good things get defiled by commercial after commercial, things get to be too much. A violent heart gets born. One really shouldn't allow oneself to be subjected to such crass and disgusting greed and money-grubbing without allowing oneself to feel anger...and to express anger. Brainwashing really isn't a nice thing, and being anesthesized to it is not something to be proud of. Tv of course was designed from the outset to be a brainwashing device, but it has produced certain positive outputs.
I watch tv, I confess, and the other night watching 60 Minutes I saw a returned soldier from Iraq express anger over how people in the civilian world seemed to be unaware or unconcerned about how people continued to die 'for them'. His story was a sad one but I saw a different sadness in his story. Like many others, he had been led to believe that he was fighting and risking his life for his country - which means for the people of his country, his fellow citizens. Its a very old belief, and a very old lie. He forgot that Iraq posed no threat to the US and so he couldn't be protecting his fellow citizens from threats, since there were none. Perhaps this has been true of all US wars since WW2.
And if those people have not died for their country - their fellow citizens - what have they died for?

On the Edge

‘$100,000’

I was merely stating what the documents I’d given her stated, our worth.

She was unimpressed and searched for the monthly income line.

‘Hmm.’ she went, which was barely perceptive to a normal person. I noticed it though.

‘I’ll call you.’

She never did.

I walked off, seeing that even though we could afford not to work for awhile, but could rather enjoy a bit of leisure, the landlords would not allow us this pleasure. We needed to work for them.

A homeless person waddled by with a grocery cart full of possessions. There was probably more stuff in that basket than I had in the tiny studio apartment I was camped out in for the time being. I noticed he had a shiny silver watch on his wrist. Both of mine were bare.

I’m only a very small step away from that, I thought.

Who knew it would come to this? In a past life being locked out was expected, but it wasn’t anymore, after I’d acquired some serious credentials.

Well, that’s my pretensions rearing their ugly heads. How foolish to believe the hype.

It would be summer soon, the real summer, not these measly days of 80’s and such. The overarching trees provided their welcome cover, and I had to wonder where I’d be when those days rolled around.

I went back to the place to watch baseball and drink beer.

No Title Too

I got roped into a discussion about race one night. This was with one of those who believe that race in humans is a social construct, not a biological reality.

            “Biologists tell us that race is not real.”

            Which I happened to know was not true, being a biologist myself.

            “Well, maybe anthropologists anyway.” I said, not totally convinced that they counted as biologists.

            “There are more differences within any population group than between them. There are no characteristics that define so-called racial groups.”

            He was very proud of himself, being but a poet, at the research he had done into the biological sciences. He cited a number of papers from the epidemiological literature, each like another notch in his belt.

            It was a curious thing. I knew that biologists routinely referred to races of insects and plants and lizards and fungi and birds and snails, but humans were somehow different. As if an evolutionary history of restricted gene flow would not lead to differences among populations. There was a strange double standard among the progressive sociologists and liberals and literati and environmentalists where humans were not only accepted but actively promoted as being simply another animal among many that populated the planet, yet were still held to be above the types of perspectives applied to other organisms by biology.

            “You mine the literature to find the data that conforms to your predetermined view, ignoring other data, and call that support for your argument.”

            “And you don’t?”

            “Well, I try not to.”

            He didn’t laugh.

            “You demand the kind of distinctions that would normally be applied to species differences, not racial differences. That we don’t see those kind of differences simply confirms that we are a single species.”

            I’m not sure if he was aware of the controversy in biology over whether species were in fact objective entities themselves. In that context, arguing about the reality of race was pretty silly. But I knew of a mountain of data that showed a continuum of differentiation and diversity. I couldn’t understand the urge to deny it.

            “What good does it do to deny what a child can see?” I asked.

            “On their own, children don’t see it.”

            “Maybe they see it but it never occurs to them to use it as an excuse to gain unfair privilege. The only way to beat racism is by embracing the diversity.”

            He sputtered and muttered something about unity and oneness. I had a vision of the mindless and stupid crowds at rock concerts with their never-ending waving arms, a Borgian beast with no soul in sight.

            Outside rain pelted the tin roof of my poor abode. It was cold and the rain came in rhythmic waves, crescendos and diminutions of attack.

            “Let me show you to the door.” I said.

            When he was gone I breathed a sigh of relief.

            But I knew he’d be back.