Hey, I won a book.

Weird Red Room science fiction essay blog contest thingum

Scroll half-way down, click on
"Where Would I Be If My Father Hadn't Died?"

"Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts."

Allen Ginsberg's writing non-tips

More like wisdoms, child-like enlightenments, perceptual switches, etc.

"No author knows fully what his book means to himself,

from what dark background it emerged,
why he wrote it, nor
what place it has in his personal development.
But sometimes it does happen
that he gets a faint notion of these things,
when favorable circumstances
bring some usually hidden motives to the surface."

--Theodore Reik, Listening with the Third Ear.

More Words Were Written in the World Today

than were written in all of history up to 2003. -Official Statistic.

Bad sax saying I love you.

Bad sax saying I love you.
And everything leading up to that.
Song of foreplay.
The crowd listening in the bedroom.
Listening on the bed.
Jonah trying to get it into his head.
Donation box at the door.
Roberto protesting.
You making money off my dead wife.

Frida saying back I love you I love you Mommy.
Who tries to get up there to see if there's a sax.
To see who's playing.
Pealing, screeching, howling, weeping.
The crowd realizes what they've heard.
The child has told them.
Communication through the realms.

Don't close down.
Don't take it personal.
Take your part.
Find your part.
The choir of listeners.
The Spanish saxophone.
No dress, naked, invisible.
Take yourself so seriously.
The ghost settled in the rose.
If you're not having fun you're being had.
Weep.
Grieve.
They do not understand.

I asked him what it would be like
if all his shortcomings were removed.
I was thinking "free".
He said "free".
My life has never been so busy
nor so still.
Saxophone breaking over the hills.
Breaking through the ceiling.
How can a ghost play a saxophone?
How can anybody play a saxophone?
How can a ghost do anything?
How can a ghost?
Communication across realms is impossible.
That is why there are instruments of distraction.
Parables, saxophones, bloems.
So that The Exchange can happen underground
where no one is looking.

What is that for?
Donations.
Donations for a ghost?
Expenses.
I want to see a list of expenses.
So you shall.
I want to see a list of donations.
In due time.
I want my cut.
That may be a problem.

Anguish! says the saxophone.
Hear me!
Believe me!
Anguish!
Wandering lonesome!
Listen!
Understand!
Redemption!
Redemption!

Now she can go.
Now he can finish.
Now she can lay down her saxophone.
Now he can lean back and clean his glasses.
She wanted to do more than have babies and sweep.
He wanted to do more than drink and curse the world.

They have met.
They were lost.
It is raining liberty dimes.
The sidewalk sings.
The crowd comes out.
Somebody is whistling.
Somebody is weeding the slope,
pulling all the roots clean out.
Nobody has a name now.
Their eyes ache, shy with morning light.
They are children stretching.

Nothing For Sale.

$1.

Charlie Sheen & Sobriety.

One of the problems with burning bridges in such a public way,
with millions cheering you on, and you playing their rebel hero,
is that it's going to be that much harder to get to the place
where you accept that you need help & get it.

I was no choirboy when I was drinking and drugging, I hurt
myself & everybody around me, but I did what I did & said what
I said in obscurity. Nobody but my dwindling few friends
knew or cared. Nobody was cheering on my self-destruction,
and I wasn't playing the role of hero to millions of people
for my entertaining rebelliousness (AKA, insane & destructive
behavior.)

But Charlie has glorified himself to such an extreme point that
I can't imagine what it would take for him to admit he needs
help, short of some disaster. I believe he's technically
physically sober and clean, but obviously he's high on hubris
& obsessive grandiosity & some post-drug chemical phenomenon.
The gap between where he is and where he needs to be to get
help is enormous now.

The tension of that gap is going to lead him to start drinking
& using again. He has already said he might have a glass of
wine or champagne, because that's what we do to "celebrate."
That will be the beginning of the next run, and the next run
could be his last.

Making it worse is that if he does have a thought now & then
about how long he is going to be able to keep these high-wire
shenanigans up, about needing to ask for help, he's going to
think, Hey, I can't let my millions of followers down, I can't
admit that I need help, that I'm losing my mind, hurting bad,
etc. So, he's going to have to get further out before he hits
a place where he doesn't care what his cheering fans think,
where he needs to do whatever he needs to do to get his sanity
restored.

Plus, of course, as he says, he tried rehab and AA many times
before, and they "didn't work." They are for "normal people."
How difficult is it going to be to admit, in this one area of
alcohol/drugs at least, that he is normal, after all, and
needs help, like most of us discover sooner or later.

Obviously, he is special. I'm special, too. We're all special.
But alcoholics and addicts are decidedly not special in one
critical regard: we can't use alcohol or drugs without eventually
being overwhelmed by terrible consequences that take us to the
brink of madness or beyond, or prison, or early death. Whatever
I think of Charlie or any other alcoholic or addict personally,
there is a deeper connection that transcends everything else,
a brotherhood & sisterhood that wishes and prays that each of
us chooses to live, as human beings, not as God or gods, and
that we get on & stay on the path of healing & sweet sobriety
together, and I wish & pray that for Charlie, too.

A TOWN CALLED PANIC is the best movie of all time.

It's impossible for me to heap too much praise on this
unbelievably wonderful movie. It's the best movie I've
seen since I can't remember. I love this movie. I would
have loved & been proud to have made this movie. I
won't describe it, because. There're plenty reviews on
rottentomatoes etc. that describe it. I would be shocked
if you like this blog & don't love this movie. We
actually watched it twice on succeeding nights. I
taped it from Sundance I think, watched it, and then
accidentally started watching it the next night &
couldn't stop. See it with somebody if you can because
so you'll keep turning & looking at each other in delight
& wonder that you're seeing what you're seeing & hearing
what you're hearing & feeling what you're feeling.

WARNING: It's in French & has subtitles.

WARNING: It's animated or something like that,
and I generally cannot stand animated movies. Even
UP! I thought the second half sucked when they went
to that other country or whatever it was. But I loved
this movie, and it is definitely animated.

WARNING: There are talking animals in this movie,
and they talk in French! And I hate talking animals
because usually they all sound like smart-ass teenagers
dreamed up by 50-year-olds who got their ideas of
teenagers from other movies etc. But this movie, the
talking anmimals, well, you'll just to see & hear for
yourselfs.

WARNING: A donkey says, "Merde."

WARNING: It will make you glad to be alive & you'll
want to tell other people about it & get them to see
it just because it is so wonderful, free, funny,
beautiful, unbelievable, etc. It should win all the
Academy Awards.

P.S. I also recently saw the Facebook movie, which
I thought was bafflingly juvenile & hollow, annoying,
soulless.

P.P.S. I also saw Inception which I didn't finish
because I didn't care, but I liked that one scene
in the outdoor cafe where things were kind of blowing
up, and then the things that blew up, more like POOF!
then they blew up again, and nobody got hurt because it was
a dream. Other than that, who cares. There was one scene
where the city folds in on itself and one half kind of
settles down upon the other half gently, and cars and
people are going upside down and sideways. In A TOWN
CALLED PANIC there's a kind of similar scene that is much
much better, more interesting, and funnier, in which a
house is upside-down in the ocean, or pond, and they
saw half of it off and it falls down and catches fire
for a moment and then the people inside have to live
upside-down for a little while until something else happens
that's even better.

A TOWN CALLED PANIC, baby! PANIQUE AU VILLAGE!

I start where God says love other people.

I love it and I hate it because
that's where my resistance is, to the truth
of love. I don't have a lot of resistance
to God, I don't know why.
Thomas Merton said something like the fact
that there are good people
in such a bad world is proof of God.
Right in the face of the absurdity of it,
I can love God in this unloving world, the world
of wars, suffering, screaming, somehow
I can look at it in a way where I follow it
through the thickets and the turns and come out
in the clearing, with a teepee and God's
in there smoking and I settle outside and wonder.

But people, loving people, thats where I resist,
so I like the commandment to love my neighbor
as myself, or as I love God, because otherwise
I don't know if I would, or would still be a hermit
sinking into myself, becoming a stranger
more and more to myself, torn by fear of going out
into the world among people ever again.

When I think of someone I don't love, of the need
to love him I don't love, can't stand, in order to be
who I am fully, I can feel parts of myself, mind,
body even being riven off by that need, by the way
my not loving and the call to love cut me
as they pass through in opposing directions,
taking planed curls of me away. How can I love
and become myself when I myself am being gouged away
by the need, the commandment to love when
I will not, cannot love. I resist my soul
and it is only the soul that passes through the eye of the needle.

Rest in peace, my good friend Peter Hobbs.

I knew Peter for 35 years, drank with him many times,
even got in a soused fight with him once over which
one of was a bigger lefty and more against war. He
was a hell of an actor (in dozens of TV shows, Broadway,
films (including the main doc in Woody Allen's "Sleeper")
but an even better friend who bailed me out of many a jam,
including loaning me money to see a fortune-teller (he didn't
ask what the dough was for & I didn't say) when I was nuts,
right before I got sober. Damn, the more I think about it the
more I remember all he did for me. He was a damn good guy
& I miss him and can't believe he's not down there right
now listening to one of his audio books.
Here's an article on his reading habits:
Peter's 630 audio books!

And here's Peter's obit
from the LA Times that I helped write.

EDIT: Apparently the Times archived the obit & you have to
pay to see it. Grrr. Here it is:

-----
After a brief illness, Peter passed away peacefully at his
home in Santa Monica, surrounded by family.

Born in Etretat, France, to Dr. Austin L. Hobbs and
Mabel Foote Hobbs, Peter was raised in New York
City, attended Solebury School in Pennsylvania, and
graduated in Drama from Bard College. In World War II
he served in Europe as a Sergeant in Combat Engineering and
fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Peter was especially proud of his
role in safeguarding the lives of the men in his platoon.

Peter enjoyed a 50-year career as an actor in theater, TV, and film.
He played on Broadway (notably, “Teahouse of the August Moon”
and “Billy Budd”); on TV (from his role as Peter Ames in “Secret Storm”
from 1954 to 1962, to “Perry Mason,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,”
“The Andy Griffith Show,” “Bonanza,” “All in the Family,”
“The Odd Couple,” “Streets of San Francisco,” “Happy Days,”
“Barney Miller,” “Lou Grant,” “M*A*S*H,” “Knots Landing,”
“L.A. Law,” and dozens more); and in film (“Sleeper,”
“Man with Two Brains,” “9 to 5,” “Any Which Way You Can,”
“Andromeda Strain,” “In the Mood,” and “The Lady in Red”).

Peter was a devoted husband and loving father, a good and generous
friend and neighbor, an amiable, passionate and good-humored man
who loved life, all kinds of people, progressive politics, reading, acting,
spirited conversation, laughter, and a cocktail or two now and then. He
was a vibrant man who, whether you knew him on the screen or in life,
put a smile on your face and joy in your heart. “Point of order!”
as he liked to say: You gave them a good show, Peter!

Peter is survived by his wife of 28 years, Carolyn Adams
Hobbs; three daughters, Anna Hobbs of Barcelona, Jennifer
McVeigh of Prospect, Maine, and Nancy Hobbs of New York
City; two stepsons, Mark and Adam Richards of Santa Monica;
and six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
-----

So long, ol' pal, great
guy, loved life, died peaceful, wonderful friend. Still wait
every day for his call telling us the mail's in.