You Did It For The Right Reason

It was in France that Sam Shepard bought the famous horse that would make him a playwright. The people of the city - & the New York Critics - didn't believe he had it in him. All that was needed was a fried lizard for effect & a hit soundtrack featuring the hottest new artists of the time.

It's hard for some of us, non-famous & strangely colored, to fathom how easy it is for certain people to just "get rid" of "things" that "bother" us. Like scare quotes, apparently. But shouldn't we spend a little bit of time deciding or otherwise figuring out what sort of world we as vaguely heterosexual judges & prosecutors want? I'm not condoning the rule of law here. I am simply wanting to understand how you as an artist or artisan can accept virtually everything about your life - from people who put mayonaisse on their ice cream to ice cream that celebrates 1970's pornography - but not the War On Sailing.

It astonishes everyone, least of all me. There's hardly no time to gather, staple & bind the facts from the figures from the hot patootie you wear like an egg on the face of your shame. Let's take as an example the great Caracas Potato Misunderstanding of 1954. It's tempting to blame almost anything that happens in South America on the CIA, or Jack Lemmon, or Morrissey, but the truth is, it wasn't all these things & more - it was a minor skirmish in the War On Sailing. Seventeen people lost their potatoes. That's nothing at all to be proud of. & truth be told, though it made video games possible a lot earlier than most people had been predicting, it set back Stand Up Comedy by decades.

As an aside, when you wake up in the morning with the storm & rain, you don't have to handle the envelopes with gloves (you must know your fingertips lie to you), you don't have to butter your toast with jam, you don't even have to shower the people you love with love (even if it does show them the way that you feel): no, all you need to do is turn down the viewscreen & turn up the brain aerials. It makes navigation through the complicated complicities of modern American living only slightly more difficult than choosing a cheese for the in-law's visit. But it's as necessary as cheese. Though slightly less necessary than cheesy in-laws. See my article about this somewhere else.

One last admonishment: I know many of you love Hugo Chavez so much you want to marry him, but you should know, he was at the famous 1995 meeting with Donald Rumsfield, Saddam Hussein, Michael Jackson, Tim Blake Nelson, Erskine Caldwell, Emeril Lagasse, Henry Kissinger (the hand puppet), Bertha The Enema Queen & of course Wilma Flintstone, & he couldn't stop making farty noises with his hand under his arm whenever someone talked about Castro. What does that say to you, as a left-leaning scrotum-washer of his? Think about it.

You make me sick.