The 60s

1960s

I took acid 5 times, cocaine twice, meth too often to remember, pot about 5 times a week for 6 years, vodka/beer/tequila just about every day.

I smoked too. A pack a day. A pack was about 25 cents when I started. Sometimes when out of cigarettes I smoked a pipe.

I also drank about 10 cups of coffee a day. In the morning and in the evening and at 3 in the morning.

I don't think I ever slept. Maybe once or twice. I remember one time being awake for 3 days and waking up behind a gas station in Moline, Illinois.

But most of the time I didn't sleep. At night I lay in bed, drunk and stoned and coffeed up, listening to the Doors.

"This is the end, my friend. This is the end."

I believed it and didn't care.

Milan Kundera Returns to America

Breaking News:  Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, returns to America

Milan Kundera took the bus from Prague. It was a long way, but he knew he wanted to come back.

There was something about the greyhound station in Chicago that called him back, reminded him of his childhood, his mother standing close to him as he waited for the light to change so that they could cross the street.

All those long days and nights on the bus from Prague, he stared out the window, dreamed about a greyhound running through the light, past the darkness.

There was one day when he almost asked the bus driver to stop the bus so that he could get off the bus and breathe in the light. He knew breathing was good for him and that he needed to do it, but he finally decided not to ask the driver to stop the bus.

It was better to keep going.

Maybe once he got to Chicago he would see his mother still standing on the corner there by the greyhound station, waiting for him to take her hand so they could cross when the light changed.

Sermon on God and Politics

I went to a politicians forum here organized by the young democrats and young republicans and listened to 16 politicians, dems and repubs, men and women, for offices ranging from city councilmen to US representatives,  and all of these people except one began and ended their debates/speeches with a statement about how God had told them to pursue this office for the greater good of mankind.

Two of these guys, in fact, were ministers.  One was a democrat-episcopalian, and the other a republican-baptist. 

'What they probably all are is bad readers.  I can't see how you can read the New Testament and walk away thinking that Jesus wants you to go into politics, or for that matter, thinking that Jesus wants you to join a church.

I read a book called What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills--and his take on all of this (and he's a catholic) is that there is almost nothing in the NT (at least in the 4 gospels) that would have you honestly joining a church.  And I've read bible scholars who have pretty much said the same thing (Elaine Pagels/Karen Armstrong).

If Jesus wants you to do anything, he wants you to be good and help people.  See the Sermon on the Mount.  You don't need a church for that.  If anything, a church gets in the way, and also sets up a structure that is more about structure and power and politics and maintaining power than it is about anything that has to do with the soul.

I was brought up a catholic and I look back on the things I was taught and it's amazing how little of it came from the teachings of Jesus.  If Jesus is point A, and the catholic church or any church is point Z, I don't think you can explain by either reason or faith how the one led to the other.

Jesus says in the sermon on the mount, as plain as plain can be: if they strike you in the face, turn the other cheek. 

I don't think any of these preachers or politicians is advocating that.  In fact, I think what all of them are advocating is a rejection of Jesus's teachings and an acceptance of a sort of vision of the marriage of politics and religion that you get in the old testament.  America as a sort of israel, a warrior state with a god who's angry at other nations.

One of the preacher/politicans at this political forum said something very interesting.  He said that where there is faith there is no need for fear.  I thought: that's wisdom.  I don't think Jesus ever teaches fear.  And those politicians and preachers (what bruce springsteen in one song calls "those soul sucking preachers) who get you worked up with fear to be afraid of other people and other countries are probably doing the devil's work.

End of sermon.

Found Poem

The Found Book:

You pick up a book of poetry on the floor of your study, and you wonder where it came from.

There’s nothing you remember about it.  The light tan cover?  The title?   The author’s name?  Nothing.  Was this author a friend whose name you’ve forgotten?  Or did another friend give you the book, telling you to read it because it meant so much or so little to him.  You don’t remember.

You turn to the blurbs on the back and discover the book is 30 years old, and you realize it’s  probably been sitting on your bookshelves for that long.

You’ve moved it from one house to another through those 30 years and you never once opened it.  It’s sat on those shelves through storms and deaths, through crises and miracles, and you never once opened it.

And now you do.

And the words are magic.

But only for a second.

You put it back on a shelf.