Blink

This is a world without Kings.  A world without miracles.  The Dalai Lama is a man: he eats meat; he likes George Bush.  He laughs at himself.  Maybe this is good.  Maybe he should have a reality show.
Mrs. Clint Eastwood has one.  It is neither amusing nor entertaining.  It occupies cable real estate.  I used to think Clint was okay, even though he is a mediocre pianist.  I'll never watch Dirty Harry again.

People who order super sized pizzas read about the new billionaires dating celebrities and confusing legends and fame and what used to be talent with obscene bank accounts and ultra-conspicuous consumption.  Men who have no sense of art can now buy iconic paintings; no matter that they overpay for these; it is meaningless.  They can't tell  a hamburger from a Warhol anyway, so why should it annoy me that crooked art dealers profit from their ignorance?  It does.  They, too, mingle with the billionaires and date celebrities.  Money is the only ID required at events.  Doesn't matter how you got it or what you do with it.  It used to pass through hands, like religion or faith; now it sticks like glue-backed securities and shines like vaseline.  Derivatives, I call these people.  Ditto their art and their tastelessly scaled homes and their overpriced labelled handbags.  My friend had a new Balenciaga bag the other day.  It looks fake, I commented.  It is fake.  She is furious and won't speak to me.

It is generally late when I feel compelled to confess things.  It is at the precipice of a new day when I decide my night is beginning.  There is a bird outside my back window that comments every morning at 5:34.  It understands daylight savings time... it adjusts.  I can't fathom where it sits for this performance; there is very little foliage back there; mostly brick wall and garbage.  I can't quite place the source of the sound.  Then there is the barking dog.
I have little sympathy for this dog... which is unusual for me.  I was in an office waiting room last week and there was a blind woman with a German Shepherd.  He was sweet and ultra-attentive; the woman was gruff and unappreciative.  Dogs don't really require affection; people do.  Nonetheless, of the pair, I sided with the dog.  Very unsympathetic of me... but I'm noticing lately I am lacking in human sympathy. I am growing a sort of bark around my sensitive nature.  Things will look less spiny in full daylight; I know this, but I choose to document the needles at their entry...when it still hurts.  I am a bit of a hater.  I hate Mrs. Eastwood.  I hate Larry Gagosian.  I hate every single person at Goldman Sachs.  I hate the Cindy Sherman exhibition.  I hate women who are nice to me because they want to date one of my friends.  I hate the parents of precocious young guitar players who photograph and youtube their young gods with me stuck on the stage playing bass for someone I never signed up for.  I hate parents who worship their kids.  I hate people who use people and that is the basis of all social networking. I hate people who don't contribute.  I hate more music than I love and that is a sociological symptom.  Music is joy and most of what is out there is not music but misplaced ego noise.  Aural blood.  Tinnitus.  Messy stuff that just clutters.  Things that don't matter blocking the way for things that do.  Things that need to be hated out there concealing things that need to make us weep.

A woman stabbed her daughter yesterday.  9 years old.   She must wake up today and know that.  And tomorrow.   I pity this mother.  She can perhaps feel something.  She is mad, they say.  Madness is not a refuge; it is a knife you cannot control.  I have developed a certain respect for madness, especially the kind that has no regard for grace.  I admire this.  I know this is evil and I am confessing; it is one step beyond simply hating.  It means occasionally loving the murderer and I know this is wrong.  But in a way madness is the only freedom left.  It is outside the law, outside morality, outside.  

I'm sure when this fog lifts and the sun comes out one of these afternoons I'll repent.  But for now, my bird has gone for the day--- maybe it sleeps through the morning like I do.  It is an old bird; it's been clocking in for years now.  It might hate its routine.  I have heard birds don't really think.  It's not even a crime to kill a bird, the way it is to kill a dog.  It is okay to eat birds, to wear their feathers and sleep under quilts made from them.  I can't process this right now, the way I can't process the obsession we have with digging up Etan Patz like a cheap CSI episode or the suffocating empathy I have for the woman who stabbed her daughter out of what I sense was some kind of mad love.   There will be no closure for those of us who are still listening.  There will be no punishment for the unpunished and no funeral for death.  There is only the good night.  One can always choose the dark.