Robots Are People Too

You know those people?

The types of people who are always going at the same speed, charging through life at 100 mph? or other people that are constantly down in the dumps, perpetually morose, with the vitality of a wet sock? You encounter them at work, freaking out day after day about nothing. Or old friends that are constantly moaning about the same things, unable to get their emotional cart out of the wallowing mud.

Makes you wonder whether we’re actually people with free will, or something else.

Why is it that we’re seemingly programmed to behave and act the same way, day after day, like robots that don’t know anything other than their design? Like we’re machines created for specificity?

Demeanor. Energy. Attitude. Aura. Whatever. Call it what you want.

There’s a dial inside of us placed on a fixed setting. It may go up and down but it never really leaves that setting. A depressed, lethargic person may get riled up and explode, but it’s a comatose sort of explosion, an implosion. A person who is always frantically running around may lie down and rest, but their mind is still racing, they wake up at the same ferret speed.

People can change their outfits, their haircuts, even their religion, but they can’t change their battery.

You can see it in photographs. Robots always make the same face.

Question of the day: What kind of robot am I?

A dreamy, wandering bard, nonchalant and somewhat lackadaisical? A drive-by philosopher? A preserved star-gazer, staring at the celestial vastness, wondering if that’s a star or satellite in the sky? At least, that’s what’s been implanted in my hard drive.

There are no sanctioned borders between dreams and deceptions. Isn’t this the great struggle within?

I am programmed to explore life but never to engage it, to ask these simple questions, but never answer them.

Doesn’t it get redundant?

Well, why yes; but it’s the only setting I have. It’s the only programmed response my circuitry knows. It’s how I cope with the twists and turns of life. I bemusedly turn upturns and downturns into riddles — what goes up must come down — that help placate the wounded animal inside. I don’t get upset or angry easily, or sad or depressed. When someone does something that harms or hurts me, I often just repeat, there’s a wounded animal inside them too.

My spiritual animal is a raccoon. Most people choose the wolf, or mountain lion, but most people aren’t that lucky. Like the raccoon, I’m a spiritual scavenger. Most of us are scavengers. Raccoons deserve love, robots are people too. The Earth stays afloat on the buoyancy of your kindness.

That’s me and my robot.

My setting is somewhere in the middle, a flat-line. Some might say emotionless, but I say even-keeled. I scavenge what I need and move on. I don’t dwell. I don’t cry to the heavens about a stain on the carpet. I don’t burn incense smoke for no reason.

There are those with a switch permanently on fight mode. Those that throw stones at the wind, toss tree branches into the ocean; I am not one of those. Nor do I light fireworks every night or dance in the trenches.

As we witness in bi-polar patients, extreme happiness and sadness is just a question of chemicals and the direction they sway.

Emotions directed by tide.

Which brings us to Of Montreal…

What kind of robot are you? What’s your setting?

What makes your heart beep… beep?

Ventura Blvd. Deities

It was a hot April day in the city of angels. My friend called me at midnight to see if I wanted to toss the Frisbee. “There’s no moon out,” I told him.

I just finished a root beer float. Dr Brown’s Draft Root Beer and Double Rainbow French Vanilla. After catching up on this week’s episode of Lost I’m up in the loft staring at a statue of Buddha throwing his hands in the air, wondering why he’s smiling like that.

Like I’ve already said, there’s no moon out, so the only light in the sky is coming from a billboard on Ventura Blvd.

I can’t make out the image but being illuminated and exalted in the air, to the uninitiated eye, it’s easy to mistake the billboard for something worshiped. Perhaps that’s all the statues on Easter Island were: Advertising.

Church steeples and the golden arches are not that different.

This section of Ventura Blvd where I live hosts a hodgepodge collection of spiritual assistance. There’s the Scientology center. A Shaolin Temple for karate. A New Age bookstore. And a Starbucks. All within a block of one another. Those modern deities and theologies share the same sidewalk, the same public space; like the Gap and Foot Locker at the mall. Mocca Lattes and Krsna.

L.A is home to many an inquiring soul. Willing to buy anything.

A friend was over earlier and we discuss the role of religion in society. He suggested that anarchy would ensue if religion would to ever disappear. I argued things would mostly stay the same.

I don’t believe it’s the fear of retribution that keeps us in line. We act from an internal morality that exists outside indoctrinated theology. It’s for our species benefit not to kill each other, to not sleep with other’s mates, so that we won’t kill each other, to not steal, so that we won’t kill each other, and on and on.

I believe Gods have proven to be disposable over time.

Religion are caterpillars, myths are butterflies. Butterflies and lady bugs, they’re the only insects people beckon to land on them.

Myths are endearing cultural artifacts, no more dangerous than bedtime stories, while contemporary Gods still have the power to cause people to believe in falsehoods. Modern Gods can still “strike us down” — that is, if you believe they can. It’s tragic, in my eyes, to go through life never knowing the truth: that we are divine.

We are the higher power to whom we supplicate.

Religion is an act of stealing that away from us.

And there’s always another God ready to take their predecessor’s place.

To receive our stolen tribute.

Lately I’ve been trying to imagine what the next God(s) would look like.

Who’ll replace the man in the sky with the white beard and angels with harps?

What will the churches for this God look like?

I’m predicting, although I won’t be around to witness it, that the next God will be incredibly small. A nano-God. The size of a cell perhaps. Or the electron inside a cell. The next God will be within. A pulse, or a receptor in your brain. The next God won’t be so old, it will always be being born. It will be personal. A feeling. It will have a million names. It will take any shape you wish.

The next God might be a freckle on the cheek of your lover.

A song, you once heard, that made you feel good.

And there will be no churches.

Say it! I have abandoned my child.

Since 2007

Leave the Writing

Watching the gore of John Adams, and the Revolutionary War, on one channel and Hillary Clinton on another, the whole width of American history seems to exist somewhere within; the weird coincidence – which isn’t really, considering there’s a million channels on cable – has me thinking of certain memories of my life, transposed upon the history I’ve witnessed: the riots, earthquakes, elections, protests.

Watching the candles float on the pool outside the Christian Science Monitor, in Boston, after 9-11.

Brand new shoes spotted with candlelight vigil wax, sustained on Wilshire Blvd, before we went to war in Iraq.

Two very different candles connected by symbolism, imagery — that’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about, the poetry of our lives.

Today I thought about the similarities between the Beach Boys and 80’s era Beastie Boys, and the difference in their personas that speak for a million acts in between: Kent State, disco, Reagan, rotting cities, MTV.

You can trace our society’s evolution through the music of the Beach Boys and Beastie Boys. They’re both groundbreaking harmonizing pop acts, marketed with cheek, each representing the ethos of their time; the clean cut, sun-soaked romanticism of the 50’s and the flashy, gritty hedonism of the 80’s; and they follow each other now in a Warehouse sale bin, except there’s no longer any Warehouse, disarmed relics collecting dust.

You can find out why the Beach Boys became the Beastie Boys in the history of America.

Licensed to Ill was one of my first cassettes. This was before CD. Way before MP3, kids. The Bangles was another. My first CD was De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising. Does that make me old-school?

I graduated high school on the day of O.J’s infamous car chase down the 405. The waiter at The Charthouse in Malibu filled us in on the surreal details while he topped off our drinks and replaced our bread baskets. So, unlike the rest of America, I didn’t see any of it live, although we were only a few miles west down Sunset on the PCH. As the sun went down that night, I was as oblivious as the pelicans sitting on the rocks outside about how much this sordid tale would change news media and thus the beast known as mass culture.

The night we went to war with Iraq I saw Quasi at Spaceland. It’s probably the only thing I’ll remember about the show. George Bush and Dick Cheney had their own show going on in Baghdad. They called it ‘Shock and Awe’.

Our lives are spread out, like a quilt, with little knots of memory woven in.

The sound of the car alarms after The Northridge Earthquake. Spilling my root beer at D.B Coopers, in Palms, when Kirk Gibson dug low and pulled a now legendary gimpy homer over the right field wall. The day I looked at my wife and knew I had found ‘the one’.

The week of the L.A riots my parents were in Alaska and I was home from school with the chicken pox. From my back yard I could see the angry smoke of several fires to the east, following La Brea up into Hollywood. I was 16 years old, wondering if the city was going to still be standing when my parents came home.

I remember the salty taste of ocean water filling up my mouth as I tumbled about in the roll of a giant wave that crashed on me out bodyboarding, one luckless day, down on Bay St., in Santa Monica. It seemed like minutes I was under the water, thrashing for my young life. When I came up I remember expecting a crowd would have gathered, a lifeguard would be heroically swimming towards me; but there wasn’t any of that, no one seemed to have noticed my brush with death. A lady was walking her small terrier, chiding it to stay away from the miniature sand crabs that appear in the wake of waves, probably the same one that had nearly drowned me seconds before.

In November of 2000, the night of the election, my brother and I stayed up to find out the results. As the winner seasawed back and forth he got sleepy and turned in, told me to leave a note for him who won. There were a couple of empty bottles of Harpoon on the table when I scribbled ‘Fucking Bush Won’ on a sheet of paper. That night I came home to find out I had also accidentally etched the note into my sister-in-law’s cherished coffee table.

They managed to buff the writing out. I think if it was mine, I would have left it. A type of scar worn with pride.

The Daily Show is on in the background now. I’m upstairs writing, like on so many other nights.

The night Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania. I took this trip down memory lane. And outside, down on Moorpark St., a car alarm beeped five times.

Saturday Night Down By The L.A. River

STUNTED WONDERMENT.

A CHAINED-FENCE RIVER.

MY CITY. LOS ANGELES; SO SWEET AND FINAL…

THE CLOUDS DEFLECT THE SUN’S LIGHT…

WHAT SNEAKS THROUGH CROWNS SLENDER PALM TREES.

THE PEOPLE DRIVE AROUND AND HARDLY

RECOGNIZE THE SPLENDOR.

The Lakers in Spring, Chick is in the air!

It’s Spring in L.A., and it was hot as shit yesterday, a million gnats are circling on the roof, and all the Laker flags are proudly flapping in the breeze, affixed to car windows across the city. The guys are hard at work in the heat, selling t-shirts at the corner of Crenshaw and Adams and the Lakers are looking strong going into the playoffs, so there’s that energy in the air.

The purple and gold.

It’s Los Angeles’s one true sporting obsession.

I’m incredibly biased for the Lakers. I take relish in suspending my objectivity and rooting like mad, yelling out in crowded bars ‘Ko-Be Ko-Be’. Every call that goes against them is by a bird-brained, can’t see, piece of shit, ref. I even refuse to recognize Sacramento as our state’s capital.

I grew up with Magic Johnson, coming down the court, smiling, his no-look passes finding a sublimely streaking James Worthy for the smooth, professional dunk; and Jack Nicholson in his heyday, stoned out of his mind probably, applauding along with everyone else, the Fabulous Forum rockin’.

I grew up spoiled by Chick Hearn, his eloquent stylings changed basketball, the all-time greatest sports announcer ever! PERIOD.

When he passed away my wife didn’t understand the big deal.

“The big deal?” I wailed in mourning. “He invented half the words in the basketball lexicon: slam dunk, air ball, no harm no foul, triple double. He was kinda like a father, well not a father, but fatherly, chiding them when they did bad and telling us stories from back in the day. He had, like, the longest announcing streak ever. And, he was the nicest man, always talked about his wife. You know how you think old people are adorable, well he had a cute muppet face. You would have loved him.

“Every time I went to a game, this is back when they were at the The Forum, in Inglewood, in the old days, I always tried to spot him in the press booth. My dad would walk me around the concourse at halftime. I’d wave, and, maybe it’s because I was a kid, but he was always nice enough to wave back.”

“Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

No, you don’t.

I don’t even get it. What changes from being a kid? so caught up in something it’s like an extension of your being; feeling the joy and the agony as if you were out there in a uniform? Why do you lose it? as an adult – going to work, coming home – sometimes forgetting when the game is even on?

She grew up in Brazil and Connecticut – no harm there – but my wife doesn’t know what it was like to be twelve years-old at the Forum in 1988, when Chick Hearn puts the game in the refrigerator, and the crowd stands and cheers and slaps high fives, and Randy Newman’s I Love L.A. starts to play as the buzzer sounds and Michael Cooper throws the ball in the air and you watch it travel a celebratory arc, glassy eyed with joy, your stomach slightly nauseous from hot dogs and cracker jacks.

And this is the point where the essay wallows in garbage time. (another Chick Hearn phrase)

The sloppy loose ends, wayward prose, philosophical backwater. Dragging a point too far.

It seemed like when Chick died, my childhood died. My last, true, connection to it, at least. Chick was the ultimate safety blanket, there for me year after year, never missing a game. Through the good times and the bad, but thankfully, and enviably, more good than bad. I had to face it though, it was the end of an era. The comforting voice was gone… I wasn’t a kid, not even a teenager, I was 27 years old when Chick died, but it felt like something heavy transpired, like the passing of a relative. That living reminder of pure joy, unaffected by larger issues, just the fate of the basketball and its travels through hoops, was extinguished. His voice was a portal I could enter and feel, however fleeting and tenuous, some connection to my innocence and childhood; and when the voice was gone, the portal closed.

If Chick could speak to me from the grave, I imagine his corpse telling me to ‘grow up, get over it!’ He’d say, ‘there’s lots of referees in the building, only three getting paid’. Or, in this case, I guess, there’s one referee…

Time.

His game was over and mine was sluggish.

You could say the first quarter had ended. I graduated college in the home of Larry Bird, came home to celebrate Shaq and Kobe’s third championship. I started to become this thing: artofstarving. Started to pick up my game. I brought my wife back from Boston and we learned about the give and go. About working as a team. When I think about it, if ever asked, I would list Chick Hearn as my favorite philosopher; a man who coined the term ‘the mustard is off the hot dog’ for a player who, while trying to show off, messes up; a player who hits a critical free throw has ‘ice water in his veins’, this is a man with wisdom in his elocution.

It’s five years late, but this ones for you, Chick.

Tiny Things

I normally fill this screen with tripe about politics or culture, or some weird hybrid of the two, but tonight I want to talk about my little nephew, Justin. Well, he’s not so little anymore, but he started out real little.

He was born just a pound and a half. About the weight of a bound copy of Crime and Punishment.

That’s what happens when you’re in a hurry to come out of your mommy.

He was premature by four months. A wee little thing, smaller than a shoe.

He could fit in your hand.

Naturally, we worried he wasn’t going to make it, spent many a sleepless night thinking about tiny things: a tiny face mask, tiny fingers, tiny lungs….

A pound a half!

I was going to school in Boston at the time and couldn’t make it to Colorado to visit. My first meeting with my nephew was in an email attachement. I opened it and saw a picture that scared the daylights out of me. He looked so small and fragile. Breakable.

Now he’s eight years-old and playing baseball, soccer, learning karate, practices his chops and kicks on his younger brother, and has a heart the size of the Rocky Mountains. When I visit him on Christmas he rams into me and I almost get knocked over, walloping me with a giant hug. He may just be playing around, but when he punches me, it hurts!

The kid isn’t a peewee anymore.

My sister claims we look alike.

This is a few years ago.

My nephew and I.

He’s as rough and tumble as any eight year-old. My sister and her husband love to watch him run around and fall down and get hit in the face with a pillow. He’s lucky to have been born when he had, otherwise he never would have been born at all. Modern medicine and all. He was on a feeding tube for over three years.

Like I said, he has a big heart. He’s a sweet and loving boy. A warrior.

Justin’s now at a stage where he’s learning about his experience and talking about it. He will tell the story for the rest of his life to the people that come into it. “I was born weighing a pound and a half. My uncle said I looked like an alien.”

It’s a trip to watch a child’s personality form. I can only imagine what his parents must feel like, like some kind of sorcerers. Not only is he developing and maturing, and that right there is a blessing, but he’s becoming involved in charity works, and the idea of giving back.

His latest endeavor is in a charity raising funds for research involving premature children. Doing one of those walk-a-thon things. He’s only eight! Gives me hope that the future’s in good hands. My nephew.

I gave $20 bucks. The crazy uncle who lives out in California. The cheapskate.

As I turn in for the night, once again, I think about tiny things….

Tiny hearts. Beating.

Hillary Clinton’s Tax Returns Are Balling!

Hillary finally released her tax returns and they showed that the Clintons are balling — as they should be. 110 million dollars is some nice coin. A lot of that money came from their book deals. I’m glad someone is making it in the publishing world.

Bill’s got to eat and corporations need their prestige.

It’s funny. I was flippping pass Fox News — like a party-goer hurdling a drunken vagabond on the sidewalk — and I heard Karl Rove’s nasally drone calling Obama elitist. Karl Rove calling Obama an elitist. Beacuse he can’t bowl? I’m not even going over there to get a link. They mutilate goats and drink bat blood. Over. There.

I Windexed the windows in my loft on Wednesday.

Now everything is much clearer and more refined.

The Universe… that much more elegant.

Pledged the table tops on Thursday.

Now they shine.

I can see my soul in them.

It’s amusing how Republicans like to color liberals as elitist. I’m guessing if you poll one hundred country club members, the majority will turn up belonging to the GOP. Isn’t the party that wants to keep immigrants out and the poor uninsured elitist by nature? It’s reverse psychology on a massive scale. Leave No Child Behind. Clean Skies Act. Compassionate Conservative. Republicans excel at mind-bending logic. Karl Rove’s ‘Obama is an elitist’ is just another example of their penchant for disfiguring the truth.

Still want the link? Fine… here you go.

I’m going to Santa Anita today. To watch the horses run around the track. Does that make me a commoner? Common enough for you, Karl? My guess is the fat cats in the box seats are elephants. Ask Chuck. He was a fan of the ponies

Charles Bukowski: Are Your Drinking? I think that I am just ill with life, the same stale yet fluctuating factors. even at the track I watch the horses run by and it seems meaningless. I leave early after buying tickets on the remaining races. “taking off?” asks the motel clerk. “yes, it’s boring,” I tell him. “If you think it’s boring out there,” he tells me, “you oughta be back here.”

It’s not too unlike a political campaign, I suppose, complete with shooting the horse that falls down.

I 409ed the kitchen counters on Fiday.

The sight of so many massacres

Question

what apple grower started ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’?

– whoever he is, he’s a rich man now.

why do I always get in the wrong lane on the freeway?

and get off at the wrong exit somehow?

– it’s a miracle I ever get anywhere.

how do we know when we’ve said too much?

will you tell me?

will you still love me, if the universe cease humming to my touch?

when we’ve forgotten all the books we’ve read, and places we’ve
been, even including The Grapes of Wrath and Joshua Tree…

are you going to still remember me?

“Stop it,” she said.

“What?”

“Stop, stop, stop talking…”