Really? Well it better be Monday. Because Friday I've got a thing with this chick at Taco Bell.
The Byzantines, the Mayans, the Incas, the Paul Ankas. All of them have predicted the end of the world or the second coming of Celine Dion. Same thing only different.
For the past five thousand years of what has been passing for civilized man, there have been predictions of nasty, icky, puss filled disasters that would rain down pestilence and liquid hot magma on the planet like a Krakatoan freebase party.
Yet. The Madonna, Sticky&Sweet tour is over, and we're all still here.
No matter what century, there is always a guy looking to tell us we're fucked three ways from Sunday. Some little grease-spot nobody gave a shit about until 200 years after he got hit by a bus, and someone digs up an old podcast of him rambling incoherently about the progenitor radio-waves in the Crab Nebula causing sushi prices to go up. All of a sudden he goes from the guy who got splashed all over You Tube wearing his sister's panties and getting a blow-job from a shop-vac, to a Prophet who knew what “RAP music” really is: People rhyming.
"These aren't the droids you're looking for."Soothsayers. Someone who has all the answers, even though no one asked them. Usually some guy dressed in an outfit Elton John wouldn't be buried in, standing at the pulpit spouting his twelve step program of how you can get to heaven if you just give him all your worldly possessions and your earnings from the job assignments that Dew Eye will be handing out at the table located next to the People's Waters of Life vending machine with the out of order sign on it.
Jim Jones, Charles Manson, The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. (Rajneeshee dinning tip: Skip the salad at the potluck.) The Greatful Dead. (If that isn't a cult, the Backstreet boys write their own songs.) Each one has their own crowd of believers: Some wearing tie-dye, others wearing tie-dye, and the rest of them wearing some sort of tie-dye.
My all time favorite of these harbingers of better living through Rolls Roycing, is Heaven's Gate. The Club Med of the: “We're fucking insane and don't care what it takes to prove it.” crowd. The first sign that you might have wanted to take a second look at this outfit before you signed up for the, -albeit brief,- lifetime membership, is that it's named after Michael Cimino's four day run-time epic that almost turned United Artists into a hot dog cart on the corner of Lacieniga and Melrose.
That a couple named Bo and Peep, could get seven American males to be voluntarily castrated in Mexico is the kind of salesmanship that makes Glengarry Glen Ross look like a lemonade stand maned by an eight year old in the San Fernando Valley.
Ah, communal living. House Memo: Hey gang. Tuesday will be falafel night. Wednesday we'll have the all you can eat popcorn, Charles In Charge marathon. And Saturday will be vodka shots and plastic bags over your head night. Don't show up late and miss out on your complimentary: Party Like It's 1999, purple face shroud.
Whacking themselves because a Waste Management comet was supposed to come by on Monday (not Wednesday, the regular pick-up day,) and “recycle” Earth.
This makes the, Rising From The Dead, story almost make sense.
(J., not the zombies. We already know them's sum craazzy mo' fo's with all that arm falln' off, face eaten' shit. Damn. That's a party.)
Here's the thing about being the guy who predicts the end of the world. Eventually, he's going to be right. Duh.
“So, tell me who's that writin',
John the Revelator.”
All these 'Guiding Lighters,' say they have been given the supreme knowledge of The Way, by a higher entity, that speaks only to them because they are the only ones wise enough to follow the instructions of an unseen Omnipotent being that says everyone must die on a yet to be determined Thursday afternoon. This method is most commonly employed by religious groups, investment and hedge fund managers, and the occasional President of the United States. “God said, to kick some sand-nigger ass. You want to tell him no? Don't come cryn' to me when Satan's givin' you a blow torch enema, purgatory boy.”
"I haven't played Ring Around The Rosy since college."Now it seems to me that I've seen a few homeless guys mumbling a lot of the same things. What sets the Polyester Preachers the flock listens to apart from BoBo over there, pushing what he believes is his golden shopping cart? Best as I can tell, it's their tailor. The quest to find answers to life's most elusive questions is at best an exercise in futility. If there were answers, they would have shown up a lot sooner, and somebody would have put 'em on a Post-it and left it on the cave wall for the rest of us. If you think about it, who needs the help more? The guy trying to carve out a living for his family, smacking a Mammoth in the head with a rock. Or the Wall Street, American Psycho wannabe who decides over a $300 bottle of Japanese imported glacier water whether another two million of us are going to lose our jobs.
Okay, maybe we could keep looking just a little bit longer. Just until it gets dark. Oh, 2009 job market. Too late.
The problem with following people is you never really know for sure where you're going until they take you there. And by then it's often too late to know if you want to be there or not. Looking to someone else for direction can be a perfectly normal instinct. Animal pacs follow one or two leaders, schools of fish and and flocks of birds move in unison with their group, and Republicans all use the same braincell to make a decision.
Look, life is a scary fucking proposition. No matter how much some act like they've done this before, we're all getting our cherry popped all over again with each new day. Right about now somebody's standing up in the back of the room saying: That's not true. “We've learned from those who came before us. We use that knowledge to guide us, to avoid their mistakes.”
--Do I really need to come up with something incredibly witty to put here?--
We all would like to know what's around the corner. We all have times we look back on and wish we had known then...
If we had known, it would have turned out so much differently right?
If right now you told me you could take me back and give me that answer. Right now, when I am in the worst throes of pain I've ever felt in my life, because of the woman I love more than life itself leaving me, I wouldn't take it. Every day for the last five years has been misery. And each one of those days I have to find a way to get through it one more time. And tomorrow I have to try to do it again.
But for all that I wish was different. For all that I wish the pain was gone. I wouldn't accept that answer. I wouldn't want to have known to have not fallen in love with her the second I walked off the band's bus. Or to tell others how to keep it from happening to them. No one likes or enjoys the hardship, pain, loss, fear that life holds. And I'm not saying that those things should not be solved, cured, avoided, prevented when they can be.
But I accept that life is life because of these things. It can't exist any other way. If we lived in a perfect world, we'd never know it.
And anyone who says any different.
Is lying.
Keep The Faith
The lyric: “So, tell me who's that writin', John the Revelator.”
Is taken from the Gov't Mule version of the song: "John the Revelator."
From the album: Dose
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