NO WAY OUT : OTHER THAN THE ENDING OF MY SELF AND MY TIMES : IN NO WAY BESMIRCHING LIFE'S REPUTATION....

Is there anybody who believes we can make it rain by doing a rain-dance?

If we should delve deeply into out first consciousness of a story being infolded in our mind enfolding it into a narrative already begun long before we were born, relentlessly informing us of the limitedly optioned parts we might choose to play in it, though rarely if ever advising us that it may or may not be the one true story, it may be a fairy-tale dreamed up and designed not necessarily by good fairies…That their ogres and villains, no less than their heroes and ingenues may not be what they seem to be. Their beginnings, middles and endings strictly arbitrary, perhaps even perversions, inversions or at least cut-out simplifications of a far more sophisticated weave, not so much evolutionarily as un-divinely thrust upon us, convincing us should we opt not to believe in it we would become but a loose alienated de-polarized strand dangling in some perilous void that needs to be avoided at all costs…

The gods are among us, angels and demons at work, playing interchangeable roles in a pre-determinedly progressive script, authored by anybody, somebody or nobody we ourselves could never imagine nor revise. At best we can improvise on a settled through-line. Skepticism is a fool’s game played only by bad fairies …

HISTORY IS A DODDLE! That’s what my history-teacher would tell us, Mr. Mullis. He’d waltz into the classroom in his bow-tie, brylcreamed comb-over, corduroy pants and leather-elbow-patched jacket, forgo his raised pulpit, grab the nearest empty kid’s chair and settle back, hands clasped behind his neck, feet plonked up on the front-middle kid’s desk, patent loafers, paisley patterned socks, disarming glimpse of bare leg, gaze up at the ceilinged heavens, far above Anthony Mitchell’s ruddy-blushed chubby cheeks and proclaim to anybody and everybody in ear-shot that “history is a doddle!!”

Something happened, so something else happened and so on and so on and so on….”So what was the first thing that happened? Mr. Bellwood? 1066 and all that…” “The Norman invasion, sir!” “Correct! That’s how we all became English!” Or British if you’ve drunk too much Scotch, Welsh if you’ve eaten too many rarebits, or you’ve ever been over the sea to Ireland….Before that, nothing but undocumented savagery. A few burned cakes, some bare-breasted woman in a spiked chariot and an inspiringly persistent spider! Legend and conjecture at best. Harold may have been the first but he was the only, so let’s leave him eyeless in Hastings and start where we mean to get consecutive! King William the First! Then William the Second…Get all your kings and queens in chronological order, all your important dates memorized and come exam time : history is a doddle!! University awaits, where all else will be revealed! We’re here to learn what put the Great in Britain and how the BBC came to rule the airwaves! You have to own your own history or somebody else’s history will own you!

“ I was having a quiet drink with a few friends. This drunk decided to pick a fight with me. Just didn’t like my looks, I guess. He must have decided I looked like somebody who would disagree with him. I did. He kept telling me I was on the wrong side of history. I told him history was a doddle. How could anybody be on the wrong side of a doddle? He decided I wasn’t taking him seriously enough. I suggested he might not be sober enough to take seriously, so maybe we both needed to be on the funnier side of history! He didn’t get the joke at all. He’s threatening to wipe the smile of my funny side of history. I ask him if he really thinks politics is going to solve anything but his apparently desperate need to be taken seriously? It was just a suggestion, but he took it as a rationale for beating the shit out of me… At that point I decided maybe he doesn’t realize how tall I am. I stood up. And strangely enough, looking down on him he didn’t seem that drunk. Just on the verge of being out of control. I’m six feet five. He must have been five feet six tops. Plus I have a shaved head, he was just losing his hair. It was a no-brainer. Though I did pause to consider my testicles might be closer to his fist than my chin. But I put my faith in discrepancy being Newton’s unwritten law of seeing the funny side of anything. And sure enough, it did gravitationally play itself out. He retreated back to the bar, some colorful expletives on his side, an elevated silence on mine. I’ve been called a lot worse, and truth be told I learned at an early age the value of devaluing language as one way of combatting the fact that really you have no idea what the fuck is going on in your own never mind somebody else’s head….

You have to own your own history or somebody else’s history will own you. Did you ever own slaves? Did you ever lynch anybody? Traffic children for sex? Did you ever do something you knew was wrong simply because somebody else ordered you to? Did you ever rape, pillage and slaughter whole villages of native Americans or native anybody else’s? Did you ever consider evil was necessary to make the world a better place for the good to live in? Did you ever conceive racial identity a sound definition of who your enemy was?

I used to think being English was a racial characteristic. Till somebody convinced me I was simply “white”. And somehow bonded in blood with everybody else in the world who was “white”. Including the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots, the French, the Italians and God-forbid even the Germans! Not to mention the Jews…Though, wait a minute, they’re a different race altogether, even though most of ‘em seem to be white. Somehow they seemed to have jumped off the Caucasian bandwagon? So we have Whites, Blacks, Browns, Yellows and Jews, who pretty much could be any of the above, so long as they keep their yarmulkas well-laundered? Will the real Jews stand up, please, cause I need to make a head-count! Do I have to wait until somebody offers me a loan? Of course I could never say that in a synagogue or on facebook or twitter or I may be labelled as a racist anti-semite A more supreme whiter than white supremecist? I look down on whoever isn’t what…? Maybe bankers are a race too? But now I’m really teetering on the brink of hate-crime…. I need to be very careful if there are any Jews or bankers around, especially since it’s not always that obvious. Wouldn’t want to offend anybody’s blood-line….. Thank God for the blacks and the browns and the yellows, otherwise I might be really confused! No matter I’ve so rarely met anybody in my own life who wasn’t more inclined to be friendly than hostile, though I often suspect they may be similarly infected by the same dis-ease of opposing identities which must eventually clash…So we may as well just get it over with now?

Am I making this up or is somebody else? I think I have PTSD from watching too much TV as a kid, or some facsimile thereof. The only cure to keep watching. Watching TV is a doddle! It’s either that or join the military or the police-force or become a hedge-fund broker and invest all my gains in producing blockbusters to re-affirm the realities of what I’ve been watching all my life on TV, or some facsimile thereof. Apparently I was born and raised into an age of deceit, subterfuge, conspiracy, treachery, depravity and corruption so deep in man’s inhumanity to humanity it can only uplift itself in dramatic light entertainment, fluffy photogenic banalities or consummate salesmanship. The natural wild tamed into a zoo or a concert arena. The savage beast gone hip-hop or death-metal. Scientific and technological hegemony. A mercilessly merciful promise of ultimate dissolution into cyberspace our only hope of an end to all our sufferings. Should we choose not to sign up for Netflix or facebook or any other smart etceteras, we risk isolate desolation in mere flesh and blood, which left to its own devices would naturally proceed to rip its’ own throat out…

There’s a mildly infamous Marlon Brando interview, sometime in the early 1960’s, in which he insists that America has no culture. Its’ culture transformed into commerce. Its’ most celebrated actors, icons of salesmanship. Nothing personal, just business. A culture of hucksters and confidence-men, the god-fathers, making you offers you can’t refuse. Protection doesn’t come cheap. In the end air and water will be more than many people can afford. And what would that mean in the largest scheme of things? You won’t just be hungry and homeless anymore. So best take a few deep breaths, before you choke on your last natural gulp. get your implant now before something kills you and makes you suffer first. All these billions spent on cancer research and now nearly one in two people are dying from it? Apparently humanity would prefer to go to Mars. All those billions, all that technology and science put to better use. Is death no less inevitable than artificial intelligence? Can anybody prove it isn’t? If we want to put an end to landfills…? First we need to send everybody up in smoke who can’t afford to own their own piece of land plus property-tax. Rid the world of smoke, no fire, at least half the battle over. If it wasn’t for all them finicky Whites and Blacks and Browns and Yellows and Jews and Christians and Muslims and Seventh Day Adventists and Latter Day Saints and Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists (maybe not so much the Buddhists?) and Fat People and Anorexics and Republicans and Democrats and Liberal Progressives and LBGT’s and Greta Thunbergs and Conspiracy Theorists and Neo Conservatives and Bono Fanatics and Catalonian Seperatists and Anybody Who Believes They Have The Truth And Nothing But The Truth Embedded In Their Personally Re-arranged DNA, maybe we could all just not commit suicide in identifiable peace?