Lottery is off

I just watched the film Captivity and came to a conclusion. There is nothing more boring than watching a woman bullied for being famous. As much as I would love to build a Holmes-esque murder house, I would have trouble stocking it with victims....the judgmental aspect of the supervillians in those movies pisses me off and makes me hate the film maker.

A Pact in Blood

You have probably already guessed this about me, I sexualize human sacrifice. I also enjoy the look of a good step pyramid in action. When I hear some vapid actor, pop musician, or "celebrity" in Vanity Fair magazine, or People, or Entertainment Tonight, complaining about how being a celebrity means they cannot walk down the street and be a regular person, I know the truth about them. They are ungrateful. I feel that they should pay the ultimate price for what we, collectively, as a society, have given them. They should pay with their lives.

Of course they should. Every single one of them, Chevy Chase and William Shatner, Tom Cruize and Jewell, should be a potential victim of the ceremonial knife. I do not know as many of their names as a typical denizen of the Western World because I do not watch television, but they are out there, inexorably smiling from magazines, immersing me in the details of their lives.

Cruel? Nonsense. Should my plan go into action, we could arrange to mail each and every one of them each an index card. A simple question, and two boxes, "Yes", and "No". The question would be, of course, "Will you now agree, within a few days or so, to become one of the millions of civilian masses, bagging groceries or stocking chewing tobacco at 7-11, anonymous, and working at a job that is not an expression of the adolescent fantasy of doing something inherently enjoyable and creative, and being paid extravagantly for it? A job at Wall Mart and an apartment in a lousy part of town, with a crazy landlord, will be provided to get you stated." To check NO means to enter the lottery, and to keep your status as a celebrity, a product of consumer culture and its various benefits, the Lexus, the bling, the personal assistant, the job where you play lead guitar for a band and somehow get paid for it, rather than saving bussboy tips to have the tubes in your amp replaced". Maybe, the question needs some editing, but I think most of us know the overwhelming tide of YES response cards that would flood in to Tikal, as workers cleaned the vines off the pyramid. Maybe an odd one, like Werner Herzog might check yes, for the change of pace, Stephen King might, though it would sadden him to loose his readers. I don't know celebrities. I think it obvious though that most of the cards would read "No".

Then, the lottery.

Why the lottery? Because we, collectively, have given them a life of adolescent fantasy, where they can act in films and travel the world, have constant plastic surgery, wear designer clothes, or have the luxury of giving flip answers to reporters who ask about their song lyrics, and yet, many of them manage to complain about the inevitable, inexorable, consequence of what has happened to them. True, they are not all alike. Some of them ruminate on the consequences of fame rather than complain about its limitations. Some rock stars are very appreciative of their fans, spending hours signing autographs. For some of them, like Salamon Rushdie, fame has brought the need to go into hiding for fear of their lives. Still, there seem to be so many of them that want the legions of adoring fans, without the strange emails and stalkers standing outside the window at night, with binoculars, or to grace the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine, without a strange message, painted in blood, on the window of their Mercedes "You Will BARE ME many children!!!". The one brings the other, doesn't it?

Those that have pulled a Sallinger, and kept their lives private, have had their cake and eaten it too, they won. I, personally, could not be happier. I do not know celebrities. Still, I think they should pay.

The true purpose of this rant is, naturally, to invoke the image of a randomly chosen celebrity, chosen by a monthly lottery, dragged to the top of a Mayan step-pyramid. Would it not be grand? The obsidian knife? The feathers? The television cameras capturing the last moment of Courtney Love, Britney Spears, or Angelina Jolie (all women because this is a sexual fantasy and not serious political commentary, and I am straight), bare breasted, chest heaving, as the Central American gods, hungry from centuries of neglect, finally receive the sacrifice owed to them, to ensure the fertility of the land?

Dear reader, perhaps you are not Satanic or Metal enough to appreciate the value of the worldwide, celebrity death lottery, and maybe that failing will keep you from being incarcerated.

I admit, maybe this lottery of mine is impractical. There are degrees of immersion into the public consciousness, and it is fundamentally different to be known for something admirable than for something questionable or downright vile. Still, it seems fundamental that every step into the public eye brings consequences, some unanticipated.

the truth, some of it

I do not know why complicated brain structures tend to be laminated, yet they do. Our own cerebral cortex is laminate, six onion layers, our cerebellum has plenty, in Morymyrid fish, there are organs of extreme neurological complexity associated with the processing of neurological impulses, and for some reason, I think lamination is tantamount to the potential for thought. I was, and still am, consistently impressed by the cognitive power of parrots, toucans, crows. I hear woodpeckers are pretty smart too. I would never volunteer to be one of those to vanish, but I would love to live on an earth with a mere five hundred million people, its present cultures intact, just represented by fewer individuals, I wonder if, at this density, we would be able to remember all the things we have learned, and I think that, perhaps, we are destined to reach these numbers sooner than we might prefer. I miss the smell of the ocean and I miss seeing the things in it. It makes me feel powerless that I have not arranged to move closer to it. It makes me feel powerless that I cannot control time or read minds either, though some might say these are less reasonable expectations, I have tried both of them with the same vigor. I am lonely, but in a strangely good way. Nothing is wrong, everything is right, but the flowers are all gone and I realize that, like morymyrid fish, toucans, and alpine buttercups, someday I will die, this is natural, and though I have no desire to put a stop to it, I am frustrated by my lack of ability to visit my previous selves properly. I should be able to stay here, in this moment, sun set, streetlamp in an evening sky, summer finally warm and my mind filled with the soft nuances of seratonin. I told you I love you because I do love you, even though it is like the love of a rainforest vine for its beauty and its tenacity, or maybe you who are reading are the one I love like the feeling of a soft blanket and a fire, or maybe it is you, the one I love like bubbles in a glass of Pilsner and the promise of wonderful misdeeds, maybe I love you for the way you look at a Winnebego and see a pirate ship, or the way you actually have committed acts of piracy from a winnebego, each of us can be so many things to one another. I am mystified by our ways sometimes.

Dear Oblivia

I do not know your gender. At this point, neither do you, and that is fine with both of us, I am quite sure. I know nothing about your chromosomes either. Judging by the fact that you have made it this far, I am guessing they are a bit more standard than the set we handed to Lucifer, on the morning of 6/6/6, because Lucifer was a short-term visit to this world and you seem destined to stay a bit longer. Whatever they are, those chromosomes of yours, I am cool with them. You are a product of evolution, and your existence is an attempt by our species to explore the whole world of evolutionary options open to it. Without such experiments, a whole array of sudden macroevolutionary changes would be impossible, so such things must be. I hear there are polyploid salamanders, and I carry a polyploid strawberry in the pocket of my coat, food for our brother, the skink, its own species on a path to evolutionary destiny.
Whomever you are, you have a telencephalon. That strange bulge at the end of the spinal column, destined to grow into an organ of incredible complexity and delight, is at its onset. There has been a primitive streak, some time between our trip to the waterfalls of the Columbia River gorge and our numerous cups of Stumptown coffee, I imagine. I like to think the coffee helped you along. Perhaps, if things go well for you, you will discover coffee yourself. Coffee, Cafea arabica, our sister in the honeysuckle family, who produces such wonderful alkaloids, on its own evolutionary path to greatness.
Limb buds, you have them. And a tail. And gill pouches. Design-wise, you are fit for swimming, and ideally suited to develop into a lamprey, or was that two weeks ago? Already, those limb buds have pegged you as a tetrapod, and if things go well, perhaps you might use them to play piano, smoke pot, or at the very least, discover the delights of touching things. I do not know who you are or what you are destined to become, but in a sense, I already love you, and am grateful for the changes you have brought to my life. I was grateful for Lucifer, temporary and inconvenient visitor that he was, but this time, there is talk of modifying the dining room for other uses.
You are a sensible embryo. You induce the consumption of almond butter. You demand a great deal of sedentary time on the couch, watching season after season of Deadwood episodes, you prefer that your host eat fresh fruit, sleep copiously, and walk around with a certain, undefinable glow.
It is raining today, out here, and there are tulips. The process of educating people is winding down now, and like a weaver bird, I am building a nest for you.

a letter home

They laugh at me when I speak of raising a newborn human in a ten gallon tank and still I think it is a good idea what love and spice to a roomscape such a creature not quite skinklike in its ability to burrow, in fact no burrowing at all and completely unable to climb through trees, like a larval scarab requiring a pile of dung, eggs so carefully oviposited upon it, dutiful mothers, like earwigs guarding their clutch against intrusion. A baby's room should have machine guns, a teenager's room should have books, a soldier should have flowers, a maiden should have reptiles, a mommy should have drugs for her day, a daddy should have the solace of a strip club and a cigar. I regret missing the formation of the solar system, it is a hundred thousand years that have slipped my mind, as have the last six ice ages and here again cometh another one, delayed or halted by anthropogenic climate change, cities flooding, blue sharks on Market Street in San Francisco, crocodiles in lake Michigan, and mangroves everywhere. It should not surprise me that people stare in disbelief at my own disbelief, that this nervous system of ours could have evolved in an arboreal frugivore, a terrestrial scavenger, a homonoid, the odds were stacked against it. Unfortunate indeed that, like plankton, we drift aimlessly as individuals across the earthscape and have such limited propensity for forming structures out of our own bodies. I am lonely for you, one with whom i should exchange pollen, lonelier still for the trees we would grow. Soon, seed shall be set and our story will give rise to yet another, still, with my minds eye and deep memory i see it all, in colors as astonishing as oil paint, the sea scorpions, the sunset on cloudy uranus, the view from a distant star as our own sun spirals round the galactic center. One tulip, then another, then armageddon, then geology, then rat men, then tree lobsters, another armegeddon. I miss you. I miss your mind.