Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival featuring Dr. Omed's Patented Oil of Prosody and the dancing Elders of the Seventh Day Atheist Aztec Baptist Synod. Fair and Balanced since 8/14/03 00:12AM GMT
THE LADY AND LITTLE SISTER, NATURAL FALLS STATE PARK
DR. OMED VISITS THE LADY
Pilgrims and seekers, aside from the poke I received from Fiona, this image is the numinous entity you have to thank for the return of Yours Truly to the blogging fold: The Lady, the naiad in residence at Natural Falls State Park. This is one of Oklahoma's numerous small state parks, tucked away in odd corners off blue two lanes all over the state. To reach this one, you drive almost to Arkansas and watch out for the small sign that marks the turn off. Blink and you'll miss it. The place is small, and betrays its origin as a private, commercial resort--Dripping Springs I think it was called. The movie Where the Red Fern Grows was filmed "on location" at the park. The ferns do indeed grow in the mist from the Lady's dress.
I go to see the Lady to find some peace--the peace that passeth understanding, if you will--from the weather of the world and my own dark heart. She does not fail. In spite of all human 'improvements', glamour, in the old sense of the word, clings to the place where she pours herself out. Don't go to her immediately. Walk the trails for a bit, cross your own path, then go down to the pool in the grotto by her foot, sit, and breath. That's all. Breathe out the bad ions and breathe in the good ions. Watch the falling water braid itself in a recursive spiral. Go on your way renewed.
CROSS YOUR OWN PATH
SIT, AND BREATHE.
WATCH THE FALLING WATER.
That's all.
When I filled up my tank that day, on the pilgrim path, a gallon of gas in Tulsa was selling at three dollars and nineteen cents per in Tulsa, which consistently has the cheapest fuel in the country. It was a selfish indulgence, I must admit, but I figured I'd better get in that last road trip, and visit the Lady, before the price of gas goes through the roof. I'm glad I did.
DR. OMED, FROM THE SAME ROLL OF FILM (REMEMBER FILM?)
1699 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 3 K'ank'in.
Friend Jonah of Love During Wartime posted a poem back on April 12th, which I think is a very fine "last" poem, as he calls it, if indeed it were to be his last. I like the humor and the history in it. Jonah and I have been friends for thirty years, so I have a headstart on the rest of you. But you'll catch the drift, if the drift doesn't catch you first. I think all poets start writing their last poems at some point, some when very young, others when in their dotage. Last looks back "o'er travelled roads," as Whitman had it, after he rehearsed himself into the role of the "good grey poet." Rimbaud wrote his last poem, Une Saison en Enfer, threw down his pen and abandoned his muse at what--age 19? So I ask my fellow poets--Have you begun the work on your last poem(s) yet? I think I was about 39 when I started writing my first last poems--my first real last poems. Accomplishing the virtue of lastness in poetry is a not straightforward pursuit, it is devious, tricky, and oblique. It helps if you have reached middle age and your brain function has begun to decay. Metaphors have to be jury-rigged, and they must "shine in use." Here's the last of Jonah, and may there be many more lasts for him:
MY LAST POEM
My last poem will walk under storm-green skies past haunted duplexes through echoing culverts through knee-high grass. It will walk from New Jersey Pine Barrons and coast up Gravity Hill; it will walk from mother's horror to father's death; it will walk from the myth of Saturn to the mouth of the whirlwind. It will walk all this way to sit on my chest, some cat-like Buddha, to flip through the uneven pages of my unjustified heart.
My last poem and my first poem will sit on the front porch and tell tall tales about the neighbors. They'll compare rhetoric and the scope of their rhythm. "You've got a charming rhyme scheme," my last poem will say; "You've got a mysterious metaphysic," my first poem will reply. And they'll write sketches of the wind while drinking green tea with a pinch of fresh mint and a spoon-full of local honey.
My last poem may have forgotten every cherished image; it may have lost its connection to each borrowed symbol and 40 years worth of repetends. It may find itself confronted by each unfinished stanza, every half-begun epic, each muse in passing and muse in waiting - each shopgirl, waitress, movie star, pew mate, class mate, anima projection - all the false goddesses and true harridans, all the true goddesses and faithless lovers. It may have forgotten their names in eternity. It may have lost its breath and its measured lines. It may not want a song or need one more sip of beer.
My last poem will shake your hand and greet you. It will welcome you like an old friend. It will walk with you anywhere.
1701 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 3 K'ank'in.
The map of fate is an indecomposable continuum. The territory is dynamical, not geographical. In the probabilistic chart of doom each point on the boundary between any two fates is on the boundary between all fates.
Note: In mathematics and topology, this is called the Wada property, after a practitioner of the traditional Japanese mathematical discipline called Wasan, name of Wada Nei (died 1847). Wasan math is similar in spirit to other Japanese arts such as the tea ceremony, haiku, or flower arranging.
His topological excursion is called the "Lakes of Wada" in his memory. A black swan cruises in one lake, a white swan glides in another, a goose honks in another, a ruddy duck patrols yet another lake, a stern-wheel riverboat steams here, a UFO hovers there...each lake a destiny, and we stand bestride the shore of every lake, and we cannot easily predict which lake we'll end up in, because we possess the Wada property in excelsis.
In the past, you might have seen a rat in this space on Friday morning. But today there is no flash-frozen tableau of George W. Ratbastard and other inaction figures, presented for the cynical and despairing amusement of my fellow surrender monkeys. There are only kittens.
Dr. Omed rescued them from the unused ductwork in the crawlspace under our new house. The tale of this rescue is fairly entertaining--Have you ever fished for cats down a metal duct? Envision a fifty year old fat man doing a bad imitation of a pregnant python, slithering under pipes and joists in black mud and standing water...and then there were the mysterious and eerie golf balls, rolling down the ducts and appearting in front of yours truly like Rover the Weather Balloon herding Number Six in the Prisoner. I can see one in the backyard right now. However, I don't have time to tell the tale in full right now, as I have to work today. Instead let me introduce you to Catnurse Mother Naamah, in whose capable hands and passionate heart the care of these feline waifs have been committed.
Or perhaps I should let her introduce herself--go to http://naamah-darling.livejournal.com/ and scroll down. After you've read all the kitten entries, and been fatally hypnotised by all the kitten pics and kitten videos, you can totter off to your day's busy, busy, busy, making faint mewing sounds and purring, one of a growing army of duct kitten zombies.
Finally, the image uploads. Trying to post with this old Radio software is like trying to start an ancient beater that's been parked in a farmer's car garden for a couple of years. So. Question is, what I am doing here, turning the key, listening to the starter grind? Question is, why return as a bloggergeist to the abandoned grubstake in the virtual ghost town that is Salonblogs? I am the Ghost of Dr. Omed...I am..a slight disorder of the stomach...an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.There's more of gravy than of grave about--me...
Ahem. Fiona left a question in my comment box, and I answered it. Fiona wrote:
I guess I've abandoned my blog and I'm too scared to start a new one. What's your excuse?
I answered with an email. An email in which I expressed sentiments previously unfolded in response to the worried inquiries of other concerned members of the congregation. It is a more than twice told tale, a theme with variations. To Fiona, I wrote, verbatim, with comments in parentheses:
I haven't quite given up on the idea of blogging, I simply have no idea. No idea how to recreate or reconstitute or simply recharge the Tent Show in such a way as to trick myself into feeling that it's worth the time and effort. I'm not scared, I'm angry, and I can think of no way to make effective my rage at the collective stupidity of my own species, and no way to make it useful, to me or anyone else.
I have not a new thing to say about it. I often think of funny or clever things I could post about, but to engage in the discourse about the trivialities with which we are all so, so concerned about is to aid and abet, to add whatever tiny shred of credibility or interest Dr. Omed might possess, to the very process I despise as bringing us to this pass. And I don't mean the Brittany level of discourse, I mean the elite, the politically active, the nice, good-hearted people who read, and think thoughtful thoughts, and recycle.
Better to enjoy life while it's still worth living, I tell myself. Yet I can't let it go. I was having breakfast with friends Sunday morning, and someone mentioned (Senior NPR correspondent, and ABC hack) Cokie Roberts, who came to speak at TU last week. I regard Cokie Roberts as one of the enemy, part of the problem. For some reason it sent me off (Somehow the quislings and enablers are more maddening the perps themselves.), and I raged in full Pan Troglodytes mode, "Fucking this" and "Fucking that" in every phrase I uttered. I averred as how I would only have attended the lecture if I thought I have could "got fucking close enuf to fucking Cokie Roberts to fucking hit her upside her fucking head with a fucking 3lb. ball peen hammer."
You have to understand that I very rarely use that kind of language, and I don't threaten bodily harm to celebrities in pubic places, or anybody else. For that matter, I don't threaten people when I'm about to do bodily harm to them. (I just do it. Perhaps I should reenforce that disclaimer for all the literalists moles out there in the ether: I am not a violent man. I am not contemplating or planning any act of violence against any person, including Cokie Roberts. Currently.)
To Spike I expressed myself more simply:
You haven't been hearing much from me because I have nothing much to say. If Groucho aka Rufus T. Firefly was President of Freedonia I am the President of Anhedonia.
To Sam (Ms. Candide) I wrote (on one occasion) :
If I can save my crop of belly button lint from the flaming marshmallow storm, I will post again. The world, being what it is, leaves me very little to say, sometimes. Variations on "AAAIIIEEE!!!" while heartfelt, soon become tiresome to the bleater as well as the bleatees. I'm working on getting past "AAAIIIEEE!!!"
To Clarissa, in reference to a troll then beshitting her comment box:
I've been listening to same tired bullshit from people like this guy for decades and it has made me a deeply angry man, among all the other whos whats and I don't knows I am. I am mentally in a state of war, me agin all comers, mea contra omnes, at all the "expense of spirit in a waste of shame" as Shakespeare has in a sonnet, at a time when it is absolutely crystal clear to me at least that if the human race does not pulls its collective head out of its ass and deal with our real problems, that those of our descendants that survive the resultant catastrophe will rightly revile us as the most short-sighted, greedy, stupid, and evil generation that ever lived. A generation of vipers, indeed. We'll be dead, but they'll hate us.
What really makes me angry is that it's already too late. We the People of the United States wasted the last eight years on a vast sideshow of incredible stupidity, and that eight years was almost certainly all the margin we had.
To she who was once Mambrina,
The Tent Show is still there, but I haven't posted to it in a month. I scribble crap in my moleskine almost everyday, but when I sit down at the computer (and when I have a chance to sit down at the computer), I can't summon the mental and emotional energy required to get over whatever bar I've set for myself that day, and crank out a post. I dislike repeating myself and after, what, 4 years of blogging I've used up a lot of stuff. For that matter, it's hard to come up with a subject, and an insight into any given subject, that hasn't already occurred to and been blogged by a million other of my fellow citizen journalists.
My scissor dances, chaos drawings, and poetry are original enough to stand on their own, but my production rate is so slow and intermittent that anyone following my blog could check in two or three times a year and keep up with what I'm doing. The what-I-did-today-whatever-was-floating-around-in-my-head I do often write down in my journal, but I can't quite bring myself to post the daily dump and call it a blog, though many people do that successfully, and even make it interesting sometimes.
On the other hand, I find what's happening in the wider world so appalling it leaves me speechless. I can think of nothing funny or interesting tosay about it. Playing Cassandra gets real tired real quick. But a heaping helping of the Apocalypse of the Day makes every thing else seem trivial.
So. Or, So it goes, Ala, ave Vonnegut. I do have more mental and emotional energy available, due to a change in circumstance--Mrs. Dr. Omed and I moved into new digs (Not saying where) and have began to recover from the long and grueling process. Believe me when I say that I am in a much better place than I was when last I blogged. I have very good windows in my new lair, and I can see the stars, on clear nights. I'm willing--willing to fiddle while Rome burns, and bask in the flames, too, if it comes to that. Boggle on the Bloggle. Carpe that diem. Schadenfreude for the few, flying fucks on rolling donut holes for all! If there are no ladders, we'll ride the snakes.
Speaking of windows, I think I just saw a goddam Grebe on the bird feeder!
*Those of you who are familar with the film Amelie will recall that she kidnapped her father's garden gnome, and sent it around the world with a friend working as a stewardess for Air France. On her travels, the friend took polaroid pictures of the gnome posed in front of various world famous landmarks, and mailed them to Amelie's bemused father. I don't have a gnome, so I use (if need be) the ten second shutter delay on my digital camera, and pose as my own gnome.
Only 1774 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 3 K'ank'in.
Explanation is not a task of the poet or the prophet.
Rabbi Ishmael Immanuel ben Sheba
I can't believe in a god that doesn't know how to dance.
Prophet Joseph Smith
Give me back my broken night my mirrored room, my secret life it's lonely here, there's no one left to torture Give me absolute control over every living soul And lie beside me, baby, that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture Give me back the Berlin wall give me Stalin and St Paul I've seen the future, brother: it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant
I've seen the nations rise and fall I've heard their stories, heard them all but love's the only engine of survival Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: It's over, it ain't going any further And now the wheels of heaven stop you feel the devil's riding crop Get ready for the future: it is murder
There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code Your private life will suddenly explode There'll be phantoms There'll be fires on the road and the white man dancing You'll see a woman hanging upside down her features covered by her fallen gown and all the lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson and the white man dancin'
When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant
Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St Paul Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby: it is murder
I'm gonna wash that rat right outta my hair, I'm gonna wash that rat right outta my hair, I'm gonna wash that rat right outta my hair, And send him on his way.
Wash him out, dry him out, Push him out, fly him out, Cancel him and let him go!
I'm gonna wash that rat right outta my hair, And send him on his way.
*Dr. Omed has noted the spread of the meme "Friday Cat Blogging" wherein a blogger posts a picture of his/her personal feline or felines each Friday. Now, Dr. Omed is a civilized man, and therefore has cats about the house, but I introduced a slight twist on this meme a while back. I have a black plastic rat I purchased at the "Big Lots" store for 99 cents. In honor of our all too fearless leader I dubbed this rat George W. Ratbastard, and on Friday, September 3, 2004 I instituted a new meme at the Tent Show, that of Rat Friday, and documented the entirely premeditated and carefully arranged tableaus of the adventures of the aforsaid George W. Ratbastard. Say it with me, Pilgrims, George...W....Ratbastard. Feels good to say it, doesn't it? George...W....Ratbastard...
my mirrored room, my secret life 
