Wednesday, March 29, 2006

SCENIC TULSA: BUILDING PEACE WITH BOWLING BALLS BOOTH 113, ADMIRAL BLVD. FLEA MARKET The round sign sixth row down is inscribed with the following statement: "THESE BALLS ARE NOT FOR SALE PLEASE HELP BUILD THE WORLD PEACE MONUMENT OUT OF USED BOWLING BALLS 8435 ARE NEEDED! THIS PYRAMID HAS ONLY 435 BALLS"  Dr. Omed is not a journalist. I don't usually delve into the details of other people's weirdness tho' I may take note of it in passing. I've got my own weirdness, and it keeps me plenty busy. But this, dear seekers and pilgrims, is transportingly weird. The weirdest thing of all is how appropriate it seems to build a peace monument out of used bowling bowls. I must know more. Stay tuned. 11:24:35 PM    comment []

DR. OMED'S LATE NITE SERMONETTE: FRED I BELIEVE I believe in Fred. Who, or what, you may ask, is Fred? Fred is the term my friend Kathy uses for her “unconscious” mind. I appropriated the name and apply a wider meaning: Fred is the personal representative, so to speak, of the collective unconscious in all of us. Fred is the psychopomp, a liminal guide, in many guises, of the soul to the underworld, the shadow you cast into the collective. Fred is transitive, that is to say, he gets around a lot. Fred is different for each of us, and he appears to each of us in many forms. Polymorphous perverse, that’s Fred.   Fred lies a lot, but only when he is telling the truth. He tells the truth in such a way that you take it as a lie, whether you believe the lie or not. The only part of the truth you take in is the lie: All lies are partial truths; that is to say, forms of human understanding. What Fred has on offer is beyond human understanding, and what good is that? Fred brandishes that question mark like Hermes or Mercury held aloft the caduceus, the winged staff twined with two snakes. It’s hard to say what Fred is good for…hard to say what he is bad for. That mostly depends on you, or what you think of as you. We all have a little piece of the truth, because we all have a little piece of Fred, and like I say, Fred lies a lot.   Fred is the you that is not you—A trickster that wears your face when he isn’t wearing someone else’s. You may think of him as a figment, but Fred thinks of you as pigment. Fred is like Mona Lisa’s mustache, you don’t know how it got there and you didn’t do it. Fred may fib but he is also an outrageous gossip. He talks to his selves and can’t keep a secret. He makes you keep it, slipping the wet brush in your pocket when you aren’t looking.   When Kathy (a Nebula Award nominated SF writer) can’t finish a story, she goes and lies down in a dark room to bore Fred until he coughs up the ending. My personal Fred is busy, busy, busy.1 Going to and fro in my head, and walking up and down in it.2 He prefers to work between the hours of 11pm and 3am. Fred loves to start downloading a poem when I’m in a meeting, or working to a tight deadline. Fred puts the words in my mouth and I say the most extraordinary things to people I barely know. Fred dances with angels and denies God exists. Fred prefers paradoxy to orthodoxy; iconoclasm is his orgasm. Rene Magritte illustrated this with elegant concision when he painted a picture of a pipe, and wrote “Ceci n'est pas une pipe.” at the bottom of it.  This is not a pipe.  Put that in your Fred and smoke it.     1When we contemplate “how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is,” we must whisper, with Kurt Vonnegut's fictional prophet Bokonon in the novel Cat’s Cradle:“Busy, busy, busy.”   2Job 1:7 10:43:38 PM    comment []