Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Dr. Omed's 24-7 Sermonette, Short Form: On writing Sermonettes for the Tent Show The Last 24-7 Sermonette I wrote was posted on August 3rd. Pilgrims and seekers who visit the Ten Show regularly may wonder why that is. I tend to write the essays I post as 'sermonettes' when I am manic, just as I am right now. Licking my thumb, and holding it up to test the ether, I estimate I am, hmm, hovering around 3 hammers on Dr. Omed's Mania Storm Warning Scale. I am currently suffering from what I call the 'Too Many Cooks' Syndrome—My neuronal line chefs are cooking with adrenaline, and the dendrite washers are looking over their shoulders, giving bad advice, instead of doing their jobs; in short, these cooks spoil the broth, and my brain is simmering in that broth. When I write under the influence of mania, it goes something like this: I compose multiple stacks of sentences and sentence parts, essentially simultaneously. Envision an octopus with a whole bunch of extra tentacles (an individual neural node or congeries of nodes) pouring batter, waving around multiple cast iron skillets, flipping flapjacks, except each flapjack is a unique set of possible permutations of sentences, phrases, and metaphors descending down the neural net in a spiral, as if Marcel Duchamp had painted 'Pancake Descending a Staircase' instead of 'Nude, descending...' Except that as each and every unique set of possible pancakes is flipped out of its pan and the batter for the next poured in by the octopus, each pancake of literary probability descends the same spiral staircase—there is only one. All those hot flapjacks flopping down one staircase tends to be a messy business. Did I mention the staircase is rotating like a screw, and has no end, like a Mobius strip? Or the Darwin-headed flying monkeys swarming around flinging heavy antique typewriters at the octopus, while screeching garbled fragments of Hamlet? Got that? No wonder, then, that it takes a subjective century relative to the universe that normal people inhabit for me to complete even as a single short essay. Everything I just said applies double to my poetry. There. Dr Omed out metas the most meta of meta-heads. Next thought cascade, please. 7:27:24 PM    comment []

ICED TULSA: THE DAMAGE DONE Yes, I know. More gloomy pictures of trees mutilated in the big icestorm in Tulsa. This one reminds me somehow of the jungle pictures of Henri Rousseau. Go figure. These pictures were not taken by me. They were taken by Mrs. Dr. Omed's co-workers. These pictures convey, more than my own, the catastrophic nature of the damage done to the trees of Tulsa. 6:03:34 AM    comment []

A TENT SHOW REVIVAL: CHURCH SIGN ROUND-UP Dr. Omed passes Beams of Light Family Church on the way to his day job most mornings. The apothegms on their sign provides amusement and/or bemusement and/or fast food for thought on a regular basis. The one you see above caught my eye and caused me to make a rather sudden turn across a lane of traffic into their parking lot. It hit me upside the head like a fried catfish, like a corn pone Okie Zen Koan—what did it mean? Though Dr. Omed was not on the road to Damascus, pilgrims and seekers, I was mugged by a semi-revelatory petit-epiphany (Have you noticed that revelations frequently don't reveal anything?)—The message on the sign revealed to me an inspiration: that I must revive an old feature of the Tent Show that some of my regular congregants may remember, the Sunday Church Show Round-up. Yes, I know it's Wedesday, this is the teaser. Although I have not posted a Church Sign Round-up for a couple of years, I never stopped taking pictures of church signs, so I've got a lot of them saved up. Look for a full round-up on next Sunday—with hushpuppies and coleslaw. Virtually. 5:01:17 AM    comment []