Am I Any Better Than John Lennon?

           I was reading something about blogs and how to make your blog successful.  In fact, I think it was a blog, a quite successful blog, about how to make your blog successful. It reminded me of synthetic CDOs or the morning line on a horse race that only takes place in the shared fantasy life of an evening coterie of racetrack touts swapping lies at a bar.  At any rate, what I learned was that for a blog to succeed, you, the person penning the blog, had to provide your readers with something useful to them in their lives. So, here you go: “Don’t take any wooden nickels;” “Buy low, sell dear,” and keep in mind that at some point “the last will be first and the first last.” I take my cue, here from Sancho Panza’s wife.  Who in literature provided more useful advice that that wise woman?

           Now that I have done all I need to do to make my blog succeed, I can proceed.  I am just now back from the walk I take most evenings.  Recently a jogger was shot down at six AM on a street in my neighborhood. It was, in fact, on one of the streets I use in many of my midnight rambles.  It is a pretty street.

           This happened two weeks ago and out of anxiety emerging from pure cowardice, I found myself choosing other routes.  I did this until tonight when I decided that I could bear it no longer and would walk the route that most appealed to me.  That route took me, of course, right down the street where the shooting occurred.  My first thought in so deciding was “fuck it, I’ve lived long enough anyway.”  Next, I thought of John Lennon, “Am I any better than John Lennon?  If a madman in this gun-crazed culture can arm himself and gun John Lennon down, why should I necessarily avoid that fate.”  Hell, my life is insured, and it’s total vanity to think that the world absolutely needs more of what I am likely to provide, correct?  So why shouldn’t I walk where I fucking please.  I decided that if the worst happened and some dipshit in a new white pickup that I could not even afford decided just for the hell of it to blow away an old guy walking his dog after midnight, I could live with it.  Or at least take no regrets into that mineral blackness of death.

Scorpio

                So I had my walk.  One thing I noticed was Scorpio in the Southern sky.  It is comforting to see Scorpio, full blown in May, just as it is comforting to bear witness to Orion stalking the October skies.  But with Scorpio there is a bonus in that every culture on earth and seemingly every culture to have walked the surface of this planet has recognized Scorpio as a configuration of stars that looks like a scorpion.  Scorpio is one of those Jungian Universal Archetypes, very gratifying to the psyche.  Until humans can regularly gaze on the heavens from a vantage point other than our own, Scorpio will be a human universal, like the sun and moon.  Even better, unlike the sun and moon, Scorpio is a human construction, a universal interpretation of an arrangement of stars.

                Another thing I noticed was that there were bats about, slaying insects in myriad hordes around the streetlights.  I love the animals of the night and the margins.  I love the wild things that cohabit the cities with us, the merciless owls, the vulnerable rabbits (there are tons of rabbits living on the UNM campus just now), the inevitable skunks, and the coyotes which will soon be after the many rabbits at UNM if my prediction holds true.  The city, as far as I’m concerned would be uninhabitable without the animals, even the trash animals, the despised pigeons, the legions of sparrows and starlings, the crows, and even the multitudes of creepy roaches which swarm the streets.  This reminded me, of course, that I love life.

                I remember in one of Frank Zappa’s shows when Zappa addressed the audience thus: “Isn’t it great to be alive?  Yes, it is so fucking great to be alive… And if there is anybody out there who does not believe that it is  fucking great to be alive, they’d better’d go now, because this show is going to bring them down so much.”  Poor Frank Zappa.  Thinking of Frank Zappa, genius that he was, reminds me that I am not too good to die of colon cancer either.  Frank Zappa’s death convinced me that we live in a world that is more arbitrary and unjust than I had hoped.  The fact that Richard Nixon outlived Frank Zappa demonstrated to me that however much we may hope for justice, we cannot expect it.  When I listen to Zappa’s music, especially something like King Kong, I can hear the real and eternal stalking and destroying the unreal and illusory.

                So I came away from my walk convinced that we live in a wonderful and infinitely interesting world and that it is great to be alive.  But like Falstaff, I have heard the chimes at midnight and know, ultimately what their toll means.  And as long as I can walk, I plan to walk where my inclinations take me.

                Cognizant of the urgings to give blog readers something, I will provide a few links:

1)      My facebook Author’s Page

2)      My Amazon Author’s Page

3)      My Literary Promotion Wiki

Read my books, you will not be sorry you did so.  Afterwards, review them on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, etc. or at least do the star thing.