Ever been called an asshole or a bigot or a heinous parasite who thinks maybe this eco-business about killing-off invasives is a tad over-the-top? Are you a hyper-Big Baby unweaned from the teat of self-pity where once upon a time a large warm Shape held you when you felt scared and tenderly raked soft fingers through your hair? Mmmmmmm. All through the bomb scares, the riots. I was one. Fretful, furrowed of brow, terrified of Death but just wanting to play in the woods with the dog and learn about nature. Then scared when the siren sounded. Freaked-out is more like it.
Maybe you're just plain high-strung.
In a moment, we're going to tell you how this leads to trouble. But first: Does it some times seem like people around you, your friends and drinking buddies or sober pals or smart set, just aren't Moving Fast Enough?
Are you afraid to launch an idea in mixed company, say, at Felicia's Atomic Lounge or even Starbucks, because you know it will rub your crop circle of friends the wrong way?
Afraid to be banished to the Other Camp or Social Limbo just because you wanted to ask a simple fucking question? Do angry young black men scare you from asking them, "What's Goin' On?"
Ever leave a place because, shit, because the chordates in the café seemed to lack a backbone and were more like some new species of jelly-necked bipeds designed to hunch over a glowing screen emitting the sound of some co-ed smacking on bubble gum?
You did, didn't you? Then you felt shame. Maybe you were drunk. Or depressed. Or anxious about the economic situation. Maybe your head's not screwed on straight. Maybe it's more important to shut yer gob and go with the flow.
Notice something funny happens after a person does that: They become Neurotic.
So they go blow chunks of emotional peat moss in a church basement full of kindly faces and "there-there" people who tell you, "it's okay, you're just like us: Sick from Over-intellectualizing everything." You blanch at the notion of being ill for actually having a percolating Mind, but it feels nice, doesn't it? To be held. To stir a little pap and wombsop into your cuppas. It almost feel like you maybe want to join and eat fresh baked cookies with these kindly folk at a pajama party. You consider praying or popping give-a-shit pills.
Maybe this happens at a 12-step meeting of some kind. Or, you take the solitary road. You stuff some over-certified Head-Two-Ears-Opposite with the best that's in you. You fill their office with Fried Air that crackles and sparks with the honeyed or blue static light of your personal genius.
You leave meeting rooms and offices. You feel oh so much better!
What. A. Fucking Tragedy.
You just pissed away your inner fortune and paid someone to tell you what time it is. How much Good American Verse and Prose has been lost in this way, we dunno.
A stupendous amount, we suspect. And who do you find making monkey faces at us on the bookshelves? Jonathan Franzen and his ilk. A bunch of elitist flunkies.
It's sad, really. Too sad. Because maybe, just maybe, you're a Thinker. And thinkers are natural born writers. Ditch the fumy fiction, folks. What's inside your head combined with your empirical observations is the rich harvest from a land of milk and honey you never dreamed existed. And all the while you've been sitting on your ass wondering "what the fuck? when am I going to die and stop behaving like a fucking phony fuck-fuck?"
Don't you do it! Don't you kill that boy that girl that Child of The Way Become Way.
Let me close with this from Lao Tzu. He start the Confucian Revolution that fuels the engine that drives modern Capita-Communist China today far more than Mao's Little Red Book ever coulda.
This is the first entry in the Tao Ching, from the Tao Te Ching, as translated ingeniously by David Hinton, and it is wondrous and beautiful and grab it now and eat it if you need to.
If you find you can grasp even a nit of where we are coming from, the tinytowntimes.com WANTS YOU! to write for us. If not, keep to your Cake and kickback in your comfort zone.
Out here the wind is nasty and the elements lash us and knock us to the ground -- but never kill us. We do NOT die. Beseech the Deathless Child of Death. He will explain.
Expect to be: Shut Out. Ostracized. Maligned and considered "mean" as well.
Good signs all of them! The best Men and Women of the Past and Present never gave a Rat's Ass what anyone thought of them, okay? Granted some were rich. Others -- well, let's take Thoreau for example. He was a layabout. And he layout in his lean-to scribbling and swatting at bugs and marveling at voles until his stomach started growling. Then off he went to his friend's house for a nice hot meal.
We do not want any Walden Ponders, okay? Emersonians will be searched at the door for ether spirits. Happy with your fat shelf full of Euro-Trash like Thomas Mann? Hie thee to the dentist and ask them to bore a few holes in your skull to let the methane out. Big on Hitchens then, are you? Okay. Show me. Then drop dead. Same with all you Marxists, Linguists passing as Deconstructionists and you huddled canon of post-post-modernist positivist crap hounds. So you're Queer are ya? Go fuck a duck. I don't care! Just show me you can think for yourself, okay? And not follow some o what was it last? -- New Media Theory? Some hot studly Meso-American with his slithery prose and knives n blood in the moonlight? Give me a palsied blind librarian instead and get the hell outta my sight.
Old, young, cripple, one of the seven percent who aren't Hets but don't have some axe to grind because they think they're so fucking special, FREAKS, please join us.
We need to take care of ourselves and find the Czeslow Milosz among our clan and nurture the Child. You're out there. I know it. Any Slavs Return is Most Welcome. Leave the uncontacted Amazonian Alone. They have a lot to teach us and would already have done so if we were worth their fucking bother. Like they don't know what the Geologist and the Anthropologist is really doing ON THEIR LAND!!!
As for certain Peruvians who know of an entire different system for computing, leave them alone, too. I don't have time to learn it and we have to work with what we have right now. Even the Hopi medicine men want to bomb the boardrooms of Peabody and Koch.
Kill the Frackers. Don't be Afraid of Death.
Once the last trace of you is gone, whose Death was it? Who Died? Think. And Write. There isn't Much Time. In One Year if you are a writer of promise, We Guarantee you will get paid for your thoughts. If not by Us than by some glossy of high order.
Read. Listen. Keep Asking. And suck on this:
A Way become Way isn't the perennial Way.
A Name Become Name isn't the perennial name:
the Named is Mother to the ten thousand things,
but the unnamed is origin to all heaven and earth.
In perennial nonbeing you see mystery,
and in perennial being you see appearance.
Though the two are one and the same,
Once they arise, they differ in name.
One and the same they are called dark-enigma,
dark-enigma deep within dark-enigma,
gateway of all mystery.
– Franklin Crawford, just waking up, ya'll
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