my humbug

"...because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them." George Orwell

My style is designed to beguile you…

It’s a Jackson Pollock painting, a Charlie Parker solo, a Jimmy Hendrix lick, a Tex Avery cartoon.

It has the switch-blade wit of Lenny Bruce, the energy and attitude of a Sex Pistols show.

It’s like angry sex with an ex-wife.

It’s a junkie’s first needle in the morning and that first drink after being off the wagon.

It’s your grandmother’s kiss when you’re sixteen.

It’s reading Hunter S. Thompson backwards and upside down.

It should remind you of an acid trip at your aunt’s house who’s a conservative Republican and has strong ties to the Christian Coalition and reminiscent of picking dandelions in your backyard in the dead of summer and presenting them to your mother who puts them in a drinking glass filled with water and sets them on the window sill in the kitchen above the sink.

I equate it with drinking tequila and smoking hash on a motor boat in the middle of a lake with your buddies during senior skip day as the sun blisters your back until it bleeds.

It’s bad poetry and rap performed by Jews for Jesus.

It’s a Peggy Noonan speech delivered by Ronald Reagan in front of a rippling flag addressing an audience populated by the Girl Scouts of America during their critical cookie drive.

It’s a Buddhist meditation, a Taoist retreat.

It’s slipped-disc surgery performed by Doctor Bombay.

It’s Salvador Dali and Norman Rockwell giving birth to a child and that child is me.

It’s stream of consciousness.

It’s a higher consciousness, an in-and-out of body experience during the High Holy days and it’s glad-handing elderly Jewish men with Seagrams on their breath who immediately run back to open their clothing stores the second the Yizkor service begins.

It’s pop-up culture and the cigar ashes settling at the bottom of your grandfather’s pants pocket, the smell of a rest-room at a drive in movie theater during intermission, the taste of metal in your mouth, the touch of a woman’s finger on the nape of your neck as she walks by your desk.

It’s a three-hour wait at the motor vehicle department, a dentist’s appointment, a rectal exam, a car accident, a lost wallet, a bad haircut, diarrhea, a sudden cold, a pulled neck muscle and a burgeoning pimple on the tip of your nose all in the same day.

It’s rejection, dejection, infection, imperfection, vivisection, no inflection, intersection, introspection, detection, election, inspection and catchin’ up on the gaps in your education without a tutor in your Tudor home with the two-door garage.

It’s contradictions and massive generalizations and holes in your arguments and holes in your underwear and non-sequiturs that have direct connections with things that were previously said.

It’s the inner-child, the outer-shell and the soft-meaty part on the belly of a turtle.

It’s the Warren Commission on books-on-tape read by the guy who did the voice for Winnie the Pooh.

It’s the prequel of an art house film that will have no sequel.

It’s righteous indignation followed by anger, denial, repression, suppression, aggression, resignation, forgiveness and acceptance.

It has the hollow ring of truth and is protected by an army of lies.

It’s intellectual Barnumism, plagiarizing something in the public domain.

It’s pretentious and pedantic and pedestrian, preachy and self-conscious, entertainment for the moron masses as well as a metaphysical feast for tweedy, tenured fern-league professors who cull passages from texts and search for inaccuracies in character delineation, plot structure and the misuse of really big words…

My style may defile you with my bile or it may put you on trial while you travel the miles of tiles and pile on the denials that you file away on that desolate isle somewhere between your smile and your rile.

But it’s not meant to be taken literally.