New Miranda
Category: Writing and Poetry

Hey class,

For those of you who are fans of my story cycle "The Miranda Complex," there's a new installment now posted at the Mr. Smolin website entitled "Don't Make A Move." It's broken up into 4 parts only because of server software limitations; it's really meant to be one big-ass story. It's long and crazy, so beware. You can dig it here:

The Miranda Complex: V. Don't Make A Move

Hope you like,

shmo

8:28 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The Fantastic Catch
Category: Writing and Poetry

The Fantastic Catch


I used to love playing catch with my dad. Thwack! The snappy slap of the Thwack! when ball hit glove smack in the Thwack! pocket was a godly sauce of sound always, whether I was receiving pitches from him with my Rawlings "Tim McCarver" model catcher's mitt Thwack! or just wearing my regular old Rawlings "Tony Conigliaro" model fielder's glove.

What was the magic of the Thwack! in a game of catch? Partly it was the give-and-take of me and my dad. And partly it was the non-action of it all, without goal, without rules, without intention, without winner or loser, without any predetermined end, without the garbage of artifacts, without reason or assertion or strategy. Just tossing the ball back Thwack! and forth Thwack! with my dad Thwack! Sometimes he'd fling a pop fly surprise over my head or deal me a tricky grounder ("Think FAST!," he'd shout), and I'd scramble to find the fly ball amid the branches of the sycamore trees on Citrus Avenue (we used to find it amusing that, in those days, Citrus Avenue was lined with sycamore trees, and Sycamore Avenue three blocks away was lined with citrus trees, kinda like that Greenland/Iceland thing) or try to snag the grounder before it veered under parked cars or went through my legs straight on out into the middle of Beverly Boulevard.

If I missed, he'd always admonish, "Don't try so hard! Let the ball find your mitt!" And when I got it right, Thwack!, the ball indeed found my mitt. THWACK! Just like that. And it was beautiful.

I wouldn't describe my dad as a Taoist per se, though one afternoon I found a book in his drawer, amid the meaningless slips of scratch paper, restaurant matchbooks, a deck of cards, a pack of Kent cigarettes, a 9-volt battery, those red rubber bands used to wrap the Herald Examiner, the keys to something or other, one stick of Juicy Fruit, my 4th Grade report card, the ticket stub from a Laker game against the Cincinnati Royals, a yellowed edition of the B'nai Brith newsletter, Canadian pennies, a bristle hairbrush, a copy of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask--the source of endless sneaky giggles whenever my sister and I would flip through it (one of our favorites was the chapter on "Bent Cock Syndrome")--, a few condom packets (before I even knew what they were . . . I remember in early childhood going into the bathroom to pee at dawn and seeing a jellyfish every so often floating in the toilet . . . I'd wonder what the globby creature was, pee, flush it down, and go watch cartoons), yes, amid all that racket of scraps Thwack! and doodads, I found a slim hardback volume called The Wisdom of Confucius and Lao Tzu, so I guess some of the advice my dad would impart about life and love had Lao Tzu as a basis, conscious or not. Thwack! Occasionally when my dad asked if I wanted to play catch I'd say no, usually due to some other meaningless pastime I preferred to pursue. Today I regret those missed opportunities to Thwack! sample dad's wisdom.

I remember one visceral wu-wei lesson I received when I was about 10 years old. The day I made "the fantastic catch."

That summer--it would have been 1971--I was having a great season in little league baseball at Gardner Park. Well, we all called it Gardner Park because it was on Gardner Street, but the official name was West Wilshire Recreation Center. Only the employees called it that though. Everybody else called it Gardner Park. There were any number of child molestors walking around that place. Also schizophrenic monologuists. Yeshiva buchers. And some crazy-ass dogs too, all mangy and stray. Dude, you never went in the restrooms at Gardner Park. You went into the Fairfax Branch of the Public Library just across the parking lot and used that toilet. You had to look at books for a couple of minutes first so the librarian thought you were a library patron, or if you were really in a hurry you could go right up to the librarian (who wasn't as nice as she seemed) and ask her where to find a book, like maybe Ball Four by Jim Bouton, and when she'd point you to the aisle you'd head that way but then detour to the bathroom, a hassle, yes, but it was worth it to avoid the rank smell and the drooling pedophiles and Manson Family canines in the park's facilities. Today Gardner Park has been swallowed up by the behemouth Pan Pacific Park, a fairly soulless splay of acreage.

It used to be a sanctified and dangerous place, Gardner Park. A funky haven for amateur athletes and moms with their toddlers and old Jews and weirdos from good homes and kids and adolescents of all colors, a real-life rainbow coalition occurring organically around the area's only public pool and the nondiscriminating bond of summertime and baseball and ice cream trucks and girls who talk dirty. A chain link fence separated Gardner Park from a vast vacant lot strewn with tumbleweeds and beer cans and abandoned lawn chairs. Bad-ass teenagers rode mini-bikes through the shrubs and wiped out on the broken glass and gravel and bled and smoked cigarettes and thought everything was simultaneously funny and meaningless. Across the lot you could see the Gilmore Drive-In at the south end--a favorite family oasis where my sisters and I would watch movies on the roof of our family's Chevy Impala station wagon (and later a black Kingswood Estate)--and the creepy, abandoned Pan Pacific Auditorium to the north.

Being 10 years old there, a child at Gardner Park, those were the first real independences, away from both parents and school, just you and the other kids, doing nothing, fucking around, being jokers, arguing about the Lakers or the Dodgers, using your allowance to buy stuff from the ice cream truck, like 50-50 Bars or Sidewalk Sundaes or Strawberry Shortcake or Kool Pops or Scooter Pies. I was often torn between enjoying the spectacle of the social scene in the Gardner Park parking lot and wanting to be back at home watching reruns of The Rifleman in the big black chair (it was its own world).

Sometimes I would sleep in the big black chair. If I got up before dawn, I'd amble into the living room, turn on the Zenith TV, curl up in my blanket and doze off while watching the early morning Farm Report, wondering who had a farm in Los Angeles. I loved that chair. My sister and I could both fit in it at the same time. Room for two during Saturday morning kid shows. You had to start your Saturday morning with H.R. Pufnstuf, the trippiest of tripped-out kid shows, and Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, which had its own brilliant witty weirdness, and Cool McCool, whose motto "Danger is my business" was repeated endlessly on the playground of Melrose Avenue Elementary School during recess and lunch where everybody wanted to be as cool as Cool McCool.

But my favorite memory of the big black chair was a strange night when the Angels were playing against the Oakland A's, on July 9, 1971, the night Tony Conigliaro freaked out during a 20-inning pitching duel. The game went on until 1:00 am, and my father let me stay up to watch it. We sat and watched the debacle together in the comfy-wonderful big black chair. It was the sweetest bliss. Even as Conigliaro batted his helmet into the stands and then flung said bat into the crowd before stomping off the field in some kind of psychotic episode. Vida Blue pitched a tremendous game for the A's, a 17 strikeout marathon the A's won 1-0. I didn't fully understand the Conigliaro drama being played out, only that it was kinda weird and that it had something to do with Conigliaro getting beaned in the eye years before when he was on the Red Sox, but the sweetness of the evening had nothing to do with baseball, rather it was the preciousness of sharing that comfy-wonderful chair with my father, two fleeting beings in holy concord.

I started out as a catcher in the Gardner Park little league. (My father used to tell me the sad story of how he had coveted a catcher's mitt when he was a boy in Cleveland during The Depression, and then he got one, a birthday gift from his mother, only to have it stolen the same day he received it). At the age of 7, I found myself coveting a catcher's mitt, an official Rawlings "Tim McCarver" model. The day I finally saved up enough allowance money, for some reason my parents weren't able to take me to Big 5 to get it even though they had said they would. I remember sitting in the big black chair watching professional wrestling on KCOP Channel 13 and crying quietly at the shattered expectation. The next day my dad took me to Big 5, and I plunked down $7.50 of my allowance money for my treasured catcher's mitt. I oiled it, strapped it shut with rubber bands, left it under my mattress for a couple of weeks, re-oiled and baked it. My father pitched to me Thwack! every night after the mitt had been sufficiently worked in.

At the first team practice I told the coach I wanted to play catcher, and the coach obliged. It was obvious; the position was mine; I had the mitt. I learned to strap on the gear, the leg guards, the chest-protector, the backwards helmet, the mask. I practiced crouching without cramping and making the throw to 2nd from that crouch and chasing down bunts and blocking the plate and giving the pitcher a reliable target. Once I got past the romance of the mitt, however, the reality was I didn't really enjoy playing catcher all that much. I could never get the timing of gear removal right when scheduled to bat in a given inning. If I took the leg guards off too early, inevitably the third out would arrive before my chance to bat, then I'd have to put the gear back on again, thus delaying the pitcher from taking his warm-ups; but if I left the leg guards on, for sure my turn at bat would come up, and the umpire would get impatient while I fumbled my way through unstrapping the gear and scold me about paying attention and being more prepared for my at-bat next time. I was pretty good at being a catcher, and I loved my Tim McCarver mitt dearly, but I wasn't feeling the fun. I wasn't feeling it. A recurring theme.

My baseball life found its groove when the team I played on, The Yankees, needed someone to fill in at shortstop, which I volunteered to do to get out of behind-the-plate duties. So, Ron took over at catcher, and I became the Yankee shortstop, a 4-year gig, ages 9-12, that earned me much reputation, and yearly placement on the all-star team as well as MVP status a couple of times. My first real niche. I became known for making diving-snags of line drives and tumbling stops of tricky out-of-the-way grounders and dead-eye throws to my pal Jeff on 1st base.

My first-hand lesson in the Tao came during one of those all-star games. That particular year, there was another good shortstop in the league who got the nod to play the position against Poinsettia Park, our arch rivals (a lot of my elementary school friends played there, and it always felt weird going up against them in such heated battle and then having to hang out with them at school a couple of days later). I was assigned to play right field, a position I was utterly unfamiliar with. It was pretty rare for balls to make it out to right field, so I took my place and hoped for no action. Alas, big time action came my way late in the game via the arc of a long fly ball with the bases loaded slugged by a corpulent left-handed hitter on the Poinsettia team, a kid who kind of resembled Boog Powell. The trajectory of the ball was clearly going to take it way beyond where I was standing, and so first I started backing up, keeping my eye on the flight, then, realizing I wouldn't gain sufficient speed quickly enough moving backwards, I turned, losing sight of the ball, and began running toward the right field fence of Gardner Park, an ivied tangle of vines. Turning my head over my shoulder and skyward, I re-spotted the ball in descent, though I had to negotiate between the ball and the approaching walll. The downward arc seemed just out of reach.

The Tao took over in that instant of hopelessness. I stopped looking at the ball, stuck out my mitt, and, just as I came up against the fence, in an event that came to be known around Gardner Park as "The Fantastic Catch," the ball simply dropped into my glove, THWACK!, just so, and the Poinsettia team and parents, who had been screaming with the presumption of a grand slam, fell silent, and the Gardner team and fans also fell silent, as I turned and held up the ball. No applause, just disorientation and flabbergast. One great big collective "Huh?" I made my way across the field and into the dugout from out in right field while a rumble of approval slowly grew as everyone realized what had happened. My teammates mobbed me, the coach hugged me, and parents shouted in the stands, "Holy mackerel, did you see the fantastic catch?"

I however stood numb and dumbfounded by the moment. Aware that I had done nothing. I let the ball find my mitt, that's all, Thwack!, a secret knowledge that made the moment bittersweet. I enjoyed the accolades, but I felt something of a sham for letting them congratulate me on this random grace of the cosmos.

And the game was not over; I was due up 4th in the bottom half of the inning. Not a particularly good hitter, though I walked a lot, I dreaded tarnishing the fantastic catch with a strikeout or some other game-blowing ignominy. Of course, when I arrived at the plate, the bases were loaded, the three batters before me having all walked. As I took a couple of warm-up swings in the batter's box, the Poinsettia catcher (whose long fly was in fact the victim of the fantastic catch) ribbed, "OK, Mr. Fantastic Catch, let's see what you can do at the plate," to which I didn't reply. "He can catch, but he can't hit!" shouted one of the players in the Poinsettia dugout (the dugouts were just standard issue wooden benches behind some fencing, nothing "dug out" about 'em). The dude who heckled me was this borderline tough guy I knew from school, Osvaldo, a classmate of mine in Mrs. Slattebo's class.

I took a strike and two balls, and before the next pitch, the Tao unwound me again; I stopped concentrating on the ball and the timing of my swing and simply met the next fastball on its own terms, sending it over the shortstop's head, deeply between the left and center fielders, allowing all three runners to score and landing me on third base. A triple. The next batter singled me in, and the Poinsettia catcher sweetly said, as I crossed home, "All right, Mr. Fantastic Catch, I guess you can do it all." I think I said thanks, but my shyness most likely made it inaudible as I trotted past him and into our dugout. He probably thought I was being rude. An ongoing problem of mine since childhood, one which continues to this day.

My parents didn't come to my little league games. They found it too stressful. That afternoon my dad arrived to pick me up near the end of the game, and later reported that, as he took an anonymous seat in the 1st base bleachers for the final inning, everybody in the stands was talking about "the fantastic catch," though he had no idea it was his son who had made it, until the dad sitting next to him pointed me out in right field ("that kid, right there, he's the one who made the fantastic catch"), bringing him a twinge of regret that he hadn't seen it, though he joked on the way home, "I probably would have keeled over anyway, so it's better I wasn't there."

When he asked me how I felt about the fantastic catch, I didn't know what to answer. I didn't give him the dad-satisfaction of hearing me say, "I did what you always told me, I let the ball find my mitt." The harmony of ball and glove and motion and flow converged to land that thing in my mitt. The sound of one hand clapping. I had nothing to do with it, other than providing the mitt and the suspension of will. I didn't interfere. I just allowed it to happen. I had enacted his lesson. It would have been so easy to give him credit for the magic he'd taught. Instead I sat inexplicably silent, defiant, a miserly bastard, withholding my gratitude, blasphemous Thwack! against fantastic catches.

"I don't know, I have to think about it for a while," I said.

"Well, think FAST!" my dad said and tossed a super-gooey Scooter Pie at me (which I bobbled and dropped). I picked it up off the car floor, unwrapped the cellophane, and chewed that Scooter Pie with joy and tears interior as we cruised east on Beverly Blvd through the bronze of August. The fantastic catch itself mattered less than the sublime drive home with my dad.

"Wait'll I tell your mom about the fantastic catch!" he crowed and slapped the steering wheel, "You like that Scooter Pie?"

Though I managed some other well-executed plays during my little league tenure, nothing ever quite equalled the moment of the fantastic catch Thwack! and the ride home munching that perfect Scooter Pie with the chocolate slightly melting on my fingers and my dad kvelling over the fantastic catch even though he hadn't actually seen it. The funny thing is, I can't even remember if we won that game.



          --Mr. Smolin, 6/21/08

5:00 PM - 3 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

Radiospielen
Category: Writing and Poetry

Feeling down, friend? Feel like all four walls and the ceiling are collapsing in upon you? Feel like every step you make is a step in the wrong direction? Feel like every breath you take carries you that much closer to your final breath? Feel like the universe you're living in is a random accident of gaseous expansion? Feel like other human beings are way too mysterious and complicated to ever connect with on all but the most superficial levels? Feel inadequate to the task of being a participant in the gnarly realm of social discourse? Feel like people are laughing at you if, indeed, they are aware of your existence at all? Feel in your bone-essence you will end up old and alone? Feel like there's no way anyone will ever care about you?

If you're rumbling in the funk, in the lowdown blues, if you're tired of despair and that holiday sadness is creeping up on you as it always does, remember there is a path to the alleviation of suffering, a noble path, a road without maps, an anchor in the void. Put your imaginary ego away, put your precious illusions of separateness away, put your hung-up nonesuch away, and get your mind out.

Reach out for the one you love, the one you're about to love, the one you're crushing on, the one you worship from afar, the one you spend all your time with, the one you fantasize about nightly, the one you chose a long time ago, the one you haven't thought of yet, the one you sit next to in class, the one across the room you've had your eye on all night, the one you had an embarrassing dream about last week, the one you think about when there's nothing to read in the dentist's waiting room, the one you saw that time and went whoa who's that, the one you wish for when you blow out your birthday candles, the one you hold dear through every difficulty and setback and triumph and jubilation, the one you picture when you sing in the shower, the one who takes you over the moon, the one who stokes your celestial engine, the one who reminds you of everyone you've ever known, the one who has dogged your heart since time immemorial, the one who made you realize, the one who is the one, the one who taught you how to play with fire.

Doors are constantly opening all around you; it remains only for you to choose a portal. Will it be door 1 or door 2, the lady or the tiger, the pit or the pendulum, the devil or the deep blue sea, a rock or a hard place, one or the other, in or out, yes or no, all or nothing, truth or consequences, love or squalor, trick or treat, now or later, red or white, innocent or guilty, yes or no, smoking or nonsmoking, potato salad or cole slaw, Vishnu or Shiva, Skippy or Jif, smooth or crunchy, the Brady Bunch or the Partridge Family, Mary Ann or Ginger, The Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Weber, Coke or Pepsi, UCLA or USC, Democrat or Republican, heaven or hell? It remains only for you to choose a portal.

Dollars to dregs to doughnuts to dimebags, we are in the midst of a global shift, the imbalance of power an impossible fulcrum, like a see-saw with that lard-ass big kid holding his own end down and leaving everyone else up in the air, bane of the playground and bully with a behemouth appetite. But his big fat arsenal is weighing him down too, and he will inevitably succumb to the ravages of gravity. The bully ultimately bullies himself into submission. Friendless and alone his girth is a hindrance, a granite ballast, enough to sink him, a drowning descent, a diet of twinkies and pop-tarts and beernuts, a culture addicted to entertainment and consumption, a perpetual madcap savagery, a comatose cul-de-sac, a self-inflicted degradation, a humiliating defeat, the end of the American dream.

In this increasingly teetering freedom scene, baby, the global meltdown that seems to drive the ignorant toward an embrace of evil theocracies and rampant fascisms, those who keep a belief in individual destiny as a treasured vesture in their philosophic get-up must hold firm against the tendency to embrace fraidy-cat solutions to the daunting problems all about and ahead. The world is not simple, not black and white, not sacred vs. secular, not east vs. west, not liberal vs. conservative, not us vs. them, not the faithful vs. the heathen, not the believers vs. the infidels, not the sinners vs. the saved, not oil mongers vs. god mongers, but rather an interwoven and complex tapestry of inherently beautiful connectedness. In the midst of this uptight Manichean dualism, it's time for those of us who abhor the extreme and the vacuum, who resist simplistic mythologies that explain behavior with a biased child-mind in need of Nobodaddy, those of us who are dedicated to a direct experience of the world as it really is, not the way some megalomaniac mystics imagined it, not the way the shepherded many subscribe to ancient folderol, it's time for us to stand up and testify.

What is imperceptible, what is beyond or behind your sensory mechanisms is the very impulse-energy of reality itself, so grok the fullness, redeem the slippage, have a look-see at the degradation of the dimwit simpletons who dictate the business of life and hold the world hostage to primitive myth systems and ancient ignorance and primal fear, and realize your task is to subvert the backwardness of the lying creeps who hide behind scriptural dictates and other methods of social control. Face down all bases of judgment and commit yourself to a direct experience of a reality that knows nothing of Torah or Bible or Qur'an or any other portentous distortion of the universe; say hello to the rightness of the myriad indifferent phenomena as they swirl about you and are you every moment undisguised.

          --Mr. Smolin, 2/11/08

11:59 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Holy Search Engine Word Salad (a found poem)
Category: Writing and Poetry

According to my web logs, the following phrases (typed into search engines) brought people to my mrsmolin.com site. I don't know what's creepier: the people who thought up these phrases before typing them into a search engine or the fact that these phrases brought them to MY website. I present the search engine entries almost as is, the only alteration being their organization into stanzas which I did just to be all arty and shit. If you can manage to get past some of the more abominably sicko ones, there's a treasure trove of wicked imagery herein ("saline bloated scrotum" is my personal favorite, though "hurling your bodies into the void" deserves special mention too I think . . . anyway, here):



beautiful whore in negligee
the gay nun a sacred clown
swamp buggy queen dunked
the toilet of venus
sweetheart neckless
i spank her ass sore rainbow
on my cow
mirrors astral cunt
farted as i fucked her

nude virgins tutti frutti
yoni massage gallery
chastity trap curious unable
doges fuck women
slave girl child raped in the anus by gorilla
scat panties to muddy salad
pressurized pussy farts
groin smell
funk tablature

betty rubble fucking wilma flintstone
fornicatrix
juneau blowjobs in solo pantomime
limbo cunt
rusty trombone sex
mother denial of incest
umbilical bondage thumbs

saline bloated scrotum
lapidary crystal penis
anal fissure
twenty thousand leagues under my nutsack
nude women humping a pencil

shirtless executioner scaffold
boys with boners
foggy lips
climbing fingerboard tendons
dude raunch wyoming
cowboy bebop free down lode

cooking shark you cunt rag
tapioca cactus asphalt
saxophone chocolate pig worms
demented elvis toys
abominable swamp slob
orangutan coffee cups
celestial sweaters
expressions of dust ruffles
virgin mobile secret code
hitler aria
barry white prophecy
crystallophillian undiscontinued semaphoric presubordination reedplot
the names of the planes of hell

troll shaman guides solo
mulberry hallucinogen
heady dank nuggets
hurling your bodies into the void
another world entire




Dang, there be some fucked up people out there, people.

11:54 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Around The Tao In Eighty-One Whirls, pt. 81 (finale)
Category: Writing and Poetry

Eighty-One




"True words are not beautiful;
Beautiful words are not true.
A good man does not argue;
He who argues is not a good man.
The wise one does not know many things;
He who knows many things is not wise.
The Sage does not accumulate (for himself).
He lives for other people,
And grows richer himself;
He gives to other people,
And has greater abundance.
The Tao of Heaven
Blesses, but does not harm.
The Way of the Sage
Accomplishes, but does not contend."




          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching







Scarecrow Jesus


I once had a dream that I was Jesus
Looking for a new perfection
In my death and resurrection
I was ready to ascend unto the main
They nailed me to a cross and left me dangling
My blood would not succumb to
What my body had grown numb to
Damn I should have slept with Mary Magdalene

But it was a lie
I wasn't Jesus
I was a scarecrow in a cornfield filled with skulls
But not Golgotha
No it looked much more like Kansas
It wasn't true
I wasn't Jesus
I was a scarecrow on display against the grain
Could've been a savior
If I'd only slept with Mary Magdalene
Scarecrow Jesus dangling in the rain

I once had a dream that I saw Mary
Grieving and despondent
Wondering what the Romans wanted
She was dressed all like a vestal virgin saint
She asked if it was cool being the Messiah
I said it had its credits
Though the one thing I regret is
That I never slept with you Miss Magdalene

But it was a lie
It wasn't Mary
It was a girl named Dorothy from the land of Oz
Over the rainbow in a cloud
Somewhere near Kansas
It wasn't true
I wasn't Jesus
I was a scarecrow made to gaze upon the plain
Almost a savior If I only had a working human brain
I might have slept with Mary Magdalene
Scarecrow Jesus dangling in the rain

There she prayed before me
Dorothy from the land of Oz
Asking me to take her
To whatever whiz there was
Then she vanished in a panic
Nothing but images remain
Now I'm wide awake still dangling
Scarecrow Jesus savior in the rain

I once had a dream that I was nothing . . .




This current circumstance, however, really has nothing to do with the time I dreamed that I was Jesus having his last few thoughts on the cross. Not the typical "Dang, dude, I shoulda slept with Mary Magdalene" type shit but more like, "Dang, dude, I shoulda kissed Miranda in the sandbox." Not even that really. I was thinking up a new sermon, even as my side bled and my entrails strangled me. I wanted to talk to my apostles about the insubstantial particular, the ego as color, how the sky isn't blue, how there is only light distributed and configured in just such a way as blue as green as me as you, just bending light manifesting itself as color, but never inherent, always only in motion toward a blending flow, but I realized I wouldn't have time because I was getting pretty close to croaking up the holy ghost.

Where were my sorry-ass apostles anyway? Probably circle-jerking onto Simon called Peter's store-bought matzoh. That'd be typical. And these were the losers who were allegedly gonna erect a church in worship of me. They've got the erect part down, for sure. I've got the horniest disciples since Buddha. Simon called Peter was born a boss, though. Dang, dude, the other day when we were getting rid of all the chumetz before pesach, shvitzing like a bunch of gentiles (and it was hot as a warlock's dick out too, dang, dude), Simon called Peter was all like, "I'll supervise" or some shit which essentially meant he just sat in the shade all day sipping on date shakes and thinking about pussy. But ya hadda admire the guy. I mean, man, Simon called Peter knew how to run things. I swore that once I was resurrected the first thing I'd do would be to make sure Simon called Peter got named as the first Pope because he was the MAN. Even if nigga din't feel the need to show up at my crucifixion. I mean, I was the dang messiah dying for everybody's sins and shit on the cross, dude, and he was out nutting on jew-toast with his gay-ass friends. Dang, dude. The once and future Pope. I'm just saying. He's like the fat kid from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. He shall be known to the world heretofore as Buzzy Lagniappe.

There was just nobody in this dream, barely even me as Jesus. And it didn't look like Golgotha either. The sky was a darkening purple. I was in the midst of fertility. The air smelled like earth and vice versa. At times I suspected I was dreaming. And just as I was thinking, "Dang, dude, this is what Eli Wallach must've felt like after everybody in the cast of The Misfits died premature deaths except for him," (he was probably, like, "dang, dude"), I caught sight of a human figure coming toward me, distinctly female. Mary Magdalene, perhaps? Brown hair and gingham dress like unto Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz or Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island. She had come to tell me of America's final collapse apparently. Barren prairies, fruitless plains, empty cities, ravaged land, forgotten promises, abandoned dreams, the aftermath of despair. I wept at the failure of our sunken republic.

And I weep still. This is not a dream. Wide awake now and dangling. The furry gate is visible from here.

"I know you from somewhere," I say to the farm girl. She reminded me of the girl From Zody's, I think.

"Death is always in the present tense, always now," she swears, "and so are we."

(i.e., All the way in the Is-ness business. An inseparable continuity. An eternal concurrence. It never stops being Today).

"At last, we've caught up with history," I gasp in fading conscience.

"It's just us now," the approximately human female confides, "The other people have gone away. I must go soon too. There's another who must guide you."

Now I remember. There's hardly any me left. 3 breaths to go maybe. Just as I'm beginning to recognize the landscape.

"Is this Los Angeles?" I ask without sound.

"Of course. It all ends up in Los Angeles, you know that."

"I knew it by the Tar Pits."

"Indeed, they await your submergence," she arises flying.

She's like a diamond in the sky now.

"How I wonder what you are . . . " I croak, thus bringing my earthly world to a close.

A shapeless voice lets me know the path ahead: I must follow this grandeur to the very top of a brand new garden. Joyously rapt in the exit lights, living a socket apocalypse, I can hear her coming. I know who she really is by having known who she was pretending to be.

The rider arrives festooned with the aura of Beatrice's glory, her chariot a carnival of shine, beckoning the holy soul away from its obligatory ghostwork toward a new biochemical nexus.

"Come to my perfect knowing," she says through her beatific face, "my crazy pilgrim, my prisoner: I am thy very language," she reveals in sudden fuckery to my blitzkrieg-ridden head, "your obsession since birth, and into death, just before the now, oh misty one, I am your words, the ones that never finish their mission, bubbling up like tar pits."

She draws me toward her motherly cuntship astride the portals. Visions of eternity pour me open.

I bound toward the river, willing to enter her through an alternate ancestry, unaware of my reluctant thrusts into her volcanic radius. "Come inside me," she offers, becoming both river and chariot, "Speak to the yet unknowing world in a way that's truer than sense, so that a portion of your Love will carry on," she recommends as she submerges me away from what I was, this lady of my tomb, and I resurface with an echoless mind, depths of empty mechanisms, with a soft hand guiding me into the white center of it all, where no things happen yet.

"You are perpetual and selfless," I proclaim in sudden dark recognition, born to a permanent wilderness, an eternally lonely zygote.

Retaining some ritualized tidbits of memory in the juggernaut transition, I resolve to obey the voice in whatever form, the original Shakti, to commemorate the paths we have to travel, separate and alone.

I have been a goliard
Shooting my scatological doggerel
Onto make-believe bellies
A vacant behavior directed
By a shameful aversion to humanness

But now is the end of a long dream
And I'm resisting the voice
Like the sound of many waters
Or a draft of moist wind

Somehow I reach another morning
Open to hoping
Because the sky is streaked with red
And it's beautiful

Attachments lose all reason to mean anythng. Destinations fade away into the wisdom of oblivion, into no time, into a reunion with truth, into a truly original world.

The rest is paradise . . .


          --Mr. Smolin, 10/23/07

11:46 PM - 2 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

Around The Tao In Eighty-One Whirls, pt. 80
Category: Writing and Poetry

Eighty




"Let there be a small country with a small population,
Where the supply of goods are tenfold or hundredfold, more than they can use.
Let the people value their lives and not migrate far.
Though there be boats and carriages,
None be there to ride them.
Though there be armor and weapons,
No occasion to display them.
Let the people again tie ropes for reckoning,
Let them enjoy their food,
Beautify their clothing,
Be satisfied with their homes,
Delight in their customs.
The neighboring settlements overlook one another
So that they can hear the barking of dogs and crowing of cocks of their neighbors,
And the people till the end of their days shall never have been outside their country."




          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching



Sometimes the Tao that gets spoken of is vastly different from the Tao that gets written about. One of my students gave a speech in class entitled "My Mama's New Volvo," though when she turned in the written text for grading it took on a whole different meaning due to one simple recurring spelling error:



My Mama's New Vulva


My mama's gettin a new Vulva. The Vulva she has now's all beat up and worn out. It's been in a couple of accidents too. Once her Vulva got rear ended by a Korean man with a big head. The second time her Vulva got banged by another Vulva that belonged to a Mexican lady who kep pointing at my mama's Vulva and sayin "It's not my fault we bang our Vulvas together." My daddy found out about that one and ooh he was mad at firs. But then he said he wished he could of been there so he could watch the two Vulvas bangin. My mama said "It wasn't nobody's fault. It just happened. Sometimes you can't help it you know? Now every time I look at my Vulva I gotta see it all messed up." She got a BIG ol dent on the side of her Vulva. My daddy says he don't like to ride in mama's Vulva no more cuz it's the wrong size now that she had all those babies. My mama's Vulva fits five, six if you squeeze in. Daddy says theys too many people all up in that thing. He says theys so many other people in mama's Vulva theys no room for him. And daddy also says my mama's Vulva smells bad cuz she don't wash it enough. But I don't know though cuz she washes her Vulva like every Saturday or sometimes Sunday. She does it right out in the driveway where erryone can see. Erryone watches when my mama comes outside to wash her Vulva. "You want some hep with that?" Mr. Peterson always aks my mama when she's washing her Vulva. "No that's ok, I like doin it by myself better" my mama always says back to Mr. Peterson "And I never known any man on earth who knows what to do with a Vulva anyways." My daddy is excited by my mama's new Vulva though. He says theys nothing like the smell of a new Vulva. I can't wait to get inside my mama's new Vulva and smell it. I'ma stick my face inside her Vulva and take a big whiff. Then I'ma crawl aroun in it. Her ol Vulva is red on the inside and black on the outside. I think she said she wants her new Vulva to be the same color as her ol Vulva. When I tol my mama I like her old Vulva fine she said to me "I'm glad you like my Vulva baby but Mama wants Daddy to like her Vulva too. Cuz he's gotta drive it once in a while."


For reals.

When I was 15 my girlfriend left me for a guy with a Volvo. I can't remember her name exactly. Janine maybe? She was left-handed and had 3 earrings in her left earlobe. The guy she dumped me for was a Senior, one of several dozen Jewish guys named Josh. Lots of Joshes at Fairfax High. The break-up happened suddenly. It was like one day she was feeling my boner through my pants and saying, "Oooh, what's that?," the next day she was telling me it's just not working out with us and she wants to be with Josh. I understood immediately Janine's decision to rid herself of my whole wimpy situation. Going out on dates with me meant being driven by parents, taking the bus, walking, or riding bikes. So it was no surprise when I asked her why she wanted to be with Josh and she answered, without hesitation, matter-of-factly, "He's got a car."

That phrase--"He's got a car"--lingers near the surface. One of those defining moments of inadequacy.

It was all so simple:

"He's got a car."

It will be spoken at the closing of America.

Wherever and whenever you are in the bloody chaos of a world losing its fulcrum, losing its axis, losing its bearings, losing its humanity, wherever and whenever you are, whether alone or accompanied, singled or coupled or grouped or mobbed, wherever and whenever you are, prone to seeking, grasping for answers, needing a reason, longing for love, wherever and whenever you are, making claims of understanding how the world should be, passing judgement on sinners and slackers and malcontents and wage slaves and other people just like you, wherever and whenever and whatever and whoever you are and whom you claim to represent, be ready with evidence, be ready with sensible solutions, be ready for anything, be ready to back it up with something other than rote allegiance to wherever and whenever and whomever and whatever.

Transcend gender and access your inner damsel in distress, in fetching expectation that some knight in shining armor will swoop to your rescue from this incendiary conflagration of freedom-loving souls victimized by missionary zealotry inflicted upon us by those who allow their irrational religious beliefs to trump their humanity, who seek to legislate faith, who use bogus, anti-human, world-destroying concepts like 'martyrdom' and 'holiness' to foist their hyper-violent narcissism upon the world and justify it in the name of YHVH or Allah or Christ or other such mythic constructs in an attempt at social control and strategic, life-denying, death-worshipping, juvenile, tantrum-throwing, pre-adolescent, superstitious fears about the randomness that comprises a direct experience of reality. It's a bitter, brutal circumstance living among a species that refuses to embrace the chaos. They only like God 'cause he's got a car.

Seek respite from the melty swelter, a buffer against the caustic hotness of a world caught up in rigid ideologies, vacant hatreds, ignorant paranoias, and mindless consumption. Reality is nothing but a canopy across the firmament, a frosted mug, a big phat bowl of luscious nugs, a happy home where anyone weathering the elements can find some necessary shelter.

Let some groovy music move you to joy and celebration. For all the mess the world's in, for all the uncertainty and precariousness that leaves us all hanging in the balance, for all the madness we can't prevent or control, for all the falling apart that appears to be the case in this vale of tears, let an oasis of our making stay the scary onslaught, let this unencumbered bliss exist as a reminder of your good fortune: You're alive in the world and you know it.

The sultry night air, the summer scrumptiousness, conjure thoughts of first love, that dawn caveman butterfly fluttering, your earliest recognition of beauty and truth, the first time you looked at a fellow creature and said wow, the birthplace of all your psychosexual mythology, the steamy cauldron, the basis of longing and nostalgia and bittersweet reminiscence, the source-point of unencumbered purity and unbaggaged adoration, before the realities of intimacy and its complicated struggles overwhelmed your fragile heart and brought bitterness and cynicism and fear into your innocent being, the knowing that it's 'cause he's got a car. Remember the first that e'er you sighed for, somewhere in the velvet July nightscape, up there in the firmament, separating the waters from the waters, a signpost to your selfless adoration of the beloved.

You know, how, like, when some enchanted evening you might see a stranger across a crowded room and the most oceanic eyes devour the space between and beckon like centuries to every latent hope, to every newborn dream, to visions of rivers and reverence and the evolution of human ingenuity. The subtle other, the view from elsewhere, the newly fumed beauty, all misty and ephemeral, prodding you to find a connection, a reason to get up off your infatuated ass and lower the boom, baby; ya see her, ya grab her, ya kiss her, you elevate your spirit fingers and testify.

No matter what your personal circumstance there remains a world beyond the neurotic self-obsessed nature of human tendency; there is ample opportunity for social intercourse pregnant with possibilty. Participate in the stream of life. Get out of your dark corner. Reach out and make contact with your species. It's easy. All ya gotta do is stand in that river. Take your place in the pre-chill night beneath a little slip of a moon, pondering the symmetry of existence, impossible loves, contagious laughter, the promise of autumn, the sweet immediacy of living in the present tense, the accidental magic of what's happening now: The faintest hint of fall signals a return to dormancy, and the scales of nature tilt, like the earth, away from the sun and toward a different kind of light, a slanted fantasy, a masterful backdrop for infatuations and other heart-spasms, the eternal longing.


Who's got a car?




          --Mr. Smolin, 10/16/07

10:51 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Around The Tao In Eighty-One Whirls, pt. 79
Category: Writing and Poetry

Seventy-Nine


"Patching up a great hatred is sure to leave some hatred behind.
How can this be regarded as satisfactory?
Therefore the Sage holds the left tally,
And does not put the guilt on the other party.
The virtuous man is for patching up;
The vicious is for fixing guilt.
But the way of Heaven is impartial;
It sides only with the good man."


          --Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching





There used to be this cereal called Sugar Smacks which looked like little vaginas. Little vaginas in a bowl. It was the most glorious pornography to a 12-year-old. Every morning I'd be greeted at the breakfast table by little vaginas in a bowl. I didn't even like Sugar Smacks very much. But I wanted to have them anyway. It's an old old story. My sister referred to the cereal as "Sugar Snatch." I think the name was first changed to "Honey Smacks" in the anti-sugar '80s, and the cereal is still around. But now, to avoid offense to anyone, it's just called "Smacks." It still looks like little vaginas in a bowl, though. Afloat in milky white.







Who Knows What



Rabbi Hamlisch was talking to me about unholy fire and who knows what else, but I was preoccupied with thoughts of the soggy note from Miranda Savitch--a love-struck summons perhaps, a beacon from the burning bush--waiting folded and unread in my backpack. Was it about our weekend schoolyard trespass last Saturday? Her shivery whispers? Her darkly sparkling eyes, like crazy? My blushing bumblings? The genius of hamburgers? The shame of wanting? Our feet in sand? The corner of Curson and Curson? The sharing of solitaire? Or nothing to do with any of that?

The previous Saturday afternoon, during a game of spin-the-bottle in the bushes at the Tar Pits, Miranda and I split off from our group of fellow cool-nerd 8th Graders at John Burroughs Jr. High and strolled through the maze of Park La Brea to Hancock Park Elementary School, Miranda's alma mater. Having almost but not quite kissed in the aforementioned spin-the-bottle game, the conversation was, at first, awkward. She had suggested we break away mid-game, but she didn't explain why. We mainly talked about friends of ours who lived in Park La Brea--a carefully planned apartment community in the heart of the Fairfax area, as yet ungated circa 1974, one of those complexes wherein all the buildings are identical and the streets absurdly labyrinthine.

"I hate going over Misty's house 'cause I can never find her building," Miranda said, "it's like where the fuck are you?"

"Oh, man, yeah, last time my dad had to pick me up at Oliver's place he was totally pissed at how hard it was to find where Oliver lived. 'You can take the bus home from now on,' he was saying all crazy, 'because I am never under any circumstances doing this shit again.'"

"Your dad said shit to you?"

"Yeah. Ever since I said shit in front of him he's all cool with saying shit in front of me now."

"Whoa, when'd you say shit in front of your dad?"

"Back a while ago. We were walking the dogs at night, and these three unattended doberman pinschers turned the corner and started walking right towards us--"

"Nazi dogs."

"--Totally, and I said 'shit' right at that moment. My dad just said, 'Turn around slowly and start walking back toward the house.' I apologized for 'using the s-word,' and my dad patted my head and went, 'That's OK, son. That's what the word's for.'"

"For when you're scared shitless."

"No shit, yeah. But also for when shit sucks. Like my grandmother, behind her back we call her cooking shitalicious. That's pretty flagrant."

"Shitalicious. Sounds yum. You got away from the dobermans though?"

"Yeahyeah, they didn't really follow us at all," I explained as we stopped at a strange corner. "Oh, here, check out this intersection," I said, pointing to the sign that showed two perpendicular streets both called Curson, "this is where Curson crosses itself."

"Meet me at the corner of Curson and Curson," Miranda said, "what a great place for a date. 'Meet me at the corner of Curson and Curson.' I want to say that to somebody someday."

"You just did."

"No, I mean I want to say it and mean it."

"Nice, thanks," I faked insult.

"No, no, I mean we're already on the corner of Curson and Curson. so I don't have to tell you to meet me there," she was squirming her way out of it with undeniable charm.

I shook my finger mightily, "A curse on Curson!"I said just to be saying something (though I do admit I was hoping she would find it adorable. I couldn't tell if she did or didn't).

We stood at the corner of Curson and Curson, looking at each other in silent acknowledgement of who knows what. Miranda's eyes were a fireplace. They filled me with the shame of wanting.

"You do realize neither of us would have any idea how to find our way back here," I prophesied.

"Lance," she said.

"Ya," I offered my ear to her foggy silence.

"Nothing, just . . . ," Miranda scanned the landscape, "This reminds me of the crossroads scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow."

"Yeah kinda," I said.

"Now which way do we go?" she intoned quoting Judy Garland in the movie.

"That way is a very nice way," I said, doing Scarecrow, continuing the movie vibe. A flirting technique.

"Who said that?" Dorothy looked about bemusedly.

"It's pleasant down that way, too." Scarecrow said, pointing in the other direction.

Miranda didn't know her Dorothy line there. Neither did I. Kinda broke the spell.

"Of course, people do go both ways!" I went back into Scarecrow character, all Ray Bolger rubbery.

It was too late.

"So, which way DO we go? Curson or Curson?" Miranda asked as herself.

"I think if we stay left it'll take us to Colgate, but who the fuck knows," I slipped back into Lancehood, "Maybe we'll end up at Misty's building!"

Miranda laughed.

"You do a good Scarecrow," she said.

"Well, it's easy: I haven't got a brain--only straw. I can't make up my mind about anything . . . I am the fuckin' Scarecrow," I said.

"No you're not. You're just doing a good imitation of the Scarecrow. You're really someone else," she said.

"Ah, the Little Prince, right?"

"Wrong."

"The fat kid from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory?"

"Not Buzzy Lagniappe, no," Miranda joked.

"Um, Captain Howdy?"

"Stop, you're being silly now."

"Well, WHO?" I really wanted to know.

"You're Lancelot Link Secret CHIMP," she sang to the melody of the show's theme song. She moved toward me, brushing my shoulder with hers, making like she was trying to run me off the road or something. I didn't put my arm around her. I was probably supposed to right then. And I really wanted to. But I couldn't do it. I was scared of starting.

The spin-the-bottle game had been one of those dreaded suggestions that erupted spontaneously while all of us were just messing around at the Tar Pits. Lorelei Lux found an empty bottle of Schlitz beer, and I believe it was Dahlia "Dolly" Ferris who uttered, "Hey we should play spin the bottle" with which every girl agreed immediately (in addition to Dolly and Lorelei, Justine Balthazar was also there, Misty Winters, Sharon Rose, Claire Farnaway, Candy Stoner, and Miranda: the newly named Chick Clique). The boy contingent, less inclined to want to suffer the psychic discomforts of spin-the-bottle, included me and Gus Lagniappe, Chester Flinch, Claude Moss, Whitman Rust, Oliver Gelding, and also Dolly's newly official "boyfriend" (they had frenched) Freddy Snow, one of those bronze-faced, godly-looking Jewish guys with feathered brown hair parted in the middle, the kind of guy who'd grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer or a media executive if his ambition didn't get derailed in adolescence by cocaine and quaalude cocktails. He stood in stark contrast to me with my braces and zits and dorky jewfro. I'm fairly convinced he didn't like me very much.

And, dang, dude, Freddy Snow was hanging pretty close to Miranda for somebody who was officially going with Dolly Ferris. When he spun the bottle it stopped at Miranda, and Freddy didn't just lean across the circle and kiss her; Freddy pushed Miranda onto her back and gave her a long tongue-involved kiss, at the conclusion of which he turned and looked intently at me. "Dude," that's cool, right?" Freddy asked as he sat back down. Miranda looked at the ground. Dang, dude.

Candy Stoner's first bottle spin stopped at me. She crawled across the circle we had formed in the bushes near 6th Street, and kissed me on the mouth, attempting to french and yeah I let it happen 'cause it felt good and maybe I wanted to get back at Miranda or something. It had been like 4 months since Candy and I'd stopped being a couple, but the rhythm of the tongues was intact.

A general "oooh" permeated the circle.

"Aaaah-ha Sexes with the exes," quipped Oliver.

My spin, as fate dictated, landed on Miranda, who was sitting next to me. Following the briefest eye contact I leaned toward her, but as my mouth approached hers she turned her face and then sidled up to my ear and whispered, "Can we get away from here?" I pulled back and nodded yeah. We separated without kissing.

"Dang, dude, REJECTION in spin-the-bottle? That's dog," said Oliver.

"Why'd you do that, Mandy?" scolded a cross Candy Stoner.

"That's cold-blooded," Claire Farnaway rejoined.

"Actually, Lance and I are going to go somewhere more private," said Miranda as suggestively as her 13 years could muster, and thus began our romp through Park La Brea.

Another "ooooh" swept across the group.

"All right, Soylent Green, golita, Soylent Green," we heard Oliver say as we journeyed forth.

"Mandy, call me later, 'k?," Dolly shouted making the universal thumb-and-pinky hand-to-ear call me sign. I looked back and saw the girls huddle before turning my attention to Miranda and our sudden oneness.

We had followed the right Curson which led us to Colgate and the Hancock Park Elementary School playground. On that soothing blue April afternoon we had the entire schoolyard to ourselves. Oh, holy emptiness. Hopping the chain-link fence, we entered what seemed to me standard issue LA Unified playground: a covered eating area with tables and benches, 3 beige handball courts, a couple of tetherball poles, monkeybars, rings, and other climbing equipment installed over black rubber padding, painted four-square and two-square games, two kickball/sockball diamonds, a couple of basketball courts with 8-foot hoops hung with chain-link netting, and a bunch of hopscotch boxes.

(In 3rd Grade I threw up while watching Nancy Judenrein play hopscotch one morning before school. The puke looked and smelled like rotten eggs. My mother had to come and take me home. What I remember best about that day is that I got to lie on the couch and watch TV. The Los Angeles Kings were playing the Montreal Canadiens in the evening. I watched the game on the black and white television in our living room. Ross Lonsberry, "Cowboy" Bill Flett, Eddie "The Jet" Joyal. I loved that team. They were sacred. They sucked, but I loved them anyway. That's the nature of love, I suppose. I didn't feel sick at all. Just peaceful. Snuggled up and watching hockey. True holiness.)

I was not a Hancock Park alum. I had spent my grammar school years at Melrose Avenue Elementary School, right behind hotdog heaven Pink's. So, the Hancock Park yard was not buzzing with wonder for me, but for Miranda it harbored a fleet of beloved memories. I enjoyed learning about her past and her nostalgic thrall for that distant life of two years before. What was she like then?

"This is where Freddy Snow fell backwards and cracked his head open in 6th Grade. He was trying to imitate some Kung Fu movie guy--"

"--Bruce Lee--"

"--YES! and he tripped over this bench and cracked his head on the ground. He was awake but bleeding really bad."

I will admit a certain joy at hearing of Freddy's injury.

"Is Freddy a good kisser?" I tortured myself by asking.

"Well, you know, he's experienced," Miranda blushed and then countered, "How was it kissing Candy again?"

"She was into it, but the thing is I saw her with some older guy at The Exorcist, and he looked like he wanted to kick my ass. So I thought she had a new boyfriend. I couldn't figure out why she was kissing me for reals in the game."

"Dorkwad, that was her cousin Nick at The Exorcist. He goes to Uni. You are Mr. Gullible's Travels, totally," Miranda said.

I still don't know what she meant by that, but I pretended like I did at the time.

"Deafenly," I pulled out the favorite flirty tease, my mockery of her speech.

"Stop," she warned.

"Why did you want to get away from everybody back there?" I inquired.

"I don't know. I din't want to be there. With them. Right then."

"You din't?"

"Don't be a dookey."

"Did it have to do with Freddy?" I asked. Miranda looked down.

"No, not really, I guess," she mumbled.

"Candy?"

Miranda nodded a sort of yes.

"What about Candy?"

"She's just . . . going out of her way to be against me. I guess that's how I'd describe it. But we have all the same friends so I have to be around her all the time. And who knows what I did wrong?"

We strolled over to the Kindergarten yard, a fenced off area next to the Kindergarten classrooms.

"I remember being in Kindergarten," Miranda said, "I'd come in the morning and then go home and watch TV."

"I was in afternoon Kindergarten," I said, "I watched TV all morning, then my mother would make me a Swanson's chicken pie, and I'd eat it while watching Sheriff John. After that I'd go to school."

We climbed the little fence into the enclosed Kindergarten area. A copy of Paul Zindel's My Darling, My Hamburger lay carelessly tossed open near the sandbox. Miranda took off her Jack Purcells and the tennis socks with little fluffy balls dangling in back, picked up the book, and stood barefoot in the sandbox.

"How's the sand?" I asked.

"Mmm, warm-cold. Come try."

"Warm-cold?" I didn't understand.

"Yeah, the sand is warm from the sun but cold underneath once you dig your feet in. Warm-cold. It's yummy!" Miranda beckoned.

I removed my Adidas and sweat-socks and joined her.

"I can't believe elementary school kids are reading this," she said of the Zindel book.

"Yeah, and we're in the Kindergarten yard. Is it dirty?" I tried to grab it away from her.

"There's a lot of stuff in it they wouln't understand. It's about high school. There's a lot of stuff in it I din't understand, I guess, and I'm 13. Maybe it belongs to one of the teachers."

"Let me see it," I made another grab.

"No, it will give you ideas," she dangled.

I reached for the book and she pulled away playfully, sometimes almost letting me snatch it.

Miranda interrupted the struggle and looked over at the handball courts.

"I wish we had a handball," she said.

"So I could whoop your ass?"

"No, so I could show off my cuts and slices," she explained.

"Ah."

"And then whoop your ass," Miranda challenged.

"At Melrose Avenue we called them slicees," I said.

"Slicees?"

"Yeah."

"No way. That's lame."

"Yeah. Cuts and slicees. And I'd always get stuck sitting in line on the bench next to Wayne Paul Nader."

"Hey, what is that guy's trip?" Miranda wondered. "He says really creepy stuff to Lila Saddleback all the time, and she's always telling him to fuck off."

"Let me 'splain something, Lucy," I said in my best Ricky Ricardo voice because Miranda was an I Love Lucy freak. It seemed like another good flirting technique. (She knew every episode of I Love Lucy by title. Including all the shitty ones on the farm in Connecticut).

"'Splain," she mocked, Lucy-style.

"You know how Wayne is now?"

"Of course. Dorkus of the year. You went to elementary with him?"

"Yeah. All through. And he was always way out, like talking to himself and shit, even when we were like in 5th Grade. So, during handball we'd be sitting on the bench waiting for our turns, and if you were sitting next to him, he'd say to you, in this, like, fucked-up munchkin voice, "Tickle my legs," like all Lollipop Guild and shit, "Tickle my legs," and then he'd, like, tickle your legs a little, but in this majorly feeble way. It felt like a spider was crawling on you. I don't know, dude, it was fuckin' creepy. Dang, and he always wore these purple cords. Dang."

"Do the munchkin voice again," Miranda demanded.

"Follow the yellow brick road," I said.

Miranda reminded me of Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz sometimes. So the munchkin thing was more flirting. She laughed and asked me to do it again.

Miranda Savitch and I were in 8th Grade when we stood face to face barefoot in the sandbox and nothing happened save the warm-cold pleasance of our feet in sand, separate and together. Miranda had just turned 13. I was still 12, but on the verge, my bar mitzvah less than a month away.

"Why didn't you have a Bat Mitzvah?" I asked her.

"I dunno. My parents thought it'd be too jewy, I guess. 'We're just people,' they always say, 'we aren't anything.' We get presents for Chanukah and we go to my aunt's house every year for Passover but that's it. There are several trees growing in Israel in my name I think. People gave them to me on my 13th birthday even though I din't have a Bat Mitzvah." She put the book back down on the ground where she found it. "I want to go on the monkey bars," she shifted the focus.

"Oh cool. I love watching girls go on the monkey bars. Except you're not wearing a skirt. No fun."

"Lech."

"No, it's not like that. It's natural. It can't be helped. It's a thing."

"Do I want to know this?" she asked.

I shrugged. I waited.

"Well now you have to tell me," Miranda couldn't resist.

"All right, it's simple. The basic idea is this: Dresses and skirts were made to be looked up."

"That's perverted," she scoffed.

"But it's not. Perverted is when things are all sick and twisted. Like the stuff Wayne probably says to Lila, that's for sure some perverted-ass shit. But looking up a girl's dress isn't sick and twisted; it's just what you do," I attempted to defend my gender. "I mean, it's not even a sex thing really. You know Gina Dichlich, right?"

"The girl with the famous name."

"Yaya. Well, she went to my elementary school, too. In like 4th Grade a bunch of us would always watch her go upside-down on the monkeybars so we could see her underwear."

"That's pathetic."

"True, it's pathetic, but it's not perverted. We didn't want to have sex with Gina Dichlich. We just wanted to see her panties. Hopscotch was also good. And jump rope. Pathetic I agree with. But it's what we do. To everyone."

"Ew gross. Really?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Any opportunity. That's the thing I was telling you."

"Everyone?"

"Well, basically . . . "

"That means you've tried to look up my skirt," she gasped.

"TRIED?," I groucho'd my eyebrows.

"Oh I'm so--What's the big deal about underwear?"

"It's not the underwear; it's the promise."

"Huh?"

"You want the promise before you even know what the promise is."

"You mean like hope?" Miranda asked.

"Nyeah, sort of but not really."

"Or more like wish," she tried again.

"No deafenly not wish."

"Stop."

"Sorry. I din't remember."

"You are bad, you promised not to make fun of me," Miranda reminded me, slapping my arm.

"Wishes make me sad," I confessed.

"Everybody wishes," said Miranda.

"That's what's so sad about it. And also that wishes are always a disappointment when they come true."

Miranda was watching me talk. Who knows what she was thinking. I continued, "I also don't like getting presents. Whenever my parents ask me what I want for my birthday or for Chanukah or something I always tell them nothing. I don't want to want anything."

"Sometimes you're like a girl, Lance," Miranda said, oddly.

"I think it'd be weird to be a girl."

"Being a girl feels like the normal way to be," she said, "I dunno. Boys are the mutation. I mean, please, the male thingy, you know, it looks like a mistake."

"Seen many, have you?," I taunted. Miranda blushed and looked away. "You know that joke about the boy and the girl playing doctor?"

"Which one?"

"This little boy and this little girl get naked, and the little girl points to the boy's thing and says, 'Oooh, can I touch that?', and the little boy says, 'No way, look what you did to yours."

"Ha ha," Miranda endured the humor. She sat down in the sandbox and started mounding up the foundation of a castle. She had abandoned her plan to go on the monkeybars. "Hourglasses make me sad," she said. "What else makes you sad, besides presents and wishes?"

"Carnivals. I don't feel like I'm part of the human race when I'm at a carnival. I come from a planet that doesn't need carnivals," I confessed. "What about hourglasses makes you sad?"

"They make me think of everything I can't keep."

"Isn't there a big hourglass in your room?"

"Yeah, you remember? Neat. That was my grandmother's. I got it when she died. Another reason hourglasses make me sad."

"Kinda the same reason, huh?"

"Yeah, huh," she looked at me forever in that moment. "I want to live in a castle," Miranda said as she turned her attention to the sand and the erection of her fantasy palace.

"And so castles made of sand," I scraped the Hendrix tune with my nasal drone, "fall into the sea eventually . . . "

"Kinda like hourglasses . . . huh?"

"Yeah, huh," I echoed.

Miranda didn't know Hendrix.

"You know, the deserts get bigger every year?" Miranda said, "One day the entire earth will be a desert. But things can grow even in sand. That's what you have to remember. I love sand."

"Except in hourglasses . . ."

"Yes," Miranda Savitch offered up all intensity. She was wearing brown corduroy pants. I could see her brassiere through her blouse. And so arose the inevitable knotty eruption of cock-in-pussy thoughts.

"I think it's unlikely the entire earth will be a desert," I said with controlled breath.

"Unlikely," Miranda said, "I like when things are unlikely. If I'm thinking of the word unlikely when I'm falling asleep at night I always have the best dreams. "

"You know, I didn't know you were so weird, Miranda."

She smiled, "Wowie kazowie."

"What?"

"You called me Miranda."

"Yeah so? It's your name."

"You never use my name."

"I use your name," I insisted.

"Never."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Really? Never?"

"YES. And in fact if I didn't start conversations with you we'd probably never talk even." This was starting to remind me eerily of American Graffiti. I don't know why exactly, but it was. She was right, though. I never called her by her name.

"Dang, dude, I suck," I offered, "I'm sorry . . . Miranda."

"I like the way that sounds," she said.

Who knows what she meant by that. Miranda was beautiful.

"I thought it was funny in Ms. Bukkake's class when she said, 'Miranda is a moon of Uranus,'" I recalled, "I wrote it in my science notes." (Every time I looked at that phrase in my science notes I thought of Miranda's ass.)

"Ha, yeah, huh? Almost as good as when Bukkake said 'Uranus is mostly gas.' Yes, a moon of Uranus. That's me. Hey, did I tell you about Palm Springs?"

"I know you went."

"Yeahyeah, when I was in Palm Springs over winter break we stayed in this hotel called The Spa. It was weird because I was lying by a concrete pool--"

"A sea-meant pond," I said in my durndest Jethro Bodine voice.

"--Yeahzackly, on a plastic lounge at an air-conditioned hotel, but still when I looked up at the stars I felt like I was in the wilderness; I couln't believe how many of them there were, and I thought, dang, those are there every night and I don't get to see them, that sucks," she thought for a moment.

"You got to see what you're missing."

"For reals . . . " Miranda's mind meandered. "What was it like to be the first humans and look up there and see the Milky Way? Do you ever think about that?"

"Every night," I wanted to say but didn't. I just wanted her to keep on talking so I could keep on looking at her. And listening. I loved her voice.

"What did they think it was? Freaky," Miranda continued, "It's the best movie I've ever seen, the Milky Way."

"Better than Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory?"

"You would've liked it," Miranda said, and added, after a pause, "I thought about you a couple of times when I was out there looking at the sky."

"Only a couple?"

"OK, like 3 times. Yeah, no, like I wondered if you were also looking at the sky."

"I do that."

"Yeah, no, I know, no, but I wondered which stars you were able to see. Like maybe we were looking at the same one at the same time or something? I could see the whole thing but you were looking at the same sky and could only see a couple of those stars, right?"

"Like maybe four or five. Like Orion maybe on a good night. Or the Big Dipper."

"Yeahyeah," she was putting the finishing touches on her sand castle, "and so, Lance Atlas . . . here's the big question . . . were you looking?"

I had no idea.

"I look at the sky every night," was my honest but evasive reply.

"I love the sand and you love the stars," Miranda said, "you ever notice that?"

"Is that why I remind you of the Little Prince?"

"I dunno," Miranda shrugged, "but I will tell you my favorite line in The Little Prince though: 'What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.' That's my life motto."

"I don't get it."

"There's always hope, monsieur. Remember that. Things can grow even in sand."

"One day I'll figure it out, I guess."

"You're somewhere between the Little Prince and a blueberry," she teased.

"With a bit of chimp thrown in?"

"Yessireebob."

"My dad always says that!" I said.

"Mine too!"

"Dad's all know the same jokes."

"They learn them at Dad school," Miranda said with authority.

"Yeah, like 'shave and a haircut, two bits, right? And 'Pull my finger,' dang."

"Right, or how about this one?" Miranda said as she stood up. "Here, get up." I rose. "Shake . . . come on, hand out . . . Shake," she said, shaking my hand, "Spear," she said poking me in the ribs with her elbow, and then turning me around and sticking her knee in my jean-tight buttock, "kick in the rear." It was not the last time I would let a girl kick my ass. I turned to face her, and she held onto my arm.

We stood for a few seconds without saying anything.

"What?" she interrupted the silence.

"What what?" I returned and looked aside.

Miranda said, "What's that?" and pointed at a spot on my shirt. When I looked down she zipped her finger up my chest and onward across the height of my face, a fitting joke for the kindergarten sandbox, and, of course, I fell for it for the billionth time in my almost 13 years on the planet.

"CHIMP!" Miranda ran and hopped the Kindergarten fence, dashing back out onto the big yard. "Let's play handball," she shouted, though there were no balls on the premises. I followed her over to the handball court, and we sat on the bench as if waiting our turn to play. She was sitting side-saddle. I straddled the bench, facing her.

"Tickle my leg" she said in Wayne Paul Nader munchkin voice. I allowed the tips of my fingers to touch her courduroy pantleg and began these wormboy sissy ticklings which she swatted away several times playfully. "Lance Link, whatcha gonna do?" she half-sang. I wanted to run my hand up her leg and feel her crotch through the plush nexus of seams.

"What should I do?" I sort of lust-croaked.

"Follow the yellow brick road," Miranda said breaking into a nervous laugh. Did she know I wanted her on her back, legs spread, taking my cock in the sandbox, yessireebob? I placed the palm of my hand on her inner thigh at its lowest point near the knee. Miranda put her hand on my forearm, neither pushing nor pulling. But I wouldn't let my hand move any higher. Miranda looked at me with too much mystery to read. I was supposed to kiss her at that moment, I knew. But I didn't, again. I remembered a similar constellation of feelings in the moments before I kissed Candy Stoner for the first time, that earliest frenching. I didn't want Candy Stoner and kissed her anyway. But here I wanted to entwine tongues with Miranda Savitch. Her mouth was devourable, the voice that emanated from it a river I'd swim in, the mind it spoke for a magic lantern. But the shame of wanting, the fear of being seen as human left me sunk in paralysis. She'd think I was like everybody else. I wanted her to think I was above all that. The promise was lost.

"You wanna get a hamburger or something?" she said, gently pushing my hand away.

"Yeah, ok," I said, pulling back and getting up.

We retrieved our shoes and socks and made our way across Fairfax to Jack-In-The-Box. An overriding silence accompanied us, though once we settled down at a table, the heavy tension subsided.

"Genius," Miranda said, pointing to her Jumbo Jack, "this hamburger is genius."

"Mine's pretty good," I said, "It's the 'secret sauce,' that's what does it."

"No, this hamburger is genius," she spoke as she chewed, "You don't understand. I've been wanting this all day and it's like the hamburger knew and was just waiting for me to find it. I've been thinking about this hamburger since I woke up this morning and I didn't even realize it. Genius." She shook her head at the revelation.

"So," I said, "you liked that book My Darling, My Hamburger?"

"Yeah, it was good."

"But not genius."

"Not like this hamburger, no."

"A Jumbo Jack from Jack-In-The-Box," I said in my best Rodney Allen Rippy 5-year-old voice (which bore a marked resemblance to my munchkin voice), "It's too big 'a eat." Miranda didn't laugh. "What's the book about?" I asked.

"I don't know, relationships I guess. Mainly 2 couples with problems. They're in high school. I din't get some of it. I liked it though."

"What's the title mean?"

"Oh it's like going to get a hamburger is a way to get out of stuff that's too intense. Something like that. I don't really remember!"

"But you liked it."

"Yeah, it was good. But this hamburger is genius."

Miranda took a sip of my milkshake. Using my straw.

"You want to come over for a while?" she asked.

"Yeah, cool," I said, pondering the cock-in-pussy possibilities of the venture. I hadn't been to Miranda's house since our ping-pong debacle. Perhaps I would redeem myself.

We walked the few blocks to her house in the waning April afternoon. The house was empty, which stoked my horny commotion of course, and we settled on her bed, some distance apart. Miranda pulled two decks of cards from her nightstand drawer, one of which was a Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp deck. "Here, you can use this deck because you are a chimp," she said and began taking the other deck out of its box, indicating I should do the same with mine.

"Um, what are we doing?" I asked.

"I wanna play solitaire with you."

"I've never heard of playing solitaire with someone."

"It's fun. Oh, wait, music," Miranda strode across the room and pulled a Jim Croce album from her small stack of records right next to the big hourglass. Croce had died the previous autumn in a plane crash and had been splashing across the airwaves nonstop posthumously for months. It was one of those things where you kinda had to say you liked Jim Croce's music even if you didn't 'cause he'd just died and he was a nice guy and shit. I actually did like Jim Croce's music, but I knew people who didn't and were waiting for the day they could fess up. Miranda put on "Time In A Bottle" and re-joined me on the bed. As she was dealing her own hand of solitaire, she sang along:

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
Till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you

"This is my first time," I said.

Miranda looked at me quizzically, then looked back down at her solitaire hand and continued singing:

If I could make days last forever
If words could make wishes come true
I'd save every day like a treasure and then,
Again, I would spend them with you

"It's my first time playing solitaire with someone," I clarified.

Miranda nodded, still looking down, and continued:

I've looked around enough to know
That youre the one I want to go
Through time with

"It's cool to be alone and together at the same time," Miranda said without lifting her gaze from the cards.

If I had a box just for wishes
And dreams that had never come true
The box would be empty
Except for the memory
Of how they were answered by you

Alone and together at the same time. That was us. That would always be us.

"You can learn a lot about people when you play solitaire with them," she said over an instrumental interlude, then joining the bridge's return:

I've looked around enough to know
That you're the one I want to go
Through time with

She looked up from her cards. By the time the song was done, though, I had already reached an impasse in the solitaire game. Dead end. All my cards were spent. Dang, dude.

"That was quick," Miranda said.

"Dang, that's embarrassing."

"Aaaah-ha . . . 3 minutes . . . loser."

"Man, sorry. I'm no fun," I said.

"Oh, stop, who cares, I'm just teasing," Miranda said as she crossed the room again to pick up another LP. She held the cover up to show it was The Man Who Sold The World, David Bowie.

"I got this 'cause of you," Miranda said as she laid the needle on the title track. The opening trippy riff got kicking.

"The other day on KMET I heard a new version of that song that Lulu just did. That's on my list," I said.

"You have a list?"

"Oh yes, I have a list for everything."

"Pick a list and tell me what's on it."

"OK, um, Lulu's version of The Man Who Sold The World."

"List of records to get. Give me something harder."

"Burning bush, unholy fire, false idols."

Miranda pondered, then said in fake Italian, "Beats-a me-a."

"List of shit I have to talk about in my Bar Mitzvah speech."

"Your Bar Mitzvah's coming up soon."

"Yeah, three weeks. Are you coming?"

"Of course. I already know what I'm wearing. You wanna see?" She went to her closet and pulled out a yellow dress. She held it up to herself as if wearing it. It was short. The better to flash you with, my dear. I thought of the big bad wolf . . . the yellow brick road . . the burning bush . . . unholy fire . . .

"Lance, are you with me?" Rabbi Hamlisch's voice reclaimed my attention. "While Moses is communing with the burning bush up high on Mt. Sinai, down below in the desert sand there is unholy fire, right?"

I stared at the xeroxed words of my Torah portion without answering.

"Come on, Lance, concentrate. What is going on in this parsha?," Rabbi Hamlisch asked me.

"Nadab and Abi'hu are killed when they try to bring unholy fire to the altar," I answered.

"Anything else about Nadab and Abi'hu?"

"They don't care about the difference between holy and unholy."

"Very good. What you have here is a clear demarcation between the sacred and the profane. One of the gifts of the Torah is its recognition of this duality, and in some ways our only duty as Jews is to observe and respect this duality. Read the passage to me."

"And Nadab and Abi'hu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered unholy fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD."

"They go to the altar and don't perform the offering according to the prescribed priestly practice. Why would they do this?"

"Maybe they hadn't been taught the correct method?"

"They're the sons of Aaron, the head priest. Wouldn't they have been taught this by their father?"

"I suppose."

"What else? Skip down to verse 9."

"Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations: and that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean."

"What does this tell you?"

"Nadab and Abi'hu were drunk?"

"Precisely. This blurred their understanding of God's requirement that we put a difference between holy and unholy. You see, Lance, there's nothing wrong with unholy fire, but it's important to know the difference between the burning bush up high (he pointed to his head) and unholy fire (he pointed at his crotch) down below," Rabbi Hamlisch proffered, "it's important to know the difference."

Miranda Savitch in her short yellow dress was both. The Torah didn't help with that circumstance.

I continued, "'there went out a fire from the LORD . . . ', I dunno, that sounds like the fire came from God."

"Well, sort of, yes, in the sense that everything comes from God, but look further down, you see, their clothes are not singed, the skin is not burned. They are consumed from within by the very same unholy fire they sought to offer before the LORD. And so what does this mean?"

"It means," I tried to focus, "we all have unholy fire inside us."

"This is true, of course, but not the correct answer. And there's an extra lesson for you," Rabbi Hamlisch went on, "it is possible for something to be true and still not be the correct answer. But back to the Torah question: what does it mean?

"It means I have no idea."

You understand nothing, Lance Atlas.

"It means you have to pay much more attention to this than you have been. What do you want to say about this parsha in your speech?" Rabbi Hamlisch asked.

"I want to talk about worshipping false idols, like money or celebrities or Nixon. He's really the falsest idol of all. And Watergate is the unholy fire."

"Heh, that's good. But you do realize Rabbi Magnin is friends with President Nixon?" Rabbi Hamlisch warned.

"He is?"

"Yes, he even participated in the inauguration. Your criticisms will not be well received."

"Dang, that sucks," I said, forgetting the difference between the sacred and the profane.

"But I'm going to let you take that approach anyway, as long as you remove President Nixon's name and replace it with 'politicians' instead. And say they are the falsest idols of all, plural."

"I will do that. Definitely. Thank you, Rabbi Hamlisch."

"All right. Go home and get that speech written. I want a draft to read by next Monday."

"I'll have one for you."

"You're very distracted, aren't you, Lance? You look like you're thinking about who knows what."

"Yeah, I suppose."

"Let me guess. You're thinking about the fat kid from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory . . . what's his name?"

"Augustu