No Small Talk

I just had my first haircut. That is, my first haircut in a barber shop. (They wouldn't give me a damned lollipop, though.) See, my mom, a hairdresser, by necessities of old (i.e. she is a musician just like the rest of my family), always cuts my hair, but she just had to have surgery to correct the damage of those necessities.

So, I walked in to the barber shop and had no idea what I wanted. (Cut it like my mommy does?) The long and short of it is, I finally worked it out and the haircut is pretty good and they even slapped hot towels on my face afterward. (I'm not sure why -- there was no shave forthcoming, but it felt pretty good. Scared the hell out of me, though.)

The Gardener and His Wife (A Parable)

The old man bent, sadly, over the two vegetable plants. One was dead and the other had grown fat, strong and tall. He rubbed his chin with a thumb and forefinger.

"I don't understand," he said to his wife, who stood behind him. "I raised them just the same. I fed them the same food. I kept them in the same sunny garden patch. I pulled away their dead leaves and talked to them each day."

Birds chirped and a wind moved the green trees.

"Are they the same?" said the old woman.

"No," said the old man. "They are two slightly different vegetables."

"Then, perhaps," she said, "what was nurturing to one was cruelty the another."

Resisting the Twisters of God

Some years ago, I bought Sting's album The Soul Cages. Lyrically, I think it is his best work -- in fact, I would group the lyrics on that album in with some of the finest works of English literature. No I'm not kidding. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Be that as it may, on one song, "All This Time," Sting utters the line:

"Men go crazy in congregations; they only get better one by one."

This, I worked out years later, is derived from Charles Mackay's statement:

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Sting is putting a slant on it, of course, at the expense of organized religion, but the principle is the same: We need to work things out for ourselves, in the end. But how many of us do?

Where Do You Live?

Morgan Llywelyn is the author of a series of historical/fantasy novels about Celtic heritage and the Irish. Good reads, all. I remember, in one (it might have been Bard or Druids) that a druid-in-training was taken to the house of the chief druid. The druid-in-training was very disappointed by the house. It was simple and sparsely furnished. Drab. This, the boy thought, was no place for someone of the chief druid's importance to live.

The boy said, to the chief druid, "You live here?"

The druid replied, "No." The boy looked at him, puzzled. The chief druid pointed to his own head. "I live, here," he said.

                                                          Indeed.

Beelzebub's Bubbly Bane

I've been thinking about Hell. Not in a pill-bottle rattling in a shaky hand at the temple or a pre-suicidal, double-clutched steak knife sort of way, but in a conceptual way. It has always terrified me that Hell is supposed to be a place with no hope. Of anything. So, in other words, there is never anything to look forward to.


Sure. HE gets a snack.

So what you get is this: After the first thousand years, you know that there are ten-times a thousand years to come, with a million beyond that, multipilied infinity. And never, never, never, is there anything to look forward to. No tasty snacks. No rest. No TV. No snow. No anything. It seems to me that never having anything to look forward to would be the ultimate punishment. And . . . well, there it is. Hell.

In prison, you get visits, if you are lucky. Or you get to walk the yard. Or eat. Or you can look forward to the day you get out. So there's that. Even if you are "in for life," at least you can look forward to checkers with ol' Bubba in block A, once in a while. Or, at the very least, to dying.

So I guess the worst state to be in is one in which you have nothing to look forward to. We really need that. And I think we all have things to look forward to, but we don't always do ourselves the favor of looking forward at them when things are worst. The cool thing is that any of us can do this.