Here’s an HGTV fantasy. The host of a reality TV home improvement program is doing a house walk-through with the homeowner. They are discussing plans for the various improvements that will be made to the house, which we will no doubt be able to watch in edited fragments over the course of the next twenty minutes or so.

 

Host: So I understand you have big plans for the fireplace.

 

Owner: Yes, there’ll be shelves here for the entertainment center which will be flush with the existing wainscot. People like that.

 

Host: Screw what people like, Dude. What do you like?

 

Of course, it’s not likely to happen that way.

 

Above please find a picture of a beautiful home interior. Gaze at it; commit it to memory. It’s a part of our great history, and the work of our hands today produces nothing but shit by comparison, and should be destroyed rather than preserved, for the love of God. This room is so unique, so completely individual, that it challenges the mind. There’s nothing plain about it, nothing ordinary. Compare that picture to the homogenized ideal which home builders, home sellers, home buyers strive for today.

 

 

Recently we have been inundated with negative economic news from TV, radio, and other media sources, most of it arising from the scandalous crisis in the sub prime market, but fueled more generally by that peculiar bird of self-loathing amongst many Americans which tells them “we deserve” disaster. Honestly, there are people – including people I know – who are absolutely gleeful when economic indicators go down. Good news depresses them. Mind you, it’s important to note that in such cases their own personal economy is unaffected. They just get aroused by doom and gloom, so long as it’s somebody else who is suffering. But, in any event, the housing market did plummet in some areas of the country.

 

Sales of existing homes is up nearly three percent in the same period. That’s right, up. You’d never know it, of course. Despite whatever mental illness it is which causes rampant, hysterical negativity, and lust for more of the same, the truth is out there – if you look for it.

 

OK, so that’s just a little good news in a sea of bad, but it means something. It means the downturn has created what’s called a buyers’ market. That means there are home sellers who are losing money. They can’t hope to get the price they had hoped to get for their properties. But it also means that there are many buyers and potential buyers who may now be able to afford a home, now that prices have adjusted to a more affordable range, who would not have been able to do so before.

 

Many of these home buyers will be buying first homes, “starter” homes, but some number of them will be looking for the home in which they will eventually die. And that’s interesting. Imagine buying a house to live in - how very odd! It may even be vulgar.

 

If a person buys a house to live in, ultimately to die in, what may he not do? Well, he can do anything he wants with it, can’t he? He may even begin to develop a clue about what his own unique personal taste might be! Heavens…

 

Well, let’s go back a few years. When my parents bought the house I grew up in there really wasn’t such a term as “starter home.” They didn’t buy the house only to sell it several years, or several months, later. They fully expected to die in it. And, in my Mom’s case, she did. Then, of course, it would ideally be passed down as an inheritance to their children.

 

Over time homeowners ceased being homeowners in that sense. They became home brokers. The ideal of creating a family homestead which could be passed down through the generations was somehow lost to many people – downright unheard-of on HGTV, which concerns itself almost entirely with house “flipping,” or fixing up an old home in a big hurry in order to turn it around for a profit.

 

There’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. It’s one way to make money. Or – that is, it was, up until quite recently. Markets go up, markets come down. Trends come, trends go. Fortunes are made and lost. Investing involves risk. ‘Twas ever thus. I wouldn’t dream of changing it.

 

But, one thing I have observed is that house “flipping” almost always involves stripping houses of their individual character. Why? Well, to make it appear in line with whatever the potential buyers’ expectations might be, and of course here we are concerned not with individuals, and individual taste, but with groups and mass mind tastes. In other words, the extraordinary everybody’s-a-broker-flip-flop market which we have just come through – many of us quite profitably – and which may now be over, has created a dearth of artistic creativity in home decorating.

 

When homeowners are more concerned with how their domicile will appeal to the mass mind than they are with infusing it with their own individual tastes and character – because they intend to sell it one day – what effect does that have on the aesthetic principle in general, if any?

 

None. The human mind’s ability to grasp, or to understand, aesthetics died away many years ago. If it hadn’t, the mass mind aesthetic standard would be far more interesting. We would still “flip” houses. We would still prosper by making a profit on them. But our priorities would be quite different.

 

That’s a by and large statement, of course. There are pockets of civilization here and there. I’m one. If you’re reading this the chances are you would like to think of yourself as being one too.

 

It’s my belief that people – human beings – have by and large lost the ability to create beauty. How? They willfully lost it. They threw it away. And it didn’t happen just because of a big bubble in the housing market in the U.S.A. It happened because the Western world turned secular. Beauty is a function of spiritus. It isn’t of the material world – world of things. It isn’t of the flesh. Beauty is created not by man alone but only by God-in-man. When man denies there is a God, begins to see himself as the center of the universe, beauty dies. His ability to imagine beauty and therefore create beauty with his mind (and subsequently his hands) eventually vanishes altogether.

 

The good news is, if a person is still able to appreciate beauty then he may still have the power to create it. My question is, why doesn’t he?

 

That poor jerk on HGTV doesn’t even know what he likes. He has never developed a mind of his own, never fully.

 

Our materialism craves personal physical comfort above all things. Beauty, on the other hand, requires sacrifice to achieve. It’s hard work.

 

The reason I link all this to the changes in the housing market is this: Now, at last, even I can afford to buy a home. I’ll pay cash, too – good Yankee dollar. When I do, it will be a home from which I fully expect to be carried feet first. I’m not going to sell it to you, for any price. Chances are, you won’t like it anyway because I will create in my house a picture of what the world looks like to me – or should look. I can guarantee that will be extremely individual, and possibly challenging, without any regard at all for resale value.

 

Then – many years from now (I hope), I will die, and pass it on to my children.

 

And they will say, “How on earth are we gonna sell this ugly thing?”

  

The people I never talk to in my on-line Nick Cave fan group don’t care for his new album (with The Bad Seeds), “Dig, Lazarus, Dig.” Well, putting aside the pretentious title, I’ve only heard two songs, the title cut and one other. Who can tell why he has drifted so far from inspiration? But, with such a body of work behind him which can be appreciated time and again for its genius, who cares?

 

Genius is a terribly overused word, like brilliant. Bloody brilliant, right? But when something shines brightly there is no better word, and when art approaches genius one may safely say so, and accurately.

 

 

What are we talking about here? Pop music. Let’s keep it in perspective.

 

By the way, in college I was taught that people of faith are weak-minded. That was the subtextual premise into which was inserted whatever the subject happened to be. And, lest you are tempted to believe that this development is a quite recent one, my college years were 1979-1983. Yes of course I’m looking forward to seeing Ben Stein’s movie, which opens tomorrow in theaters one hundred miles (at least) away from anyplace near me. I’m sure it will be called propaganda, just as “An Inconvenient Truth” is not. But who are you gonna believe – weak minded folks like Thomas Aquinas?

 

In the academic world the history of Philosophy usually skips from Aristotle to Descartes. Try asking what comes in-between. Shocked silence will follow, but within your professor’s myopic little mind he will say to himself, “Hm, I’d better keep an eye on this one.”

 

Myopia is a land mass just south of Bigotry in the Elitist Sea. It is where political correctness is grown and harvested for export. A very good example – though off topic except as a very good example – is the word “homophobia.” A phobia is a mental illness, as you know, an intense, unreasonable fear of something caused perhaps by trauma or maybe bad potty training. When “homophobia” is applied to anybody who is opposed to the normalization of homosexual behavior what it suggests is that such people are mentally ill. So, it follows that Pope Benedict is mentally ill. He suffers from a phobia. This is a myopic view.

 

Here, by the way, is a car chase.

 

 

What the term "homophobia" is saying is this: If you disagree with us it must be because you are mentally ill. No, I’m not going to stoop so low as to debate it with you.

 

Recent furor (though limited to rational pockets of civilization) over Sen. Obama’s demonstration of myopia has re-introduced the word into our vocabulary. I like it when that happens. No one seems to bother reading “It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power” in the Reader’s Digest anymore, so if a presidential candidate becomes a catalyst for such enrichment it can’t be bad.

 

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or even a college graduate) to infer from his recent statements at a San Francisco fundraiser that he holds the myopic view of people of faith as weak-minded, even driven by bitterness caused by economic hardship to cling to such superstitious rubbish as religion. And one can hardly blame them, being but simple people who are powerless over the vast Hegelian socio-economic forces that actually determine everybody’s destiny and personal behavior. What’s interesting to me about it is that it surprises anyone. This is precisely what he has been taught. It is a view shared not only by his likely audience at that fundraiser but by the lion’s share of those in the American academic community. Whether or not it is also shared by a sufficient number of the Electorate is a question which will be answered in November.

 

Heck, it’s what I was taught. It took a team of highly skilled angelic brain surgeons to extract that mass of deliberate obtuseness from this piece of wood between my ears that I refer to as my brain, allowing me to use those parts of it which indoctrinated ignorance had effectively cut off. The tumor may be too large in the senator’s case. I picture Robert Young as Marcus Welby M.D. pronouncing it “inoperable” in that gentle, fatherly way of his.

You know I stay away from politics on these pages. What that means is I don’t make endorsements or campaign for anybody in particular. But the great thing about political news is… well, first of all it actually is news, but more importantly, it provides food for thought, or fodder for blog cannons, or opportunities to enlarge one’s vocabulary – take your pick.

 

As for news in general, if you’ve been reading for any length of time you know that I don’t believe crime stories are newsworthy. Cain slew Abel, and in that single blow slaughtered one quarter of the world’s population, a record of mass murder that has not since been matched. Crime news is an unbelievably sick form of pornographic entertainment. I find “celebrity” news infinitely more palatable. Irrelevant, but basically innocent. The weather? - Give me a break. Sports? Well, sure – if your idea of fun is watching grown men in pajamas chasing their balls around more power to you. It’s an avenue of interest I haven’t tried. I’m told I’m missing out. That may be.

 

But political news is actual news. It’s relevant. It’s also entertaining. I hope my blog is relevant and also entertaining because if it’s not entertaining you won’t give a monkey’s butt how relevant it may or may not be. You won’t read it.

 

And, in the service of that end, as promised, I have included a car chase and a sex scene. I was thinking I might throw in a strip club pole dancing scene as well, but I think that’s passé, don’t you?

Tap tap tappity-tap tap tap.

 

What’s that? Why, that’s the sound of Mom’s old Olivetti typewriter which I commandeered at the age of 13 or so to write a novel about… God knows.

 

Tap tap tappity-tap tap tap.

 

Try to imagine it magnified by one hundred – a hundred secretaries in an office typing pool churning out various documents at 80 to 120 WPM. It’s a wonder they didn’t all go deaf.

 

A John Cale song, Dirty Ass Rock n’Roll: “Secretaries and typewriters chatter away, chat-chat-chat-chat-chatter away/ Aw, don’t it make you sick when you hear a woman cry?/ She gonna get just whatever she wants.”

 

When Mom went back to work in the late 1980’s she remarked that no one knew how to type anymore.

 

Damn kids just wanna twist…

 

What makes me think of this? The Courier typeface I use for Old-Time Radio posts.

 

Tap tap tappity-tap tap tap.

 

OK, I’m done now. Back to Garamond – which Blogstream doesn’t really recognize as such.

 

Yes, it does make me sick when I hear a woman cry, s’matter of fact. It’s a sound I rarely hear anymore, like the sound of old typewriters. When a woman cries I find that I have to fix it – whatever it is. It’s like a faucet dripping. It’s like a picture on a wall which is crooked. It may not be my fault, but I’ll be damned if she cries on my watch.

 

Here I am again, a pothole in the Information Superhighway.

 

Yesterday I was accused of being iconoclast. (ic?) My story being told – how I grew up in the 1940’s (only twenty years later), and then discovered the world resembled my expectations but little when I finally got out to run around in it – I was regaling my audience with a description of my first actual date with a girl. It was in college. She wanted to perform sexual intercourse with me. We had been acquainted for all of six hours. I ran far. I ran fast.

 

“How can you be a pre-Sexual Revolution person at your age?”

 

Mom again: If everybody you know jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge would you do it too?

 

A customer of mine recently asked me, “How can a person be a Catholic in this world?” I answered, “A person can’t. Or – at least, I can’t. You have to unplug from the world. You have to create your own better world.”

 

Among the many other things The White Lodge pretends to be, it is a place where worlds collide. Well, I’m always talking about Elizabeth. And she is my only three-dimensional connector to the world I rejected. And yes, I’m a little smitten with her. But the cultural differences between us are absolute and irreconcilable. I would go so far as to say that the same may be said for many, many others.

 

I have a notion, a foggy notion…

 

The Velvet Underground: “Oh I got a foggy notion/ Do it again/ I got my calamine lotion, baby/ Do it again/ Oh, I got a foggy notion/ Do it again…”

 

Well, I have a foggy notion that the invisible membrane which used to prevent me from moving freely between dimensions is actually made of ignorance, the ignorance which is taught in schools and on televisions as “Science,” (while real scientists, who never stoop so low to appear on TV, are discovering the world is made of thoughts). We literally create our own worlds. It doesn’t just happen in a figurative or poetic sense. Ideas, emotions and attitudes create circumstances.

 

Does this happen exclusively, without affecting others in our immediate surrounding – without affecting the rest of the world? No. We are a family. It is as a family, as a brother is to his sister, and uncle to his beloved niece, father to son/daughter, Mother to all, that we are to each other – every one of us, if we but knew it. The family is the divine model – or prototype, if you will – ideal for all human relationships. Our understanding of God, of the Heavenly world, is that it is organized as a family is organized.

 

It is the reality which casts the shadow we inhabit, if you don’t mind me getting Platonic for a moment.

 

But Abraham was told to leave the world he knew to create a new one, and all of that history which follows, concerning itself with bloodlines, is telling us – among the many other things it is telling us – that we are masters of our destiny.

 

(Some will break this down to its particular level, such as my Pentecostal friends who tell me I never get sick because…, but there is more, much more to it than skating through a charmed life blessed by health. Even witches know how to do that, so what is the difference between that sort of Christian and a witch? There is none in substance. They are self-centered and self-fulfilled.)

 

I know that if I am to create my own world to the exclusion of all others then that world of mine is all that I may expect in the hereafter. I can tell you it’s a lonely place.

 

That’s why the family is the model, the reason we are called brothers and sisters, children of God. You stick by your family. When a member falls behind you help him. When your son loses his job you pay his mortgage until he can get back on his feet. This behavior is known as sacrifice, and sacrifice, when it is made in offering, given in love, is the single most powerful force in the universe. It changes suffering into joy.

 

Changing particles of matter from one form to another form is as easy as sliding into an old shoe. We do it all the time. We do it with our thoughts because matter is made of thoughts. But, changing the whole world – not only for ourselves but also for as many others as we can, even if, like Moses, we can lead them to the place we can’t ourselves enter – is really the whole point of having been given this extreme God-like power.

 

The imitation of Christ, rather than merely riding on the coattails of Christ, is at the heart of the matter. It puts to shame all lesser acts of compassion. It defines the ideal sense of that very word: com-passion, to share in the Passion, to participate not only in reaping the rewards (as we sit on our fat, satisfied asses), but to do the same as Christ did, follow the same example, or as Moses did, lead as many who will follow out of the desert into the better world.

 

In a sense, I grew up in a promised land. My father often tells me he may have done me a disservice by not preparing me for the world not as it used to be but as it actually was. I say Rubbish! – what else could he possibly have done than to bring me up in the way he knew to be the right way, the wrong world be damned? What on earth was he to say?

 

“Now, son: everything I have taught you is the truth has been changed, and it is no longer true.”

 

There would be nothing but confusion arising from such a statement, and that is precisely why there are so many people confused. That statement sums up the general philosophy of the world I left when I decided to travel here to my better one.

 

So those were my thoughts this morning, spanning several rather wide chasms with the help of a little music. I have Kashmir playing in my song widget here, I think. You know, music is the avenue along which most of us traverse the gaps between dimensions. We don’t know that’s what we’re doing but that’s it in a nutshell. (Or, nutcase when it comes to yours truly).

 

My next post will offer a sex scene and a car chase.

  

Oh he does, does he? And getting him out of the concrete gives us this week's story.

Here they are with a CBS mic between them. This is a publicity shot from their appearance on Suspense!

 

Wallace Wimple is voiced by Bill Thompson who also does the Old Timer, Nick Depopulis, and Horatio K. Boomer. You may recognize the old Hanna Barbera cartoon character Droopy Dog in Wimple's voice, and there's a reason for that: they are the same voice. We'll be hearing more from the (we must assume) diminutive Mr. Wimple and his "big old wife" who isn't yet given a name but will be quite soon in fortcoming episodes. The name of Wallace Wimple's "big old wife?"

Sweetieface. What else could it be? 

OK I’m beginning to get tired of the same three Gentle Giant songs, so it’s time for a little Suspense! I haven’t heard it yet & hope it’s an improvement over last week’s. I can tell you this week’s FM&M is real hoot, though.

I worked hard for the money

 

So hard for it, honey.

 

I did it all for the nookie – no, that’s a different song.

 

Normally I don’t work Sundays. Well, it was more of a home improvement project, just not at my home. Found a chimney that started nowhere and ended nowhere. Those of you who have worked on older homes know what I mean. When people in 1840-something needed to put a chimney in they (hopefully) found a supporting beam on whatever floor and just started piling brick. Later on, a hundred years or so later on, someone else would cut it off at the roofline. By that time it hadn’t been used as a chimney in 50 of those years. When you start tearing out walls you find things like that.

 

I’m still holding out for the skeleton grasping the briefcase full of cash. Or – skip the skeleton (though it’s less interesting) and just show me the cash. Gold is also good.

 

Around here we still have the occasional mattress millionaire. A farmer sells his herd and buries the windfall. It happens all the time, or it used to. When I lived in the house I affectionately call “The Little Dump on the Prairie” I heard something of its history. It was the hired help’s residence and its last owner had one of the largest farms in the valley. His own place was up the hill a ways.

 

Well it was an 1830’s house. It used to have rather large windows but a fire gutted it some time in the 1970’s, especially the second floor. So – being one of these geezers who spares no expense – the owner just sealed off the upstairs entirely, laid some roll insulation over the first floor, and covered over most of the house’s more distinctive features with metal siding – just on the two sides visible from the road, mind you. He put metal over the original wood roof, charred bits and all. Three of the rooms were fitted with trailer-sized windows by the time I lived there, one of them decorated with the ubiquitous “Tot Finder” decal.

 

Anyhoo, this fellow was a mattress millionaire. The farmer from up the road told me he was down having some coffee with him one day and decided to stick his cup in the nuker to warm it up. Inside the microwave was a paper lunch bag containing $87,000 in cash. Apparently, he had it squirreled all over the house.

 

When he died he left it all to his housekeeper, and a cagier old bird you won’t ever meet. Did she go through that place with the proverbial fine toothed? You bet’cha.

 

But that was another house with a nowhere chimney. It was a big one, too – not just a flu for a woodstove but a fireplace and hearth – the whole deal. It was behind a wall in one of the second floor rooms, resting on a couple of rough 2 by 6’s nailed together which were hung between the load bearing corner beams. A decent lentil, in any case. I wasn’t worried it was going to fall on me or anything.

 

Upstairs at “The Little Dump on the Prairie” was a treat. Everything was still intact: the charred and peeling wallpaper, the black bare light bulbs hanging from blackened wires, the roof joists where the ceiling had fallen in – you could stick your finger half an inch into them through the burned bit before hitting solid wood.

 

An earlier tenant had left a box of “In the Wind” motorcycle magazines featuring lots of pictures of topless women on Harleys. Woo-hoo! What fun.

 

But – and this is the big but – if I didn’t find any skeletal remains grasping a briefcase full of money up there the chances are I’ll never find such a thing.

 

I remember we (ex-Mrs. and I) were looking at the place, talking to the owner – the housekeeper who inherited all, that would be – and she talked a lot about people she called “The Element.” She’d say, “The people in this valley are pretty good, but of course there’s The Element.”

 

“Are you The Element?”

 

My wife and I just looked at each other. “Who, us? No, we’re not The Element.”

 

She and I lived there for two years, and after she left I stayed on another three years alone. (Well, it was as good a place to drink as any.) And, it didn’t take too long to realize The Element was anybody who held out some hope that the housekeeper didn’t find all of that squirreled-away money. But, to just look at the lady – oh yeah, she got it all, no question. Those buggy little eyes of hers could spot a quarter on the ground in the next valley.

 

Now that place was positively overrun with myphets, but that’s a story for another time.

 

Tonight's Suspense! episode is called "The Bride Vanishes." Well golly, she really did. Two years with me at "The Little Dump on the Prairie" was apparently not for the faint of heart.