Nothing comes to mind except an unimaginative musing about Daylight Savings Time this morning. I still get it backwards. I think that when a person dies while standing he naturally falls forward because of a body’s center of gravity, assuming there is no force compelling death which affects it otherwise, and when one sees a snake his natural reaction is to spring back, so when it comes to resetting our time pieces for Daylight Savings Time it really ought to be “Fall forward, Spring back.” The opposite is true, of course, but the imagery is more violent, and I abhor violence.

 

Now is not yet the time to be thinking of resetting watches and clocks, but it sprang forward into my mind – or fell back – because of this morning’s peaceful, blessed darkness. It seems a shame to shatter it. (Ooh – there’s a tough sentence to say out loud). I wonder if the original purpose of establishing the bizarre annual time jump is still valid? Why on earth, if it is not, do we continue to follow the tradition?

 

I am also reminded that Time is our invention. We are free to call it whatever hour of the clock we please, so long as a sufficient number of us are agreed that it should be that hour. Where I live it wasn’t so long ago that every little town had its own Time. There was often disagreement between North Littletown and South Littletown about what time it was. They could disagree with one another by as much as thirty minutes one way or another. Perhaps East Littletown would split the difference. But each little town had its own clock by which all other timepieces were set. Those citizens prosperous enough to possess a watch – usually the mayor, town trustees, and the local movers and shakers – would insist that their clock was more accurate than the clocks in the neighboring towns. Everybody else just squinted at the sun.

 

What time is it really? Well, it must be suppertime because I’m hungry.

 

This relative notion of Time continued to hold sway in my neck of the woods right through the Civil War. What changed it? Train schedules changed it. For years after the railroad replaced the canal, and horse and road, as the main form of transportation these towns – some of them – continued to stubbornly insist on the rightness of their own Time. It was not unusual to arrive somewhere earlier than it was when you left somewhere else. This looked awfully darn silly on a printed train schedule. Eventually, inevitably, the company which owned the railroad became the Master of Time. The railroads necessitated standardization of the clock.

 

Gee whiz, thanks Mr. Squabbler. Now I will inspect your fingernails for cleanliness.

 

What have we learned? Well, on the surface we learned something about the role that railroads played in frontier life, and we can travel from there into a boring treatise on economics and transportation, and yada yada blah blah. Is that where I’m going to go with this? No. This ain’t school – it’s The White Lodge. All my trains leave their tracks.

 

Time doesn’t really exist in Nature. What exists is Change. Things Fall Apart. It’s downright scientific. It’s also downright Biblical. The science of metaphysics has often been described as where those two things meet. As a matter of fact, the meta preceded the physics – historically-speaking, Natural Science as we know it having sprung (forward?) out of the study of Hellenic philosophy by the Medieval Church. Science is no more or less than a method of approaching logically the reality of change by asking a number of questions – always the same questions in always the same way – about all that is observable in Nature. In other words, we already knew Things Fall Apart; the Scientific Method is our effort to figure out precisely how Things Fall Apart. Knowing how enables us to demonstrate over Matter with ever increasing efficacy. That’s why Abraham didn’t build a computer or a rocket ship even though his mind was at least as large as ours and just as capable as ours of doing so. He didn’t have The Method.

 

Shhh – don’t tell anybody. It’s our secret. But everything in the Book of Genesis is True. The Nature of the world is (=) Change. Nature = Change. That’s why we are able to make things with our thoughts not just like God, but in the image and likeness of God. We are God-like insofar as we are able to create.

 

What is a city? A city is a pile of rocks. What are rocks? Well, rocks are made of Matter; rocks fall apart; rocks are without substance in the metaphysical sense. The only thing that can break the rock into a zillion molecules, mix it somehow with water, and come up with a pasty sophistication of particles with which to build a skyscraper is… well, us. A fish cannot do this thing. A dog cannot do this thing. This is an amazing thing that we do. It is God-like.

 

What is the city made out of? The city is made out of Thoughts – literally. Without the Thought the Matter would not have been shaped into the form of a city. And everything else that would not seem to exist without human dominion over Matter – like cars and railroad trains, clocks, and rocket ships, this computer – is also made out of Thought. The great advent of the Scientific Method allowed us to more efficiently demonstrate dominion over Matter.

 

Hey – count me in on that deal. I’m in favor of it.

 

The greatest fear people have is fear of the end of Time. It could be the end of their own worldly time that they (we) fear – that’s death – or, it could also be the end of all Time that we fear. This has been true since the beginning of Time. We see it today. In every epoch, in every age, every century, the world is threatened perpetually by complete destruction. But we know that the world is not substance; it is made to fall apart. It was designed that way. Our bodies are made of stuff, of Matter, of molecules, atoms – all that. Our bodies die. Things Fall Apart. But – here’s the big but (so what?) – the only reason we can shape, mold, and mutilate Matter with our thoughts is that we do have substance. The world isn’t real. But we are. Our bodies are of the world. But we are not.

 

Now, I happen to think the world ends and is recreated every moment. I happen to think that Genesis doesn’t occur in a fixed point in an imaginary Time, nor does Revelation, but that Genesis and Revelation are perpetually and eternally occurring. I may be wrong. So what? It’s an interesting destination to arrive at, a scenic train station in a town full of natural wonders. My friend The Lady would call this a ‘mind freak.’ But it’s not rocket science. It’s much less complicated than that.

 

Oh – and I see that it is now five minutes earlier than it was when I left. That’s weird. I wish I had the time to write more.

This appeared in my E-mail yesterday. I subscribe to a group - bulletin board sort of thing - devoted to my favorite songwriter, Nick Cave. Why is he my favorite? Why not Ira Gershwin, Leonard Cohen, Carole King? I don't know really. We seem to think alike - you know, more so than any other. I relate, identify - whatever. The songs I write are more like Cohen's if you want to know the truth of it. Cave is a fan of Cohen's. I don't know if that's reciprocated. But - for whatever reason - Nick Cave says what I would sometimes like to say, and sometimes the exact opposite, and he's an original thinker who comes at the world from a perspective which is entirely his own. I assume he can't share the way he sees things with anybody - or, at least not entirely - except to some extent through his music. Perhaps that is what I relate to.

In my song widget there is likely to be at least one song by Nick Cave at any given time. Curently, Johnny Cash is singing "The Mercy Seat," which is a Nick Cave song. "Friendcatcher," a song from NC's old band The Birthday Party, may still be in there. I think I have a song by his new band Grinderman in there right now as well - "Honeybee, Let's Fly to Mars." I'm always changing them, but previously I've had "The Carny," "Thirsty Dog," others.

Anyhoooo, here's the item as I got it. Oh - rock journalism is utter rubbish. Journalism in general is rubbish. But apparently he's receiving an award. That's good. Success and recognition. It's all good.

From heroin to hero as Cave enters hall of fame

Mix of the deranged and the humorous.

Nick Cave is finally to be honoured by the Australian music industry.

Bernard Zuel October 18, 2007

"Nick Cave began his recording career almost 30 years ago - not so much by knocking at the door of music industry respectability as lobbing hand grenades over that door then dancing on the corpses. With his band the Birthday Party he spent much of the 1980s making a raucous blend of blues and industrial punk, which seemingly chased down the hounds of hell with a mix of the deranged and the humorous. "Hands up who wants to die," he sang once. "Release the bats/sex vampire/bite, " he said in another song. The fuel for his music then was equal parts the Bible, the southern gothic novels of Flannery O'Connor, the music of Johnny Cash, and heroin.

"Not surprisingly, the mainstream music industry in Australia wanted nothing to do with him, his fame coming in London and Berlin. Cave's music with his next band, the Bad Seeds, calmed down and over 13 albums it explored the territory of political ballads and love songs. It dabbled with the charts via a murder ballad duet with Kylie Minogue, was included in the soundtrack to the children's movie Shrek 2 and performed at the funeral of Michael Hutchence.

"But the Australian music industry still couldn't bring itself to give him an ARIA award. Next week, however, that same industry will honour Nicholas Edward Cave, once of Warracknabeal and Wangaratta and now of Brighton and Hove, by inducting him into the ARIA Hall of Fame at the ARIA Awards on October 28. He will take his place alongside such unlikely companions as Slim Dusty, John Farnham, Renee Geyer and Angry Anderson.

"Cave, who turned 50 last month and is now widely seen as one of this country's finest songwriters, is also a novelist (And the Ass Saw the Angel), screenwriter (The Proposition and Ghosts … of the Civil Dead), a religious commentator (the foreword to The Gospel According to St Mark) and soundtrack composer (The Proposition, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).

"Although there have been no ARIA awards, it's well known that the ARIA board has been offering Cave his spot in the hall of fame for five or six years, but he had always declined. What changed his mind? Maybe turning 50; maybe the thought of something to show his four sons; or maybe enjoying the perversity of being lauded by some of those who had spent so many years being horrified or disgusted by Nick Cave. Nick Cave and his band Grinderman play at the Enmore Theatre on Saturday and Sunday."

ME: I added Cave performing "The Ship Song" to the comments page. This was "our song" - you know, the way people in love will have their songs. Well, I know a gal - been trying to teach her how to drive - who told me this was "her song," "their song," whatever - hers and her now ex-husband's. I said, "Why'd you take our song without even asking?" She said, "No, it's you who took our song." And so it went. It was one of the most stupid conversations that I have ever participated in, and I guess that's why I just have to share it with you.

How strange it is to open a computer program – in this case MSWord – and see the words “this product licensed to John” appear in the title box as it is opening. It makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I’ve lived on the fringes without being acknowledged by machines, a creature of aliases with nothing but a wad of cash and my smile to introduce me. Since my divorce I have been like that. When I am asked for my social security number I am struck by a sudden smack of fear and rage. It subsides, but I may remain indignant for a moment more. Having a drivers license that accurately portrays me – somewhere, I’m not sure where I put it – feels like being violated. The Board of Elections send me postcards, and my initial, or knee-jerk response, is to say, “I’d better move. They know where I am!”

 

Then I remember. All is well.

 

The popular view, it seems, is now the opposite of what it was when I was a teenager. We – my friends and I – would watch re-runs of “The Prisoner” with Patrick McGoohan  shouting, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” and that was to us such an ordinary expectation – that we should now be human beings. The Science Fiction books we read depicted quite often a nightmare scenario in which humanity had diminished to such a point… to such a point that it resembles the world today.

 

It was in the mainstream of ideas – or so I once believed – that the greatest enemy of humanity, and of our humanness, was bureaucracy. Our favorite books were “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “The Castle” by Franz Kafka, George Orwell’s “1984” - to a point. It was taught in school as part of the curriculum, and we naturally rebelled against anything our teachers actually wanted us to read, but we had to admit that they were onto something – even grown-ups could occasionally demonstrate some intelligence. These books were like Bibles.

 

We – that is, our generation – would at last defeat the great, bloated mothership of government bureaucracy which hovered blindly, dumbly, like a monstrous mutation with eyes and mouth sewn shut, held aloft by her own flatulence, with a million tits giving milk to a million blind, dumb people down here on the ground. We would be the ones to bring that stinking whore down. And when she sent out her soldiers we would fight them, and we would win.

 

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why I am left now with nothing but a knee jerk reaction, a visceral contempt, a feeling as one might have being the last human being screaming as the credits roll in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” I observe how politely we stand in line, how willing we are to sign on dotted ones, and how we pray to the bloated whore for a solution to every one of life’s difficulties – for the sake of security, health (as though we would live forever), safety…

 

Safety? What the hell?

 

I suppose it is a type of freedom – freedom from responsibility, freedom from the burden of independent thinking, freedom from the mental fight. And I know a poet who wrote “I shall not cease from mental fight,” and I know to that great generation to whom we owe our very lives this line was sung as a battle hymn when they defeated – though it turns out only for a little while – those same forces of darkness those books had prophesied. What were the Nazi’s, after all? Some historians put them on the so-called “right,” with Stalin’s Communists on the so-called “left,” but this - of course - is a lie. The Left/Right paradigm is a construction of the darkness; each so-called extreme is the same monstrous system devised to annihilate individuality – humanness. Both are exactly the same in principle and practice. Both are the creations of Satan. J.R.R. Tolkien devoted the larger share of his writer’s life to exposing the nature of the only real threat to human civilization, which comes in so many distracting disguises.

 

What is it? It is Fear itself – generally speaking. It is an abdication of the Godhead. People who don’t believe in God will believe, as you know, in anything. It is no wonder they shout to the bloated mothership with her million nipples “Please feed us, help us, protect us; take away our names and give us numbers, sing us your televised lullaby so we may sleep – Soma… Soma… Prozac – whatever. I’m all Advil. Are you all Advil?...” Lord – if Winston Churchill came back to life today he would never stop throwing up.

 

When I was a teenager I believed we were steadily progressing to a point at which the so-called “necessary evils” of bureaucracy could at last be eliminated – the numbers, the theft of wealth in the form of taxation (without representation), the antiquated laws of a pre-enlightenment period. All of this seemed to be going away, piece by evil piece. No one trusted the government to function; it had become a monumental joke, and therefore inconsequential. A new Constitutional Convention would soon be convened to reassert the principles of its founding. This was sure to happen because the people were saying “Power to the People!” They wanted freedom.

 

Today freedom is the last thing they want, and “Give me liberty or give me death” is a subversive statement, and a quaint one. People hear that and roll their eyes, and say, “Well, sure – I guess. Where’s my free drugs?” – like anything is free? Nothing is free. What they are really saying is “Where’s my stolen drugs? Where’s my stolen health? Where’s my stolen wealth, my stolen safety, my stolen security? I don’t feel like being a human being today. I feel like sucking on this big, ugly tit with my eyes sewn shut.”

 

What I actually wanted to write about this morning was my dream of being showered in shit from a ‘flock’ of passing vultures. Isn’t that interesting? I was wearing a suit, to make matters even worse, and I was supposed to be chairing a large meeting of some sort in a moment – a task which I had grudgingly accepted the way one sometimes must. But as I was approaching the door to the place – it was in a sun-lit quadrangle of some sort with one very nice building and all the others some Kafkaesque state maximum security university affair – the vultures flew over head and just let go of their bowels all at once. It happened to several of us. A few others were under cover of an awning, ordering a latte. I thought, if only that Starbucks coffee wasn’t shit in a cup I’d be over there under shelter when it fell from the sky.

 

Ah – my own discriminating taste proved to be my undoing.

  

 

It is very amusing to me that the advertisements at the top of my page include one for a service offering mail order brides. Ouch.

 

I knew several men who availed themselves of such services. One of them was an automobile dealer who tipped the scales at about 300 pounds. He had a nice house. His wife was about the size of The White Tornado. She hailed from South America, and I think might have preferred to take her chances with the death squads back home than hang about too much longer with that poor fellow.

 

The other was also girthy, though it was difficult to tell. I don’t believe I ever saw him standing. He was a balding 43 year-old man who worked as a typesetter on an old Compugraphic typesetting machine – big massive thing – the machine, that is. I had the impression he was somehow attached to it. He wore Coke bottle glasses which gave him the appearance that the windows to his soul were being studied by NASA for a possible mission. Occasionally young women with black nail polish and crazy hair would be hired to operate the machine next to his. Invariably they would fight over the radio. He enjoyed “Classic Rock,” as it was called; the girls did not. Once, I overheard him asking one of these young co-workers, “OK, who’s your favorite band?”

 

“UB40,” she replied. (She might have been chewing gum.)

 

“No!” he shouted, “You’re wrong… I be 43!”

 

Oh, he was a riot. No, really he was quite funny and warm. He had my father’s sense of humor – more like to inspire eye rolling than belly laughs. He often told us his young wife was a mail order bride. Perhaps he didn’t actually have one. Someone would call for him, though, and he spoke Spanish to her on the phone.

 

There was a fellow who worked in the press room, about seven feet tall I’d say, straight from Haiti by way of Farmer’s Blvd. He was alarming to look at, but not unpleasant. Rather like The Squabbler, come to think of it. I think he had two teeth left in his head, and like a lot of extremely tall fellows he walked with a limp as though his bones didn't quite fit together properly. And he didn’t speak a word of English. That is, he spoke English words in such a way that they were no longer English. And well, that’s no problem as I speak French – or used to – and a smattering of Creole, (which is by definition a smattering). My assistant, who was also a Haitian, was quite fluent in several languages. Between us we could usually figure out what the fellow was trying to say, but my assistant explained to me that the big guy didn’t really speak any language at all. Even his Creole was a creole.

 

But he was a witch doctor of some sort. He was over 2,000 years old. That’s what the other Haitian guys said about him. Yes, well…

 

One day there was a rumpus of some sort in that press room, by the sound of it involving women. Having women in the pressroom was very unusual, by the way. My boys’ mother would go in there from time to time – (she was a production manager at the place) – and the guys would all sort of bow at the waist. Well, they enjoyed taking care of our son when he was just a baby in a detachable car seat. They would place him on top of the counto-veyor, a machine at the end of the gigantic press which folded the printed newspapers and jogged them together into counted piles. The fellows would work there taking the bundles of newspapers off and tying them and then throwing them wherever they needed to go. (I did that when I started in the business. It’s exhausting.) Apparently, my son enjoyed the jack-hammer-like vibrations and horrendous noise of the press.

 

Where was I? Rumpus – Yes, there was a rumpus in the pressroom, involving women. I went in to investigate, (that being my job – or part of it), and found two of the most extraordinarily beautiful young women I’d seen all week practically tearing each other’s hair out in a fight over a man. The man was… you guessed it.

 

My assistant was at my side explaining it to me. Eventually, the girls were separated and persuaded to leave. After they did I said, “He really is a witch doctor, isn’t he?”

 

My assistant said, “He doesn’t fancy either of them. Too skinny.”

 

“Too skinny?” I said, “Aw hell – let’s go get a Guinness.”

 

“I’m already there, Blanc. A nice foamy one.”

 

I liked my assistant. I liked him quite a lot. I liked him better than my wife. He never nagged me about my drinking.

 

“Women are a pain in the ass,” he might have said.

 

“Yes – in any language,” I might have answered.