I wrote “April Fools” [http://rebelyogi.com/april-fools.html] a week ago and haven’t written since. Well, that is not exactly true. I have written; I just haven’t posted. While I may at times behave foolishly, I am no fool. And while on occasion I may encounter sadness or regret, I am not lamenting posting “April Fools”; I just thought the word “lament” sounded dramatic for the title of this piece.
As similar to the resulting response from my piece “The Suicide Note” [http://rebelyogi.com/the-suicide-note], I received a mere single email from my readership voicing “concern” over “April Fools.” While the girl who authored this email voicing concern doesn’t really “get” me, thinking I am solely writing self-confessionary pieces in order to purge my psyche of a darkness that would otherwise consume everything in its path, like the Cookie Monster in a Chip’s Ahoy factory after being forced on a 3-week fast by some annoying, save-the-world raw foodist, “Detox Counselor,” she not only finds me amusing but does seem to care about me as well. And so we had a few back and forth emails where I explained the method behind the madness, which she didn’t understand, and I did my best not to call her an idiot.
Just like how my former client, who is a therapist, responded to “The Suicide Note”—weeks later and only after we got together with a mutual acquaintance for a nightmarish dinner whose horror was not the food but the company—she questioned parts of the piece as “sounding authentic.” I confessed: I do hate blacks and woman and Jews and gays. But while there are elements of truth contained in the piece, I also have the ability to separate myself from the emotional content of anything I write and even “…play with desires, anger, with disturbances” as I threw you as a hint in the quote from Osho at the end of the piece.
One element of truth is that I do pour out my creative energy in the form of clever comedy as well as wizened wisdom and while I would write with or without the invisible phantom readers “just perhaps” somewhere out there laughing or getting offended, reflecting deeply or writing angry words about me on the walls of truck stop bathrooms. [And for the record, “SWAMI X TAKES IT IN THE ASS” is such a well-known fact that I don’t think anyone along Route 80 who pit stops at the Kingston Bus & Truck Mosey and has not only the bad sense to enter the disgusting bathroom there but also has a complete lack of olfaction to remain in there long enough to read the wall posting about me without gagging from the fumes of piss and shit and vomit, will really be edified on anything new; I had hung up my “OPEN FOR BUSINESS” ass shingle long ago.]
But what would be nice—besides going through the typical NYC cop handling procedure of having either a baton or a walkie-talkie shoved up my ass—would be to receive back from my readers how my writing has touched them, whether it be a “good touch” or a “bad touch.” [http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/152475]. It’s kind of a variation on the old, “If a tree falls in a forest and crushes a Boy Scout Leader who was molestering a young scout, do you call the police or just bury the body?” situation.
I think this is something that is universal among humans, either consciously known or unconsciously desired—that we’d all like to molester a young Boy Scout in the woods but are afraid of the possibility of being crushed by a falling tree. In addition to the Boy Scout fantasy involving that cute little bastard with his red bandana softly framing his delicate neck and his succulent mouth whose lips are wrapped around his canteen as he sucks down the liquid it contains, we all tend to share certain “needs” in the human experience, one of which is acknowledgement.
The founder of Non-Violent Communication (NVC), Norman Rosenberg, helps provide a list of needs in his teachings that we all share. Besides a handful of breatharians, we all have a need for food and water. We also have a need for shelter. More social/emotional needs can include a need for respect, understanding, autonomy and for someone to tickle your balls with a feather while they shove a baby pacifier in your mouth and say, “Who’s my little baby?”
I remember way back when, I had taken a 10-week screenwriting workshop with Thai Tish. At the end of the workshop, we each had written a screenplay, mine being about a conspiracy theory involving jerking-off and butt play and hers being about something gay like an outdoor Tupperware party in a meadow with yellow flowers. I ended up having a reading with actors of my screenplay and I remember my perplexity that Thai Tish seemed perfectly satisfied with her screenplay sitting on a shelf where no one would ever see it.
I reflected on this. How could one create and not feel the “need” to share it with others, to hear how it affected them, to make enough money from it so you could still afford the bi-weekly in-house prostitute without having to forego a week’s worth of meals for your dog? I then postulated that maybe she had a much more enlightening perspective than I had, that maybe the “higher” expression is to just create and then to let it go, like the Tibetans who make those elaborate sand mandalas only to immediately destroy them upon their completion, that the joy and satisfaction is in the creative process itself. I concluded that she was a moron, stole her screenplay and sold it to a small film house for $100,000 under the title of “A Meadow of Tupperware.”
While I use humor because I enjoy playing with it, I also use it to make light of the pussing sores of vulnerability that I share in my writing. Like in any relationship, if one person is always going down on the other, after awhile they start to feel ripped off if the other person doesn’t give them some “down time” as well. This is also like a relationship where one person wants to share how they’re “feeling” about a certain issue and the other person has the attitude of “Can we just move on!” While the little whiney “feeler” may be irritating, the “move on” partner is essentially saying, “Your feelings are so irrelevant to me that I don’t even want to acknowledge them.”
Perhaps I am a whiney “feeler.” Maybe I just want a blowjob. But besides just being an April Fools’ joke, I also wanted to throw in a little teaching lesson. So often we “think” we are solid in something that we “know” to be the true, be it a belief system or a friendship, and find ourselves suddenly challenged when we either acquire some new information that challenges the very system in which we are invested. This can include a religion, a diet, or even how we view another person. And the new information almost inevitably results in anger, as you fight with a death grip to hold your sense of self together which is suddenly slipping by the addition of a carefully placed squirt of Astroglide. I would suggest our belief system or friendship is built on sand if a single doubt or event could bring it crashing down.
I always thought that most of the Bible was a collection of fairy tales propagated by fairies with devil’s tails who wear dresses, live in the Vatican and molest small boys while the Pope covers up their hellish deeds. I remember reading about the nephilim in the Book of Genesis, right after the discussion about Phil Collins’ receding hairline. The nephilim were supposedly giants back in Biblical times. It wasn’t until I saw a speaker talk about giant 35-foot skeletons that were discovered and did some YouTube research that I had a real Astroglide shock to my belief system as I said to myself, “I don’t know what to believe anymore!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI8q8xTSoXk [start at 1:50 as the beginning of this video is pretty worthless]
And while I didn’t really take my words seriously in response to Dizzy’s ridiculous defense for Ash Wednesday [see comments under “Ash Holes” http://rebelyogi.com/ash-heads.html], thinking our years of friendship would allow her not to take them so seriously either, it seems that this one interaction Astroglided our friendship as well, destroying for her any closeness that we may have shared. And while I am not a fool that doesn’t understand anger and hurt—and even a time to move on from a relationship—I had kind of hoped that the cut of the sword of my words would remain on the surface and that the anger and hurt wouldn’t penetrate so deeply as to gangrene our friendship into a rotting, stinking mass that needed to be extricated in order to save the individual. I guess her discovery that sometimes I allow my words to precede my empathy for another’s feelings was in the same biblical proportion as the photos of the nephilim was for me.
The one reader who voiced concern for me regarding “April Fools” said the piece felt more like “being yelled at” than the others she had read. I wanted to challenge my readers to explore for themselves how quicksand their opinions of me are and whether one expression of “yell” would immediately make their ears grow deaf to my silent whispers thereafter. If you honestly thought I thought you shallow scum and I hated blacks, women, Jews and gays, could you look at my words in the same way? Or would you see them filtered through a judgmental screen?
In order for the “experiment” to be more real, I couldn’t just write the next day and so I sat on it for a week and didn’t post anything. One of my main points with this un-blog, if there is one, is to not only to entertain but to have you question even the most solid foundations of your belief system and understandings.
I also allowed the lead writing piece to be one that wasn’t necessarily optimally representative of what I have to offer, for not only my subscribers but for anyone who I have met briefly through expos and teachings or who have been referred to my site or found it because when they did a Google search for “How to shove things up an ass,” my site came right behind the NYC Police Department Procedures Manual and George Bush’s Skull & Bones initiation. I did this for Truth. Not the truth that is read in a book and defined by facts and figures provided by some “expert’s” experience or, more likely, his plagiarism of an experience that he never had, but the truth that you have come to through your own discovery, be it a temporary truth or a lasting one.
Frankly, I doubt most of you did much self-reflecting and the only thing this experiment showed was how far up your own asses you have shoved your heads (which, incidentally, comes after “Enlightening Nonsense” on the “How to shove things up an ass” Google search.) Maybe you justify your shallow well-digging with, “I have better things to do than to ponder nonsense” or, taking Dizzy’s lead, “I have other priorities now.”
I’m not sure there are any “priorities” that should take precedence over exploring beyond the surface of all our hurts and anger and judgments and beliefs and opinions to arrive at the core of Who I Am. And maybe when that happens we will laugh at how silly we have been in our dealings in life, how seriously we took nonsense and how we used things to build walls around us while pretending that this somehow made us stronger.
I’m back, beyotches! And I won’t rest until I burn all of your peripheral nonsense to ash so that your Phoenix can fly free. Unless I get tired. Then I may just rest.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155184
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REFLECTION:
What do you hold to be your truth? Even the concept of “your” truth is possessive and will always be limited by the ego’s grasping to be special. What would happen if you suddenly discovered that your truth was not, in fact, truth? What would happen to your world? A rebel would be totally psyched, for she has hacked away one more decaying limbs and is now one step closer to the capital “t” Truth where she no longer needs limbs to carry her. A pussy whines and cries at the blood that comes from her and will even try to modify the facts to fit her fiction. Are you a rebel or a pussy?
MEDITATION:
Imagine waking up and going through your day devoid of any beliefs, opinions or judgments. Would you brush your teeth or do you do this because you have a “belief” that this is important for health and hygiene?
Imagine yourself interacting with another about what some might call a “controversial” issue, perhaps abortion or Obama’s Socialist national health care or 9/11 being an inside job. How would it feel to discuss these issues without a preconceived idea of the “truth”? Could you even imagine it? As John Lennon wrote in the song Imagine: “I wonder if you can.”
Imagine your interactions with your friends and associates and family—and strangers—where you didn’t have a preconceived notion of how they “should” behave, what is “proper,” what is “ethical,” what is “moral”—all concepts that are made up by society and have no bearing or relevance to Truth. What would this kind of relating even look like? Can you imagine? I wonder if you can.
