Enlightening Nonsense

.

“Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”

—Luke 9:60, King James Bible (Cambridge Edition)

.

This past Saturday I was at my niece’s Bat Mitzvah, which is a rite of passage that parents of Jewish girls go through where they spend an absorbitant amount of money to impress their friends and neighbors and state loudly and clearly that while their last name may not be “Jones,” by gum they will certainly keep up with the Jones’s. It is essentially the Sweet 16 of the Jews, marking their 13-year old an adult based on an archaic tradition born from an era where if you managed to avoid being eaten by a pterodactyl long enough to live to the age of 15 you were considered an old woman. It probably coincided with the girl’s menstrual cycle starting and was the parents way of saying, “Hey Moytle, she’s got blood coming from her vagina—she can give you a child, or two, or ten!”

I usually go alone to these type o events as, to quote the punchline of the joke where the Jewish man walks in on a man having sex with his wife, “I have to—but you?” Why would I subject someone to sitting through such a freak show unless I thought it would somehow get me laid—and I assure you, bringing a date to a Bat Mitzvah is not a deal closer by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how much Manischewitz you ply her full of.

I spend most of the time hitting on the hired dancers that are there to keep the thirteen year olds up and about to counter the sedating effect of the pharmaceutical prescriptions with which their parents and teachers have drugged them. My usual lines are something like, “Do you offer any ‘adult’ entertainment?” or “I don’t take Ritalin but I just popped a Viagra.” Needless to say, I’ve never gotten laid at any Bat Mitzvah except my own and that was only because the rabbi had been at a Catholic seminary for ten years before converting to Judaism.

But this time I had the beautiful Ace on my arm. She is not only beautiful but bubbly and smiley and laughy—and probably on the drug Ecstasy! When I talked to my brother’s co-worker, Tomb, he “congratulated” me for being with her, I think based on the fact that she’s moderately hot. I was like, “Dude, what that’s about? The fact that I’m with someone who hasn’t retained the 50 pounds she gained after giving birth to your retarded child is no reason for celebration. But, hey, thanks a bunch!” I think he left the party and was found hanging from his hotel room’s closet rod with his pants around his ankles and a blown up picture of Ace he had taken with his iPhone stuck with semen on the facing wall.

I never sent my response card back as I decided instead to cut off the stamp from the return envelope and use it to send for a mail-order bride. When I called my brother a week before the event and asked him if it was okay for me to bring Ace to the event he gave me some cheap Jew text message about making sure my gift was appropriate to the number of people that would be attending under my invite and that he supposed his wife, Frigitty, could rearrange the seating.

My response was a lecture on the downward trajectory that our society has followed, where a gathering that in the past was about sharing a joyous celebration of a woman’s first bloody vagina with the ones you loved has now degraded to people complaining that there was not enough of a variety of appetizers, or “The steak was too dry,” or “So and so only gave ____ hundred dollars as a gift!” I called him a little bitch and said that while his Jappy wife was understandably too busy getting her bi-daily mani-pedi, that when he was done washing the bloodstains from her period panties and fingering his vagina that he should send me a text message saying nothing more than, “That’s fine, Swami.” And he did. I’m hoping right after he hit “Send” he washed the screen of his iPhone, as the smell of vagina takes nothing short of a bottle of Clorox and a Brillo pad to get off, at least for my penis.

I had the best time I have had at one of these Jewfests because of having Ace there. During the service she provided a kind shoulder to nudge me awake during my periodic narcoleptic fits. At the hotel room, not only did she provide the credit card for them to hold on file in case we went Charlie Sheen and sprayed tiger blood all over the walls but she also provided a warm vagina where in the past a calloused hand and the hotel’s moisturizer would have had to suffice (in his defense, the busboy’s calloused hands were due to pulling a night shift at the same rock quarry where Fred Flintstone works, or so he told me.)

And during the party she was smiling, laughing, popping tabs of E and reminding me of my high school prom—well, really the high school prom I attended last week of the 17-year old that I have been dating for the past four years. She was my dance partner when we got our groove on and also someone to confess that the rancid odor that at one time she mistook for someone smoking skunkweed marijuana had in fact not come from the local Jamaican dope dealer but from my ass, gassy from making the dietary exception that night of eating cheese and ice cream and a porterhouse.

The day after the Bat Mitzvah, at the 125^th train station, we had a discussion of which I won’t get into the details but which surrounded the issue of her drinking at the event and my disapproval of it. Right before we parted, she said, “Thanks for shitting on a great weekend,” as she turned away from me and walked down the sidewalk to her subway, reminding me of the telephone conversation I had with a girl where her last line before slamming the phone receiver down—or the equivalent cell phone variation—was, “And the last time I had something that wiry and soft inside of me was when my dentist applied a spring to my braces!” and then hanging up on me.

.

I received a Facebook message from my first real girlfriend the other day. By “real” I don’t mean, “as opposed to the blow-up sex dolls that I call my girlfriends” but the first girl that I dated somewhat regularly in high school. I discount my elementary school “girlfriends” as I never got any stink finger but only a mild case of pinkeye from one of them.

The message was short and inquired if I was now bald, ending with about five question marks in a row so I knew she meant business. I assumed she talked to a friend of hers that attended the recent 25^th Reunion for my high school and the girl either bullshitted her that I was now bald or said something how I cut off all my hair. There was a flaw in my logic, as she knew me in my short hair days, only sharing a brief drunken slur with me at our 10-Year Reunion. I later found out she had seen a video clip from my martial arts school either the very day I shaved my head or not much after. I made a note to myself for the next time I shave my head to the bone to powder my head if anyone is going to videotape me, as the glare off my head looked like a teenager’s face after eating a Supersized carton of McDonald’s fries.

We reminisced and shared a few niceties, like the time we laid on my sister’s bed and sang Sweet Baby James by James Taylor together and how she gave me my first blowjob. I also brought up how the last time we were together at my house, I physically threw her out and shut the front door on her. Well, not “on” her but you get the point.

She said something how we should remember the good stuff and it got me thinking. Why? Why is it important that we morph the past into a “happy place” where everything worked out nicely and where the girl with the big tits didn’t knee you in the balls for copping a feel at the disco that led to you pissing blood for a week? Why does anyone really care about the impressions we made in the past to people that no longer matter to us? And what the hell does this have to do with the Bat Mitzvah and Ace sucking down some suds?

.

Whatever happened in the past—prepare yourself for something Einsteinian in brilliance—happened in the past. It is only your constant rehashing of it that keeps it alive, creating a life support system for a Terry Schiavo that needs to be unplugged and buried. As the old phrase goes:

You can spray perfume on a corpse but at the end of the day it still tastes like chicken.

Why is it so important that we “make our mark,” that our legacy lives on, that we achieve some form of fame, even if it is only on a local level as the girl who had the biggest North Star zit? When I showed my mother the short poem I wrote called “When The Day Comes” [http://rebelyogi.com/when-the-day-comes.html] about leaving no trace of yourself when you depart from this world, she responded with something like, “That’s not what we want—we want to leave an impression.” Why?

My sister-in-law’s father has said to his grandkids such things as, “Remember this about me when I am no longer here”; I assume he meant when he is dead and not just out of the room. Why? Why should you influence what these independent souls think in the future? It’s bad enough that you try to nag and control them into obedience as a mini-you while you are alive, perhaps sickly inspired by the Austin Power: The Spy Who Shagged Me, but after your dead as well?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkmi_UTsjtE&feature=fvst

It’s because you fear death and have given up any hope of finding Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth but instead think you can have a touch of immortality by planting tumors of memories in the younger generation. Just leave the little bastards alone and die!

The point of mentioning the boozy Bat Mitzvah episode was to also emphasize that what happens in the past happens in the past and if it was good, even me being a prick in the present cannot change that—unless the subject of my prickiness performs a mental lobotomy on herself to carve out the pleasantry and fill it with displeasantry. If we truly live in the Now, which I don’t really know anyone who does, then we bury not only the “bad” but also the “good” in the coffin with Grandpa Wallace. We remember things for how they were and don’t change them based on events that occurred after them. We remember the sweet picnic we shared in the woods with Hitler, dining on Jewballs and blood and don’t let the visage of his horrible paintings discolor our memory of what was.

No one can “make” you feel a certain way unless you allow him to. No one can color your past unless you give her a 64 Crayola Crayon set with the built-in sharpener in back. No one can destroy your memory unless you let his words (or pharmaceutical drugs) get inside of your brain and chew on it like a brain chewing-upon brain chewer.

.

Of course time is an illusion and so the past is not past. And there are energy cords attached between different people, based on conscious or unconscious manipulation or unresolved emotion, that suck the life force out them like a hungry baby vampire sucking his mother’s blood through an umbilical straw. The only real thing this is implying is that if you don’t make peace with the past, you are destined to keep it like a tumor in your brain. But it is not saying that you should keep a tumor in your brain either.

Emotion can be broken into E-motion, which can be translated as “energy in motion.” Unlike the nonsense that the New Age phonies preach about how wrong it is to be angry and raise your voice higher than a quiet whisper, all emotions are perfectly fine and healthy and a product of being human. It is only when the energy stagnates and crystallizes that it becomes cancerous.

Make peace with the tumor, acknowledging that you did the best you could with the mental and social and driving skills you had at the time, and the tumor will dissolve and transmute into healthy brain cells through a magical alchemy that will have you at peace with driving the car off the bridge and killing that innocent woman because you were hitting the bottle too hard. But enough about Ted Kennedy.

I had a great time at the Bat Mitzvah, regardless of Ace needing to knock down a few drinks like a bowler does pins, and even if she slaughtered Abandon and, unbeknownst to me until her dog tags got caught in my throat, fed her to me as a smoothie, this would not change that fact. I had good times—and not so good times—with that high school sweetfart and whether she or I chooses to have a selective memory or not, the sun will still revolve around the Earth, despite what that quack Galileo had to say on the matter.

Our past interactions and conditionings and boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives and lovers and male prostitutes from Thailand have zero influence on Who We Are today. They may influence our behaviors and thoughts and our ability to take a piss without extreme pain but these things are not Who We Are but only the accoutrements, the iron suit of the brave knight that resides inside.

If it requires beating a pillow to feathers or talking to a shrink about how your mother was an annoying bitch for you to stop carrying the Family Guy evil monkey on your back, then do whatever it takes. Me, I’d like to forgive others their trespasses, forgive myself for my trespasses, leave my tumors of crystallized emotion out of my head and live my life on my own terms and die without trying to convince some unwitting dimwit that my crystallized thoughts and emotions are worthy gemstones. But I’d like to kill all of them first.

When I discard my body the biggest honor you can give me is to discard my thoughts and issues and ego with me and come to your own conclusions of life by living it and not reciting my conclusions that I reached through my experience as your own.

“Let the dead bury the dead” so that no living being should soil their hands on the fertilizer of another’s foregone conclusions. It’s a smell that once picked up is hard to wash. Better to leave it lie where it has fallen and not to step in it.