THE TOPICS OF CANCER

Without their love to nurture me for those many years, I began to search everywhere for a Family. And I found One. Every weekend at the Underground I find this Love all around me, and I am reminded of how blessed I am. Again on this Mother's Day I thank her -- and her husband -- for leaving me to find myself, over and over again, in the presence of a greater Family.

The Underground represents an actual Reality. It is place where Life is nurtured by Mother Earth's warm embraces, waiting patiently to lift itself out of the ground and up towards the Sun. I am thrilled that Jesus spoke of a Resurrection from the Dead. And I am continuously reminded that we are the dead that will be resurrected!

Ezra Pound identified the consciousness: "where the dead walk, and the living are made of cardboard." We are all miserable in our self imposed fogs of drugs and depression, sex and rock and roll, and hatred disguised as political correctness -- all of it enshrouding us in a Death we are too saturated with to even acknowledge that it exists and is robbing us of true Life!

I read about one middle school that banned its children from wearing red and green, in order to separate Church and State! Another schoolroom banned the nativity scene, while allowing the Muslim star & crescent and the Hebrew menorah to remain. What? Next they'll ban white snow from falling on the 25th.

The bizarre truth is that Christmas has about as much to do with Christ and or religion as the next war has to do with peace on earth. It is a winter's solstice celebration, regardless of what the name implies -- a pagan holiday at best (not that there's anything wrong with that either). The confusion may result from an innocent text that stated "The wise men visited the new born king at Christmas." (I'm paraphrasing... yes I am!)

The star that appeared to the "Wise Men" at Christ's birth - the one they subsequently followed for months - showed itself first in the east, "where the shepherds attended their flocks in the rainy season." That's fall, not winter. By the time these travelers reached the new born king, he was already several months old! It wasn't the kid's birthday!

Additional scriptures also indicate that Christ was born in the autumn - not December. Refer to the family ledger. Mary's sister, Elizabeth gave birth to a baby, John, in the spring. (It was during the time that her husband Zacharias "executed his priest's office before God in the order of his course" that the child was conceived. Since it is known when Zacharias was on the job, counting forward nine months we arrive at a spring birth.) It is recorded that Mary then gave birth six months later to Jesus. that's approximately August or September, "during the rainy season" in Jerusalem. The flocks were still out grazing, long before winter set in.

Add to this that Jesus was a Jew (of the tribe of Judah) and celebrated Hebrew Holy Days - none of which were birthday celebrations - and it goes without saying that the world of Christianity today is deluded. It doesn't make things okay to celebrate something in name only, while in truth and in flesh, one celebrates the devil's work. Consumerism is that devil. This holiday is about people who buy up and exchange presents with one another, to satisfy and appease their own selfish life styles. This is usually done to the exclusion of all others in this Great Family of God, while almost nothing goes to the Christ they supposedly worship.

People can fool themselves all of the time by jumping up and down and shouting Hallelujah, but the truth remains: it's a celebration of the pagan, the hedonist, the consumer and the Sun God of Solstice. If I stagger into a disco and start dancing with the rest of them. well, I guess I could convince myself that I was at church. but the fact and effect remains - I'm really somewhere else.

Well, I am somewhere else. Waiting upon Jesus. And like any true servant of the Eternal Messiah -- the One who is here at all times, past and present, and doesn't need a resurrection or another so-called religion to prove itself and reappear - I am giving you my share of that wisdom. Call me old fashion, call me an atheist, and call me a heretic or a politically incorrect troublemaker but I'm not celebrating Christmas again this year.

"Ye must become as little children to enter the Kingdom of God." Well that's not exactly how my 16-year old soul mate phrased it when she came last night in a phone that sounded a lot like a vision. Actually she asked why I persistently hold to Christianity, when it is apparent that much of what I believe is closer to the tenants of Judaism. She points out that Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, and is far too liberal in its interpretation of the Law.

Thankfully, for her, she is right. Otherwise I might tie her young ass down and whip that succulent virgin body of hers into submission and sacrifice. Instead, I allow her opinion. another bud on the branch that defines us. Besides, she's too young to be sacrificed. I think the legal age now is 18.

You know, she's right! I don't like Christianity any more than she does, however I do like Jesus a hell of a lot more! I think Jesus had the formula; he knew the way back to God, the difficult way back home. Further, he showed us that the Messiah is always alive in every generation, and does not wait around in some nebulous future to save us. He demonstrated daily how we might save ourselves from evil, and put temptation behind us.

I'm talking about what Jesus revealed to us, not what the assorted (sorted) religions dictate as propaganda in his stead. In fact, he commented on this problem years ago: "Having gotten caught up in the letter of the Law, they miss the Spirit which wrote it." He admonished his own to become embodiments of the Law, writing it in their hearts, fulfilling it in the actions of faith and love we visit upon one another. at which point the Law becomes a moot point. Only God Exists.

The fact that Jesus was a Jew and practiced the wisdom set down by Moses and the prophets is an important truth. Because it's a clear communication to his "followers" that he didn't worship any other God but the One that has always been worthy - he had no trek with the pagan celebrations of Easter and Christmas (which existed before they were so named); he celebrated the Passover and ignored the vain eulogies built up around birthdays.

But although I'm tempted to gain an unorthodox (but not unparalleled. think of Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin) entrance into the Holy of Holies with this little Torah temptress, I still don't think I'm gonna convert to so-called Judaism, which itself is an offshoot of the Revelations of God to Abraham and Moses. The Jews, like the Christians after them, are really descendents of the one small tribe of Judah, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. The religion they call Judaism is but a continual rabbinic interpretation of the original Revelation all the rest of us get our ideas from as well.

It's a great illustration: there are many branches, but only one tree. The original Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden was a symbol for the One God that continuously lives, as our lives here continuously demonstrate. The Tree has appeared in many guises throughout history. Adam and Eve fucked under it, creating the notion of good and evil. Jesus was crucified on it, delivering with his own sacrifice the good and evil thievery back to the source where it could be balanced and reintroduced. Carpenters dissected it, the academies made desks and books out of it, and the modern pagans and tree huggers have made a goddess out of it, attempting to restore again its reverence as a deity.

With the traumatic and indelible reminders of this past week's mass murders by terrorists in New York City, we are indeed being greeted from the other side. I am reminded that twice this past week as I rode my bike along the main streets of Chicago, with my long and knotted beard blowing in the wind, young punks from the street cheered me on with their tragically insensitive taunts, "Bin Laden. Bin Laden." mispronouncing the name to sound like "Lay-den." With the sad holocaust of this past week still burning its reality into our combined sensibilities, it would appear that even these insensitive youth were attempting a primitive, however cruel identification. My long beard twisting like knotted ropes must have acted like a lightening rod and momentarily grounded them in awareness. How sad to encounter these two groups of young wanna-be gangsters with pants falling down around themselves, posturing their scare-crow mockery of the twin towers collapsing in on themselves. These were mere children with designer logos that spoke for them in absence of the true logos. These were American youth, their racial identities a mixture. Twenty years ago they would have jeered at me and called me Castro or Manson and smiled at their defiance of America's ideals. in fact they did just that up until this past Tuesday when a newer and more terrible name passed over their lips.

Oh yes, we have been greeted from the other side all right, from deep within the bodies of huge aircrafts, where hundreds of living souls were mixed with volatile fuel to the temperature of molecular melting. Innocent lives used as a spark to trigger the destruction of thousands more, in an act that the aging evangelist Billy Graham poignantly referred to as the "mystery and reality of death." Ironically, these terms - mystery and reality - represent the only means by which we can approach an understanding of life. These deaths that hang daily in our memories are never explained to us by anyone with any certainty, be it artist or scientist, preacher or parent. we are all touched with unbelief. Death is only "real" for others, it would seem. It always happens to someone else, never to us. All we get from it is continued life, an uninterrupted flow of creation. Other people die, but we are renewed. The wisest of teachers have told us it is all an illusion that presents itself to our senses. The combined journals of science and religion have demonstrated it to be Eternity, an Infinity to which we are always connected and cannot stray. When we witness another's death it is our own senses that are heightened and renewed, our own pain that is apparent. Life itself is increased.

And what is the "other side" of sorrow and despair? And why can we not exempt it from the equation? Good and evil are constants that we all know. But how many of us call the evil "good," especially when it is ourselves doing it? The answer is: All of us. Our religion is the religion; our political party is the party, our educations and social class, our skin color and language, etc. The exception is the occasional soul that comes to show us that all judgment is in error and none of it reveals the truth of the human condition. Only Omniscience has the ability to discern truth. Is it one thing to be destroyed by a terrorist, and another to be erased in a natural landslide or frozen climate? Is it any less of a horror, as our life slips from us? In a genuine analysis, our indignities and sense of unfairness come from the judgments we make about others. Of course we have the right to choose life or death, good or evil, but having done so, we are left to an order and process that can only be understood on its own terms.

Listen to the religious extremists who designed these extravagant and bizarre deaths in molten steel and flesh; they are the same voices that seek revenge, no matter from whose mouths they come. Revisit poor Dresden and the fire bombing of women and children and their men and animals by the "righteous" Americans as punishment for the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two. The two big bombs dropped on the Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with no respect for life at all. The assault on the American Indians. and on the South American Indians. The same inferno and the same devil. We did not punish the guilty. In our anger and ignorance, we punished the innocent. We do not understand who the guilty are, even in our own society. Witness our own Civil War, declared in 1865 and still going on today.

Once I was locked in a room with an assortment of a dozen Klansman, Skinheads and Nazis, as they beat me into near death before an unexpected intervention halted their destruction. They tried to kill me because I was an enigma beyond their comprehension, living in a world peopled by everyone, equal to everyone. It bothered them that my world also included them. Steadfastly they held on to their self-proclaimed superiority when all that was really evident was their anger and frustration at not producing any works that would acknowledge them as superior. I walked away from their hostility, and when the wounds they inflicted on me healed, I laughed at their seeming judgments. But still, I can understand and sympathize with how they could be trapped in their own limited awareness since birth, as are the many liberals and enlightened who chided me and insisted that it was those SOBs that should be destroyed. When I pointed out that the other side felt the same way about them, the liberals pointed out that the klan was brought up that way, bigoted and hating. When I suggested that the same was true of them they were angered at me, in the same way the Klansman were - because of my association with the other side. Both groups avowed to never approach the other, only to kill them if the opportunity arose. And thus I became their messenger; I delivered the message that neither group had the courage to deliver, attempting to bridge the great gap and plant a new seed.

I am not Bin Laden - nor am I in agreement with his hatred of America or his militant solutions - but I have been laden with the same sadness that permeates our universe, from his land to ours. It is obvious to me that he genuinely trusts his God to give retribution for the acts of evil that have been fostered on his own people by the supposedly righteous. This is no less or no more than what we are calling upon "our God" to do: to erase the evil we behold. Where is either side's compassion when each pretends that God is settling a score that they themselves are taking great glee in perpetrating - the massacre of the other side?

I have also been laden with sadness because the same nightmare devastation has finally arrived at America's doorstep. We got a collective glimpse of it in 1963, when we watched over and over the bullet(s) enter John Fitzgerald Kennedy and blast the contents of his skull and brain across the eyes of innocent TV watchers the world over. But this week we witnessed this same living tissue splattered 5,000 times over, mixed with fire and steel into a molten hell. Kennedy was the prototype, the microcosm; this new act is the greater extension into the macrocosm. This time we watched over and over as living matter was blasted out the other side of a great and cavernous skull known as the World Trade Center; for it indeed had come to be a living organism, filled with life and intelligence, a community several thousand strong, pulsing with the heartbeat of America. While an earlier generation watched one lone president taken out by "one lone nut" and was saddened, this present generation has been touched more personally. How many tens of thousands have been filled with the ultimate pain of separation and personal loss?

Jesus foretold this devastation in the spear that pierced his own side, and he also gave us the answer to our utter futility and anger. "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." And what is it they don't know? Three days after the crisis, during an all-faith prayer service in New York City a Muslim in skullcap offered his prayers up "to the God of Abraham AND Ishmael." After all these years having been inculcated with the belief that the Christian God was and is only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their so-called superior family, we have been prompted to acknowledge our brother and add him back into the mix. We can no longer blame God and our Brother for our own prejudice and history of violence. There is a Law, like gravity, that operates in the flesh and blood experiences we meet from day-to-day.

In the beginning, before language, and when all was measured in space and time, the alphabet grew out of and was revealed as a series of mathematical equations. They were very simple ones, like A+B=C; like Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel, as expressed in an earlier attempt at language and history. And of course, we all know the next equation: Cain killed his brother Abel and unleashed a new and devastating energy upon the earth: E=MC2. Fire and brimstone, death and destruction: Hell and its inhabitants. It was all so simple to avoid - and still is. As we return to the truth once delivered, we come to realize that our own supposed "understanding" of Good and Evil has merely been our own erroneous judgment of others as being evil, while we attribute the good to ourselves. This is what the original God warned us about, that we would make the mistake of assuming that our Knowledge of Good and Evil also gave us the power of discrimination and the ability to judge others, to see the world as God sees it. It didn't. And we are today left with sorting through the debris in search of a truth that can never be found there.

Sixty years ago, when World War Two was declared, I was an infant of six months. Over the next two years, as our country pulled together and "united itself" in the name of the war effort my poor child's heart watched as the world around me was torn apart and my family split. Today I am saddened by the knowledge that again we will watch as our country answers the recent bloodshed with more bloodshed. But beyond what our country is declaring for us, we must each answer in our own unique way. I have found that in our daily efforts and relationships we are bound and limited by the words we use, usually without thinking.

A man named Vrle Minto once told me: We keep the original of everything we say, feel, and think. We only give the carbon copies away. When we condemn and judge and hate, however justified, the original feelings remain alive within us and swirl through our blood and body, condemning and eating away our very souls, minute-by-minute. The only sensible response in any of this is to learn forgiveness, for like the enemy we attack, we truly do not understand it, nor do we know what we are doing when we act out of fear and retaliation and anger. It is not enough for God to bless America only, as we all unite against the other side. It is finally upon each of us to learn to love our enemies and call upon God to bless them as well. Ishmael as well as Abraham. The enemy as well as the friend. The way we've been doing it there will soon come a day when we have no friends left, only our growing suspicion of everyone around us.

My advice is to forget the war that's being waged around us, and instead, greet everyone with a greater love, one that surrounds evil and smothers it. Of course, our countries are going to continue the various wars that rage around us daily, and yes we will have to try and dodge the resulting destruction, but do we really need to turn over our individual lives to the effort of continuing the hate and retribution? I say give it up, acknowledge each other's love, embrace them as if they were your own. But always beware. a suicidal terrorist involved in a holy war will embrace you with a bomb pressed to your heart as quickly as an abortion clinic will suck the life right out of you, while down the street a thief will cut your throat out for a $2 formula for his own starving child. The irony. They all have the best of intentions. They all want to take your seemingly useless life away from you in order to further their own fantastic goals. That's the world we live in... Good luck with expressing your love.

Standing here at the root of the Tree of Knowledge, with its many branches trunctured into Newspaper lies, I've finally got the message reduced to two pages, recycled from my own poems and pulses. Each of us, in our childhood, should have been instructed in this truth: the awareness that all knowledge precedes from revelation, and is only confirmed through our senses. That is obvious. That is, until the worm turned and puberty rewired us, and gleefully we bit into the fruit from the tree that the Snake deluded us into thinking would give us our own special knowledge of the good and evil that surround us. It was supposed to be a superior knowledge.

But today there are few of us who will admit that we are fundamentally and fatalistically in ignorance of this awesome landscape called earth on which we have found ourselves. We erroneously conceive the earth in terms of our own understanding of it, taking too much credit for ourselves, because we have been given the ability to both label and judge it, good and evil. However, in the beginning it is stated that God created Good and Evil and set it before us - so that we might choose. Our only part in Creation has been this ability and freedom to choose how it will unfold. how it evolves. We never did, and never will, create any of it. "By the way. choose good!" was the instruction from God.

Of course, Adam and Eve made their infamous choice for the rest of time, for the rest of us: They chose to pretend that they possessed the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they chose to give birth to Cain and Abel, the pitiful personalization of opposites in the universe. They did so by taking an observed phenomenon and judging it in terms of their own limited awareness, without the input from the phenomena itself or from its Sustainer.

Or we can get caught up in the Judeo-Christian's favorite trap and give the credit to an anthropomorphic god like Jehovah, an angry God who systematically created a superior race of warriors out of Moses and Abraham, and all the young Isaacs and Jacobs that followed from their bowels. "A superior race of people," no less. Stop with me for a moment and marvel at the power and authority this god gave to them from on high to do away with all of their brothers and sisters, the unfortunate Ishmaels and Mohammeds of history.

Then there are those who will attribute it all to just plain anarchy, with its no apparent outcome, and assign everything to the realm of chaos and destruction. That should give them good cause to eat, drink and be merry for however many days they've got left. This is the camp most Americans find themselves in, in spite of their dedication to god and country.

From where I stand this brother killing looks like the result of a long line of Adams and Eves laying around the garden all day fucking each other senseless. obviously overlooking the fact that they are likewise fucking everything else up; not for themselves, but for their kids. After all, it is the children who are the ones forced into the service of a hypocritical morality and outdated vendetta. It is the children who are being instructed to blow it all up, themselves included. And the Adams and Eves still remain, not one bit wiser or more knowledgeable for any of it, in spite of their fascination with the forbidden fruit called knowledge.

In the beginning Adam and Eve wanted to know what was going on, like all children in their infancy. They wanted a glimpse behind the inner workings that the subtle Snake had hinted about, and so they coveted the knowledge of Good and Evil. And because of some seemingly magical act, Eve got pregnant and begat Cain and Abel, the Archetypes of Evil and Good. Cain murdered his brother and that was the end of the beginning. Conversely, it was the beginning of the end. Moses and Pharaoh continued the beef. Abraham and Ishmael have been at each other's throats for centuries. Witness the modern day Bin Laden and Bush, intent on living out the absurdities of their own religious fervors, while leaving the rest of us to tremble in their wake.

Doesn't it finally occur to anyone that we are all entombed in a kind of stasis, when instead each of us should be responsibly developing the ability to administer the balance that will keep this world stabilized and continuing on its journey? It was a very long time ago that the original creation began to overflow its energy into time's streaming essence, a very long time since an all-wise God created the man and the woman to have dominion over this creation.

What should be clear through all of this is that no one gets to heaven by blaming his or her brother and sister for the conditions on this earth. We do not erase evil by programming each new generation to systematically kill the enemy, especially when the enemy is us - our own brothers and sisters and even the innocent embryos that overflow the corner waste baskets. Each of us certainly has the right and the responsibility to eradicate evil from our midst, but this doesn't happen via the perpetuation of more evil. It occurs through acts of forgiveness.

Here's an experiment. Forget for a moment what our "leaders" are doing. That's their balancing act, not ours. Instead, the next time you get mad at the enemy, check to make sure it's not some fellow American you've encountered on the bicycle path or sidewalk, or more often the family or friend at your side. How will you react with them? Remember. you've only got two choices. Kill them. or let them live. Oh, I guess there's a third choice... condemn the lot of them, go off somewhere and hide in a cave for the rest of the show.

I doubt whether anyone within range of my voice is going any closer to Afghanistan than the very remote controls on their television sets. It's time to turn off the hypnotic virus you are being infected with. Return your awareness to the very places you have some control over. Forgive them, because the obvious truth is that "they" are someone you know. Be careful. The enemy is in this room. Wait a minute... is that really the enemy sitting over there... or don't they know yet that we are friends?

Forget programs from satellites and the vested interests of war and the economy, the perpetuation of Cain and Abel's misguided brotherhood, the sad war against or for terrorism the world over. Both sides are for terrorism, by assuming the very idiot ideology that they are fighting against it. Only Abel had it right in the beginning... he went about the business of worshipping and sacrificing for God the fruits of his labor, that all might benefit and be alive to enjoy it. Cain didn't know his multiplication table and decided to subtract instead.

"Yeah, like they don't know who you really are! Anyway, he and his wife were going up to Akron, Ohio for the annual Founders' Day Week and they invited me to go along with them, even agreed to pay my way. We all stayed in dormitory rooms on the Akron U. campus and it was this bizarre seven days of non-stop anonymity. Lectures, plays, meetings, films, testimonies, guided tours, puppet shows. Jesus, it was a trip all right!"

"Nothing like that for the men. Just boring sermons and some ex-drunk talking about how he almost but not quite went over the line into depravity and despair. It was always the same, some lame social drinker who'd never lost a thing to drinking. He still had his wife and car and home and bank account. and the babysitter as well! Shit. they never quite get to the point where they actually get drunk and end it all!"

"Yeah, well Paul H almost got there all right! After I resumed drinking, his wife used to bring me cookies and stuff, trying to do the Good Samaritan routine on her way to pick Paul up from the telephone company. He told her to stop by and keep trying to talk me back into treatment. One day I was riding with her and I told her to pull over. She did and I slid my hand up her thigh. She just looked confused and didn't know what to do, but she didn't move my hand. I told her she should leave that schmuck husband of hers and move in with me. She was polite and insisted we go, but I was just as impolite and insisted we fuck each other right there on the side of the road. I don't think she ever mentioned it to Paul, but every time I'd call their house in the daytime and reach her she'd immediately come over and try and talk me back to sobriety. By then I kind of felt bad about what I'd said and so I backed off. I still think she was ripe to fuck though, maybe not to leave her poor husband, but definitely to get a little on the sly."

"Nah, I think she was in the program too. Apparently they both used to drink when they were teenagers. For some reason they both decided that they had a problem with alcohol and signed on at the local A.A. That's when they met, nearly nine years ago. Jesus, they're only in their late twenties now. how old could they have been?"

"Yeah, seems to me a lot of those self professing dunks never drank or drugged long enough to develop any problems whatsoever. Permanent tissue damage takes a good twenty years to set in! I think they just never developed socially, that's all, and it's sufficient for them to spend the rest of their lives in a smoke filled room telling the same tired ass story over and over about how drunk they got on prom night."

"Yeah well you should've gone with us to Akron, speaking of proms. That was one giant prom all right! The best part was the bus tour around Akron, visiting the landmarks: the school where they had the first meetings, the hospital where one of the original Nuns still worked and reminisced about the early days, treating alcohol withdrawals with prayers and the latest chemicals washed down with coffee and donuts. Then the bus rolled us on by Doctor Bob's lush country club estate and on to the other side of town to the dilapidated tenement that Bill W called home."

"Judy! You're not going to believe this but it was exactly like what you just said! After the tour I convinced Paul H. to retrace the steps in the privacy of his own automobile. Reluctantly he agreed, against his wife's better judgment. We stopped back at the schoolyard and sat for a while. When I got out and peeked in the window the kids started laughing and their teacher came to see what was happening. Paul's wife, Connie, got real paranoid about the police coming and so we moved on."

"No, Judy, but that's just it. the front steps. all that hard concrete and the years of footprints worn into it. that's what started me to thinking about the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous! Why weren't there only ten steps, like the Ten Commandments? That whole philosophy of recovery was patterned on those moral codes anyway."

"Nah. it was only me and Bill W. this time. I could just see that son of a bitch coming home at night, falling down drunk and starting up those steps of his, stumbling all the way up. That's when it came clear. Twelve Steps! So I got out of the car and headed across the street, having decided to count the number of steps leading up the hill, and that's when something grabbed hold of me and I started laughing and shouting and crying at the same time. By then I'd attracted the attention of the present tenant and she was behind the screen door motioning to someone inside, "You'd better get out here, honey, I think we got trouble coming!" and her 250-pound honey did indeed respond by throwing open the front door and positioning himself at the top of the stairs, looking down on the mêlée like he was Pharaoh about to unleash a lightening bolt."

"You don't understand yet, do you Judy? The story is all that bullshit! That's what makes it real. Remember in the Big Book where it says, "We tried to apply the principles, but at certain of these steps we balked?" Well, Judy, picture this: It's three o'clock in the morning and here he comes home, three sheets to the wind and falling all over himself and the steps. Until he gets to the third step, which just happens to not be a step at all, but a three-foot landing. Of course he trips up - he balks. What he does is fall flat on his ass on the concrete! The same thing happens again at the sixth and ninth step. additional landings. He trips again. Of course he never remembers any of this, but his subconscious does. So finally, after he's fallen down enough times in life, he pens those famous lines about the Twelve Steps, like he was Jesus and those individual steps were the twelve apostles he met and befriended along the way to his resurrection."

"Yeah, well the weirdest part was that the people living there at the time were two hippies! When I tried to tell the dude about the irony of him living in the same house that Bill W. sobered up in he freaked out and sent his girlfriend or whatever she was off to phone the police. That's when Paul got up enough nerve to get out of the car and convinced me to get in and get out of there fast, before his wife left without me! Okay, I decided. that was enough sobriety for one lifetime, and I left Akron, left Paul H and his fuckable wife, and went on with the next three years of my life, falling down drunk and telling the old, old story of Bill W. and his steps."

"Certainly that! But this Solomon was an alchemist, a magician in high standing. He was the son of David, and had been blessed with the greatest of wealth, even statistically greater that those billionaires of today. And because he had been faithful to God throughout his fame, he was granted any wish he chose."

"Yes, Judy. That is precisely the wisdom that Solomon sought! He was looking for the fragmentary meanings left over the morning after, in the vomit and anger of sobering soul. the real life situations that people transacted with one another in an attempt to assign meaning to and justify their pathetic addictions to one another. He was interested in gathering wisdom from experience. that long drawn-out process of trial and error that people really need in order to govern their own lives effectively. Get this: He wrote a book called Ecclesiastes, translated as The Preacher. It's in the Bible. You've heard the phrase, Vanity, vanity. all is Vanity?"

In an initial attempt at sobriety, Burkhart had frequented the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Cincinnati, Ohio. And as a newcomer, he was invited to tell his story - his "lead" - at the halfway houses. Being of the streets, rather than an apartment alcoholic, he spoke at places like the Salvation Army shelters and Halfway Houses. On one such occasion he told the story of Solomon's adventure and how it paralleled the alcoholic's trials and tribulations.

Answering in the present tense - which is the only tense there is - Solomon tells God: "Give me wisdom that I might rule the people fairly!" And God does just that for him: systematically stripping Solomon of his vast wealth and holdings, his cattle and concubines, and reducing him to a pauper on the roadside. Although God does all of this in the next one or two verses of history, it's understood that the humbling of Solomon required a lot longer in day-to-day reality.

In layman's terms, Solomon begins to hit the sauce. He becomes a drunk, trading his kingdom for a grape; much like the heroes in our present story. Thus begins his long and painful odyssey, a process that takes the next twenty chapters to accomplish, the equivalent of twenty years of destitution and poverty, living amongst the downtrodden and the thieves, making the same mistakes and revelations.

Finally, in the final chapter, God revisits Solomon and looks down on his drunken body sprawled haphazardly across the road and beseeches him, "Solomon. What's up? Where have you gotten yourself?" Now get this! Today, he would have gotten a bed in an alcoholic ward! But Solomon had the foresight to answer God, "Lord, I got the wisdom I asked for. I now know what the people know. I have lived and breathed among them, and I now know how to rule them accordingly." And with that, Solomon was restored to his original glory. After which he collected his thoughts and penned those popular lines of his: "Vanity, Vanity. all is Vanity!"

"Actually, I was interrupted during the telling and asked to leave the stage. It was so bizarre! The Colonel, or Lieutenant, or whoever it was in charge, ushered me off almost immediately. Yeah, I left all right, but on the way out I spoke to the decrepit men where they sat, "Not one of you has the balls to pick up your bed and walk out of here!" And of course they didn't. Some snickered, but the majority were angered that I had spoken to their senses."

During the beginnings of World War Two, the American Poet Ezra Pound was living as an expatriate in Italy. When he wasn't running with and building the careers of the likes of T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, he was involved in speaking his politically incorrect mind over Mussolini's airwaves, warning his American boys at home that there was a war brewing, that Churchill and Roosevelt were scheming to create a scenario that would put America into the war, in spite of Roosevelt's sincere sounding Fireside Chats to the contrary.

And true to warning, that scenario took place in the "surprise" bombing of Pearl Harbor, when in fact advance intelligence knew about it and sat back and smoked a big fat cigar with the president and watched it happen. This was the single event that put America into the Great War, and to which our modern president is comparing to the Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Old Ez was subsequently "captured" and locked in an open steel cage for many weeks in an open field, after which he was brought back to the homeland and locked in St. Elizabeth's Asylum for the Criminally Insane, a convenient subterfuge as the good old U.S.A. considered his fate while silencing his warnings. He was finally declared to be of "Unsound Mind" and was held without trial or protocol for 13 long years, until he was a thoroughly silenced and drained old man who could warn no one any further. At the behest of Hemingway, et al, the government, to hide its own embarrassment, let him leave the country and die with what dreams he had left inside never realized.

Nobody really said much about it, instead writing the great poet off as an anti-Semite because he made the mistake of using Mussolini's airwaves to post his warnings. Nor has anyone said or done much about the treatment of American prisoners in the 50 years since the fiasco. That is, until recently. Oh don't get me wrong; they're still not complaining too much about the abuse of Americans in custody. but rather, the stink is being raised by a good part of the liberal element here in the USA over the supposed abusive treatment of the 110 foreign born Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists and murderers that are being housed at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The protestors most certainly include my flag waving yuppie neighbors across the street, the ones incidentally who've never crossed the street in the two years they've been here to say hello - yet still I wave, periodically, in great contrast to the bogus flags they paste in their windows in solidarity yet never wave. Seems that they're mad because the authorities shackled the bastards together, locked 'em up in cages, and then have been catering to them with their accustomed diet of falafels and the Koran.

Which started me to thinking about how I was once incarcerated -- many small sentences stretching over a period of 20+ years, and was continuously being shuffled back and forth from jail to jail in California during the sixties - always shackled, locked in holding pens ten deep, with real shit and cigarette butts caked to the floor - the very concrete floors on which we were forced to sleep in absence of the proper bedding. Meals? Ha! Maybe a bologna sandwich on hard bread, and maybe not -- for the entire day. Late at night, arriving back in lockup, too late for a meal there either.

Looking back it seems like nobody but us ever complained about the treatment we got. Or how we sat and seethed four and sometimes five men sandwiched into a two-man cell that measured six foot by eight, maybe a few inches less, especially when you calculated the placement of the urinal and the two steel framed bunk beds that came out of the wall on sturdy chains. No afternoon walks or exercises periods.

One of the reasons I lost all of the teeth in the upper half of my head and some of the lowers were those long painful nights in some cells without medical attention. Once, while locked in tight for six months, two of my teeth literally fell out of my head because of the infections. I pulled a third out by hand, to put an end to the pain. Finally I was granted a date with the dentist at county hospital. The date? Two months after I was through serving the six-month sentence I was in for!

So in all fairness we're giving them their own diet did you say? When I first started going to (adult) jail in 1959, the remedy and prescription for a bunch of tired, sick, diseased, addicted and deranged men was a quarter to half ounce shot glass of formaldehyde! That's right, folks. formaldehyde, being the simplest form of the gaseous substance aldehyde, used in fertilizers, dyes and yes. embalming fluid. And it worked fine for the detoxing alcoholic in the throes of Delirium Tremors, or the junkie fresh off the street. Or the occasional mental case they locked up in the wrong institution. Technically it was paraldehyde, but the same difference though, something like a molecule difference in composition, but still the penultimate depressant. No worry, though. blood and urine are a simple molecule apart in their chemical constitution too.

It reminded me of poor old Ezra Pound again, rolling over in his own vomit and fever, as he lay incarcerated in Italy for weeks awaiting extradition back "home," locked outdoors in an open steel cage, soaked nightly and tortured in the rain and the cold and wind to near death. Ezra's crime? Again. warning the soldier boys that their president and their government were setting them up for a designer war, designed according to the age old patterns fostered on Cain and Abel by their parent's selfish longing for the power and knowledge of good and evil.

Those poor soldier boys have grown up now and become the all wise parents themselves, treating their entire countries to a fiasco of death and uncertainty, wherein all values are turned upside down and tossed in the wind like balsa wood air planes coming to land at the feet of Bush and Bin Laden, while the toothlessness and homelessness increase across the land, and the buildings topple from bombs made from burning flesh.

Addictions are the stuff life is made out of, the evidence of things not seen. I'm paraphrasing the Apostle Paul, of course, when he was talking about Faith being "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Sure, addictions are physical. In truth, they are much bigger than a physical sensation; they are actually the world we manifest to live in as a result of desiring things: things for our mouths, things for our tummies, things for our amusement and death.

Oh, believe me, I've tried them all! From the chloral hydrate and alcohol combo that killed Hank Williams to the stupid lithium and tylenol fix that keeps the rest of the world sedated and unable to deal with their own misery. I even tried sex, food, and rock & roll for a while, spending hours obsessing over my CD collection and my girlfriend's enflamed vulva. Sometimes I'd even do it all at once: I'd eat her out while she pissed streams of the bright yellow liquid Prozac she'd processed into my mouth while listening to the Police on her Walkman. And you bet that I got my tripod out and made photos of that for posterity!

But real drugs are a nightmare incarceration that aren't as much fun as a wet female high on her own juices and lust. So I'm not here tonight, folks, to talk about horny young girls on ecstasy. no, this time it's about the major hardcore addiction number one: the habitual sucking of smoke from Satan's hot burning and cancerous bowels. I'm talking about cigarettes and the hell they've created for their foul following.

When I smoked cigarettes I too shared the nightmare with the rest of the world. In fact it was thirty-three years from start to finish, an interlude that took me to places that only a smoker would appreciate: from the reform school in early 1955 right up until a fateful night in March of 1988 when I suffered a blood clot in my left lung. Looking back, I see now that it was one long continuous lack of breath, interrupted only a couple of times when I was locked up in solitary confinement, and one other time when I made a feeble attempt at abstinence which lasted a full ten hours before I leaped onto the back of the first passerby with a pack of Camels and assaulted him.

Thirty-three years that left me feeling like a 33rd Degree Mason with a cancerous voice box sitting strapped into a smoke filled room with 33 old geezers gasping about an imaginary world inhabited by gods and goddesses that they never could seem to materialize outside of the doors of their den. Well I did take a walk outside and inhabit that world, from the Pacific Ocean's depths with its evil sorceress Circe still ruling the waves, all the way up to the new found heights of the World Trade Center and a smoke so hot and dense it left me weeping, all the while wheezing out a wisdom that never really surfaced, but ended up exploding in my face - actually it blew up in my lungs and heart.

What occurred in my life that changed the addiction into triumph was sickness. It was a stroke, to be exact, shortly after the stroke of midnight on March 15th, 1988. I had just lit up and was savoring that first rank whiff of hot dry smoke when all of a sudden out of nowhere I was slammed to the ground with a force like the time I was attacked and beaten with a baseball bat by a bevy of young teenage punks. It felt mighty heavy all right, the incredible feelings that ran outward from my chest and erased the left side of my body. I was speechless and unable to explain it away, the disconnecting effect that had interfered with the natural synapse from right brain to left, or perhaps the other way round, I don't know, and it didn't matter. But what I do know is that even in the height of the psychedelic drug euphoria of the 1960's I was never as spaced out as the state the stroke left me in.

So it was a stroke, I later learned. But at the time it happened I was afraid of it and just lay there in a pool of vomit and blood, the cigarette smoldering on the bathroom floor a half dozen inches from my face. I had no concept of what had just happened to me. When my live-in found me there hours later I was incoherent and unable to answer her. That is, until she attempted to call an ambulance. For a moment my soul stirred and I leaped at her throat, stopping her dead in her tracks. I always did intimidate her, she was fond of telling everybody in the neighborhood who would listen. But I was more intent on stopping her intervention - her middle class interpretation of my problem and its solution. I would rather go through my own changes, after all, unassisted by the professionals and their prescriptions. If I had died on that bathroom floor, then so be it. Right now I'd be writing you all from heaven, where I would have gone to join Elvis in his great mansion in the sky.

But the only death I experienced was the death to an old way of life. That cigarette was destined to be my last cigarette and I knew it right then and there, lying on the bathroom floor. My first conclusion was I had lung cancer; the pain in my chest seemed to suggest it. It was only later to be identified as a blood clot in my already ravaged lungs.

And the identification might have never come, had it not been for a second stroke, which hit six months to the day from the first one, with the further damage of a heart attack from the stress of it all. When I finally did show up at the hospital - which visit, by the way, netted eight prescription drugs dispensed for my equilibrium - all of which I summarily threw in the garbage can on the way out - the doctor was not sympathetic.

Because I was still addicted, of course. Oh, I was through with the smoke, I knew that - but I was still in the throes of an addiction. Only the withdrawals seemed to go unnoticed because of the pain attending the stroke. Perhaps that pain was the withdrawal, after all. Regardless, the addiction remained because it was still occupying a vast part of my body, having yet to unstitch itself from the vital organs and make its long convoluted journey into my bloodstream for egress out. Years earlier, when leaving intravenous drug use, and still later, while leaving alcohol behind, there was that same pain created by an overabundance of toxins encumbering the blood stream as the stuff tried to forge a new route out beyond the jurisdiction set up during years of chemical abuse.

So it is with all addictions and their withdrawals: they announce their going when they are damn well ready to go, and not a minute beforehand. And they don't do it the way you expect them to, nice and easy-like, like the way they came about in the first place, gradual and connected to so many fond memories like getting laid for the first time, or lighting up after a completely scrumptious meal. The list of pleasantries can only be measured by each individual's imagination.

But real transitions don't take place via lines of arbitrary association, when the mind is fooled into thinking erroneously. Nor are real transitions grievous. Like the first time I fasted on liquid other than alcohol for ten days. It was a fast of naturally distilled liquids, concocted daily from the squeezings of fresh fruits and vegetables. And on the tenth day I had an epiphany. sort of in in reverse. Because on the morning of the tenth day of the fast I awoke startled to find that I had not smoked for over 36-hours - and what was shocking was that I hadn't even noticed! The habit had gone from me, without any fanfare whatsoever. In retrospect, I see now that my little tiny longings had disappeared and were replaced by the greater world around me. It was a shift in consciousness, that's all. I didn't have to chew gum, glue nicotine to my skin, or stick needles in my ears. I merely was returned to a consciousness in which smoking was not the reality. Kind of like a little child who walks right by the cigarette machine because she notices a flower growing out of a crack in the pavement at her feet - or a bubble gum machine!

No withdrawals, no trauma, no longing. The fast had purified me and the toxins were replaced for those ten days with nutrients and enzymes, fresh minerals and deep breathing. The body was no longer paramount, and the mind was free to revise its behavior. Oh but I didn't learn that time. I didn't take the smooth and easy way that had been offered to me. Instead, my powerful ego chose to take the bumpy road out of there, with the stroke and debility that followed. What my stubbornness to change left me with was the very real symptom of withdrawal in its place. I guess it made me a "man." I sure in the hell wasn't a woman, but I could see how just as many females fall prey to the all too human trap of addiction and its message.

Wasn't it Eve who offered Adam the first joint, anyway? The first fruit of a small herb that had grown in stature and had come to be known as a tree - not just any tree, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only our stubbornness to be informed by a Creator has led to that particular herb ultimately working the opposite effect on us, leaving us to languish in a lethargy of our own making, filled with the pain and disbelief that follows desire.

Buddha was known to sit under that very same tree for a lifetime at a sitting, listening to the complaints of passers-by, coming to his own conclusion that its one's desires that create the addictions, not the light-bearing particles that dance about us in wonderment, enticing us with their magic molecules and chemical chains. It's not the actual substances in stasis that addict us; it's our imaginations that attach us.

Think about it the next time you light up. Is it really not the Devil belching and farting out his words through your mouth? Those original and fluent dreams of the Creator. dismally going up in smoke. And having lost their power, these myriad pipe dreams have now coated our otherwise transparent environment with one more layer of soot. I guess if addictions were really a personal matter, it wouldn't matter at all. But your addiction is ultimately your gift to the earth. On a more personal level, it is your gift to me. Why deliver the Breath of Life as second hand smoke? Why kill a good thing for the rest of us? Why kill yourself?

A little over 200 years ago in stuffy New England, Massachusetts made state sanctioned education mandatory for children: state polished policy and propaganda as pabulum. Until then, children followed in the footsteps of their parents or their community, building worthwhile skills. The ones who didn't sometimes became artists or drunkards and way wanderers.

There is a famous painting by Rubens depicting the front steps of the Academy at Athens. A solitary figure sits brooding in the midst of the steps, surrounded by a dozen or more assorted individuals who are animated with communication amongst themselves. That personage is recognized as Ruben's characterization of Michelangelo. In addition, the other assorted old bearded scholars and mathematicians are identified, and with them, the very young poets, some yet in their pre-pubescent form of children, sitting next to the old men in concentration and conversation, each learning from the other about the nature of the universe. (I know. I know. there weren't any women in that painting. remember, these were the days before political correctness made a mockery out of history.)

These were, of course, the days before political correctness, when wise men and women spoke the truth, to their beheading or not. They knew that truth is best communicated esoterically through time, from individual to individual, in terms of relationships. What was spoken between these wise ancestors of the past was not the sugarcoated correctness of today, intended not to offend another, or having the sole purpose of building a false sense of self-esteem. It was just obvious information that they were bartering back and forth, couched in mathematics and other languages that delve into the relationships that bind the earth and the sun in their orbits. Such exchanges were all sufficient to build the vessel of the 20th century - the one that everyone is now afraid to go any further in.

Ah yes, but the Sate was clever, deciding the rest of us should overlook this great contribution to culture. In an act of camouflage, they created the original peer group as a means to pressure its constituents into following the lead sheep. They observed that hardly anyone ever ventures out beyond the group to which he or she is assigned at birth. Kindergarten. Teens. Twenty-something. Thirty-something. Middle-age. And finally, the nursing homies and death. All in order, and all in the proper group.

But the problem with education offered up in these State-sanctioned and institution-ridden classrooms is that it only works in similar class determined environments. I'm reminded of one young man who complained to me that his fancy college darkroom was overcrowded and he wanted to come and use mine instead. I let him do it once, after which he never reappeared. While we were talking, over the mixing of photo chemicals, he asked me where I went to school and I told him I didn't. I told him that I learned how to print photos when it became necessary to do so, once I had shot my first roll of film.

"Well how did you know what to do?" the student in him asked. "I didn't" I replied. "Well." But I cut him off and reassured him that I learned it all over a period of six months, when I was thinking heavily about the same things he was now thinking about -- how to proceed. But I didn't make the mistake of asking a teacher, I told him. "It was real simple, it was," I told him. If I was going to print some photos, I decided, I was going to have to find a place to print them. So I busied myself with nailing four walls and a door together, wiring up some red bulbs and outlets for the enlarger, plumbing up a sink for the chemicals to wash themselves out and away from my precious photographs which started appearing about then. "But, but." he continued to stammer. But he was not able to print a single print in my dusty old darkroom, it turned out, and he ran back to the university (Columbia College) and his mommy's bank account.

Many years ago I accidentally wandered outside and stumbled into the wilderness that the homeless walk the length and breadth of. I still have yet to understand, but I know now that the teacher is not confined to the classroom, nor is the student. I stood in awe as I was shown the earth and the inhabitants that roam it and call it home.

Who is imparting the education? What's the teacher want out of it? A relationship? Or are they ther for the paycheck! Maybe it's the tenure they're after. Is this teacher just teaching you what she knows, or is she giving you the information you require to search yourself for the particular and individualized education that you need in order to formulate your own world? Because the sooner you get it, the sooner you are going to use it to get out of school! Teacher though, maybe never gets loose. Which is possibly the best use for a schoolhouse anyway -- a repository for aging educators who might otherwise gum up the rest of our future.

I got my first PHD in a jail cell sketching a picture of a murderer. "Life Drawing" we called it. He got life, I got awakened. He was my teacher, and instead of correcting my paper, he destroyed it and nearly destroyed me as well, but for being pulled off of my neck by some of the other homies in the cell. I got another degree a dozen years later locked in a different cell, and still another degree a dozen years down another road, where jails are no longer built and maintained, where condos grow up out of vacant lots, offering a different form of confinement.

My girlfriend's dad came once to visit me. His daughter was half my age, so he and I should've been in the same peer group, but weren't. "You should get an education and a job," he came to tell me. At 50 he had retired from his desk job at the university where he had once practiced "architecture," according to a degree he received twenty-five years earlier. It didn't seem to bother him that the degree was no longer up to date, that the collapsing new buildings being designed these days were of another time and material.

I showed him the darkroom I had built and equipped with the fixtures of electricity and plumbing, pointing out that even with his degree in architecture I knew he had to hire a carpenter to put in the additional room extension that his daughter had learned to masturbate in. Of course he couldn't build anything, let alone a relationship with me. But I think he was most offended because he realized that his daughter slept right there in the middle of the floor on a crusty old mattress that lay in the corner of my studio. We hadn't even bothered to build a bed frame to fuck on... the photo darkroom had been my priority!

He's one of those guys (was, cause he's dead now) who had one education and one job for life. He raised one family, bought one house and retired only once, sufficient that he had done it all. I told him that I was not one to retire, that I am a working artist in search of an education. The essential difference between he and I, if it were to be measured, was that he received a paycheck, whereas I didn't. Oh yeah. and that I am an architect of lives, not the opaque walls and windows he was so intent on raising between us.

I live in an area of Chicago that contains the highest concentration of yuppies in America, according to Paul Harvey. But they didn't always live here. When I first entered the landscape as an idealistic young man of 22 it was a badland populated by Puerto Rican gangs. Storefronts were boarded up or indwelled by families who curtained them with muslin just as securely as those covered with plywood. It was a haven for a guy like me, having