Fuck 'em If They Can't Take A Joke

No point in trying to catch up with every event and feeling since my last post. A lot has happened.

A lot is always happening

Big event - the annual Old Port Festival. Last year I had to work, this year my strange little schedule made it possible to attend.

Our quarterly meeting and my willingness to help open the store kept me from being a part of the parade. I tended to slide in late anyway, pick a loose-fitting pair of trousers from the can and a beat-up drum then beat the daylights out of it infront of hundreds of people which seemed like thousands.

There was an al-fresco cafe set up in frnot of the Regency Hotel, the old Armory. I liked the burger, though the service was very slow.

A big crowd ... People everywhere you turned. Usually I can depend on my cloak of indifferent invisibility to observe people.

Sadly I also indulged in my annual bag of kettle corn, which meant I wasn't really thinking straight.

There was one booth by Bard coffee, crowned with a huge sign asking "what kind of person are you...good or bad? Take a simple quiz to find out".

I admit I wanted to ignore it and spend my energy watching the Top 40 stage and critiquing the performer but the ancient lure of a theological argument woke up brain synapses dormant since my undergrad days.

So I chatted up the two young men.

The questions?

1 - have you ever told a lie, no matter how small?

2 - what do you call someone who tells a lie?

3 - have you ever stolen something, no matter how small?

4 - what do you call someone who steals something?

So now that you have admitted to being a liar and a thief you are asked to consider what happens to such folks and if you are prepared to be judged.

Since I was under the influence of kettlecorn I admit I missed the obvious comeback: If I am a father whose child is starving and I steal a loaf of bread, saving my child and fully taking the fall, then what am I now?

It all comes down to context. The larger your ability to see the inter-connected picture then the more good you can do. I think pushing the limits of who and how we are makes us more useful, a greater blessing to the world.

And it hit me that this was the face of pure evil in the world.

This willingness, this need to have things be purely black abd white, the desire to have the entire world be reduced to one neck so it could be slit ... whether for theological reasons or to support an abusive relationship ... this denial of the fundamental inter-connectedness of us all, what an former girlfriend and I called the "right game" (which she played incomparably well) ...

... all of it is a source of blisteringly destructive action.

After I had said goodbye I walked by the Vietnamese American assiciation of Maine, doing a Dragon Dance in the street.

It was giggling, delerious fun.

People would run up to the front of the dragon, holding out food and jumping back as it snapped it up.

.... and it struck me, forcefully, in the middle of my dodging the dragon and trying not to trip over a child who was shrieking with delight, that if my very-earnest friends got their way than all of this would be wiped from the earth, as surely as the Taliban blew the statue of Bhuddha to flinders.

...I heard them in the voices answering me when I was working a phone bank for the Gay Marriage referendum.

...I heard them in the voice of a waitress refusing to serve me a slice of the apple pie on the shelf of a truckstop cafe in Montanna in the middle of a Blue Devils performance tour.

As Thomas Jefferson said "I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God eternal vigilence against every form of tyranny over the mind of Man".

So now what do I do?

What CAN I do except try to be the best person I know how to be and try tolisten and love everyone around me .... Even the one who try to trap me in a web of questions.

I think it will take more than a web of pointless words to catch a truly honest dragon.


-- Post From My iPad