Poetry & Blindfolds

I have an mp3 CD that lasts about six hours that I listen to most nights when I go to bed.  It is my full collection of Beatles bootlegs, er, ‘alternate takes’.  From the Decca audition tapes to the demo for ‘Help!’ (done on piano very slowly, which adds a different shade to the happy pop of the final version) to Take 1 of ‘Paperback Writer’ to the rehearsals for ‘All Things Must Pass’, the disc is full of low fidelity gold.  Tonight, and I fear this will only make sense to people who know the Beatles catalogue, I fell asleep around Take 4 of ‘Misery’ and woke up during the demo of ‘We Can Work It Out’, then the orchestra overdub for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and finally the runthrough of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.’

My mind, full of irrelevant and irreverent thoughts, has driven me out of bed and onto this page.  And some of the top irrelevant and irreverent (and VERY unedited) thoughts tonight are:

*Why does one person walk at their regular speed, yet if there are two or more people walking together, their speed is slowed down by at least three times?

*Why do people stand on escalators? 

*Iran stopped its nuke program in 2003 and is still viewed a threat by the White House.  Why – because they don’t recognize Israel?  I’ll admit that I wouldn’t recognize Israel if I saw it at a party.  I hope Bush won’t want to go to war with me anytime soon.

*An attorney collapsed with appendicitis in my office yesterday.  After she was taken away, I walked up to the guy who does office assignments and asked if that office was now free.  He called me a ‘sick fuck’ but admitted that he was irritated that his meeting with that attorney at noon would probably have to be pushed back.

*Whenever my friends are flying, I offer them $20 to embark on their plane and yell “let’s roll.”  Call it a macabre sense of humor.

*We need to stop calling people who shoot a lot people ‘gunmen.’  This evokes a certain heroic quality.  Jesse James.  Wild Bill Hickock.  Clint Eastwood.  I think, to discourage lunatics from going to a mall and shooting people (and then invariably themselves), these people should be referred to on the news as ‘pussy farts.’  “Tonight, in Omaha, a pussy fart shot dozens of people.”  Nobody wants to be called a quief, even lonely, ugly, down-and-out losers.  To prove my point, go up to the biggest loser you know and call them a pussy fart.  Gauge their reaction.

*There was a woman in the subway last night who was doing a Q&A, presumably for some magazine, about peoples’ opinion of god.  I admit I thought up my responses to her questions, even though she never got to me prior to my train arriving (must have been a miracle).  Among my imagined answers was something like: god’s good fun, the ultimate mental band-aid.  If ever you don’t understand something, you can say ‘it’s god’.  Like 911.  Either you can see it as an inevitability for how we hosed al queda in the 1980s and kept putting military bases on so-called holy land, or… you can say it was god.  Punishing the US for the feminists and the fags. 

*I don’t like that the events of September 11, 2001 are called simply 911.  Makes it sound like a film.  Like ID4.  It’s very reflective of the A.D.D. culture we live in.  I cannot imagine Pearl Harbor Day being referred to as 129.

*I don’t think you can support the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by owning a magnet you put on your car.  You can, and do, support magnet manufacturers.  And why a magnet?  Do you anticipate changing your mind?  Then you can say, ‘whew, glad I didn’t paint this one; that would have been a bitch to remove.’

*My comedy group is involved in Sketchfest, which is a big festival featuring 100 sketch comedy groups from around the US and Canada.  While I respect and recognize the value of this endeavor, I must admit to not liking being in a room with 500 people just as funny as I am.  It’s not because of jealousy or competitiveness; rather, it’s because funny peple should be the odd-man out in social circles.  The odd observer.  The wry commentator.  Plug half a thousand of these fuckers into the same room and it’s a Star Trek convention with rubber noses instead of pointy ears.  Fookin’ terrifying.

 

And now I lay me down to sleep, or stare at the clock until I have to wake up – and then I’ll be exhausted.  Woot.

 

 

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