Yahoo! News – Johnny Carson Dies at 79

Well, I liked him. He was a funny guy, original, personable.

I subpoenaed him to a deposition once, when I was a paralegal for a law firm in Santa Barbara. But that’s a long, boring story, and I didn’t get to meet him. I did see a lot of documents about his finances and stuff, though . I don’t remember anything, and wouldn’t post it if I did. Wouldn’t be ethical.

I’m sorry he’s dead. 79 is awfully young these days.

I’m borrowing the title of a fine poem by one of my favorite poets, Robert Bly, because it’s the first thing that came to mind.

I downloaded the complete text of President Bush’s second inaugural speech to my

computer. As a writer, I thought it might be interesting to look at its construction.

Unfortunately, I think there are holes in it. The first thing I did was to seach it for the

words Iraq and War, to see how this most delicate and vital subject was handled. Those

words do not appear in the text. How can this be? Befuddled but undeterred, I searched on for Empire. It’s also missing, but I did find this, which seems to be the same

thing:

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of

our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has

rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the

maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the

imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one

deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our

nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent

requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

Oh, no. Absolute doublespeak. Our deepest beliefs are supposed to be personal, not national. Hence “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion…” I thought that our deepest national beliefs were supposed to include tolerance for the various beliefs of others. Last time I checked, America’s vital interests were killing extremists before they can attack us again, keeping up our supply of fossil fuels, and protecting traditional marriage.

This president needs a history lesson. From the day of our founding, we proclaimed that every white man with land could vote. Women didn’t vote until the 1920s. And we slogged along a hundred years before a civil war — and the price of roughly two thirds of a million lives — ended the offices of master and slave. The mission that created our nation was the exploitation of North America’s natural resources. Sure a few folks came for religious freedom, but mostly we came to find work.

What the hell is this Bush Doctrine? We’ve got it perfect, and we’re going to ram it down the throats of the planet? Merd. We’re still way down the road from getting a handle on freedom. We are, at best, in the process of becoming free. Two steps forward, one step back. But if we truly believed in the imperative of self-government, we would never tolerate imposing our beliefs on others. That is the great madness of Caesar’s ambition.

There was a memorial in Ventura today for the ten people killed in the La Conchita mudslide.

[news]

Don’t miss tonight’s rant against the war on Burning Daylight.

The man who never alters his

opinion is like standing water, and

breeds reptiles of the mind.

— William Blake

I like that moment at the end of the day when I turn out the lamp and settle back unto my pillows, and for a short time my eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark and there is a such a simple peace. I think of the people I love, and have loved and lost, and the small animals that have brought a furry joy to my spiritually abraded days. I hardly ever think about George W. Bush, Rumsfeld or Rice, or Clinton for that matter, and not even Ahnold Schwartzenegger. They are not, jointly or severally, worth a passing glance when I settle back to say my prayers.

I met a man today from La Conchita, a friend of my Dad’s. He told us that he’d been having a tough time, going to so many funerals. He went to one today for one of the men and – there were a thousand people there. Please understand that there never were a thousand people living in La Conchita. They were only a few hundred. And here in Carpinteria, we’re only 13,000. Do you see?

You need to know about his ceiling – the ceiling of the man I met today. He lost it in the 1995 mudslide. He was in his house, trying to coax his cat from under the bed, when the police made him leave his cat and his house behind. He was driving away when he saw in his mirror the roof of his house come off, flip over and land in the street. He walked back and looked at it, and said, “that’s the ceiling inside of my kitchen, my dining room, my study.” Later, someone stole the light fixture from his ceiling. That was all he ever saw of his home, the rest being under the mud to this day.

I learned some things about mudslides this afternoon; you don’t want to know. Mud’s faster than you think. You probably can’t outrun it. It’s not evil, it’s just a friend to gravity. Mud doesn’t pretend to be moral when it takes life, doesn’t deceive with reasons that dissolve in the rain. It can’t hear us cry, or else perhaps our cries would cause it to forebear. And when the sun comes out, mud doesn’t pretend that what’s been done is right.

So tomorrow we’ll have an inauguration. It doesn’t matter. You’ll have something better to think about, and find it easy to turn your back on this broad and fetid defilement of our better conscience. Make something up, or take a hint from me and think about mud. The intractable deafness of mud, which sits there atop the splinters of lives and homes, not despite the cries of the innocent but because it is mud. And Man, which came from mud and returns, having practiced an indefensible and bloody refusal to hear.

CASSIUS Who offered him the crown?

CASCA Why, Antony.

BRUTUS Tell us the manner of it, gentle Casca.

CASCA I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it:

it was mere foolery; I did not mark it. I saw Mark

Antony offer him a crown;—yet ’twas not a crown

neither, ’twas one of these coronets;—and, as I told

you, he put it by once: but, for all that, to my

thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he

offered it to him again; then he put it by again:

but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his

fingers off it. And then he offered it the third

time; he put it the third time by: and still as he

refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their

chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps

and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because

Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked

Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it: and

for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of

opening my lips and receiving the bad air.

–Julius Caesar, Act 1.

I’m having one of those days. It’s not your fault, I know. But I can’t seem to get connected to the productive beam of psychic red bull that runs left to right through the fields of the Lord.

I’m bored, already checking out tonight’s TV listings. West Wing, which I recently commended to jumptheshark.com for its apparently having begun the last lap of the race to oblivion, is on tonight. I never miss it. WW replaced Northern Exposure as my favorite show, and that replaced M*A*S*H. At least tonight it appears to have most of its regular cast. Last week, it was just Josh plodding around in angst over his new nominee for the next president. But tonight’s episode is “365 Days,” an apparent reference to the time remaining in the presidency of the MS-stricken President Bartlett.

If if walks like a lame duck and quacks like a lame duck….

OK, I could be writing, working on the book. And I owe e-mails to a few friends, though a lot of my friends are blowing off my e-mails lately.

But then I wouldn’t have come up with that cool red bull … fields of the Lord line. And that was entertaining wasn’t it? A little glimpse into my interior life … no charge. Right, then my work here is done.

I would like to thank the people of the Los Angeles area for thoughtfully considering that the roads, not to mention the nerves, of the Santa Barbara area were strained to the limit by recent storms. And thus for not zipping up here like you do every other 3-day weekend. It was good that you foresaw that, if you drove up here past the La Conchita disaster area, you’d have to drive back past it, and every rubbernecking idiot would have to slow down for a look. You knew that it would cause massive gridlock, not only on the freeway but on every significant side street through my little town.

If you guys from the LA area had decided a sunny drive up the coast, and a nice lingering look at the sight of our recent heartbreaking loss, were just what you needed, it would have been very hard on us. And we’ve been through a lot, as have you. And no one needs that kind of meaningless diversion right now anyway.

I don’t know which of you Einsteins first had the idea of cutting through Carpinteria, 3 miles above the site of the traffic jam, thinking you could get ahead of a few cars that away, but he’s an asshat. Everyone of you who did it crawled through our town, then got back on the freeway on the other end. You gained nothing, but you made things miserable for us who live here and just wanted to get home for dinner.

The one mile drive from my parents’ house to our local market, which usually takes two minutes, took 30 minutes this evening. The drive to my house from the market – usually about 3 minutes – was another half an hour. That’s longer that it used to take me to commute from Goleta, 10 times farther from home, in rush hour.

Let me just say this: We are not Disneyland up here. You’ve already got that down there. How about, just for a while, try Tucson for your weekend getaways, OK? Thanks for your support.

Please take a moment to remember this man, whose eloquent and passionate service catalyzed a season of positive change in the land. I’m not posting any quotes – that would be too easy. But I’ll suggest that we consider what civil rights means to each of us.

“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in

the forced contemplation of their own works.”

— John Dos Passos

It’s a different way of looking at things,

of celebrating half-light and fog.

For instance, a bee I saw, just

for an instant, fumbling among

the camellias and darting past

the dog’s head. You’d almost believe

it was Spring, forgetting the windmills

droning all night to save the lemon

trees from frost. But the chiminea,

warming in compassionate sunlight,

is half full of rain. And in January,

I prefer fog. I would rather have

a morning with the houses gray

and almost lost in it. With Papa

standing by the pickup, asking

if I’ve got good tires, a full tank

of gas, a map, some cash.

They called him Bee. He liked

a Timex watch, a good pen

in his pocket. Ballpoint, blue.

I had everything I needed, checked

everything but the weather.

So he stood there by his house

in the long, cold January, foggy

San Joaquin, breathing gray exhaust

in the gray world. He stood there,

waving as I disappeared.

Kyle Kimberlin

January 15, 2005

with Grandma & Papa on my way to CSU, Chico, January 1983. Click on the image to enlarge.

My anti-war blog is active again. Just thought I’d mention it.