THE HOKEY POKEY IS NOT WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT!

THE MEANING OF LIFE;

 I WAS WRONG;

 IT’S NOT THE HOKEY POKEY

I have always said that the Chaos Theory described life, and that everything is chance.   I have used the analogy of the Hokey Pokey; but in retrospect the Hokey Pokey is choreographed: you put your left foot out, you put your left foot in, you put your left foot out and you shake it all about…

After 4 a.m. consideration it is obvious to me that life is a play without a plot.   All the actors are improvising, and every actor believes he or she is the star.  New actors show up while other actors disappear, but the show goes on.   The script is babble and the movement senseless.   

Does that mean that our life is worthless?   On a personal level, of course not: we come on stage and then we exit, but the journey between is up to us.  We can play out angry and bitter or we can Zen out and play to the beauty in every minute and try to make the journey as pleasant as possible.  

Because in the end it’s bugger-all.

The Ol’Buzzard  

FOR SQUATLO

The hokey-pokey is really what it's all about

the Ol'Buzzard

INTROSPECTION

Our lives consist of returning serves and mindless self gratification, sometimes spliced with simple blatant mindlessness: sitting in front of a TV or computer.   We spend very little time in reflection; perhaps we unconsciously avoid it. 

With me, introspection – reflection - (Is the hokey pokey really what it’s all about?) automatically occurs at the beginning of the third drink – when I am by myself.

For someone prone to depression introspection probably isn't a healthy pursuit, in that depression in itself is an unhealthy state…the sound of one hand clapping. 

However, for me it brings on the realization that I am a self proclaimed intelligent creature accidentally inhabiting a meaningless world.   It is not a bad thing to realize that you – yourself – are not the center of the universe.   That actually you are little more than brief electric pulse existing in a momentary flash in one of a million bubble parallel universes… or simply an evolutionary accident.   

I must say that occasionally I enjoy sinking into this alcohol induced funk.  The only down side is I always have the urge to break out my old pipe and tobacco – I gave up smoking years ago.    How nice it would be to sit in the dark on my front porch, surrounded by the Maine woods, and drink whiskey and smoke my pipe.  

But you see, even though there is no meaning to this world (wars, genocides, governments…a struggle to get by) there are personal pleasures (as brief and passing as they may be) that make me want to stay around as long as possible; so therefore I avoid the pipe and usually content myself with the third drink. 

the Ol’Buzzard  

RIDE THAT TRAIN

The age old question of old age occurs when you look in the mirror and an old person is staring back, and you ask yourself: When did I get so fucking old?  Not; how did I live so fucking long – because it doesn't seem long to you.  

You are born and you die: you don’t remember the first and you won’t remember the last.

Along the train ride of life you decided that what you are doing is important – that you are moving toward a goal and that you and the rest of the world will reach nirvana when all your goals are met – but your goals were always ill defined – it is just moving ahead that is important. 

You meet, you fuck, you marry, you fuck, you shoulder responsibilities, you have opinions, you work, you travel…     And time passes.    At some point it becomes a reality that life is finite.  You are riding on this train with no destination but you will have to get off before the last stop.

Humanity has been able to escape Darwinism because of its ability to communicate.   Communication has led to cooperation and innovation; but this same communication has allowed corporate and individual greed and avarice - wars and genocide - rape and disaster and unbelievable mass-inhumanity on a grand scale.   The outcome only reinforces the maxim that we are semi-intelligent animals living in a meaningless world; and our destination is nowhere.

It’s only Rock and Roll

Everyone dies

Go with the flow

And try to have a few laughs.

Cletus Purcell (James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux series.)

Have a good day

the Ol’Buzzard 

                                                                                                                  

DEATH AND THE HOKEY POKEY:

Nan at ALL THE GOOD NAMES WERE TAKEN just did a post on mortality.   

When you get my age you find death lurking in the shadows just beyond sight.    You are conscious of your mortality and your limited future – something that never really concerned you when you were young.  

I don’t worry about death, but I know it is the final payment we all owe to nature. 

My grandmother would tell the story that her family always got together at Thanksgiving at the great grandparents house and it was an unspoken joke that my Kentucky great grandfather always started the meal by saying that this would probably be the last Thanksgiving he would share with them.   This went on for of years - until he wasn't. 

I don’t have family to share with: just my wife.  At my stage of life I find it important to do the things I enjoy.   When I am finally gone I have only one request: that my wife put my ashes in a douche bag with bourbon and water and run me through one more time.

The last ride!

the Ol’Buzzard 

GROWING OLD IS NOT FOR SISSIES.

 when I asked The Reaper what it was all about

he did the Hokey Pokey and he turned himself around

and grinned

 

Yorick, I knew him well.

Young people do not deal with the specter of death on a daily basis.  Their lives are filled with the day to day trivia that is the minutiae of existence.   Relationships and bills, and financial and personal security fill their moments of consciousness as they move through each day.   

I, on the other hand, find The Grim Reaper my personal companion.   He stands by my bed at night; sits in the room while I read; and keeps me company while I split and haul wood for the wood stove.  

Young people dreams of adventures they plans to have and the goals they would like to achieve. 

Since I have much more past than future, I dream of the adventures I have had and goals I have accomplished – my plans for the future are bland; and this is the main rub of growing old.  (As I have said before: I don’t buy Craftsman tools because they have a lifetime guarantee – and at this juncture of my life Harbor Freight tools will outlast me.) 

Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying the laidback life I had hoped for all the years I pulled in harness.  I enjoy my wife’s company (and sex); reading books; eating home cooked food; drinking good wine; and the lack of stress not having to work a job.   But is can be oh’ so boring.  

Keeping busy is now the job; and many would envy my position.

But, The Reaper just tapped on my shoulder and told me to hurry up with this post – He has plans for me down the line and doesn’t want me to be late. 

the Ol’Buzzard

DEATH AND THE HOKEY POKEY

Warning! The following blog post may not be conducive to a carefree happy morning.

We all try to express our feelings; and I for one always fall short.   As I approach mid-seventies I am reminded of my aunts’ comments about their grandfather (my great-grandfather) at Thanksgiving: Each year he would preface the meal with the statement “We may not all be here next year.”  It was a family joke – to everyone except him.   

It is very easy when you are young to dismiss the understated concerns of the old.   After all, who wants to dwell on dying?   The young note it and move on – it is not real; but for an older person that specter is just around the next corner - waiting to reach out and grab you when you pass by.  It is real.  

I refuse to dwell on it…until four-o-clock in the morning.

I can not write the words of those early morning thoughts; but that is all right for they have already been written.  

If you have not read the poetry of Philip Larkin – you should.   I view him as the present day equivalent of Robert Frost.  And for that four-o-clock hour he states it on the mark – for me. 

Aubade

BY PHILIP LARKIN

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The Ol'Buzzard

  

THE SUBJECT NO ONE WANTS TO TALKABOUT

Back to the HOKEY POKEY

I know that people don’t care to sit down and read long post.   Like everything else in this time of computers, twitter and cell phones, people want to read a few paragraph from a blog they are following, make a comment and then move on to the next post.

For this reason I have decided to breach the subject of DEATH in two or even three installments.

"The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far from being on a cruise ship.   Most of your time is spent lying on your back.  The brain has shut down.   The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens and nothing is esxpected of you." 

STIFF, by Mary Roach

I recently attended the funeral of my wife’s aunt.  It is not the first funeral I have attended, but the first commercial funeral I have attended in a long time.   That funeral and my approaching birthday (no. 72) have me rethinking about death; and how death is handled by different cultures and how it is perceived by different individuals.   As I have said before: Death is the final debt we owe to nature for our time alive on this earth – but that’s bull shit.   I don’t question so much why I must die; but the real question seems to be why have I lived?

The only answer I can surmise seems to be that at some random point in time, one of the millions of sperms in one of my fathers random ejaculations (who ever the hell he was) happened to connect with a random egg passing through my mothers uterus.  The whole thing seems perfectly random: I am here via the butterfly effect described in the Chaos Theory.   I am a random male, that had a random birth, that has made random choices in life, that has led me to be a random old man, expecting a random death at sometime in the random future.

Without getting any more metaphysical than that, in the following post I will write about how death is handled in our culture, and how it differs from the death rituals I experienced while living in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska.

But first a little background.

From the earliest times death has been feared and misunderstood by man.   Early humans left their dead for the animals and the environment to consume, as evident by early archeological finds.   Early man was fearful of the unknown, fearful of death and fearful of the dead; and somewhere along his cognitive development the idea of gods and ghost and an afterlife evolved.

Early Neanderthal burial vaults have been discovered that contained weapons and personal artifacts, evidence of a belief in an afterlife.   Pharoses of Egypt were entombed with riches, personal belongings and even slaves.   Michael Crichton describes a Viking funeral pyre in his book Eaters of the Dead in which all preparations were made for the Viking chief’s journey to Valhalla. (Though fiction, Crichton researched his material thoroughly.)

Now we have the advent of major religions and their drive to take control of death



Ars Moriendi (The art of dying), a Latin text dating about 1415, contains woodblock prints presenting the Christians’ dilemma at the time of death.  



The dying man is surrounded on one side by the demons of hell and on the other side by saints and angles.   A battle is in progress for the dying man’s soul.   The only chance this man has is for the last rites to be administered in order to purify his soul so that he might be received sinless by the body of angles.   Early Catholics feared the prospect of sudden death because dying unconsecrated could result in being abducted by demons into the inferno of hell.

The early Catholic Church, with its doctrine of purgatory, was able to manipulate huge financial benefit from the policy of priest receiving money to pray to the saints for the deceased’s speedy trip through purgatory.  The more someone paid the more prayers the priest would offer – thus insuring the rich man a prominent place in the heavenly realm.

(Side note: even today the Catholic Church is one of the biggest individual owners of funeral homes in the city of New York – again profiting from death.)

Notice the early church was all about men going to heaven – the Christian church has never be overly concerned about women, other then to pose them as wanton, temptresses, debasers of men and the cause of original sin.

The image of The Church as the protector from death was lain bare during the mid-14th century when the Black Death swept through Europe, killing perhaps half the Continent’s population.   During that time traditional burial customs collapsed as most victims were consigned to mass graves.   It has been claimed that not only the dead, but also the dying were buried in public pits in an attempt to stem the contagion.

Today death is a big business.   Funeral homes are never short of business and they prey on the grief of surviving family members to sell the biggest and most elaborate death ritual the family can afford.   Cemetery lots increase the value of land from cost per acre to cost per square foot.   Massive cemeteries blanket our country and tie up valuable land from productive use for the many centuries to come.

The dead in our culture are feared and considered an unnatural macabre spectacle to be endured, avoided and dispensed with as fast as possible.   Death is a damn profitable business, and the major recruiting tool for religions of the world.

I know reading a post about death is a bummer - but maybe it can help you

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE



The Ol'Buzzard