"The artist is the last free person."
Duncan Fallowell

It's getting weird out there.  I derive no pleasure from believing it will only get worse.  People who revel in "being right" are dangerous lunatics; I would love nothing more than to be completely wrong.  Probably, there is more truth in one person who would like to be wrong than in a million people who insist on being right.

I am in my own private Mexico.  The curtains are bright, but I can hang blankets on the windows to darken the room, and keep the sunlight warm.  The neighbor is building a junkyard next door, but he's friendly, and keeps his music clean.  There is no air conditioning or heat.  You can turn the oven on, if it gets bad.  I've done it maybe half a dozen times.  I hate to cook, so the propane lasts a year.  Food is for the living.

"When I die it'll be a glorious day.
It'll probably be a waterfall."
River Phoenix

I like the sound the dogs make a few houses down, when somebody comes home.  It's as though the neighbor's yard is an ocean of dogs that comes to a boil every time the gate opens.  Like bubbles in a boiling pan, the dogs come to life, and it's like an echo of the sound people hear when they get to Heaven.  When you tune the radio in your soul to the frequency of Heaven, the sound of happy animals and children is like an advertisement for glory.  It's as though the angels have announced, "we'd like to interrupt your regular programming to remind you that Heaven is going to be great!" 

I need to hear it.  For you, maybe this nightmare world is as close to Heaven as you want to get, and the thought of being surrounded by family and endless friends in a deathless place of peace and joy fills you with boredom.  Chalk it up to something else we don't have in common.  Is the radio in your soul tuned to Hell?  Does the thought of freedom bore you?  Do you measure your freedom by the frequency with which you stimulate your zombie nervous system?  Do thoughts of deathlessness and peace elicit visions of sitting around in the waiting room of a dentist's office with humorless zealots, playing arrhythmic children's music for bureaucrats who work in an eternal, monochrome police station, waiting for your turn to be judged?  Don't you know, that's how you know you're going to hell?

When presented with the keys to your prison, all you ever talk about is being judged?

It's as if you want to be free of being clean.

I am in my own private Mexico.  The Mexico I inhabit is the only Mexico of its kind.  For all I know, it isn't even Mexico.  Nobody bothers me, and the walls aren't padded.  The house is surrounded by a hedge of fire that warms my soul and keeps the demons out.  The lemon tree is bleeding.  It isn't solipsistic of me to observe it.  I still have trauma symptoms, sizzled nerves and marbles rattling around inside my chest, but I can keep them in a jar by the bed.  I don't even have to put them back in my heart, if I don't want to.  I'm not there yet.

But I'm working on it.

"Artists explore the forbidden and the unknown."
Duncan Fallowell

I recently discovered Duncan Fallowell on YouTube, and listening to him describe his library is like attending a wedding in a landfill.  Something beautiful, what...  Here?  There are no books in my Mexico.  I brought a few.  Frida Kahlo's diary, Frank Zappa's autobiography, Of Love & Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez, and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn are highlights of my milk-crate library, which has spent months at a time crammed in the back of the van between the antifreeze and hydraulic jack which I've, by the grace of God, never had to use.  I never read them, though.  A page of Zappa, every couple years.  I don't like reading anymore.  Too many bad associations. 

Van life ruined it for me.

Apparently, though, people who produce and appreciate beauty still exist.  To listen to someone talk like that is like taking an opium bath in a river of life.  Which is to say death.  Cuz I don't believe in it anymore.  In my own private Mexico, the idols of work and self-interest have been bottled and smashed.  I have learned the proper place for the pleasure of words.  It is indeed a gift.  But words aren't sacred.  Art isn't sacred.  Music isn't holy.  Poets aren't priests of the transcendent.  Poets are bricklayers, working with their hands in the pyroclastic mud of civilized culture.  Writers and painters and filmmakers aren't gods; they're gravediggers, making poems and paintings out of piles of rocks.  Rocks that will one day be used to construct a cathedral.  Or a whorehouse.  Or a prison.

"Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion."
William Blake

What religion is Blake talking about?  If privi-lege is derived from the Latin for "private law," and re-ligare means "to bind fast to the law," or "to place an obligation on," does this indicate that "re-ligion" is like an iron chain wrapped around the hearts and minds of every human being?  If so, then the brothel serves the same spiritual purpose as the prison or cathedral:

Keeping people chained in the dungeon of sin,

Where oceans of dogs never boil

over with joy,

And purity is seen as boring.

However, if Christ made religion obsolete 2,000 years ago...

Then the "art" and "literature" of Heaven must be magnificent beyond our capacity to understand.  The beauty of the place will perhaps take at least one eternity to become accustomed to.  Maybe it will only take an instant.  Once a couple million instant eternities have passed, maybe we'll get around to making a fingerpainting, or a sunset.  It's beyond our understanding.  We can't even imagine a world in which the act of depicting what we experience or see is an absurd, obvious waste of what used to be called "time," back when we were chained to the walls of desire in the basement of the cathedral, or brothel of casino law.  Our libraries down here in the legalistic whorehouse we call civilization are written in chalk on a sidewalk in the rain.  There's nothing wrong with writing a law book about a beautiful girl in fingerpaint, carving a statue from a lightning bolt, or riding an opera over the edge of a waterfall.  But it's important not to idolize those things.  Idolatry is always right (in its own mind).  Ask it, it'll tell you.  Always right.  Every time.

That is why it's wrong.

People who revel in "being right" are dangerous lunatics.  There's nothing wrong with being right, but there is a great deal wrong with reveling in it.  Probably, there is more truth in one person who would like to be wrong than in a million people who insist on being right.

“I don't have any friends in the business.  Just River.
Oh where, oh where has my Juliet gone?”
Keanu Reeves

I am in my own private Mexico.  I ingratiate myself to nothing and no one, and am leaning closer into God.  It isn't strictly true that "I don't have any friends in the business," but it is true that, at the moment, I don't have any business.  My closest friends are my fellow citizens of Heaven, my brothers and sisters in Christ.  Then there are my earthly friends who haven't let the demons come between us, and hopefully never will.  After that, I have a great appreciation for smart people, whether we share a disdain for epicurean idolatry or not.

It sounds haughty, but I want to make a clear distinction between people with open hearts and minds, and people who have chosen to be worthless obstacles.  It's always a choice.  There are no inherently worthless people.

It's always a choice.  Being dysfunctional does not make someone worthless.

It's always a choice.

One's opinion of My Own Private Idaho is a good litmus test of the value they have chosen to place on their soul.  Anybody who sees it as a "queer classic" is fundamentally deficient in the basic mental and spiritual nutrients required for critical thought.  Anyone who sees it as simply a cool and artful film with great actors and interesting characters, who understands that what makes it interesting is the artistic vision behind it, not the use of bricks of any given sexual persuasion, and who can see past the bricks, and the wall, and the chains of ideology that make up the brothel in the basement of the single-cell cathedral, the one-room prison in which many people insist on languishing in sanctimonious rage from on high, at everything that challenges them,

Is someone I would consider a privi-lege to call a friend, if not a brother or sister in Christ.  I could bind myself to the private law of the friendship of a person like that.  If that's you, and I die (or get raptured) before you do, I have one last request.  Two, in fact.

Seek the warden while He may be found, so we can meet again on the streets of gold,

And please don't call me Juliet.

Thanks for listening.