Rosenbush Café

“There are people who cannot change from the inner to the outer, who must be pushed from the outside. They are the ones who need revolutions.” — Anaïs Nin

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Contains adult themes, innuendo, black humor, cigar smoke and graphic language

ExNil

Earlier today, I reached an ultimate conclusion; irrevocably identifying an amorphous individuality and mercurial perspective when faced with the unequivocal certainty:

I was born on the wrong planet and compounding my predicament; in the wrong century. I am destined to be viewed with ambiguity for the remainder of my short-lived existence by virtually everyone I know, or, who thinks they know me. It’s improbable that I will ever be continually happy or that my life will imbue ecstasy but I cannot obstruct my quest for moments of solitudinous significance.

I am unknown except to a miniscule core of friends totally less than a dozen and others who think they understand who and what I am is measureless. Most of us do not reach for cosmic relevance in our lives while the scope of my judiciousness is rapidly reaching extinction.

Not that I am an enigma in flesh tone but rather an individual who has the tendency to wear despondency like a tight shirt over my heart and soul rather than acknowledge fate in unclothed dignity.

Like anyone who is truthful with themselves and the world is sadly lacking in enough of them, I am guilty, too, even though I’d like to think I am clever, resourceful and intellectual. On some levels, I am all three while on a daily basis I lack sufficient discipline to contain my self-esteem without bravado. I talk too much, am prone to repeating stories about my life that changes on flights of imagination and although the core of my life is sincere and honest there are moments where I am like a dishonest historian re-creating personal memoirs to flatter the moment. As an existential nilhist I view the earthly humankind in fractured hues, intentionally, hybridizing positive and negative with a conflict of inner being searching for external appropriateness in the grand scheme of everyday life.

My fifth house is in disarray and life has become intolerable. Like most people in the world I am in debt; financially as well as culturally and emotionally. Not unerringly bankrupt but closer to the realization that possessions are the stranglehold that eventually suffocates inspirit leaving behind epitaphs of unreciprocated empowerment. Almost into my late fifties I have become conscious that my failings are not unique and that success is often measured by achievements more than self-esteem. I once wrote, “We are what we aren’t until we become what we will be” and I accept the fragility and preponderance of paradox in my aforementioned declaration.

While shopping in a local grocery store I, trapped in a temporal warp as to which brand of tuna was best for my feline housemates, when I was approached by a couple from my neighborhood. I live in the suburbs of Tuscaloosa, in what I acerbically describe as West Ala (Western Alabama) and even before my mother died in 2007 was not on friendly terms with most of my neighbors. With the exception of two people in the hundreds of houses composing my environs, there is only one person who speaks to me on a consistent basis, a woman I have known since 1968. I do not belong to garden clubs or neighborhood associations and after my father died in 1995 I dropped completely out of being a member of service organizations.

Most people who could claim to know me were never concerned while my mother was dying of Alzheimer’s disease to even drop by to ask if we needed any help. In the fifties, when I was a child, next door neighbors were actually friends, knew names, came by for dinner and regularly cared about the welfare of their friends and acquaintances. Back when the nuclear epoch represented the “nuclear family” thoughtfulness was in practice.

It became extinct during the sixties as cultural revolutions spawned by the Viet Nam War, Voting Rights Act of 1964, drug culture and intensification of governmental and religious influence over every aspect of life from education and welfare to personal and impersonal civil rights. Women’s liberation was often displayed with bra burnings, war protests with draft card burnings and on the whole, the entire country was aflame from Watts in Los Angeles to Harlem in New York City. The Heart of Dixie, which is printed across Alabama License Plates still unnerves me as much as the phrase “the south shall rise again” was habitually voiced during my youth…and beyond.

The couple, whose eldest son and I went to school together, stopped and we chatted briefly. It was during the conversation I remembered why I no longer dropped by for visits, as I had done eons ago, when the man inquired: “So, how long have you been married? I didn’t even know you were married.”

My reply was sincere and immediately presented the reason the word awkward is included in our English lexicon.

I am not married and never have been; however, I have been in a 19-year relationship with the same partner and when I answered that I was not married, but that my partner and I functioned as a couple he responded, “God doesn’t approve of that…”

How fast do you think I changed the subject?

Nanoseconds.

Now I remember, he did not approve of me thirty years ago when I was living with a girlfriend. Wonder what he would have thought had I told him I no longer attend synagogue, that I am more personally spiritual than religious and that I do not believe in God in the manner he was presented to me as a child or young adult in Sabbath School.

To further complicate matters, he invited me to come by some Saturday for a sandwich, containing among other ingredients, tomatoes, to which I am allergic, or to come by on “whatever day it is you are allowed to eat!”

What
The
Fuck
?

Before I traverse athwart back to the landscape of my mind and some other subjects fucking with my fucking with mentality, after the couple left and I realized tuna wasn’t such an important purchase I contemplated what my mentor George Carlin once mused about how God didn’t have time to answer prayers while throwing gas balls around the firmament:

If God exists at all, I thought, why would he give a fuck’s sake whether or not I was an unmarried man in a relationship with an a woman for so many years while many other people I know have been married and divorced thrice? With billions of parallel universes, black holes, gamma ray bursts, super novae and a galaxy of other planets to create, destroy, re-create and destroy again and deciding which planets should support life versus ones that shouldn’t (imagine the rethinking had God realized there would be an earthbound Christian master plan) how did I fit into anything worthy of such bizarre prescience?

We function as a couple, I told the duo, and we are not even in the same state and for most of our 19 years have never lived in the same place simultaneously. I could see the mental gears clicking as if, well, God wouldn’t mind so much that we were not married if we didn’t live together.

Fuck me.

What a world to have such thinking in it. While checking out I re-envisioned life in another constellation where no one was married, life forms were asexually proud and there were no religions, politicians, television or any kind of abuse. By the time I was packed to leave earth it was time to swipe my debit card and get the fuck out of Winn Dixie and go tell the felines about my adventures in the canned food section.

Earlier in this diatribe I was glancing backwards at civil rights and how suddenly, everyone wanted rights; while that is ideally a correct assumption the manner in which those rights were dispensed was no better than before blacks and women could not vote, unwed mothers and homosexuals were ostracized and language was understandable.

I will repeat something I say often: Human rights have to be for all humans or the concept is just rhetoric. I believe in rights for women, blacks, gays, lesbians, children, overweight and undernourished, animals…get the idea? If one keeps adding to the list everyone is on it including the worst of the lot: molesters, white supremacists, racists, rapists, drug dealers, illiterate university professors with tenure and religious fanatics.

Freedom comes with a price higher than the ten cans of tuna for ten dollars I did not buy today. The Westboro Church cretins have been given Supreme Court rights to be repulsive and neo-Nazis still believe the Holocaust was a Jewish fairy tale. Guess they forgot about Stalin, Napoleon, Nero and countless other purveyors of genocide. Imagine a world where all the evil was bottled and sold like deodorants?

“Get you hate body spray at the local pharmacy; it’s located next to bottles of Red Bull, Viagra and condoms…” That shit would go over well in West Ala. Yeah, I know, it would sell well anywhere detestation is lacking, which could be virtually anywhere on this planet.

Readers of my blog have the right to think I am an arrogant high minded cock walker and I have the right to espouse my beliefs that like that seventies song by War, the world is indeed, “a ball of confusion.” The corrupt news media would have us believe the system works and that this world is not in such bad shape: the system isn’t breaking down or non-functional: it never existed, like Santa Claus, Keebler Elves or freedom.

Somewhere, the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta have been stuffed into a bottle and thrown into an ocean and swallowed by a whale with Jonah, Glenn Miller, Amelia Earnhardt and all the sailors lost during the Philadelphia Experiment.

I could have been a euphemist had I studied more in college.

During the recent West Ala elections one particular gubernatorial candidate made issue that the driver’s license test was given in seven languages when he believed it should only be in English! Every time I saw his repellent advertisement I was angry. There is sometime disturbing about calling this country The United States of America when it is far from unified. As I have many times emphasized, as an ExNil, I grew up in the segregated, anti-Semitic south, went to high school with the daughter of the Grand Dragon of the KKK and endured bullying at the hands of both girls and boys.

By the time I reached college age and left for Southern Miss to gain an education, that was wholly lacking in Alabama public schools, I was already displaying an out-of-the-closeted radical attitude. I became proficient at repartee so I was no longer a silent sufferer but a verbal aficionado. I supported civil rights, as I had always done; living continuously with a black neighborhood and over half my childhood friends were black. Although not gay, I was consistently called a queer or homo by the bullies and while at the uni was unfeigned by having many gay and lesbian friends. We were all kindred spirits; fighting adversity in the early and mid-1970s, perhaps unaware of what would eventually transpire in the latter portion of the 20th Century as individual civil rights and awareness of lifestyle choices began to receive worldwide news coverage.
Sadly, the coverage was then, and even more today, tainted by religion, ideology, bigotry, homophobia and genocidal mania.

For the past three and a half years I have experienced the life of a blogger and through my Café esthetics have explored a faux fictitious lifestyle that has finally and utterly unraveled like the loose threads of my stateliness.

Before leaving the house this morning for my grocery shopping escapade I watched two movie trailers, which appear at the end of this essay; one a documentary, the other a purported romantic comedy. Both are worthy of your edification to display what is really wrong in this world:

Individual freedoms to life, love, be yourself and be left the fuck alone are crushed by prejudice.

The first, “8 The Mormon Proposition,”details religious zealots redefining marriage because they believe gays are a threat to America. How can we ever conciliate such narrow-mindedness to restrict marriage to only heterosexuals?

I find it beautiful when people find love. Personally, I am neither threatened nor upset over gay marriage. What does upset me is that marriage is just another man-made control mechanism that requires a government seal of approval.

For fuck’s sake. Life is brief enough and alone it is often unbearable. I spent my first thirty seven years alone and unloved. My partner and I would have gotten married years ago except I was anxious and stubborn and by the time I decided it was too late. However, we survived and continued our relationship as friends and equals.

While observing the minutiae of this documentary I was overcome by the sadness I saw as many gay and lesbians who were in love were deprived of happiness because of some genuinely horrendously misplaced angst on the part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Do I care if members of that church marry one another? No. It is not my business to declare they have no rights in that area so on the other side I believe THEY have no rights to decide who should or should not marry; gay, straight or transgendered. I doubt these extremists consider the number of heterosexual marriages, even within their ranks, where child and spouse abuse exists, which I’ll bet my monthly tuna allowance they do not consider.

Are we one day going to decide blind people shouldn’t be married because they cannot see? If love, like justice, is blind then when will thine offensive eyes be plucked for seeing the beauty of people in love?

The second trailer is for a movie which disturbed me equally. Typical of my talent for observation I figured out the scenario just from reading the one line synopsis about a woman with a secret past. She is a woman who was originally a man, thus the title “Amanda.”The male character in the trailer is such an odious bastard that he is undeserving of love of any kind. This trailer, which is slightly different than the one I saw today, omits a scene where, as a boy, the protagonist is seen jumping up and down on a bed, his pants down, to shock girls walking by his window. This preview does at least show this idiot caught masturbating by a crowd of people presumably for a surprise party.

Entertainment?

Hardly, but what I did find worthwhile was when we are introduced to the title character and see she is deserving of respect that may be included in the screenplay but I cringed at the manner in which she is treated once this asshole learns he has been dating and sexually active with a transgendered person.

To make matters worse, the trailer producers have gone to great lengths to make certain we see that “man” is included in the name “Amanda,” as if we are unenlightened.

The Nature of Existence Trailer

In March, I previewed “The Nature of Existence,” which sadly, but unsurprisingly, did not open here in West Ala, along with the big budget action flicks, gross out comedies and horror movie remakes of remakes. It is worthwhile to watch it last and think about the existence of everything:

I leave you all with another question:

“If God exists, why would there be any need for religion?”

I only offer this simple question because throughout history religion has been presented as another form of control under the ironic hypothesis that it somehow makes life easier. Uh huh. The Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials and persecution of millions of people who did not follow the beliefs of their masters.

I offer simple a solution to make religion work: let those who want to practice it do so while others who are not interested be allowed to believe in whatever makes their lives worthy. If non existence works for someone then they have the right to believe in nothingness. I know it is asking much for the powerful and wealthy world religions to somehow suddenly realize that freedom works best when individuals are allowed to live without fear, tyranny, prejudice or being told they are going to Hell if they do not believe in what one another practices.

I do not believe in Hell or Heaven.

I do believe in existence on this astral plane in the now and while it may dismay others it is not my intention to sway anyone to my beliefs. I have different beliefs today from yesterday and tomorrow, well, experience and intelligence dictates that they may change again. The possiblilty to change my mind is a wondrous gift that should be cherished and not misused.

God is another humanoid invention and while I believe there is a cosmic force involved on a galactic level, here on earth, it is fantasy.

We should strive to believe in the possibilities of our existence and promote human rights for all sentient beings.

It works for me; perhaps, it will for you, or not, but either way, it is not my decision to force belief, it is my RIGHT to consider my individual freedom is mine alone and not delievered through some phantasmagoric ceremony.

Fairy tale or Fable?

Fairy tales and fables offer far more stability than religion.