In Honor of Oscars Sunday,

because, this time of year makes me extra curmudgeonly-critic

I love movies. But I hate actors. Of what purpose do they serve in society? They are merely our escape artists.

The Oscar acceptance speech is worthless, bloated air pouring out of puffed up lungs. Fake and pretentious...

Inflating the ready to burst egos of these gaseous masses who parade atop crushed red velvet carpets. Celestial stars of gratuitous camera flashes and blue applause. The sound of 10,000 hands striking 10,000 hands. Fake validation for these vulnerable monoliths, these sensitive actors. People who make their entire existence as a detachment from reality. Living high up in the hills, up in the sky, to confrim they are indeed stars. In the heavens we have made for them.

Jack Describes Eterntiy

Or, a confusing dialogue I had with Jack Kerouac in my mind while eating apple pie in Julian the day after Christmas.

“Did I create that sky? Yes, for if it was

anything other than a conception in my mind

I wouldn’t have said ‘Sky’ – That is why I am the

golden eternity. There are not two of us here,

reader and writer, but one, one golden eternity,

One-Which-It-Is, That-Which-Everything-Is.”

                                    Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

He dances around the near empty dining room shouting psalms and sutras, twirling round and round with his invisible dance partner, surrounded by invisible music. Each boot stomp, a kick of a bass drum, echoes to the walls and back. Shaking my coffee, it slips over the white rim of the mug. Stains the sides brown, grandmother’s teeth. Each line, singular, statements, lighter than air. Twisting towards the exposed wooden roofbeams, circa 1919, like cigarette smoke.

He is not making any sense. He enunciates Buddhist lyrics as Catholic creeds. He sings of eternity and nothingness. Mortality and infinity. I am not following along anymore. My eyes read words on the page, but without content to comprehend, they only sound pleasant together. I know I will forget them. Soon. Same as when I first endeavored to devour everything he wrote, when I was younger and much more impressionable.

Stop making no sense! I shout, between his boot beats.

“The cause of the world’s woe is birth, the cure of the world’s woe is a bent stick,” He answers and leans into me, spilling the Frangelico and coffee between the grooves of the worn, wooden floor. The Golden Eternity is everything and nothing.

So it is a paradox?

He smiles, a smile ten times the size of Jupiter, raises his finger to make a point, but instead shovels a forkful of apple pie into his mouth. Raises one eyebrow. The difference in distance between me and you and the Golden Eternity is a foot and it is a mile. The years are blinks of an eye that pass like seven hundred lifetimes stacked one on top of each other. Pancakes! You should be thrilled that you get blue. Blue proves the existence of happiness. Blue like a bodhisattva riding the rails from Montana to Mexico City. Blue like Michelangelo, like Rimbaud, like Nietzsche, like Robert Johnson, like Bird. Bird is gone, sadness is eternal. Sadness is golden. Eternity is golden. Golden smiles, old golden teeth of the ancient man.

I feel nothing but an eternal distance between Jack Kerouac and me.   

It seems like a tired line – there is peace and joy through oneness with the universe. I’m afraid I will never digest this Buddhist thinking. I am too pre-programmed to look for beginnings and ends. To search out causes and effects. It is the consumer of history in me that seeks out straight lines. An album has a start and a finish. There is no eternity there. Not even when you press repeat.

Jack ends with a joke –

“This is the first teaching from

the golden eternity.

The second teaching from the golden eternity

is that there never was a first teaching

from the golden eternity. So be sure.”