In every religion there is a loophole
Something or many, many things
Not quite believable
I guess that's why one must
Have faith, and
Suspend disbelief
But Goddammit it's hard.
In Christianity it's hard to believe
Jesus did all those things and
Popped out of the tomb and went
a wanderin' round,
And in Buddhism
Can't prove or disprove one has
Found or achieved Enlightenment
And will escape the cycle of
Birth and death.
I mean it's a subjective thing.
And in Islam Muhammad was a good
Channeller but he might be put to shame
By some of the nuts talkin' for God today.
And Rastafari? Right, Haile Selassie was God?
I guess one just has to stop believing what humankind
Has previously set forth as explaining God
And live without faith
Claiming a hold on dignity
Knowing the real truth is that one day
Your heart is beating and you're breathing
And the next day you're not.
Does consciousness persist after physical death?
One can only speculate no
Otherwise I would know who and where I was before I
was born
Or, if my creation did miraculously begin on July 20,
1961
And when I die this unique me will persist
I can only gamble and lay odds it will or it won't
And sit tight trying to maintain in the face of this
existential
Burden,
Oh shit how I wish I were an animal!
Not fallen from grace!
Knowing only instinct and what is in front of me
Incapable of much abstract speculative thought
Or do animals, birds, insects, plants, herbs, fungi
and trees
Possess this singular faculty?
Are single cell organisms
The most intelligent of all?
I guess we'll know when the breathing stops
When the heart stops beating
But then, how will we know
If we, our thinking brains,
Are not functioning anymore?
This is a question for the philosophers
For the poets, for the physicists
And for anyone who has smoked good weed
Or taken a tab of acid…
What will I be doing on election day, November 2, 2004? Probably sitting in front of my computer, drinking coffee or tea, smoking, maybe typing some odd short story or academic paper, thinking about my upcoming death, thinking about all those guys getting their heads chopped off in Iraq, watching the Chinese TV movie channel (I can't understand what they are saying so the noise doesn't bother me), maybe reading the Yahoo news or checking out how my favorite stars died on findadeath.com, maybe reading my Che: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of a Revolutionary book or reading about Buddhism, maybe reading my Oriental Painting Course: A Structured, Practical Guide to the Painting Skills and Techniques of China and the Far East book and staring at the blank pages of rice-paper I have laid out on the little rectangular felt paint-rug on the floor of my little Zhenjiang Forestry University floor flat, maybe reading the book I just bought The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, maybe masturbating while looking at pictures of lesbian teens on the Sublime Directory free porn website, maybe just staring at the cheap Chinese globe I bought and have sitting on a little Zhenjiang University crude chair that is set next to the table whereupon lies my computer, maybe staring at this globe and wondering about all those little islands in the Pacific Ocean between Australia and South America and what the hell people do on those things or if there are even people on them at all, maybe looking at my tiny antique carved jade statue of Buddha sitting in the lotus position and saying internally Amithaba Buddha like my Pure Land Buddhism book Taming the Monkey Mind tells me to do to gain merit and disperse my bad karma and make my life oh so better for exclaiming these words either internally, externally, moving the lips or not while saying it - no matter even if you just think it you get the same reward, maybe playing my guitar, watching the Chinese movie channel, reading the Yahoo news or findadeath.com or the Urban Legends website, or writing some poem or weird short story about Indians or Native Americans if you want to get politically correct about it on the reservation drinking too much and getting into all sorts of cosmic mischief when a space ship lands and picks a bunch of drunk ones up, maybe lamenting my lowly position as an English teacher in this odd foreign land and missing my parents who really don't want me around because my Dad remarried and my original Mom died and my Dad's new wife thinks I'm a leech when I stay there and I always stay too long and make them buy Hagen Daz and stuff when I am there and they usually don't buy the 'premium' ice cream when I'm not there, maybe reading my The Great Philosophers book, maybe thinking of calling my only real friend here the Iranian-Australian Nader (his first name don't know his last yet) and asking him to go out to the karaoke club drinking with me, maybe eating candy, maybe looking around my dirty little hovel and thinking about cleaning it a little, maybe answering the door if someone knocks but maybe not, too, maybe rereading parts of the Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven especially the part where Courtney Love climbs on top of Kurt's body at the funeral and sort of dry-humping him screams "Why did you do this to me!" selfish wench, maybe wondering why the other English teachers except Nader think me a recluse and strange, maybe just looking at my suitcase which I haven't put away since I got here, maybe and a very big maybe here preparing for my class tomorrow or just deciding to 'wing it' since I already know English and thinking what am I going to prepare for, maybe eating more ramen noodles or something Chinese that I don't even know what it is, maybe drinking some of my extract of American Ginseng I bought that comes in four cylindrical jars with a brown nasty tasting liquid and a root stalk of the stuff in there to chew on after you drank the liquid, maybe thinking about my life so far and how when I now come back to the US seems like I am a big terrorist criminal drug dealer because I taught in Kingston, Jamaica, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Kharkov, Ukraine, Bangkok, Thailand and now Lin An, China and these are all places where either drugs or bootleg CDs originate from, maybe watching (again on my computer) one of the movies from the Godfather trilogy that I got at the local supermarket for 35 yuan also called RMB and thank God it's in English but I didn't know it would be in English before I bought it and I'm so starved for entertainment I was gonna just watch it dubbed in Chinese but happily it turned out to be in English, maybe just sitting here wondering why they have two names for the money here in China - yuan and RMB, maybe sitting missing my girlfriends the older one I left back in Thailand and the younger Vietnamese beauty I left in Cambodia, maybe writing more on this piece if Jonathan doesn't publish it before the election comes, and maybe wondering just where is my absentee ballot anyhow and how come it hasn't arrived yet and thinking of how I could swing the election with just my one vote for.for.drum roll please......Ralph Nader!
Randall says, "I was born in 1961, the second of two brothers. I grew into a small but strong young lad, and I especially excelled at swimming. At eleven years of age I won four gold medals in the regional junior Olympics. Then I turned twelve and my swimming career was over. I was small and could not compete with the size of the fourteen year olds. I was a loser. I lost interest in swimming and turned my interest to writing and books. In the thirty or so years since then, I haven't done much of nothing.”