Sitting here watching Broken Flowers thinkin’ bout’ all the trillion trillion things happening right now as I write this the joy the suffering the way Obama looks at himself in the mirror shaving wonder how the hell he sleeps at night might we dance together today under the sunny skies of North Carolina my heart is singing and the thought of the thought of the thought of happiness of good friends of “Golden Days, Golden Days”  then you know it’s up to me to take you away for a moment why don’t we do that…

A young woman walks into a Midwestern bar out of loneliness and a break from her smelly apartment.  As she enters – the eighteen drunk, insensitive males look her up and down as if they were inspecting meat at a factory.  The grunting can be heard a mile away and Cindy ponders the notion that his  really big  cock just got a little bit harder looking at her – is both repelling and enticing in the worst of ways.  She can feel it, being subjected to this carnivore delight, the animalistic and primitive way guys rip the soul out of women and reduce them to ass and tits.  They down another Bud and strut with the simple pride of being part of the man-clan.   ” Fuck you if you don’t want in...”

“I believed in fairy tales,” she thinks to herself and goes to the bar to order a beer.  Goddamit, a spider is on my back. And that spider knows what is coming.  It bites her on the shoulder as a reminder of life’s pain, the unending cruelty of physical sensation going either direction, pleasure or agony.

“I believed in true love, a Prince to rescue me, God, everything.”  The lustful eyes are saturating her, fucking her from the imaginations of lonely men just three feet away.  Jesus, am I the only girl in here?  FUCKING SPIDER!

The tattoo infested bartender looks up – terrified as what unfolds.  The old red roof of Fred’s Beer Barn begins to rip apart as a distraction that simple men cannot fathom ignites upon the Nebraska night, carrying in its funnel a hundred corn plants and one pathetic scarecrow.  The wind of the F-3 Tornado is like ten freight trains off the track and headed for a cliff,  sucking up wood and steel and drunk, horny, overweight men into the night sky of Omaha.  These “men” become boys quickly and shriek in terror as two of the regulars, Frank Simmons and Ted Slavinsky  – are sucked up for a ride into oblivion they have only had nightmares of, despite holding onto wooden posts and their beer bottles, like a sacred ornament they will die to defend.  Their overweight, beer and meat filled bodies are ripped to pieces as they see their wasted lives pass in front of their eyes in one American instant.  Ted once had a thought that was truly original he believed, and the moment before the cyclone devours him, he realizes how stupid a thought it really was – to serve Beer in vending machines.   It was a fuckin’ good idea at the time… He ponders quickly as the two hundred and fifty mile an hour wind rips his  fat, worthless body to bloody pieces, smashing him repeatedly on the pavement in front of two schoolgirls.  They no longer believe in Fairy Tales either.

And Cindy Sampson keeps drinking,  taking in the shock and horror on a night she really just wanted to be held on.  The men who moments ago were plotting ways to defile her body in unmentionable ways are taken away to certain death,  and she thinks to herself that this tornado may make her a true believer  in the Almighty after all.  The bar area is miraculously not hit by the funnel and she looks and looks at the chaos and looks again, holding tight to her St. Pauli Girl and the notion that to die by a tornado is a glorious death and should be savored.   This “Finger of God” may take us away to some other world, she thinks, a world no man could ever give me.

Maybe I should jump in the eye and see where it takes me – away from this mediocre life where the most exciting that that happens to me is ordering extra sour cream on my bean burrito at Taco Bell.    I’m Cindy Sampson and I want a goddamn adventure!

Though it was not Cindy’s night to die, the singing goes on from cloud to cloud as the harmonies of Mozart and Mr. Vivaldi open up the glittering passageway to that far off place, but so close that you could whisper and infinite souls hear you through the madness.  The voices of Cindy’s ancestors who followed the road of truth and fell short are waiting with all she ever thought, felt, dreamt, hoped for, and loved   The twister is gone and people have gone with it.  Fred’s Beer Barn has no roof now.   The weather looks nice on the horizon.  Cindy can now see a meteor shower light up the June skies over Tornado Alley.

Wow.  I mean holy shit, fucking, unreal – as in I WAS SAYING WE NEED TO GET BEYOND MONEY FOR YEARS. (it’s all about ME, don’t you know that yet!) Looks like these guys are ahead of me and propose a RESOURCED-BASED ECONOMY instead.  This is the cool part if you haven’t watched ZEITGEIST – which you should because they say let’s combine all the good parts of our technology and combine them with our Planet to live in what some would cynically say is idealistic Utopia.  I think we need some serious idealism after watching this last oil spill.   Replacing boring, monotonous factory and assembly line, spirit-killing jobs would be robots that could do them faster and not get exhausted.   Zeitgeist, which means “The Spirit of the time or of the ages,” is a two-hour documentary that covers everything from 9/11 and explosions in the towers to religion, thousand mile per hour mag-lev trains,  to the evolution of our banking system in America and its power over the world.    Okay, this isn’t one to watch stoned with your beer-buddies or a date.   There aren’t a lot of “lough out loud” moments going on here, although they did hire Tony Danza to play Jesus which was an odd casting choice as he is far too buff to be my messiah.

Part of the film goes into the above mentioned ideas which branch off into THE VENUS PROJECT,  the child of Jacque Fresco, a 90-something architect who has devoted his life to that idea that we can live on the beautiful world without the neurotic need to possess land and control others and define ourselves by our checking account balance.   He talks about ideas that are more Christian than any one I have ever heard in church, although proposing all men were thongs on Thursdays is one I think we should vote on, as well as his obsession with asparagus and ostrich racing.  Just kidding.  I’m thinking that mental illnesses might begin to disappear in a world like this because I’d have nothing to bitch about any more and that would be a huge problem.   Where would we go, what would we do…

A new spirituality would arise out of a greater community and new freedoms of time, health, and creativity.   I never thought I’d say this, but maybe science and technology could be the genesis of finally, finally discovering God on Earth.

(You can watch all two hours sometimes without having to reload)

And check out this site:

http://www.thevenusproject.com/

That thought you just had.  I know how important it is to you.  You just moved your foot in nervousness while reading this without knowing it.  You read a little more thinking “I better feel something soon or I’m over it.”  I write something hoping it will either make you feel or think or laugh or cry.   Like Eckhart Tolle’ says, “words are just signposts.  Not absolute truth.  They are just pointing you in a direction.”  The direction I want to go today is up, which is north I suppose – but not to the Pole above Canada but to outer space and beyond.  We sit on this spinning earth, complaining that our egg salad needs salt and our girlfiend ignores us and our bank acount is shrinking.  And to us this is the greatest God we know of, the supreme ruling force in our lives – what we want against what we have.   We read spiritual teachings and try to overcome our neurosis, being “one with everything” through the teachings of Zen.  We stub our toe and scream “GODDAMNIT!”  At that moment, all hope seems gone and your reality is the pain in your toe, the project you wish you had funding for.   Meanwhile, six billion others are doing the same, each in thieir own beautiful and horrible ways.  Meanwhile, planet Earth keeps spinning and going around the sun and meteors come within striking distance but big brother Jupiter saves our lives again and gets no thanks.   A black hole devours a star and all its planets just a million light years away and perhaps billions of creatures on a planet with it.  All those souls drift back home and the moment they are embraced by the spirit waiting for them, true ecstasy comes.  The incomprehensible nature and size of our known universe it as mysterious as the depths of the human mind and the illnesses that manifest inside it.

“When you looked down his throat, you could see the whole universe…  It was inside that he was different.”

Those words belong to the band DISTURBED, and although I am not angry enough much these days to listen, one cannot deny that the first three tracks were amazing on that debut album, including STUPIFY.  They remind me of how myself and others drift into the vast unknown wastedland of hopelessness and how some force brings us back.

“He saw philosophy as the highest echelon of the entire hierarchy of knowledge… I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought…  Few people travel here.  What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?”  Mr. Pirsig’s words there  – but relevant to my train of thought this Sunday morning as I prepare to leave California again.   He was looking for what we all are, truth – and it nearly cost him his life, as it did me.  Perhaps I was running away from it. In the second book LILA,  Phaedrus takes Peyote with Indian Americans and realizes that all of his intelligence is insignificant compared to the heart of the people around him and the beauty of the Earth we live on.  His search for truth is actually simplified, you might say.

Fairfax is lovely today but inside  me all turmoil spins like heat lightning in clouds off the coast of Florida.  They are stunning to look at, but contain  “a power to great and terrible to imagine.”   They come from some place greater than the clouds or the sky, and that place I call Heaven, for lack of a better word.  I can see it in the darkness while Angels spin around me with the silent reminder that I am protected.  Why this is I do not know.   There is an event happening to me and I am not the only one.   Something good, really good is happening to me.  If I were to explain it to you fully you might think  me crazy, and perhaps I was at one point, thinking myself alone in this world and that life was not worth living, that I was separate.  This was an illusion created by thought and circumstance.

As I write this, my home state of Tennessee has been ravaged by mother nature and her floods.  A man with an MBA had a failed attempt at blowing up Times Square and will never taste freedom again, as I have no doubt the FBI will keep him in jail for the rest of his life and Hillary Clinton is telling Iran that they need to chill on their “nukes.”   These are the headlines – but the headline should read this:“An unending world of energy and limitless possibilities sits in front of all humanity, but only the few can see it, as if God is holding our entire universe in the palm of his hand and Angels dance and fly upon fountains of dreams the spiraling arms of God with beauty and inspiration, showing themselves briefly to a certain few and protecting us from ourselves.  This world is believed to be the true home of all creation and everything in it and time and space and future and past and death and life have little meaning here, because they are merely words and perceptions that men create to attempt to  define their limited  glimpses of reality.  This unmanifested world sees us as the temporary, the illusion.   Here’s Phil with sports.”

This is the really funny part.   Our Bipolar friend in New Zealand says she can see dead people.   And get this… I believe her.  Her mother, who also has “mental illness,” is considered a powerful psychic/shaman among the Mauri people she knows.  I have met psychics/shamans/mediums here in America who have told me that they have loved ones with mental illness who can tap into the “other side” on a level that would both frighten and exhilarate most people.  There seems to be a connection with “mentally ill” people being able to see powerful glimpses of spiritual entities and when we are the  sickest, is when we can see the MOST.  A strange irony, to be sure, but that is the way it is in some cases.  I have experienced this truth first hand and keep saying to God, “what are you up  to?”  But what I see and what I experience takes the suffering away and heals me.  Instead of asking “is God real?” – these days I simply say “Thank you.”  I have been shown a beauty beyond comprehension, as the swirling air in front of me lights up and enters my body.   I don’t expect most will believe me, but that is okay.  There are two types of madness  and I have been down the dark one.  This, is the good side and I have been waiting for it all my life.  Thank you, God.

Like Johnny Depp says to Alice with that devilish grin of his,  in the new Tim Burton’s film – after she says “you’re completely mad…”

“ONLY THE BEST PEOPLE ARE.”

In the film SHADOWLANDS, C.S. Lewis tells his flock of eager followers at a lecture near Oxford that “God Sculpts us with pain.”  This was his primary answer to the many people who asked him why God allowed so much relentless suffering in the world.  As the movie climaxes and his wife dies a slow, agonizing death from cancer, Lewis changes his mind and says (paraphrasing) “No, I think pain is just pain after all.”  This brings me to the topic of whether or not God actually intervenes in the physical world, or are we sort of on our own?

I have been reading Robert Pirsig a lot lately.  His writing, in its own beautiful, tortured, “classical and romantic” way – is as much of a Bible to me as those manipulated Scriptures they place in motel room dressers.  For those of you not familiar with the fascinating life of the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila, this brilliant man with an IQ of 170 went to the edge of insanity and beyond and paid the price for it, as they performed electric shock therapy on him time and time again to completely erase his entire personality, Phaedrus – as he calls him now.

The world’s smartest person, from an IQ test perspective – is a woman named  Marilyn Vos Savant.  She has actually scored over 220 on the test.  220.  It hard to grasp in terms of problem solving, analytical intelligence.  She rejects certain parts of geometry as being unreliable.  It never dawned on me to either reject or accept math.  People write in to her from all over the world to ask questions.  This would be mine:  Would you like a beer?  I mean that with a certain bit of humor but not really.  I was going to ask her to tell me the secrets of our universe, but that may be too much even for her. I am of the belief that experience is more important than intelligence, even ideas.  Ideas are wonderful and can shape or break the world.  Mr. Pirsig had too many ideas as Phaedrus, particularly the concept of redefining QUALITY.  This one idea literally pushed him over, away from his family, urinating on himself on the floor as the labeled him paranoid schizophrenic.  To him at the time, he was on the brink of true revelation, discovering a new truth to share with the world.  The world wasn’t so keen on the idea, and opted to shoot large amounts of electricity through his body.  All that remains is Robert, with images and stories of who he used to be.  Intelligence almost cost him his life.

Marilyn, the queen of the IQ test – we need your help.  Please, come out from where you are hiding.  Tell the politicians that the way of the Native Americans must come back – that we must use all of our technology that is good and combine it with a way of life that was murdered and with it, the murder of the Great Spirit.  Please, Marilyn – they won’t believe it if I say it.  But they might listen to the world’s smartest person.  I’ll let Chief Ten Bears say it better than I ever could.  From the Medicine Lodge council of 1867, this is a small part of what this Comanche Chief said to the assembled tribes and to Washington:

The White Man has the country which we loved and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.  Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten.  I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Spirit.  I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass.  I want it all clear and pure, and I wish it so, that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in, and leave it when they go out.

Robert Pirsig and his late son, Chris – on one of their trips, before Phaedrus died.

There is no intelligence without compassion, humility, and one hell of a sense of humor.  That is my quote for this day, and it is a good day to be alive.

Spring has finally come to Marin county.  It was seventy today.  I bitched all winter about wanting spring and I spent the first week of it lost in a bipolar low, bitching about something while my “chemical imbalance”  took me for a dark ride.  I made the mistake of watching the documentary “The Bridge.”  This happy, “feel-good” (very sarcastic there) film shows actual footage of people committing suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge.   They filmed it for three years straight or something.  Crazy…  Really a well made film and more about suicide and bipolar and mental illness than the bridge itself.  This one kid with bad bipolar 1, maybe 21, jumped and as soon as his hands left the rail he decided he wanted to live.  I had a similar experience with my own attempt, although mine less dramatic to be sure.  But I understand his sudden desire to live again.  That same calling can change the world.  He went in and tucked like divers do, saving his life.  Some of his spine shot into his intestines he hit so hard from 225 feet up.  In the midst of the insanity, he felt something BIG move across his leg.  He said in the interview “first I lived from the jump, and now a Great White is about to fucking eat me!”  It turned out to be seals brushing him up to the surface.  He believes it was divine intervention.  It is hard in animals to see where nature ends and God begins, but I love to follow that mystery.  I have hear of dolphins protecting U.S. Navy men in the water from Great Whites.  Hard for even the most cyincal person not to me moved by such tales as these  But what this poor kid went through, into that freezing cold water.  Jesus, it must have been hell on earth to jump from 25 stories, while people walk by taking pictures and gazing all around at the pure wonder of both the bridge and the Bay’s beauty.

The boy who jumped was in a coma for a while at Marin General Hospital.   His father, a businessman in SF, could hardly believe it.  And yet, 24 people jumped from the Golden Gate in 2004 and more than anywhere else on the planet.  This is not a record to be proud of.  As a woman says in the film, “there is NOTHING romantic about it.  He is simply dead.”  I don’t suggest you watch The Bridge if you struggle with depression.  This film makes Schindler’s List seem like Groundhog Day .    After I sat through the hour and a half film the little bit of happiness I had left all but died and I went into a week-long slump of suicidal thoughts and fantasies.  I lay in my room for days, drinking and isolated, a slow but effective suicide of my own.  Don’t I know better?  Hasn’t the darkness already been there and done that?  WHY?  WHY?  Smetimes I hate this fucking disease, imbalance, Biplorar, my soul “stranded in some skin and bones” (thanks Bono)  I tought of jumping myself, ending this retched pain for the last time, silencing this ruthless fucking demon that never, ever surrenders.

But the power of happiness returned today.  I sang loudly while listening to Josh Grobin and Simple Minds in my Jeep, animated in my rebirth under God’s skies.    I laughed and forced that damn happiness to come.  I have known you before, a feeling of such love and inspiration it takes much to contain and everything seems alive again while the Spirit Flows from within.  I want to do everything and love all around me.   I stayed productive.  I have a good friend who reminded me yesterday, “if you could only remember that they are just thoughts and emotions and you will feel DIFFERENT in a day or two!”  That sounds overly simplistic but it is so true.  I will thank him later for those simple, all important words that only a true friend can say.

I climbed to the top of a beautiful hill in San Rafael.  You can see the bay and the hills all around.  I go up there to rehearse sometimes – acting and singing.  I was sitting there and this old, limping dog came up to me.  I petted him or her and she took off, struggling to keep up with her owner on the next hill.  I thought of how animals just keep fighting, even the blind ones with only three legs.  I sing this song of hope today, under the lovely skies of Marin county with a heart full of new hope.  The wind is warm again and the green hills look like Ireland and New Zealand all rolled into one, lovely northern Californian moment.  There is a feeling in the air.

“Create, yeah.. cause’ in a spiral I wire Grace to the fire of Open Souls”

Lewis Carroll must have taken hallucinogens.  No sober person could have thought this story up.  I mean that in the highest respect.  It is just too briliant a place in the imagination to tap into without some “flesh of God.”  Well, who knows, maybe not.  But if I had to pick a film to watch on mushrooms, Alice in Wonderland in 3-D would easily pass the Lion King, Fantasia, or even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as my  top choice.   The critics may be tearing this new Burton/Depp film to pieces but fuck them.  I was thoroughly entertained for almost two hours by the bizarre, computer generated, mushroom based world of Wonderland.  Okay, I wasn’t really on shrooms’, but it felt like I was  and I wished I was, as the images shot off the screen in vibrant colors of  lovely 3-D.   It isn’t often you see a blood-hound  run with a tiny girl on his back and actually look real (he speaks with an English accent).  Alice in Wonderland isn’t going to win Best Picture next year – that is  a given.  I just read one reviewer trashing it and saying Burton needs to make a small, personal movie.  Normally I would agree with him, like going back to Ed Wood (a fantastic film) and forget about all this new technology.  I was going to sneak into Crazy Heart and watch Mr. Bridges act again so wonderfully or the end of Avatar – but I couldn’t get my body to leave Wonderland’s grip.

The voice-overs for the animals are mostly fantastic British actors beginning with Sir Alan Rickman.  Every time I hear his voice, whether in Die Hard or Bottle Shock (good movie about California beating the French Wines in the 70’s) or this, I feel somehow comforted knowing if Mr. Rickman is in it, it can’t be that bad.   The CGI may be “overdone” but it is stunning.   If I was ten years old I would have possibly thought this better than Star Wars.  I’m starting to not like movie critics.  Jesus Christ, you could read a negative review and blow the whole experience.     I want to quit condemning movies like I used to.  If somebody likes it, then forget my criticism.  Go with it, enjoy it.  If you think Jaws 4 is a fantastic film, fuck what I have to say about it!  That’s an extreme example – how about Bad Boys 2?

I must say this, as an animal lover and a big fan of WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams,   I LOVE THE RABBITS!  I wish the star of ALICE could have been the bunnies, but they did get two nice parts, including the insane bunny who shared a great scene with the Mad Hatter.   He has this habbit of slinging tea-cups into people’s heads at fast speeds.  Very cool.  

Johnny was hilarious and fuck the critics that say he “overacted.”  Are you kidding me?  This is FANTASY!  He is the MAD HATTER!  It’s like saying Gollum “overacted.”   This was not a role to hold back in and work on being subtle.  Mr. Depp is brilliant and weird as hell here.  Very, very cool…

Okay, take some shrooms, go see Alice in Wonderland.  You will laugh your ass off and be sucked into a world far more interesting that our own shitty one.  I know I didn’t want to leave.  Isn’t that why we go to movies in the first place?  Thank you Mr. Burton for bringing this to life.   I finally just sat back in your movie and quit criticizing and like Woody Allen says in Hannah and Her Sisters, while watching the Marx Brothers – “I just started to enjoy myself.”

Tim Simmons struts and huffs down Bolinas Avenue WANTING the locals to know that he is there in Fairfax and that he could sum up what he thinks of it in one word, fuckin’  WEIRD.  His jeans are so tight that his beer-belly blobs up and down like a sack of liquid shit for all to see, with the pride of the south gurgling inside it and the last remnants of the sole Budweiser ordered at 19^th and Broadway in the last month.  Given the choice of several excellent home-brews on draft and many imports, he demands a cold Bud and a burger, only to find out they don’t sell food at all, just booze.  And so that fat gut of his has two Buds and the leftover double cheeseburger from Burger King rumbling inside as his toxin-filled body tries, as usual and in vain, to find some sort of nutrients in his latest input.  His job, of helping run coax cables up “monopoles” has landed him in a place so terribly liberal, so devoid of the southern town of Wartburg he was raised in and loves, that he finds himself cast out, alone.

“These California hippies can suck my fat fuckin’ cock-sausage.”  He passes two gay gentleman.
“Yeah, I know.  I get it.  You’re in fuckin’ love.”

Tim walks to a hidden area where he feels most at home urinating.   He begins to think about his old friend Jack Jones from Asheville, the one with Bipolar Disorder that talked him into taking this stupid job in California.

“FUCK YOU JACK!” he yells and then falls violently to the ground, crying and urine dripping onto his fat leg.
He sits alone with his urine, vomit, and degradation.

Let me take over now.  This is my fuckin’ story, ain’t it?  Here’ s what happened next…. These four queers felt sorry me and took my drunk ass inside.   I was fightin’ em’ at first, but those dudes are stronger en’ ey’ look.  I can tell ya’ that.  They took me in and I had nowhere else ta’ go.  They taught me bout’ art and fuckin’, fuckin’ good food and how ta’ dress.  They showed me a shitload a’ things and ya’ know, it was hard at first.  That bein’ cause’ I’z taught to think they was pieces of garbage an all, made it tough to get along at first.  Heck, I even tried the gay thing – somethin’ I NEVER thought I’d do.   I asked if dude wanted me to rub his shoulders first of “warm-up” but he sayz he just wants to get right to the penetration part.   So there, I guess I became a “liberal,” that day, if liberal means buttfucking.  But we didn’t do it.  I couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t get aroused by a man.

Tim, is that it?  Is that the story?

“I guess that’ s it.  Can I crap now?”

Andrew Koening, the child star of Growing Pains and son of Star Trek father Walter Koenig committed suicide today in Vancouver.  He was found in a park.  His father told the papers how many, many people have written in talking about their own depression.  Like an epidemic, it seems to infect perhaps billions on this beautiful planet of ours.  This nice-looking, 41 year old man who friends says was a deeply emotional and caring person, painfully decided he could take no more pain.   His parents were helpless to stop it, and apparently Andrew went on and off of his medication and was struggling to keep his head above water in the manic world of show business.

So who is to blame for this – A heartless world, so caught up in its own madness that one person’s needs are irrelevant?  His parents or friends?  Should they have done more, said more loving words?  Could any person have stopped him, or the million others who will kill themselves this year alone?  How can someone so full of life one minute, simply be gone the next?  It makes my heart break in two and I cry, even though I have never met him.  But I also smile and today will be a little brighter because I am still alive.  I still have blood running through me, love in my heart to give away, and the mind to write these words.

I will be with you one day, Brother.  “But not yet.  Not yet…”

It was in the rainy and depressing winter of 2005 in New Zealand that I first met the Kiwi men who pretended to be legitimate clowns.  It was with them that I  paraded through children’s carnivals dressed in full clown gear in the intense grip of  a BZP High, laughing my ass off as I posed for pictures with the unknowing little ones who had never met such energetic entertainers.   Jimmy Debrowski, an accountant, my mentor and trouble-making clown guide, ran over from a group he was juggling in front of and threw a huge bottle of mustard onto my stomach for no apparent reason.  That is a sensation I’ll never forget as it was the spicy kind.   His eyes were on fire and he laughed diabolically.  “Take that, America.”  That was my simple nickname and they seemed intent on keeping me in my place as a foreigner.  The unknowing children seemed to care less that the fools in front of them were far removed from sobriety or appropriate boundaries of any kind.  They hollered and we fed off their approval.  Jimmy took out a soft baseball bat and slugged me in the back with it.  I keeled over in pain but was still laughing my ass off as I lunged at his legs.  We wrestled to the ground with our floppy shoes as the children shrieked in delight before the manager of the Auckland carnival ran over to kick us out.  Pete and Timmy had managed to get into the main tent and Timmy was standing on top of a mount and breathing fire into a hoop.  He then decided that he wanted to pet the tiger which was running through hoops so he did a full dive into that area to the crowd’s terror.  The tiger didn’t find Timmy amusing and he swiped at him.  It was lucky for Timmy that he’d been de-clawed or the joke would have been quite over.  He was vomiting all over himself  and he pissed himself, much to the shock of the mothers, as they drug him out in front of frightened children – a sweaty, trippi ng, frightened little clown trying to soak up the last bit of attention he could.

The Kiwi clown imposters laughed at Buddhist Monks who strove for peace with their quiet footsteps.  For it was the untameable and wild part of those men and myself that redeeemed us in the madness to come.  “The monks are pretending” they said.  “No one can be that nice, not a man, anyway.”  I wondered what a Buddhist monk would do, or, how he would perform, disguised as a clown and dosed with a large quantity of BZP at a fully functioning circus?  Would he sit there and not try to be funny?  Would he rise to the occasion and let the moment be what it is, a brief sample of life at its most pure, chaotic, hilarious, uncontrollable form?  Or were we kidding ourselves and bending morality too far, patting ourselves on the back for being so daring and clever, taunting boundaries of right and wrong and rationalizing it by the sound of laughing children?

We were staying in a batch in a town called Mangawhai.  The costumes were perfect, right down to the red nose and huge shoes and face paint and little squeezable honkers with those little blowers that shoot out which kids go crazy for.  We would drink KilKenny beer and consume large quantities of narcotics and “party pills” while preparing – passing the bottle around and laughing as the BZP flowed through us – the legal X of the day.  We considered it a bit careless in the grand scheme of the mighty universe, but reckoned that none of us could perform such shenanigans while sober.  We scanned the papers and internet trying to locate the nearest circus and it was in Whangarei, about forty miles north.  “The North Island Traveling Carnival.”  This was nothing to compare to Barnum and Bailey, only an atmosphere of little Maori children with their fierce looking, tattooed fathers hoping to find a break from the gloom of five straight rainy days.  New Zealand could use lots of clowns at times and we saw ourselves as “givers of happiness.”

If you know New Zealand at all you may recall the Tsunami of 2005.  Who knew that on this day, with this carnival so close to the ocean, that our laugh would finally come to an end.  The wave was nothing like the 2004 Asian mammoth, but our shouting and antics were brought to an abrupt halt when the four tripping clowns became the only hope for six little children washed out to sea.  We did not know that we would be the only ones to help them not drown and had we known mother nature’s wrath, well, you never know these things.  Timmy and Jimmy were great swimmers, like most Kiwis and I saved the life of Peter Mexted as he clung to my large shoes when all others lights went out.  Our pictures were taken as heroes and it came out that we were not actual clowns and that we were drug abusers with twisted senses of humor and a fettish for needing attention .  These two facts were forgiven by a grateful community and mothers in tears to see their kids again.  But the party stopped for us and we  never crashed a carnival again.  I am sober now and those days are long gone, the red nose and floppy shoes just a memory.  But I loved both the men I performed with and I will never forget the laughter of all those cute little Kiwi children.  I try to be more like those Buddhist monks, living a peaceful life.  But I slip from time to time.  I hop a train without knowing where it goes.  I hitchhiked across Canada and saw Banff in the freezing rain.  I still long to feel alive again.  And then I smile and remember that in the midst of insanity or boredom or darkness, something wonderful can still happen.