BooMan: Sisyphus SINNED. We just sleep.

Posted by Arthur Gilroy | Mar 20, 2006 | 24 |

Sisyphus…I mean, BooMan…just posted a diary titled Can’t Win For Trying that bemoans the left’s constant position as losers in its Sisyphean ordeal of uphill rock rolling against an almost constantly winning right.

I think that it is time to DROP that rock like a hot potato.

It is a fiction.

A fixation.

A fixation on “Doing things right. The AMERICAN way.”

It does not exist.

There IS no more “American Way”, and if there ever is to be one again, we must reinvent it out of whole cloth.

Read on for more:
Oh BooMan.

Sometimes I am just so sorry for you and your compatriots.

Really.

I like you guys.

Your hearts are in the right place, I think.

But…do you actually believe that the Ford and Reagan eras DID “end”?

No, BooMan. They just took a little unexpected electoral detour or two. Nothing that can’t be ironed out over the long term. Just a little glitch…

Remember…43 years since JFK’s assassination.

12 years of Democrats in the White House (I do not count LBJ, because I believe that he was at least passively complicit in the assassination[s].), 36 years (by the time Bush II is over) of Republicans.

That’s a score of 36 to 12. If this were a football game it would be considered a rout. A laugher.

And then you write:

“It amazes me that all our work has failed to prevent this. But I don’t know what else to do but roll up my sleeves, like Sisyphus, shrug, and start pushing this damn rock back up this damn hill.”

43 years of constant failure. And there you go, pushing the same damned rock back up the same damned hill.

WHEN ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING TO GET IT, BOOMAN???

Sisyphus was CONDEMNED FOR HIS SINS…primarily the sin of hubris, because he tried to cheat death not once but twice…to roll that rock.

The only “sin” the left has committed is the venial one of credulity. Of innocence. It has believed the official story. It has accepted the story around which the fix has been spun.

The “America The Great” story.

The “America: The Constitutional Democracy Story.”

‘Tain’t so, BooMan.

Not since 1963.

The fall of 1963.

The FALL of 1963.

And not EVER for the poor. The permanently disenfranchised by dint of their skin color or sex.

Not EVER.

Stop rolling that rock.

It ain’t going NOWHERE.

Except back down the hill.

A sane man…an unhypnotized, un-mediaized man…would see that.

Eventually.

You would think.

Wouldn’t you?

Say when the candidate for the losing side went skiing in Gstaad while the evidence of the fix in Ohio was being assembled and wrote an OH so nice letter to his fellow Democrats about how for the good of the country we should now all rally ’round the winner and go fight the bad guys who wear rags on their heads and murder innocent American wimmins an’ chil’rens an’ such.

Like GOOD little sheeple.

And then some of you get incensed when I suggest that you wake the fuck up?

Rolling a Sisyphean rock again and again up Capitol Hill while your weak-livered, Humpty Hump Hump politicians sell you down the river at every turn is the ACT of a sleeping people. A sleeping people who NEED a good wake-the-fuck-up call.

So far, only Russell Feinstein and George Galloway have stood up in public, taken off their kid gloves and said “OK, motherfuckers. You want a fight? I got yer fight right HERE!!!”

I was watching a prizefight last night…an overweight, too old James Toney (One of my favorite characters of all time in sports, a natural middleweight who put on the pounds in order to get some of that heavyweight money) against a plodding journeyman heavyweight. I didn’t even watch it to the end but I think Toney lost simply by being too small, too old and too fat…the other guy was TERRIBLE and Toney is a master.

Anyway, in true HBO fashion they did a little feature on the fighters, and in Toney’s feature it was noted that he is an truly obstreperous trash talker and actor-out in the gym, and that he acted out once by throwing a chair though the wall of a gym owned by the fine trainer and ex-lightweight boxer Freddie Roach. Now usually people just let Toney get away with his act, but Roach…who is ten years older and about 60 lbs lighter than Toney…got in his face.

Toney said some shit about how he would “Wipe the floor with you, white boy” and in his own words (with a smile and a little twinkle in his eye), Roach answered “Well…maybe you will. But you’ll know you’ve been in a fight.” The exact same idea my Irish grandfather (The REAL “Arthur Gilroy”) taught me when I had to learn how to deal with bullies.

It works, too.

Toney backed down, and the little South Boston Irish banty rooster prizefighter is now Toney’s trainer. Calls him “son” in the corner.

America. Ain’t it great?

Welll…I think it’s great anyway. And I think that the Dems could do worse than listen to little Freddie Roach.

Stop pushing that Sisyphean political rock up the neverending down staircase of the Ratpub hustle.

Step back, ball your fists and say “OK. You want a fight? I got yer fight RIGHT HERE!!!”

You write:

“I don’t know how we lost the battle. I don’t know how we got back here from there.”

BooMan…WE NEVER LEFT “THERE”.

The deal has been crooked from the Grassy Knoll right on through to the cooked books and the fixed elections.

BOTH sides.

Time for something new.

Time for THE NEW PARTY!!!

Yes.

Impeach BOTH sides.

Send the Liebermans down the river WITH their Ratpub boys.

Clean house.

It’s time.

Later…

P.S. And…awww…YOU know.

WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!

Isn’t that rock getting just a little…heavy, BooMan?

You’d think so.

Wouldn’t you…???

About The Author

Arthur Gilroy

Born. Still working on it.

24 Comments

Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 3:20 am

Wakeup recommendations?

Anybody?

Anybody up out there?

AG
- BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 7:23 am
  
  Ahhh. You obviously either disagree with Camus, or you don’t get the reference. Whether you choose to push the rock for the Democratic Party or a Third Party, the only naivete lies in giving up on pushing the rock, or in believing that it matters whether it rolls back down again.
  - ed dalesio on March 20, 2006 at 12:02 pm
    
    What happens when one realizes that one has been pushing the rock up the wrong hill?
    OR;
    Pushing the wrong rock up the correct hill?
    - BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 12:25 pm
      
      The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than fu tile and hopeless labor.
      
      If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopu s would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of h is deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
      
      It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods w as necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
      
      You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screw ed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
      
      It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
      
      If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmou nted by scorn.
      
      If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the on ly bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
      
      One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—by such narrow ways–?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discover y. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
      
      All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eage r to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
      
      I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The strugg le itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
      
      —Albert Camus—
      - ed dalesio on March 20, 2006 at 12:49 pm
        
        Thanx
        
        The man of survival is man ground up by the machinery of hierarchical power, caught in a mass of interferences, a tangle of oppressive techniques whose rationalization only awaits the patient programming of programmed minds.
        
        The Revolution of Everyday Life
        by Raoul Vaneigem
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 2:11 pm
        
        Y’know, BooMan…when I read Sartre…and when I reread such deep thinkers as yourself as well…I am often reminded of a lesson I learned from a great jazz musician.
        
        Houston Person.
        
        Never heard of him?
        
        You ain’t been listening with them GOOD ears.
        
        Not a famous intellectual figure even in the jazz world…just a true player. A black tenor player with real southern roots who is now probably well into his 70s and who for 50 years has made a steady living playing…the blues.
        
        The JAZZ blues, which is harmonically and rhythmically a whole ‘nother level beyond simpler blues forms.
        
        Sophisticated music that has not lost its common sense.
        
        Its soul.
        
        Its connection with working peolpe.
        
        So here we are…a fine big band of NY jazz players, rehearsing for a concert celebrating the sophisticated (and decidedly NON-bluesy, in its original intent) music of Harold Arlen. (Over the Rainbow, It’s Only A Paper Moon, Stormy Weather, I’ve Got the World on A String…YOU know. STANDARD standards.)
        
        With Houston Person as the featured soloist.
        
        Now Houston doesn’t talk a lot.
        
        He’s a big man…wide receiver, NBA shooting guard big..and he looks and sounds as if he’s leaning against an invisible wall while he’s playing. Every note reaxed, from the heart and true. And the arrangements and band were fine as well. So we were just sailing along, getting the cues straight, etc. About an hour and a half into the rehearsal, however, we ran into a little roadblock. The bass player, who although VERY good is also somewhat renowned for being a little…fussy (A little too thinky, not enough feely sometimes)…stops the band on this one chart and starts a discussion about how the rhythm section should be approaching the time feel. Should it be straighter eighth notes, more or less of a shuffle feel, etc. This goes on for about 5 minutes, the arranger/conductor trying to reason w/the rhythm section (to little effect) and Houston just leaning back against his invisible wall up there in front of the band.
        
        Waiting.
        
        Until finally he straightened up a little, turned around to face the band, and said quite clearly and slowly “HEY man. It’s JUST the blues!!! Let’s take it from the top. ” And he counted it off. “2-3-4.”
        
        You can intellecualize about Sisyphus all you want. I’ll bet HE did some heavy thinking around the 27th millenium of his endless task as well.
        
        But it’s just the blues, BooMan..
        
        It’s just the blues.
        
        It’s REAL simple.
        
        You…and almost the entire REST of the left…continue pushing the wrong rock up the wrong hill.
        
        You’re a rock junkie. And you use intellecualization as a denial tool.
        
        “ME??? I’M not a rock junkie!!! I’M a deep thinker!!! This rock rolling is just what I do to get my exercise whilst I’m a’thinkin’.”
        
        Bullshit.
        
        Kick cold turkey or die like a dog.
        
        It really IS that simple.
        
        Do it or not.
        
        “Take it from the top….2-3-4.”
        
        One more time.
        
        Please.
        
        Roll that ol’ rock on down the hill and never EVER go back to push it up again.
        
        It’s ONLY the blues!!!
        
        Go on out and play it.
        
        It’s only a new set of dues.
        
        Go on out and pay them.
        
        Your union has proven itself to be incompetent and useless over the last 50 years.
        
        Go out and join a better one.
        
        Or start your own if you have to.
        
        In the end…you be bettah off.
        
        Bet on it.
        
        Later…
        
        AG
      - BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 2:26 pm
        
        that’s a lot of talk for someone who still totally misses the point.
        
        To counter Camus by insisting the struggle is absurd is mind-blowingingly inept on your part.
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 3:00 pm
        
        Not the struggle. BooMan.
        
        Just the form.
        
        When you run one play over and over and over and over again…when you bet on one losing team repeatedly despite all evidence to the contrary…
        
        You just hooked on losing.
        
        Papo down on the corner of 148th and Lex could tell you THAT.
        
        If you’d just put down your books and ask him.
        
        “You just hooked on losing.”
        
        Yup.
        
        That’s what HE’D tell you.
        
        And he’d be right.
        
        (A renownedly nasty jones, by the way, Boo. Got old man Freud’s shorts all in a bunch, too. Bet on it.)
        
        AG
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 3:02 pm
        
        P.S. Now a diary.
        
        BooMan: It’s ONLY the BLUES!!! (Houston Person, 2003)
        
        AG
      - BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 3:22 pm
        
        You clearly haven’t understood a word of the diary that inspired your two diaries.
        
        The point of Camus’s essay is that life is unavoidable tragic and our actions are inescapably vain. We are condemned to push the rock up the hill only to see it roll back down.
        
        You can’t push the wrong rock, in fact, you have no choice in the matter.
        
        If you gain one level of awareness, such as yours, you will discover that vanity, but not the inescapability of the vanity. Therefore, you may latch onto some panacea that might put an end to the absurdity.
        
        Like a Madman in the Marketplace, you may hold up a lantern and ask people to wake up and see that all is vanity. Or you may come up with some “manual of happiness” including a Newstrike or a third party.
        
        That shows your awareness has only made a first step. There are no panaceas. There is only the struggle. And the struggle, when it becomes conscious, is tragic.
        
        The next step is not to care that it is tragic. And to choose joy in defiance of the Gods.
        
        You promote apathy. You do not show the way to joy.
        
        Lastly, the Democratic Party is my vehicle for change precisely because I recognize the impossibility of perfection as well as the futility of dividing an already neutered left.
        
        BushCo. is not more of the same. They are the worst administration in our modern history. I’m not willing to play games with third parties to teach the wrong party a lesson.
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 3:49 pm
        
        As you wish.
        
        MY take on it is that it is a NEGATION of effort.
        
        You CAN push the wrong rock; you DO have a choice in the matter, and there is NO joy in Mudville when Mighty Casey habitually strikes out.
        
        Sorry, BooMan.
        
        One reason that the left has so badly lost here is JUST this attitude.
        
        It the the attitude of thjose who have lost faith in evolution.
        
        HUMAN evolution.
        
        Or who at the very least think that evolution will continue without their conscious efforts to change things.
        
        So just go push ANY rock. It’s the effort hat coiunts.
        
        No.
        
        Not in MY neighborhood.
        
        If you practice the wrong scales all of your life you simply will never play like Charlie Parker.
        
        And playing on that level IS desireable.
        
        Else…why bother?
        
        In the service of the Inscrutable All?
        
        I think not.
        
        SCRUTABLE all that!!!
        
        It’s JUST the blues, BooMan.
        
        Once you really understand that fact things get much…simpler.
        
        And more efficient too.
        
        bet on it.
        
        If this note doesn’t work so well…repeatedly…then TRY ANOTHER NOTE!!!
        
        Or…from the undermind of America as exporessed in vaudeville comedy:
        
        Silly patient: “Doc!!! It hoits when I do DIS!!!” (Raing his arm above his head.
        
        Silly doctor: “Don’t DO dat!!!”
        
        Yup.
        
        Duh.
        
        If it’s called common sense…how come it’s so goddamned rare?
        
        AG
      - BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 3:57 pm
        
        if you don’t understand the analogy then don’t pontificate.
        
        I might as well attack your diary by saying that you are wearing the wrong colored shirt.
        
        Your whole argument is just argumentative. It is not a rebuttal of anything I said. It is only a rebuttal of what you think I said because you don’t understand the references.
        
        It’s tiresome, AG.
        
        You cannot push the wrong rock. Sisyphus is all of us. You don’t get to opt out of being Sisyphus. You can’t get rid of the rock by turning off the television.
        
        It’s boring to engage in this kind of conversation with someone that can’t get the point.
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 4:06 pm
        
        Bored?
        
        Oh.
        
        OK.
        
        Stop.
        
        (You can always turn on the TV and get ALL het up again, though. That’s what it’s THERE for.)
        
        AG
      - BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 4:14 pm
        
        If you would listen instead of making nitpicking your permanent vocation, you might have noted the lyrics (both included and only available thru the link) to Stella Blue, and then you might have seen how it is an Existentialist anthem through the eyes of a touring musician. It might have spoken to you about a number of things, including: your identifition of evel and the necessity to fight it without expectation of prevailing, your interpretation of history from Dealey Plaze until now, and your need to believe that there is still a way forward despite all evidence to the contrary.
        
        But you aren’t listening.
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 5:31 pm
        
        I reference Charlie Parker, a genius on the Mozart level, and you reference Jerry Garcia, who was an execrable poet who couldn’t even tune his own guitar.
        
        He wasn’t a touring musician…he was a touring faker.
        
        That about sums it up, Boo.
        
        And you think you understand Camus and Sartre.
        
        You don’t even understand middle Bb yet.
        
        PLUS…unless it’s just bad syntax…you statement about my “need to believe that there is still a way forward despite all evidence to the contrary” seems somehow disapproving.
        
        BooMan…the entire history of the universe as far as we know it strongly suggests that there is indeed a “way forward”. And you, sir are as lost as a babe in the woods if you cannot see that one simple truth.
        
        Every tree past which you walk deep in painful thought about how to roll your goddamned rock up the hill one more goddamned time and what a drag it is to have to do so bears mute witness the the way forward as it lifts its braches to the divine sky above.
        
        And you can’t see it.
        
        Nor can you hear how bad thge grateful dead really were. And are.
        
        Becuase you are…
        
        TAH DAH!!!
        
        Fast asleep.
        
        I am through trying to reach you.
        
        You are too deep into it.
        
        Sweet dreams.
        
        Jerry Garcia!!!
        
        Sweet JESUS!!!
        
        I’m outta here.
        
        AG
      - BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 7:01 pm
        
        Robert Hunter. Not JG.
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 11:05 pm
        
        Same lame scene, BooMan.
        
        Same lame scene.
        
        AG
      - BooMan on March 20, 2006 at 11:22 pm
        
        Arabian wind
        The Needle’s Eye is thin
        The Ships of State sail on mirage
        but drown in sand
        in No-Man’s Land
        where ALLAH does command
        
        What good is spilling
        blood? It will not
        grow a thing
        
        “TASTE ETERNITY”
        the sword sings Blues for ALLAH
        In’sh’ALLAH
        
        They lie where they fall
        There’s nothing more to say
        The desert stars are bright tonight,
        let’s meet as friends
        The flower of Islam
        The fruit of Abraham
        
        The thousand stories have
        come round to one again
        Arabian Night
        our gods pursue their fight
        What fatal flowers of
        darkness spring from
        seeds of light
        
        Bird of Paradise – Fly
        In white sky
        Blues for ALLAH
        In’sh’ALLAH
        
        Let’s see with our heart
        these things our eyes have seen
        and know the truth will still lie
        somewhere in between
        
        Under eternity
        Under eternity
        Under eternity
        Blue
        Bird of Paradise
        Fly
        In white sky
        Under eternity
        Blues
        for ALLAH
        In’sh’ALLAH
        
        Hunter’s note in Box of Rain says “This lyric is a requiem for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a progressive and democratically inclined ruler [and, incidentally, a fan of the Grateful Dead] whose assassination in 1975 shocked us personally.”
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 11:47 pm
        
        Listen, BooMan…all the words “a fan of the Grtaeful Dead” mean to me is someone who was not given the tools to recognize amateurish bullshit from art by his education and does not have enough native intelligence to figure it out for himself.
        
        ” Tonality is a natural force, like gravity. Indeed, when we consider that the root of a chord, because of its most favorable vibration-ratio to the other tones, and the lowest tone of a chord, because of the actually greater dimension and weight of its wave, have greater importance than the other tones, we recognize at once that it is gravitation itself that draws the tones towards their roots and towards the bass line, and that relates a multiplicity of chords to the strongest among them.” Paul Hindemith
        
        Can’t HAVE “tonality” if you are too ignorant to be able to tune your fucking guitar.
        
        Just bullshit and posing.
        
        Bad time, bad notes, bad tuning, laughably primitive attempts at “improvisation”…lame like a motherfucker. And anyone who involved himself in that scene is EQUALLY lame and woudn’t recognize “Allah” if he showed up in the room and started dictating verses of the Koran to him in Brooklyn-accented English.
        
        Just another acid casualty, as far as I am concerned.
        
        Go read Rumi or Shakespeare if you want verse.
        
        Go listen to Bird or Mozart if you want music.
        
        Go listen to Chano Pozo or Art fucking Blakey or Frank Sinatra or James brown if you want groove.
        
        But DON’T hand me that Grateful Dead shit.
        
        Lame like a MOTHERFUCKER!!!
        
        Over and out.
        
        AG
      - BooMan on March 21, 2006 at 12:49 am
        
        Your conceit is amusing. You dismiss a lot when you dismiss so totally. Dylan said it one way, Hunter said it another. Open your mind, and you’ll see Hunter was saying the same thing you are trying to say.
        
        Your rain falls like crazy fingers
        Peals of fragile thunder keeping time
        
        Recall the days that still are to come
        Some sing blue
        
        Hang your heart on laughing willow
        Stray down to the water
        Deep Sea of Love
        
        Beneath the sweet calm face of the sea
        Swift undertow
        
        Life may be sweeter for this, I don’t know
        See how it feels in the end
        May Lady Lullaby sing plainly for you
        Soft, strong, sweet and true
        
        Cloud hands reaching from a rainbow
        Tapping at the window touch your hair
        
        So swift and bright
        Strange figures of light
        Float in air
        
        Who can stop what must arrive now?
        Something new is waiting to be born
        
        Dark as the night
        You’re still by my side
        Shining side
        
        Gone are the days we stopped to decide
        Where we should go
        We just ride
        
        Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams
        Gone – both dream and lie
        
        Life may be sweeter for this I don’t know
        Feels like it might be alright
        While Lady Lullaby sings plainly for you
        Love still rings true
        
        Midnight on a carousel ride
        Reaching for the gold ring down inside
        
        Never could reach
        It just slips away but I try
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 11:48 pm
        
        P.S. Go read some Bob Dylan, you want poetry.
        
        AG
      - ed dalesio on March 20, 2006 at 3:51 pm
        
        BooMan says: The point of Camus’s essay is that life is unavoidable tragic and our actions are inescapably vain. We are condemned to push the rock up the hill only to see it roll back down.
        Say’s Camus. Why should I believe him?
        How do you know Camus is correct here? Is it from your own experiences before reading Camus or after? After all it (Camus’s essay) is only one of many, many such essays expounding on the Meaning of The Struggle, whatever that may be. Is ALL of life tragic? Are all of our actions vain? Personally, my life has had some tragic moments, and many of my actions were quite fun. How ’bout your’s?
        pax
      - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 3:55 pm
        
        P.S. From one who just wrote a diary bemoaning the fact that he seems stuck with pushing a Sisyphean rock yet one more exhausting time up a seemingly endless hill, the words “You clearly haven’t understood a word” regarding ANYBODY else ring more than a little…unseemly, BooMan.
        
        Hollow, even.
        
        “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Vince Lombardi
        
        Yup.
        
        “Fools, too.” Arthur Gilroy
        
        Yup
        
        AG
    - Arthur Gilroy on March 20, 2006 at 3:15 pm
      
      Thank ypou, Ed.
      
      Rock rollin’ is (unfortunately) here to stay.
      
      So it rolls…
      
      AG

BooMan: Sisyphus SINNED. We just sleep.

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Arthur Gilroy

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