My Onion entry

For anyone who enjoys the Onion, and I absolutely do, they might enjoy the following. I wrote and submitted this to the Onion a few months back - I'm pretty sure I'll never hear back from them since they have written, in very prominent type, and in a very prominent place on their contact information page, that they do not accept editorial submissions. Surely they didn't mean me.

God Cancels Reality In Favor Of Reality TV

Nov 15, 2006

Vatican City, Italy - According to a Vatican representative, speaking on behalf of the Almighty, reality will be canceled at the end of this season and will be replaced by reality TV. God, the release stated, has found that the multitude of reality TV shows being aired more than satisfied his experiment in creating mankind and then watching the ensuing trials and tribulations. “The shows created by the four major networks,” stated God, “in fact go well beyond even the most difficult vicissitudes that I could have dreamed up. Bravo Fox, NBC, CBS and ABC,” he concluded. The release further stated that the fate of mankind at the end of this season will be instant non-being, with the exception of a small percentage kept on to staff the various reality TV shows themselves. There was no word as to which network’s season end date God will adhere to.

Goodbye, Mr. Vonnegut

A sad thing happened last night. A wonderful and sensitive and funny and creative author, by the name of Kurt Vonnegut, died. In “Timequake,” Vonnegut talks about being a Humanist, that organization of people who do not believe in God or an afterlife, and who try to ‘behave decently and honorably’ as he said, in this life. He relates,

“I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a few years back. I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. The room was like the court-martial scene in Trout’s “No Laughing Matter,” right before the floor of the Pacific Ocean swallowed up the third atomic bomb and Joy’s Pride and all the rest of it.
When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, ‘He’s up in Heaven now.’” - Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake [pp 83].

Leafing through my Vonnegut books, I find a few other quotes to remember this wonderful man by….
“Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
The books of Bokonon I:5
*harmless untruths”
-Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

On the topic of why bother writing in today’s movie and TV saturated world:

“Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.’”
-K.V., Timequake [pp 221]

(See my 'Why Blog' post for similar comments from my thinking and Buddhist thought)

And I wonder Mr. Vonnegut, did you have, as Robert Frost famously said, "A lover's quarrel with the world"? Since I have only read your books I never knew you well enough to say, but that feels like it might be the case. In any case, you're in Heaven now, and I'm very sad to see you go. But, as you so famously said, so it goes.....

The Zen of the road trip

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” –Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ‘Where I lived, and what I lived for’

This past January I headed out from Colorado, in order to escape a monstrously long stretch of bad winter weather, to the desert southwest. I toured through Albuquerque, Flagstaff, down to Tucson, through San Diego, back up through Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, and finally home via Zion National Park and Utah. Without trying to define how much the ‘road trip’ is a uniquely American experience, and I suspect it is very much so, I’ll simply comment that it was a definite part of my college experience, and that my friends especially loved a good road trip. And why did we love The Road Trip so much? I would say that there are many reasons. I can’t speak for my friends, but I have to believe that excitement and adventure are a big element of the joys of a good road trip. I’m not going to delve into this reason, though, partly because I don’t feel that I can do it justice. If you want a great description of the energy and excitement of a road trip, there’s no finer account that I’ve read, than Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.' So there is a second, and for me, a deeper reason that I’ve come to appreciate these trips.

An especially vivid example of this second reason occurred when I was about an hour west of Gallup New Mexico, on I-40, headed towards the Arizona border. It was 9:00 at night, I had been on the road for about 10 hours, and I was pretty beat. Furthermore, I had been listening to music all day long, and simply couldn’t stomach any more noise, so I had shut off my stereo. I was now left with the soft green glow of my car’s console, the pitch darkness surrounding me, and the combined hum of the wind and the tires on the road. White pinpoints of light would appear, grow larger, and then wink out of my vision as cars would go past on the opposite side of the two lane divided highway. I knew I had another few hours before I reached my destination for the night and, tired and bored, I remember sighing a bit and shifting in my seat. I resigned myself to more driving and it was about then that it came over me; or, more accurately, that I settled into ‘it.’

I can’t say exactly what ‘it’ was, but I felt that the road and the noises and the passing median became such a constant regularity, that I almost seemed to float in space, as if I wasn’t going anywhere at all. I was simply just sitting in my car as the grass at the side of the road floated by me. Time seemed to become so very unimportant; the clock on the dash would continue in its inexorable march forward, but I no longer felt attached to it anymore. I had no worries about where I would spend the night, no thoughts of when I would need to fill up next, or what CD I would play next. I simply drove, and nothing more. And this, I think, is the essence that I love about the road trip. The feeling of just sitting and being. I had settled into something of a Zen-like state; while I hadn't entirely lost my sense of self, I had lost much of my attachments to the world around me, or 'Trishna' as the Buddhists call this attachment. I felt as if time and causality, those bedrock concepts of western thought, were things that I was aware of, but not attached to. As Thoreau so eloquently said, I could step back from everything, and just watch the ‘thin current of time’ slide by. It’s somewhat paradoxical that I had to be moving, going somewhere, to feel like I could just sit and not worry about getting anywhere.

I can’t speak for all people who take road trips, but I suspect that, at some point in our trips, we all have this feeling. Would it be so unbelievable that, for a society always on the go, the only place we can feel true peace of mind is on the road? In any case, this is what I felt that night. For me, the beautiful essence of the road trip was, in a sense, that of a wonderful little fishing trip.