god

Audiovision: Truth vs Power

So a wise man, or a man who was at least passing for wise, started talking about truth. And the first thing he did, the clever bastard, was admit that nobody has the first clue what it is. We’re all just monkeys with car keys, little fizzing bundles of electricity piloting meat-suits around the planet, and we haven’t even figured out what the fizz is. Consciousness? Human thought? We don’t know what’s running the projector, but good lord, the movie is colorful, brief, and loud.

And yet…

Out there in the great electronic shrieking festival… pow! slap! kick! BOOM! you’ve got no shortage of bloviators, of sidewalk saviors and cable news prophets with shellacked hair, their faces glowing in the 4k pixel bath, absolutely convinced they’ve got the universe on a leash. They are selling Truth like it’s a used car, a timeless, irrefutable, low-mileage beauty that can be yours for the low, low price of your own brain. And the loudest dealership on the whole cosmic car lot is, of course, religion. These fanatics, these apostolic holy rollers with their eyes spun back in their skulls, insist their particular brand of Truth is the only one that gets you to the bliss of heaven. Just have a little faith, they say. Which is a five-dollar word for blind credulity. 

And so on…

Sometimes, you see, you have to do more than just believe. Sometimes you have to get up from the couch and move your feet. Take Vlad Dracul III. There was a man who put his convictions on a stick. A very long, sharp stick. He wasn’t playing around with faith and hope. He was a man of action, a walking thunderhead of revenge. Why? Was it because the Ottoman Turks read the wrong magic book? Nope. It was because his own father traded him and his brother like hockey cards to the Sultan, who was not a nice man. It was because while Vlad III was learning to hate in a Turkish dungeon, his father and brother were being tortured and murdered by his own people.

This sort of thing can change a boy’s outlook…

Vlad’s truth wasn’t a holy whisper in his ear; it was the hot, screaming fact of betrayal, and his answer was a field outside Târgoviște decorated with two thousand screaming, writhing, shish-kabobbed exclamation points aimed at a merciless sky. 

That was his dark sermon… that was his truth…

Now, let’s rewind history to Simon the Zealot, a different cat altogether. For him, the truth was a revolutionary tinderbox just waiting for a match. He saw this Jesus fellow, this Nazarene miracle man, and his synapses started to crackle with visions of Roman eagles falling out of the sky. He saw the critical mass, the juice, and he wanted to turn the power of popularity into a revolutionary battle-cry. He was trying to shove a prophet shaped like a question mark into a political hole shaped like a sword. This, you might imagine, made the local authorities a little jumpy. While Simon was trying to crown a savior king, the Romans were sharpening their nails. Was Judas the real betrayer? Or was it the man who tried to turn a movement about turning the other cheek into a bar fight with an empire? As a wise old Chinaman is supposed to have said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” Simon may have changed his tactics, but his all too mortal king wound up in the same place as Vlad’s unfortunate enemies: pinned to a piece of wood, proving a point about the interaction of truth and power.

Vlad
Simon

Undeniable truth? Not so fast. It’s a road, not a motel. Anyone who tells you they’ve checked in and unpacked is either running a con or they’re so lost they think the lobby is the entire universe. The best we can do is what that magnificent, gloomy German filmmaker suggests: you can actually stare into the void until misty clouds of undifferentiated nothingness take shape and stare back. Who knows? You might find something interesting in there. Mostly, you’ll just see yourself, your own egocentric story reflected in a million broken pieces. But if you can lose yourself, as the poet from Detroit once said, you might stumble over a shard of something real. Something inspiring. Just be wary the winds of power can short circuit your heartfelt illusions. 

Mr. Herzog
God

For now, until we actually begin to understand the wellspring of consciousness, could we please interrupt the merry-go-round of inherited cruelty, this endless cycle of pain passed down by people who were taught to be main characters in a story written by a mysterious, all-powerful Sky-CEO who actually cares to keep a running tab on every thought, every misdemeanor, every everything. The horror show starts when these people realize… and they usually do… that the Sky-CEO, in fact, isn’t watching and doesn’t care. 

Anyway… what if we tried something else? A little compassion… a little kindness… a pinch of skepticism and doubt. After all, the points of light seen in the dark night are mostly distant clusters of billions of stars and their satellites. That the universe allows for individual micro-particles such as you, me, astrophysicists, theologians, filmmakers, schizophrenics, etc. a glimpse of itself is nothing short of miraculous. What we know (we’ve learned quite a lot over the last couple centuries) amounts to no more than a quark, on a barnacle, attached to a massive seagoing cargo barge. We’re as good as bats experiencing hearing loss, we’re constantly bumping into reality in the barely audible darkness. 

But so what?

Don’t be afraid…
Keep stumbling…
We’ll see you there…
Fishing for ecstatic truth…
…in the gallery of the void.

This Land: New Hampshire

On a July Monday in the year of our lord, 2025, Ronnie and Rocinante woke up to a new day, in a strange land. And with all apologies to the natives, it appears they brought the Kanorado weather with them. Average July temps in Derry New Hampshire (no, not that Derry) is between the upper 70s and mid 80s. Today, it’s 92 with tomorrow’s forecast predicting temps up to 96! Fortunately, no one in the Derry Public Library knows it’s Ronnie’s fault… woo hoo!

Anyway, New Hampshire, the Granite State. The first to weigh in on the various candidates making bids to run the most powerful nation on the planet (till it’s not). These loopers are fiercely independent, proving themselves resilient and worthy from the jump.

On January 5, 1776… long, long ago, the cantankerous loopers of New Hampshire decided they’d had enough of old King George. Wham… first colony to declare independence! Nearly half a year before those other guys got around to signing the Declaration. Brave souls, or maybe just impatient.

“Live Free or Die!” It’s what they say.

Established in 1629, named after some place in England… typical. Then came the British troubles. In 1774, before most folks even knew what was what, New Hampshire jumped the gun seizing Fort William & Mary, just like that. Two years later, they had their own government and constitution. First again. No dilly-dallying for these loopers.

“Live Free or Die!” Sounds about right.

Later on, when the big American family squabble happened, the one they called the Civil War, New Hampshire was all in for abolition. Thirty-two thousand soldiers, give or take a few, marched off to fight for the Union. After that unpleasantness, boom… factories everywhere! Textiles, shoes, paper. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester was the biggest cotton mill on the planet. Can you imagine? Then came the French Canadians, by the droves. Now, a quarter of the population has French-American blood. And these days, New Hampshire is rich and smart. Go figure.

“Live Free or Die!” A mantra, if you will.

They’re not big on religion here. Least religious U.S. state, they say. Staunchly libertarian, they won’t be taking orders from priests… they really like their freedom. A Pew survey in 2014 showed that thirty-six percent here were part of the fast growing demographic known as the “nones“. Thirty percent Protestant, twenty-six percent Catholic. Not many Mormons or Jews. They don’t go to church much, these New Hampshirites. Only fifty-four percent are “absolutely certain there is a God,” compared to seventy-one percent elsewhere. Curious, isn’t it? Oh, and here’s a kicker: New Hampshire is the only state to have a woman governor and two women as U.S. senators. There’s another kick in the agates for the patriarchy.

“Live Free or Die!” And make room for the ladies in your ol’ boy network.

Now, before all the European colonizer hullabaloo, the Abenaki tribes were here, minding their own business. Different cultures, different gods, but same language, mostly. People were living near Keene up to twelve thousand years ago! Imagine that. You can commune with the sacred spirits in the White Mountain National Forest, winding through the Appalachian Trail.

“Live Free or Die!” A long, beautiful nature hike.

On Mount Washington, they call it… the “World’s Worst Weather.” Hurricane-force winds every third day. Through the years, more than a hundred visitors underestimated that fury, and now they cant. Little dwarf trees, all matted and gnarled, like angry bonsai. So it goes. And the Old Man of the Mountain, a face carved by nature itself, watched over Franconia Notch for ages. Then, one day in May 2003, poof! Gone. Just like that. And Ronnie thought Kanorado had windy days.

“Live Free or Die!” Until you can’t.

Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams. Eight hundred of the first, nineteen thousand miles of the second. Hard to keep track of all this windy river vertigo. Sometimes state boundaries get bungled. New Hampshire and Maine had a little squabble over the Piscataqua River boundary, specifically some islands. The Supreme Court said Maine owned them. But New Hampshire still says the naval shipyard on Seavey’s Island is theirs. Stubborn, these Granite Staters.

“Live Free or Die!” And don’t tread on me.

New Hampshire has the shortest ocean coastline in the whole darn country, eighteen miles. Blink and you miss it. Hampton Beach, where folks go to get sunburned. And the Isles of Shoals, nine tiny islands offshore. Four of them are New Hampshire’s. Poet Celia Thaxter had an art colony there. And Blackbeard, the pirate, supposedly buried treasure there. Treasure and art. A strange combination.

“Live Free or Die!” For rum, booty, and framing services perhaps?

 Abenaki Tribes
Blackbeard
Fort William & Mary
First to weigh in.

And New Hampshire has produced an impressive list of notable people: Mary Baker Eddy, who started Christian Science. Robert Frost, a poet who knew a thing or two about lonely roads. Alan Shepard, who went to space. Ronnie James Dio, the flaming heavy metal icon. Dan Brown, who writes those mystery novels. Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Seth Meyers… funny people. So it goes.

“Live Free or Die!” Or at least, take it with a generous sense of humor.

And with that, again we point out the fact that New Hampshire’s average July temperature ranges from the mid-70s to mid-80s. As this entry gets logged the thermometer is in the mid-80s, on the way to a high of 96! Now without sounding like a total narcissist, Ronnie is rehearsing excuses in case anyone were to irrationally put the blame on him and Rocinante for bringing the Kanorado “Dawg Days” all this way north. You gotta admit, it is an astonishing coincidence. On the drive from Burlington VT to Derry, NH, the conditions were gorgeous. Light rain and upper 60s to mid 70s. Ronnie was breathing a sigh of relief for getting away from the punishing Kanorado summer heat, only to find he had apparently brought his customary suffering with him, to the astonishment of the Yankee natives.

PS: There is a silver lining… Ronnie always manages to find one. That being, evening temps cool down significantly so that Ronnie’s able to switch the ceiling fans off around 10 or 11 P.M. as they aren’t needed for the rest of the night. So… there’s that.

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

You won’t get far…
In the Granite State…
With Shuck and Jive…
They can’t relate…
First to weigh in…
On the Presidential Race…
Live free and chalk it up to fate.

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter V (genderpocalypse)

In the chaos of twisted chromosomes and warring hormones, we stumble upon the battleground known as “gender identity.” Picture it, loopers: a cosmic joke played on the fleshy stage of human existence. On one side, we have the cold, hard warriors of science, armed with their microscopes, brain scans, and impenetrable jargon, dissecting the very essence of what it means to be a dude or a chick. Like a swarm of blue ants, they peck away at the X and Y chromosomes… they focus their compound lenses on squishy gray folds of the brain hoping to uncover the secret lair of gender.

On the other side, we’ve got a dubious combination of politics and religion. And like red ants quoting holy scripture confined in a glass jar with the lab-coat wearing blues, all are content to share the space peacefully until someone comes along and shakes the jar. Ideologies and agendas are imposed upon the mix, where gender is leveraged as a weapon, a war cry, a bargaining chip designed to divide in order to conquer. Here, the forces of division speak in tongues, twisting words like “identity” and “expression” into righteous mandibles and impenetrable exoskeleton. They invent fake threats, hurl buzzwords like sugar crystals, and paint the very notion of gender itself as some kind of existential threat against all ant-kind. It’s an artfully designed battle, loopers, where common sense goes to die and the casualties are sanity and nuance… but enough of this ant-jar metaphor.

Caught in the political shitstorm, behold, the ordinary human! A curious creature, armed with little more than a body that feels and a mind that questions. “Who am i?” they wonder, peering into the distorted screen of warring society. “Am i what the textbooks say i am, what my birth certificate proclaims? Or am i something more, something deeper, an echo of feeling that defies the rigid rules of biology?” The scientists, bless their methodical hearts, try to offer answers, mapping out hormonal landscapes and brain circuitry. But what do they really know about being trapped in a body that feels like a prison, or feeling a defiant joy under a label that the world wants to erase?

Meanwhile, politicians bellow and posture. Christian Nationalists, with their faces twisted in apocalyptic fury, see transgender folks as harbingers of societal collapse, demonic agents sent to shatter the sacred order of man, woman, and holy matrimony. They clutch their dog-eared Bibles like shields, shouting verses about abominations as if the wrath of God himself will smite down those who dare to blur the lines. Oh, the irony, loopers, for aren’t those holy books dripping with gender-bending stories? Androgynist angels, prophets who blur the lines of man and woman… all stuff of genderqueer fever dreams!

And let’s not forget the paragons of liberal tolerance, sometimes just as ridged and uncompromising. Armed with academic tomes and social justice battle cries, they paint gender as a fluid, ever-shifting spectrum, where the very act of categorization is an act of violence. For them, biology is a mere suggestion, pronouns a tool of liberation, and self-declaration of the highest law. To question their orthodoxy is to be cast as bigoted troglodytes, clinging to a world that no longer exists, a relic of a less enlightened age… nuance be damned.

So, here we are, loopers, trapped in this absurdist play. The lab-coat wearing blue ants fiddle with their instruments, hoping to find a grand unifying theory of gender, while the red culture-warriors trade barbs and twist reality like cheap balloon animals. Yet, in the end, what does any of this say about the boy who looks in the mirror and sees a girl staring back, or the woman who feels like a stranger in her own skin? It’s the eternal human struggle played out on a new stage… a struggle to simply be, to exist without judgment, to find a sliver of peace in this glorious, messy, and often nonsensical thing Bill Hicks reminds us is “just a ride.”

And where does our fictional alter-ego fit in this absurdist play? Well, Ronnie Hays says he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body, but that woman happens to be a lesbian. So… the deviance is nearly imperceptible because if he’s dating… he’s dating a woman, and since his skin, flesh, and blood is male from the get go… NO ONE notices something amiss.

Cheers… Loopcircus

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter IV (arc of the spiral)

In an attempt to illuminate where Loopcircus is coming from, metaphysically speaking, we’ll draw a brief allegory of humankind’s struggle to understand its place in the universe as an ever oscillating battle between those who insist there is a particular source from which all creation springs and those who insist we can observe the universe as the result of billions of years of adaptive (and otherwise) incremental changes. Loopcircus may be tempted to side with one or the other of these conflicting views, but the bare-metal truth is we don’t know… nor do we believe ANYONE truly knows. So… without further adieu, the spiral of puny human metaphysical understanding from Gilgamesh to Sagan.

In the beginning, there was dust, then clay, then Gilgamesh, a king who wrestled gods, chased immortality, and discovered, like a Vegas lounge lizard hungover in a bathtub full of pennies, that life’s a fleeting joke. Fast forward a few millennia, and the frame focuses on the desert of Palestine, where a carpenter’s son strolls in, flips the metaphysical tables, and promises an afterlife juicier than a Lebanese fig. This, my friends, is the Big Bang of Western metaphysics.

Centuries later, Europe enters its Renaissance, a period where deities dance the can-can with da Vinci’s anatomy sketches and Galileo gets poked in the eye by the Vatican for suggesting Earth isn’t the cosmic navel. Science, now a pimply teenager with a telescope, starts flexing its muscles, whispering sweet nothings of reason and logic to the masses. And religion, the aging aristocrat clutching its pearls, declares war.

Enter Darwin, a fellow with a penchant for Galapagos finches, drops an apparent truth bomb making the Colosseum look like a petting zoo. Suddenly, humanity isn’t God’s special snowflake, but a hairy cousin to the orangutan, scrambling up the evolutionary ladder in a desperate bid to avoid becoming monkey chow. Cue the Wagnerian strains of existential angst, thicker than London fog, and the rise of Nietzsche, and his magnificent mustache.

Across the pond, the soon to be U.S.A., a rambunctious toddler all hopped up on Manifest Destiny, is busy carving its own metaphysical niche. The Wild West, a whiskey-soaked fever dream, birthed bootstraps pragmatism, a philosophy as rugged as a cowboy’s chaps, where truth is measured by bullets, dollars, and cents, not divine pronouncements. Meanwhile, in the East Coast salons, Emerson and Thoreau, Transcendentalist proto-hippies on a nature binge, preach a gospel of self-reliance and communion with the cosmos, a far cry from the fire-and-brimstone sermons echoing from the puritan pulpits.

The 20th century, a rollercoaster ride through world wars and atomic bombs, left humanity bruised and questioning. Freud, a psychoanalyst with a penchant for cigars and Electra complexes, peered into the murky depths of the human psyche, revealing a primal soup of desires and neuroses far removed from the squeaky-clean narratives of organized religion. Existentialism, a philosophy as bleak as a Greek Tragedy, became the soundtrack of the disillusioned, while pop culture, a neon-lit funhouse, offered fleeting solace in the form of Elvis’ hips and Marilyn’s pout.

And now, in the 21st century, the stage is split. On one side, the Intelligent Design revival, a troupe of fire-and-brimstone preachers, resurrects the old gods, their voices booming with the righteous fury of a televangelist hawking snake oil. On the other, Carl Sagan’s disciples, hold aloft the flickering torch of reason, their voices laced with the wry humor of a scientist explaining the Big Bang to a five-year-old.

Then there’s we, the ever-curious, popcorn in hand, watching this embarrassing spectacle unfold. Will we turn into pillars of salt? Will fire and brimstone engulf the stage, will the Saganite laughter pierce the darkness? Or will Camus, W.B. Yeats, and George Carlin’s detached amusement save us from the disease of “passionate intensity?” The curtain has yet to fall, and the play, as always, goes on. One thing seems destined to persist: The spiral… ever oscillating between extreme attractions and aversions follows a seemingly eternal arc… each epoch like Groundhog Day… round and round the galaxy we spin… forever… and ever… and ever.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/1000-migrants-returned-libya-year-200114132748736.html

Human Beans

 
The fronts are building now… there’s a cold wind blowin’ through. And good folks everywhere talk about the chosen few. They can’t help themselves… it’s only human beans… to cling tight to their notions… and that’s just what they do.

A piece of dirt both sides… they claim for themselves. They swear by God someday… justice will prevail. They can’t help themselves… it’s only human beans… to want more than is had… well… nothing fills the pail.

I know… it’s a cold cruel world… I know… you gotta make do for yourself. I know… people never satisfy. I know… disproportion breeds hatred. I know… the gap of disproportion grows. I know… nothing ever stays the same………

Every living breath is a part of us all. Makes sense to extend a hand. Are you sure you want the whole world bearin’ down on you… are you sure you want the call?

The fronts are building now… better dig your graveyards proud. ‘Cos good folks everywhere… well they’re ready to throw it down. They can’t help themselves it’s only human beans… to fight for love and pride… in the rain… they gladly drown.

I know… it’s a cold cruel world… I know… you gotta make do for yourself. I know… people never satisfy. I know… disproportion breeds hatred. I know… the gap of disproportion grows. I know… nothing ever stays the same.

I know…
I know…
I know…
I know.

Spotify link… HERE

Judgement

 
Turning on a spit…
Don’t forget to save a hit…
For the child inside a pit…
All alone without a bit…
of strength with which to split…
Extra words of twisted wit…
For the king and all his shit…
And all the things that make us quit…
The transcendental seizure fit…
A flight bound to slip…
Through a dimensionary tsunami of love.

Oh the judgment of God…
will be harsh… will be swift.
Movin’ down through the stratosphere…
to the folly of man. And we…
the righteous agents of God…
have got to face the awesome truth… 
Sometimes redemption requires discipline.

The stone will roll…
And mockingbirds will toll…
For whom the bell sings droll…
simple steps on patrol…
Where kindness creates a hole…
Where blackness takes the soul…
Where winding river’s scroll…
Through the universal hole…
For jesters to control…
The ultimate goal…
Unleash the earthquakes of war.

Oh the judgment of God…
will be harsh… will be swift.
Movin’ down through the stratosphere…
to the folly of man. And we…
the righteous agents of God…
have got to face the awesome truth… 
Sometimes redemption requires discipline.

I AM the dark tower of gold…
I AM the story told…
to children eons old…
For withered words sold…
masses follow pipers told…
Firebirds dripping droppings bold…
Mean sharing bounty cold…
Cash drawn from workers hold…
Power in their hands… sight behold…
The miracle of ONE voice ONE indivisible fold…
Of labor to the power of all but none as the
random judgment of GOD.

…the judgment of God…
will be harsh… will be swift.
Movin’ down through the stratosphere…
to the folly of man. And we…
the righteous agents of God…
have got to face the awesome truth… 
Sometimes redemption requires discipline.

“I’ll see you on the other side
of the judgement of God.”

Spotify link… HERE