The author of "The Dice Man”—that dangerous book that influenced billionaire Richard Branson and had a British gonzo journalist nearly trash his career and disappear—was not a jaded psychoanalyst named Luke Rhinehart. He was a mild, sweet English professor named George Cockcroft. Though he was married (faithfully, we presume) to the same woman for sixty-three years, he had a vivid imagination.
More than common sense suggests that Missouri’s scrupulously limited information might be counterproductive. A raft of studies show that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth dates.” Positively correlated.
The concept of sumptuary laws is so alien, I am intrigued. Though they pretended to be highminded and austere, a free pass could nearly always be bought.
The next time I wonder what I am feeling, maybe I should take my actual pulse. What is my body feeling? How should I interpret that? Will a label help, and if so, what label will help the most? Because I suspect I jump too quickly to the same old conclusions.
This a tricky time to start a theatre company. But halfway into Albion Theatre company's run of "Heroes," the play is a resounding success. It ignores short attention spans, opening with the three vets sitting silent on the patio, staring at the weather.
We do need our muck raked. But who, in the current corporate oligarchy, will want to pay for that? And in a media landscape clogged with charging knights—their steeds kicking up clouds of dust in every direction—how are we to locate moral clarity?
While I have never had the courage to—another telling phrase—“prance around” naked in public, I can imagine how free it would feel. To move through the world naked as the day you were born, casting aside all costume, an emperor unashamed? To be unclothed is to be vulnerable, your flesh unhidden and unprotected; to be comfortable being vulnerable is to relax, easy in your own skin at last.
Were they with her, I wonder, when she died? I hope so. No living creature is as much comfort at a deathbed.
A wandering mind has slipped its moorings, severing connection with its immediate environment. No longer paying attention to what it can perceive in the surrounding world, it turns inward, self-referential, occupied by dreams and memories and stray thoughts. Instead of musing about what its partnered body is experiencing, reading, hearing, thinking, it slides away to a different destination altogether.
The real Elvis is American, remember, and America is a consumer society. The desires we project, the stuff we buy—that is what feels real to us. It lets us have any Elvis we want. He left plenty of kitsch in his wake, plenty of pseudo-religion, plenty of Elvis jokes—but he was not, is not, a joke. He lived our contradictions, released our inhibitions, and lost himself in the process.
I return to the tv, determined to cure myself of the casual lust that overtakes me every time this crap comes on, the mild hypnotic state in which I watch messes wiped from a sparkling white surface, food prep bewitched, household glue used to hold a Volkswagen in midair.
Conversation is just as vital now, a glue for friendship, a bridge to romance, a necessity in any workplace, and a source of energy and creativity and understanding.