Merge Left

This is the time in the show when we like to mention that we generally run the show in two parts.

There’s the first part and the second part. We like to run the show in that order.

In between the two parts is another part that we like to call “Intermission”.

Intermission is a time when you can go out to the lobby and smoke (they don’t have to smoke). You don’t have to smoke! You can go out and drink (they don’t have to drink either). You don’t have to drink, you don’t have to smoke. If you don’t want to smoke, you certainly don’t have to smoke. You don’t have to drink either, hardly enough time for anything else, although it has been done.

Intermission: 15 fun-filled minutes without smoking or drinking. Have fun.

Anyway, that’s how I remember the Intermission Bit by the Smothers Brothers. I can type it without reference, and while listening to Neil Young’s Le Noise, because in addition to listening to their albums just about every other day when I was younger (so much younger than the day before), I often use the bit when I host, or emcee events.  The Off Topic series is moving along and the next level relates to humans more directly, so I want to take some more time to polish it up.

The memories tied to the words of the Intermission Bit are layered over with time and spun into yarns, milestones, signposts, and the winds blown over the nearest horizon. Here and now, I plant it yet again in the wild garden that has so long been an object of my toil and a source of much tribulation. Such are the wiles to be found within the cracks of any old nest, no matter how tightly woven we have been made to believe it might have become over time. To unravel remains in the nature of strings, no matter how many arch angels sing for redemption. No matter how many pins we’ve stuck into our eyes, or grains of sand are piled on our head, from here it is only a matter of time. We all know how time bends toward the greatest mass. So let us pray

that at least one god will survive this deluge of colorful numbers and irrefutably beautiful math. Else what purpose all the past prayers? And all those righteous sacrifices! Undone? Say to ain’t

where you have gone, Joe DiMaggio.  Please, just say it.

You see, sometimes it is just easier to throw some caution into the wind over your left shoulder and let it take your fingers for a ride. So, are we smoking yet? Or have we calmed it all down to these few moments scrounged from the detritus of another day on the corner of Frenzy and Disaster? All the way at the edge of downtown and just before the outskirts, you’ll know it when you’ve gone too far.  There is plenty of parking, especially out back. I think we all can see what has been so clearly written on that wall. Still we never agree

about what it says right there in front of our lying eyes and under our stinking noses. Get a life coach already, and learn how not to fumble for a change. All those coins deep in your pockets, are they for sharing, or do you plot to pass them to your kids intact?  From how many hides have you extracted those fortunes?  It is the wealth of a sweat collector. All those greasy coins frakked from the bowels of fellow humans splayed by chemicals applied. You practice an alchemy charmed with blood, steel, and passion. You churn bodies into gold and collect it by remote control, laundered it for security purposes and to better facilitate the ease of transfer; to sustain certain surreptitious movements made deftly so as not to impede the grisly harvest of cash from the cashless; clues from the clueless; perhaps hap from the hapless as well. Oh, it might not be precisely true but it sounds good and it feels good to say it. So do it now and be done with it.

It could very well be true if you would just admit it every time you are asked and think about it even while you dream. Why is a table not a chair? Why can’t purple be brown? We already agree that up can be down and backward is just forward in reverse. It seems very logical in this reality, really. Let’s put it to the test. Rename the constellations, if only in jest. I like the name “Zero” the best. Orion is so staid and there’s naming-rights money to be made. Seriously.

Even so, the shell game of corporations has been a recent off shore spectacular. Really, it is truly what all the rage is about, near as not to the so called heart of the matter of this particular fact. The case seems to have been perfunctorily closed, the appeals have loudly been heard, and the Court jesters have thusly adjourned. Get it through your empty heads already. I mean money is tight and marketing is not, if you know what I mean. Perhaps not.  But we gotta move the process along and you resist by dragging your feet. Move along. Stop sniffing that Jasmine, you’ve had near enough. Perhaps not.  Point is, we know that we are not working, not working at work, at jobs, at politics, at culture, at survival.

We know we are not working or at least we smell it on the brisker winds

that tingle the natural thread of the acid bases that weave each of us into the web that we believe exists beyond the horizon because after all the world isn’t flat as any fool can plainly see (once we built us a spaceship with cameras that is).

Ah, there’s the point. How did it get over there?

Memories of the Intermission Bit, that’s what I meant to write about. They are so deeply layered and varied. Every time I think about them, I wonder how many molecules it takes to maintain that intricately woven virtual tapestry of thought, especially through time?

Now, you’ve got one too. Memory, that is, of the Intermission Bit. Use it as you will. Or not.  Flip a coin or roll some dice.

Yeah. That’s it. That’s what it was that I wanted to write. I wish I knew sooner, because then we could have run it like one of those jelly beans in the jar counting schemes. Or maybe one can just google eye the whole thing and be done with it.

Speaking of which, I am.

Welcome back. How did Intermission go?