wrob explains everything

(There's an unspoken conceit that any poem which needs explaining probably isn't good. Codswallop. Oh, in some cases perhaps, but with due respect to those who feel that poetry is essentially subjective...most of the time, i suspect poets know EXACTLY what they have in mind. I'm going to deconstruct one of my poems, something i've never done before. I do this because it might be a poem of incalculable importance, the most morally/spiritually advanced thing i'll ever set down. And it also might be a century or more before the average person understands what i'm talking about. That's too long.)

EVERYTHING
When i think of friendships lost
we poisoned sex...
Friendships that should have been
we poisoned sex...
Joys betrayed by jealous greed
we poisoned sex...
The incarceration in carnal isolation
we poisoned sex...
Sex took our touching
Sex took our belonging
Sex took our healing
Sex took our sex
we poisoned sex, then sex poisoned everything
http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2011/01/sex.html

Think of every romance you ever had...every boyfriend/girlfriend, lover, or significant other. Put them all together in one room in your mind. Wait a second for everyone to catch up (some people are knocking down walls, and wondering if the corner bodega has enough salsa). Now, look around the room. At some point in your life, you felt an intense connection to each one of these people. An intense desire to care for and protect them. To fill them with joy. And for at least a moment in time, these people felt the same for you. Look at them...and tell me how many are still a part of your life? Eliminate those who are around in some obligatory, contentious way. How many? Twenty percent? Ten? Less? These are the people who were most intensely interested in you...moreso than almost all your non-romantic friends and family members. But they're not with you. They're gone, like they were never there. Now clear your mind...and imagine these people are still in your life. Whatever part of you they were able to love, they still do. Every single one of them.
Would you suddenly have more friendship and love than anyone you've ever known?
Now think about platonic relationships you've lost because of sex. That friend who was crazy about the same person you were crazy about, but only one of you had the nerve to go after. Or the friend who had a hidden fling with your sister/brother. Or the friend you thought was soooooo cool, until their unwelcome secret was revealed (they wanted to be "more" than friends). Or that family member who has never forgiven you for forgiving (blank) after he/she cheated on (blank).
Now...imagine a world in which you've been held and touched every single day of your life, and have sex whenever you want. A world where anyone you desire, is happily receptive. It goes the other way, too. If anyone desires you, nothing makes you happier than giving them that happiness.
Ridiculous? Inane?
Loneliness is far and away the most prominent, universal feature of this society. Even during our most intimate acts, or in the midst of a crowd, we all lead lives of crippling, encompassing isolation. One in which sex is never a gift, but always a bargaining chip. We poison sex with jealousy, competition, and the tyranny of searching for that one love who will cleave to us "forever". And when you think you've finally found it, the two of you isolate yourselves from the world, until you can't stand the sight of each other. You might have even brought a child into the world, to whom you gave your sickness.
But that other life, that ridiculous, inane dream, is the one you were born for. The one that's in your DNA, the one that five million years of human existence prepared you for.
Your birthright.
Look what we've done with it.
For five million years, humans lived in foraging societies. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers. Foragers have no notion of private property. They share a sense of belonging that is incomprehensible to us. Try to imagine growing up in a world where every adult is your "parent", and no one would ever hurt you.
Ask yourself what we've traded that for.
And think, just think, of all the love that should have been a part of your life, that sex took away. This isn't abstract. For each of us, life is one long unspooling of lovers and friends who disappear, leaving us alone...
To move on...
To the next person we'll disappoint. And be disappointed by.
It's time to awaken, and arise.

(for further reading: http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2012/02/sex-at-dawn.html)

99 greatest pop songs

99 GREATEST POP SONGS OF THE ROCK ERA
Imagine, John Lennon
Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen
Hotel California, Eagles
American Pie, Don McClean
Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin
Black Water, The Doobie Brothers
What's Going On, Marvin Gaye
Good Vibrations, The Beach Boys
In the Air Tonight, Phil Collins
Dance to the Music, Sly and the Family Stone
Africa, Toto
Be-bop-a-lula, Gene Vincent
I.G.Y., Donald Fagen
Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix
Yesterday, The Beatles
Hound Dog, Elvis Presley
Me and Bobby McGee, Janis Joplin
Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan
Virtual Insanity, Jamiroquai
Roxanne, The Police
I've Seen All Good People, Yes
Come On Eileen, Dexy's Midnight Runners
You're So Vain, Carly Simon
Tempted, Squeeze
All Night Long (All Night), Lionel Richie
Free Bird, Lynyrd Skynyrd
Thriller, Michael Jackson
Love Me Do, The Beatles
Money for Nothing, Dire Straits
Leader of the Band, Dan Fogelberg
Copacabana (at the Copa), Barry Manilow
Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads
Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry
Love Shack, The B-52s
What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong
Sexual Healing, Marvin Gaye
Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell
Respect, Aretha Franklin
Is She Really Going Out With Him?, Joe Jackson
Celebration, Kool & the Gang
Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon & Garfunkel
Everybody's Talkin', Harry Nilsson
The Logical Song, Supertramp
Reminiscing, Little River Band
California Girls, The Beach Boys
Dust in the Wind, Kansas
You Can't Always Get What You Want, The Rolling Stones
Layla, Eric Clapton
Thank God I'm a Country Boy, John Denver
We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions, Queen
The Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel
Stayin' Alive, The Bee Gees
The Way We Were, Barbra Streisand
Stand By Me, Ben E. King
Everybody Hurts, R.E.M.
Who's Cryin' Now, Journey
You Can Leave Your Hat On, Joe Cocker
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot
Joy to the World, Three Dog Night
Down on the Corner, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Lola, The Kinks
Try a Little Tenderness, Otis Redding
Jailhouse Rock, Elvis Presley
Time in a Bottle, Jim Croce
I Want You Back, The Jackson 5
Band on the Run, Paul McCartney
(They Long to Be) Close to You, Carpenters
I Want You to Want Me, Cheap Trick
Luther Vandross, Superstar
La Bamba, Richie Valenz
Brown-eyed Girl, Van Morrison
Danny's Song, Loggins & Messina
Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana
Alison, Elvis Costello
Peace Train, Cat Stevens
It's the End of the World As We Know It, R.E.M.
Desperado, Eagles
I Write the Songs, Barry Manilow
My Way, Frank Sinatra
Love the One You're With, Stephen Stills
Baby Got Back, Sir Mix-a-Lot
Peggy Sue, Buddy Holly
Day-O, Harry Belafonte
On Broadway, George Benson
Great Balls of Fire, Jerry Lee Lewis
Closer, Nine Inch Nails
Show Me the Way, Peter Frampton
You've Got a Friend, James Taylor
Alone Again (Naturally), Gilbert O'Sullivan
The Gambler, Kenny Rogers
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Eurythmics
Jack and Diane, John Mellencamp
Don't Worry, Be Happy, Bobby McFerrin
Black Magic Woman, Santana
Karma Chameleon, Culture Club
1999, Prince
Afternoon Delight, Starland Vocal Band
Midnight Rider, The Allman Brothers Band
I Love L.A., Randy Newman
QUALIFICATIONS FOR INCLUSION
-45% aural experience
-45% cultural resonance
-10% X-factor

monogafesto

MY RELATIONSHIP TO, AND UNDERSTANDING OF, MONOGAMY
(and i may have no idea what i'm talking about)
Historically, monogamy arose soon after the idea of private property, not long after the agricultural revolution (about 10,000 years ago, less than 5% of human history...perhaps a good deal less). Males wanted their possessions to go to their sons, so they needed to know which sons were theirs. Presto...monogamy! In the great non-surprise of history, every single marriage-based society has had a distinctly more permissive attitude toward male extramarital sex. If monogamy were natural, WHY would there be punishments (up to and including death, and always harsher on women) for those who trangress? Why would a seventh commandment even exist?
Scientific studies ever-increasingly conclude that pre-agricultural humans had multiple sexual partners, men and women equally.
In my own sexual life, i've never fucked around.
I was once proud of that.
Even within my own youthful "life partner" dreams, i perceived the foolishness inherent in two ideas: the notion that there is only one "right one", and the notion of being "completed" by your beloved. Your spirit has to be whole BEFORE you can be good for someone else. As i grew, i was forced to accept the logic that if my love genuinely loves another, she will be MORE of a person, not less. She will be happier, and have more experience and wisdom to offer both me and the human race.
The stages of falling in love are a rush (if they weren't, we'd have no babies). But all those feelings, including the sustained bliss that follows the whirlwinds of attraction and infatuation, are dictated by hormones. In the grip of hormones, it can feel natural to desire no one but your shipoopi (or not). But in the big picture, our physiology is only equipped to sustain these rushes with one person for about the time it takes a child to be born. Years of monogamy will steadily lower a man's testosterone, making him more susceptible to depression, cancer, heart attack, and dementia. The effect on women is as yet undocumented.
I'm not anti-romantic. Far from it. My deep caring for all people makes me more capable of loving a woman intensely and profoundly. Put another way, i might be the man least able to use a woman as just some receptacle for my desires. Anonymous sex is more painful to me than no sex at all (but only barely, ever so barely). I'm open to love in any way it finds me, even something that looks traditional. In the early stages of mutual wooing, i find myself inclined to shut down other romantic potentialities. Whether that's leftover social conditioning or something less noxious, i'm not yet sure.
All of this, however, leaves my life in a bit of a sexual netherworld. I don't fit in at the altar or the orgy. On top of everything else, i don't want STDs, yet loathe condoms (i'm not just being whiny...people who use condoms are more prone to depression than people who don't). I'm generally content to offer monogamy to a new lover, but that's a ticking bomb set to go off when human nature (hers and mine) kicks in. Most women still want monogamy, because it's all they've been taught, and because men still control almost all the world's resources. Women are tied to the Cinderella paradigm because their economic survival depends on it, especially if they want to (or have to) raise a child. But if you were to set all women loose in a world free of poverty, where they knew that any child they birthed would always be cared for, they would lose interest in monogamy within a generation or so.
And in that world, men would get more sex.
So who's keeping monogamy alive?
Are they dead yet?

(for more on the science behind this: http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2012/02/sex-at-dawn.html)

sledge poetry

I suppose no two creators create in just the same way. No painters have the same stroke, and no guitarists twang quite identically. Perhaps there are poets who never edit at all, or some who do a first draft straight through then put it in a drawer for thirty-seven weeks. Or some who edit right away, but very...gently.
For something as "delicate" as poetry, my own editing doesn't feel gentle. It feels like i'm wielding a mini-sledge, striking away for hours, trying to sculpt the words into submission. I bang away with the sledge in my right hand...despite the bluntness of the instrument, my less dextrous left hand would yield apalling results. If i'm lucky, the finished product bears a resemblance to the first draft. If i'm not, it can be days or weeks of hacking and lunatic stanza-shuffling. Lines or words can be taken out, put back in, taken out, put back in...on rare occasions, i even take recourse to a thesaurus, trying and rejecting five, six, seven words...
Often a perfect strike, a perfectly-phrased line, will require a complete overhaul of the rest of the poem. Even the lines that were working.
Last week, i wrote a poem entitled "everything":
http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2011/01/sex.html
I whacked and banged for many hours, over several days. Sometimes after staring at the words for too long, your brain starts shutting down. You can fight off the bleariness, or lay your head down. Knowing when the poem's done is an inexact science...on at least half the poems i think are done, i scramble back hours or days later. Sometimes you just say, "Hey...that's the best i can do." "Everything" went through many title changes (even after posting, you can look above and see one): it was also called "Poisoned", and others i've since forgotten. There was a line that hung around for days..."Brother hate brother, lover hate lover". And "Sex took our friends" was another line that rests in (hopefully) peace. For the longest time, the entire last line was repeated throughout the poem.
Bang. Hack. Slice. Slide. Bang.
The end results are...usually middling. A good poet will write good poems (though not always, by any means). A great poet might never write a great poem, that perfect lightning strike of inspiration and craftsmanship. There are few rules, and no guarantees. A perfect title for most poetry books would be "Hey, I Wrote One Really Great Thing, Now You Wankers Get to Read All This Other Crap!"
Mommy, why is that sweaty man walking down the street with a mini-sledge wrapped to his hand?
That's just a poet, sweety.

"UFO"

1970-1971
UFO was producer Gerry (THUNDERBIRDS, SPACE: 1999) Anderson's first non-puppet series. An adult sci fi show, there are elements of the childlike simplicity found in his previous shows, like the stock footage vehicle launches repeated in full. And whenever a UFO explodes, you might experience an unintended giggle. And you can sometimes see the strings on the ships. But generally, being pulled into the show's universe is easy. It aired the year after STAR TREK ended. It's set in the wild future (ten years, to be precise...you might chuckle as "1980" repeatedly flashes through the opening credits). UFO is pronounced "you-foe". The look is psychedelic...men in nehru jackets and women in minis. Earth is under attack, and the public is unaware. A secret military organization, S.H.A.D.O, defends the planet. There's a moonbase armed with interceptors, a submarine which launches an attack fighter, and earthside ATVs. The first episode aired fourteen months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The headquarters is under a film studio, and Commander Ed Straker (Ted Striker?) leads a double life as a studio chief. Straker, flintily played by Ed Bishop, is one of the earliest bona fide TV hardasses. George Sewell is lovely as Col. Alex Freeman, his cynical, womanizing right-hand man. When the producers began selling the show to America, George was cut because he wasn't handsome enough...you may now be ashamed of your species. Michael Billington (a contender for the role of James Bond) plays the suave Col. Foster, and he's as good as his material. There's a tendency to think of England as less cowboyishly moronic than the U.S., but the truth is not so simple. UFO is often flawed, with outdated morality and bad writing. Yet there's also an occasional burst of gratifying intelligence. The most egregious shortcoming is its treatment of women. They're glorified secretaries, mostly in the 18-23 range and wearing skin-tight costumes. There's more than one workplace scene of a woman walking away from a man whose eyes very obviously follow her ass, and he's in no way portrayed negatively (an attitude that comes from the top...the opening credits flash a walking woman's body twice, one posterior and one anterior, and in each flash, the head is out of shot). It's so noxious that this show should NOT be viewed by impressionable minds. Anderson may have received a studio memo about this, for three quarters of the way through the run Col. Virginia Lake becomes a regular. But the writers bungled her, having no idea how to write a strong female character. Scarier yet, Anderson considered the show progressively feminist. But even classic STAR TREK, with its embarrassing treatment of women, comes off as enlightened compared to UFO. And that said, i shamelessly aver that Lt. Ellis (Gabrielle Drake) is one of the most achingly beautiful sci fi characters ever. She moved on to other things midway through the run, and you never stop wishing she hadn't.
FOUR STAR EPISODES
-Survival
How many iterations of this episode exist in the sci fi universe? Foster and a lone alien are stranded in a life-threatening situation, and must work together to survive. This recycled idea always seems to yield a stellar product. And just so here, with a non-Hollywood ending wherein Foster is unable to keep his moonbase rescuers from killing the alien.
-Sub-Smash
All the best elements of the show, in one episode. A submerged UFO damages the sub Skydiver, stranding the crew on a ledge. Oxygen is running out, and they can only get out one at a time at ninety-minute intervals. It's finally down to Straker and Nina, facing death together. She starts to reveal her feelings for him. Later, in the hospital, she starts to apologize, and he responds with the greatest line of the series: "That's what life's all about, I guess...the things we never say."
-Mindbender
A surreal experience, as a UFO fragment induces paranoid hallucinations in all who come in contact with it. A moonbase lieutenant sees all his mates as menacing Mexican bandidos, and kills several. An earth captain thinks everyone around him is an alien. Straker imagines that his entire life is just a movie. The lush silliness of the bandidos plus the normally buttoned-down General (Grant Taylor) Henderson's sheep calls push this one over the top.
NOTEWORTHY
-A Question of Priorities **
Straker's son is injured in a car accident, and only experimental drugs from the U.S. can save him. He orders a S.H.A.D.O. jet to England with the drugs, but the jet must be diverted to combat an alien incursion. The son dies. What, no alternate U.S. happy ending?
-Ordeal **
It starts off with a bang, as Foster hits a wild earthside party. The images of futuristic ultra-hip 1980 are tooooo rich. And they got permission to play "Get Back" as the party music! How the heck? In 1970?? The episode spins into wretchedness.
-The Square Triangle ***
An adulterous couple kill an alien who falls into a murderous trap they'd set for the husband. S.H.A.D.O. wipes out twelve hours of their memory before uncovering their true intent, and must then address their moral obligation to the husband.
-Confetti Check A-OK ***
There's an unintentionally hysterical moment. A new father is passing out cigars. Three men gather around a woman, and light her cigar. She goes into a coughing fit, and they go into a laughing fit. You'd never see such a jovial attitude (or any attitude) about smoking on TV today, of course. But beyond that, it made me appreciate one facet of STAR TREK i'd never thought of before - the fact that no one smokes. Can you name another television product of the sixties that was smoke-free? In UFO, people smoke on virtually every episode. (they even designed wacky lighters that seem to double as TV remotes). Obviously, non-smoking was a conscious choice by Roddenberry. Mind you, i'm not one of those who approve of smoking being "edited out" of old shows. But imagine Kirk smoking. I suppose we'd still love TREK, but i'm eternally grateful we never had to find out.

ex-officiant

The historical scholar who's traveled back in time to study me (for such i'm now convinced the cricket must be), has noticed that there is one less vocation in my profile.
Say hello to wrob, ex-wedding officiant.
I can no longer muster any kind of indulgence for the institution of marriage. I'll not participate in one ever again. Not even as guest.
Understand, my officiant career was a bit of a lark...including the "staged" wedding in which the congregation didn't know i wasn't legit, i've officiated exactly twice. In the past year or two, no prospective couple has been a match for my spirit. I've known most of my life that marriage was an outdated institution of barbaric origin, but i became an officiant in the spirit of fun, thinking that if people wanted to do it, nothing was going to stop them, so they might as well have my irreligious, irreverant energy. I also like embracing ludicrousness, and to tell someone that i was a wedding officiant, had a little touch of zaniness in it.
The change in my spirit comes from the realization that my sentiments against marriage, instead of being some idealistic fancy, are more likely a sensible attitude that science is finally catching up with. I don't believe in capitalism or slavery...and the roots of marriage are in the male ownership of women. I don't believe in monogamy...and what is marriage but the sanctioning of the most unrelenting, spirit-maiming monogamy conceiveable?
For a primer on the scientific basis for the unnaturalness of monogamy, look to this book:
http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2010/11/myth-of-monogamy.html
And this better book:
http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2012/02/sex-at-dawn.html
Okay, i suppose i might be convinced to come out of retirement for a couple embarking on an open marriage.
But only if the service is naked, and the reception downright orgiastic.
I love you all.

buzzzz

Think of the last thought you had
It could only have been thunk
in a broken world

Think of the last words you spoke
They could only have been spake
in a broken world

Think of your last screw
Such humping could only hap
in a broken world

Think of your dreams
They could only be drumt
in a broken world

Think about you
You could only bees
from a broken world