[MD] F*CK YOU, God!!!

[John Carl]

"The Prince of this world cometh, and he hath nothing on me"


                                      Jesus



Bill and I moved apart through the years.  He married my wife's best friend
and ex-roommate and so you'd think there'd be nothing but harmony and joy
ever after, but alas, that was not to be.  My wife's best friend and
ex-roommate can not stand me in the smallest doses, and so it has put a
strain upon our relationship.  I haven't heard from Bill in years.


One of the times I did see him was at this event called "Wordslingers".  And
it is something of a literary event here in our pretentious burg of Nevada
City.  I should say a few things about Nevada City...


It's quaint.  Are you acquainted with quaint?  Its where a buncha victorian
gingerbread has been slapped over "Ye Olde Ice Cream Shoppe"  along with
stores selling T-shirts proclaiming, "My folks went to Nevada City CA and
all I got was this lousy t-shirt" and there is a very seriousness in the
local paper and chamber of commerce about "tourism".


That sort of quaint.


But beyond the quaint there is the  pretention, which has a different source
than "ye olde mining town picturesqueness".


The main source of annoyingly pretentious liberal intellectualism is that
bastion of all things right and righteous, San Francisco, but 2 1/2 hours
away.  From whence a whole stream of consciousness flowed to these fair
hills back in the day - mid to late 70's.     Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg and Neal Cassady always talked about buying some land in the
country where they could get back to the land, grow herb and groove on being
in-tune,  peasant bodhisattvas.  Jack got stuck with fame on the road, Neal
lost his path on a railroad track,    Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg ended
up buying a hundred acres near here and Gary settled in the hills.  Lots of
like-minded people followed and began the melding process of redneck sons
marrying hippie daughters.    And the successful and town-oriented
gravitated naturally to Nevada City and it has quite an artsy following with
lots of quality music, theater and events.  I didn't recognize anybody at
the wordslinger's festival, but I did have Bill to talk to in a big room
with around 40-50  hushed and serious looking professional new age types.


The sad news was, Kesey couldn't make it.  He'd just in the week prior
suffered a debilitating stroke.  It was just gonna have to be Ed McClanahan,
whom I'd never heard of before.  It turned out ole Ed was probably a more
entertaining speaker and reader than Kesey.  I bought this book he was
selling there, Famous People I have Known and it has become one of my
favorites.  Ed's from Kentucky.  Good friend and neighbor there of Wendell
Berry.  Who's probably dead by now, but I digress, as usual.


Ed met Kesey at Stanford, where he was on some kind of fellowship and he
fell in with this amazingly crazy crowd on Perry Lane... his writing of that
time is worth the whole book for there was a literary and intellectual
community around that time that was about to change the world, but he also
reveals the inner secret workings of the mind of Little Enis, the worlds
best upside down, left hand guitar player who is a better singer than Elvis
and has a bigger dick.   Unfortunately he's only 5 foot 2.  But his
pompadour adds a good six inches.


The evening consisted of Ed reading a story from his book about the time
Kesey was down visiting an institution we shall term (in the story) the
"Harvard of the West" from his farm in Oregon and was invited along to hear
a French intellectual in the company of the Black Panthers berate the white
liberal establishment for its great evil, at a faculty tea at the home of a
prominent academic.  Great opportunity Ken thinks, to go and flaunt some
American STYLE and wear a psychedelic shirt and enlighten the whole affair
with a story of the time his brother's basketball team shamed the referee
into calling a straight game where a bunch of black guys were getting the
shaft.   It was a great story and I kept nudging Bill and looking around the
room, because to my eyes, the exact people skewered on the point of
McClanahan's insightful wit, were the same serious-minded bozos in the room
around us.  I thought it was delightful.


Before the things started, we'd had an opportunity to write down questions
on slips of paper and Ken Kesey was going to answer our questions as read to
him over the phone by his old friend Ed.  And speak to us via the long
distance call over the PA.  When that time came, it turned out the only two
questions from this hall of people were from Bill and me.


The questions were read mine was read first, and it was probably the most
embarrassed I'd ever been.  It was anonymous but Bill and I stuck out so
much, that everybody knew where the only two questions in the room had come
from.  I felt that way, anyway.


For another thing, the question period came after Kesey gave his little
talk.  A sort of set speech that he gives to aspiring writers, a sort of
test and definition of greatness.   I would not have asked the question I
asked if I knew the nature of the talk it was following.   Ahead of time,
with my mind on other things, my mind came up with a question reflecting
those other things.  After he gave his speech, which I learned from reading
in Ed's book he always finished up with,  I would have asked a completely
different question - what the hell did THAT mean???    Fortunately I bought
the book and got my real question answered.  Unfortunately, when my initial
question was asked over the phone to Ken Kesey, taking out time from
recuperation to listen to Ed's stumbling over my writing in the long
rambling and ridiculous question, it was one of the biggest thuds I've ever
experienced in public.  There was a Lo-o-o-n-g silence.  From Ed.  From Ken.
 From everybody in the hall, while I squirmed and squirmed.



 I mean it's lame, but there's this fun celebrity thing you wanna spring on
people that's an egotistical thrill.  It's a vicarious thrill, but
nevertheless.  And there was this social factor of being so overlooked by
everybody  (when we were both just newlyweds, Bill and his first wife Kathy
and Lu and I shared a house together in Nevada City), that he and I  had
looked forward to going "tah dah" and experiencing Kesey's delight at
meeting Neal's grandson out of the blue like that.


So foolishly, I tried and capture some of that in this  complicated question
I got from interviewing a friend of Neal's in Mexico that time Bill and I
went down there to see where his grandpa died.  It was this friend's
assertion that Kesey's nickname "Chief" came from Neal, and it wasn't to do
with Kesey being the boss, it had to do with Kesey being analogous to the
narrator in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.  The narrator was the Indian
watching Murphy trying to be free.  Neal, according to this guy we met
identified strongly with Murphy and that's why he sought Kesey out in the
first place.  At that time, Neal was locally famous for being Moriarity in
On The Road and Kesey hadn't had a movie made of his book yet... so he was
the lesser known.


Like I said, it was a big dud. It didn't translate at all into any kind of
coherent question that can be read over the phone to a guy who'd just had a
stroke.  Here I thought I had some special inside information into the
insight of a character and all Kesey said in response, after about five
seconds of awkward silence,  was "no".


Bill's question came as a relief.  Do you have anymore stories about Neal?
 Tell us a story.    Those always save the day.   I don't quite remember the
story Kesey told, but I sure remember his advice to writers.



Kesey's explanation of how to be a great writer went something like this...


In order to be a great writer, first you have to be a good writer.  A good
enough writer to attract some attention and get a little success.  But to be
a great writer, you have to pass a certain test.  You don't know where the
test will take place or when the test will come, but if you are to be great
you must meet this test someday.


The test will come when out of the blue the voice of God will come to you
promising fame, success and riches.  If you hear the voice of God clearly,
then you must raise your middle fingers, of both hands, pump your fists with
middle fingers extended and yell at the sky as loud as you can,


"FUCK YOU, God... FUCK YOU!"


Only then can you have any hope of being a great writer.


There was something so wrong about that speech.  And yet something sort of
right at the same time.  The shock value carried a subtler message.  Ed
explained it in the book as troubling him also as being a mite bit
blasphemous even for an old agnostic hippy to be too comfortable with, but
then one day he realized, hey, that's not God.  That's the devil.  And the
faithful are enjoined to say "fuck you" to the devil.


When I heard it, I thought of Pirsig.  I thought of the God of celebrity and
fame being a different God on a different level than the God of truth and
intellect.  The story made sense to me on a certain level because I
understood the underlying morale patterns.  It took me a while and some
thought to rationalize it, but the immediate moral feeling was real.    But
regardless of my correct understanding or Kesey's correct understanding,
good ole Ed illustrated with a story of his own from his book, which also
has a Lila tie-in so I'll let Ed's be the last word on the subject.  Or
rather, Ed quoting Wendell Berry, an old acquaintence from the Deep Ecology
days.


"I do have one local Famous People story, though, about my neighbor and
longtime dear friend Wendell Berry, celebrated poet, novelist, essayist,
farmer, and ecology curmudgeon.  When Wendell's The Unsettling of
Americawas published a few years ago, his editor called oneday, very
excited, with
the news that Robert Redford loved the book and was giving copies to all his
friends for Christmas.   Whereupon Wendell, as he hung up the phone, turned
to his wife, Tanya, and said, "Queenie, who in the hell is Rober Redmon?"