Measuring Stick
11/17/2007 04:30 p.m.
I admit, song lyrics usually aren’t much good unless someone is chewin’ them, but I like this particular lyric, and inside my noggin, someone is chewin’ it, so what the hell?

I could be jealous and grasping with greed
I could pretend that I want something I don't need
These are the things that go through my head
But then, I could be an angel disguised as a man
I could be the sun that shines in the midnight land

- Utopia

As I mentioned in one of my poems, as a teenage boy, I measured my erect pecker with a ruler. This was a natural and normal thing to do. Sadly, the result was quite average. Is average ever good enough?

Acorns are all over the parking lot at work. I find it most satisfying to smash them beneath my black tasseled industrial strength work loafer. In fact, I often alter my stride in order to crunch one to an orangey powder (I look like a real goofball, stumbling and weaving about.). I suspect this to be some sort of symbolic release of a suppressed and violent tendency deep in my compartmentalized psyche. I would probably get an even bigger kick out of crunching people, what with the snap crackle pop of brittle bones. And imagine the fun and challenge of a moving target!

Maybe all I really want is to be a midnight strapping strutting lightning bolt Nazi, whenever I don’t get the girl or the job or the raise or the “yes.”

One of the lousy things about being human is that at some point one is bound to question the value of the way one spends his endless numbered days, or one’s value relative to the vastness of the cosmos. In all likelihood, that value isn’t much. Worrying over such stuff is a rotten burden.

Like the great philosophers, though in a less sophisticated way, I too wonder about the nature of good, and just how the heck a person is supposed to spend his time that he might be good. Of course, I want to be good because good people are more advanced on the evolutionary scale, and there is bound to be a reward. Yes, my aim is low. But who the heck holds the measuring stick? At what point is good good enough? Must I work evenings at the soup kitchen in addition to my day job? What percentage of my income must I donate to charity? Is it sin to hoard while others starve? Can I give one larger hunk to one charity, or do I have to dole it out in little bits to dozens of outstretched hands so I seem really busy doing it? Is giving my dollars the same sacrifice as giving my time?

Am I a good citizen? Am I a good citizen if I don’t support the troops? At work, they collected and mailed crackers and lip balm, but I failed to donate so much as a crumb. They supported, I did not.

Is it un-American to sponsor an impoverished child living in a foreign land through one of those TV commercial charities? Are foreigners less worthy and what is it with all these made up boundaries, any way?

Is average good enough and who holds the measuring stick? (Is it me?)

What if this is the best I can do or what if I’m just too darn lazy to do better?

I believe I would prefer to be a starling on a wire, assuming your starling has no such worries. But I suppose he has the tom cat.

A starling on a wire. This is pretty much what I become when parked out back of the Starbucks where I overlook a manmade drainage ditch, trees, and a distant strip mall rising above the tree line. I sip obscenely priced coffee while shoving in a cream cheese and pumpkin muffin and listening to The Smiths’ “Louder than Bombs.” What crackpot wouldn’t love a lyric like:

Spending warm summer days indoors,
writing frightening verse,
to a buck toothed girl in Luxemburg

I know it doesn’t hold up on the printed page. Lyrics need some chewin’. Additionally, I am concerned about this so-called “cream cheese” that requires no refrigeration.

Is a magical telepathy required to get in touch with the invisible overlords?

And if I give it all away, what happens next? Crucifixion?

Is it conviction that I lack or cwardice?

These are the things that go through my head.

I am currently Cool
I am listening to Tennesee Ernie Ford