CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL PROSPECTUS

Hang On To What?

I noticed suddenly I’d lost all sense of planning and was wandering aimlessly.  I was  thinking about Robin Williams’ suicide and repeating my mantra, 

“Death of a clown.  Is this some kind of joke?”

And stopped beside a huge tract of vacant land where years ago I’d done a performance about the end of a relationship with an incest survivor and the end of my year as (self appointed) “Urban Shaman”.  I skated around burning head high cardboard paintings of buildings done, week after week, with the help of my absurd acolytes on the lawn of the main library.  Then I lay semi naked in the mud holding up a jar of ashes which a child took and gave to a motorcycle rider who came roaring up out from behind some distant trees and bushes.  And took the jar up the entrance ramp and disappeared in the sunset on I-10.  The videotape was accidentally taped over by someone else, the pictures are gone, lost by disorganization, ruined by rain, but even if that hadn’t happened, and much as it still haunts me, I can’t take you back there, someone closed and locked the gates when I left. 

Meanwhile back in the Pleistocene present, it was sunset again and clouds had come down to form a ring around the distant mountains.  It was beautiful and I was depressed. Robin had taken on a lot of grief and stupidity and traded it in on funny.  And now it was payback time.  Yeah, I’d made a little progress on my non profit gardening and art center but it just seemed to point up all that was needed to make it function and all the years of struggle threatening to come to the same meaningless end I’d seen with several other local efforts trying to reach out to global consciousness. And I wasn’t getting any younger. 

Why couldn’t someone help me?  I worked hard with my hands all my life looking forward to the day something meaningful could come of it.  Maybe the mail hadn’t been delivered.  Maybe the presentation was fatally flawed.  Maybe the heart of man was indescribably evil. Whatever.  I had staked my claim to a worldview on the wisdom of clowns, and the Clown In Chief had flipped out on me.  THAT was totally depressing. And then someone called needing their water heater lit.  

Why didn’t they understand there are bigger problems we need to address together? And huge questions to take out and look at, questions like what is Superman’s underwear made of, and how do you get the skid marks out? Why weren’t they calling up to say, we saw your website and we understand, can we give you some money?  What was I thinking? Why was I trying to think?

I went to their apartment and found the water heater dribbling out the inner liner.  And sat there a long time watching the stream of water make a light show of projections from my flashlight and remembered Robin saying, 

“Well like the guy at the suicide hotline said, ‘Life isn’t for everybody.’”

I don’t know what he was thinking, but I can’t help thinking about it.  I know you gotta put up with a lotta nothingness, you gotta just stand there like a good soldier in a bad war with toy gun and ragged flag without a country singing nonsense bravely into the fading light. I know drugs are just crutches for broken people, and sometimes jokes are just drugs. And what goes up must come down.  And when you’re down here on common ground with the rest of us, and the rest of you, the poverty of this world breaks your heart sometimes.  But plenty of broken people find some way to just keep on going.  And if you can help one of them get on down that road, that’s the bright side.