Just A Wednesday

 

Mithra

But it has only slipped below the radar of history. As a popular mystery cult, especially strong in the Roman Military it resurfaces, albeit in variant forms, all over Europe as the pagan religion of choice. Late Roman emperors even underwent Mithraic baptismal rites supervised by members of the Parthian priesthood. Their Mithreaeums – dark subterranean sanctuaries, where the initiatic mysteries were gorily celebrated with the sacrifice of living bulls – are found as far apart as Armenia, Scotland, and the borders of the Sahara Desert, and abound in Rome. The dank limestone wall-carvings depict a haunting story: that of the celebrated sacrifice of the bull by Mithra himself. Intermediary between man and the Divine, a spiritual being of threefold nature, light bearer of the world, born of a virgin mother Anahita on the 25^th of December, it is Mithra himself who drives into the neck of whom he has subdued. By the redemptive power of blood, his twelve companions are spiritually reborn, and share in a final feast of sacred bread and wine before their masters ascent to heaven.

It is a long time before this same thread becomes visible again in ….

 

The Last Millenium

We have lived many lives. In the bluehorse sweat lodges of the native plains peoples we had glimpses to those old lives: when we were sacrificed as a child at the temple of Kali in the Bihar flatlands, when we lost a fatal game of ball in a mayan temple, the years we spent traversing to oceans as a whale — we have been karmically blessed to live as a mammal for all these generations. We seemed to have missed nearly a millenium. Maybe they were spent as a cockroach as karmic payback for when as an early homid we estinguished the ashes of a rival tribe out of spite and hatred for Oognor — the prissy Alpha of that other tribe. Maybe they were spent as a fern or a maple tree that had been uprooted by a pilgram. These years are hard to remember. But in the late 70’s we were reborn on a island in greece to a nudist colony. And life as such has grown from there.

Recently we stood at the graves of Voltaire, and Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, and saluted these men of freedom. Never have we thought too much about this last millenium chalking it up mostly to the unhindered expansion of capital markets and environmental degradation. But in front of these graves we came to know about these times, about the french revolt and the guillotine, and we felt good about humans for a while. And this other evening, in a meadow where there used to desert, looking at a lake and surrounded by thousands foot tall buildings, we watched something about the 60’s, the youth of the time banded together, and about music.

the best time is always now, but those times looked good too.

 

The Hills Are Our Only Home

Bespoke Cashmere only knows a few things. But the most important is that these hills exist. And in the rolling hills we know about the shepherds with their goats and the raptors with their talons. We know about the tigers who are slinking around the bushes and the proud elephants of the valleys, we know about their scarred faces and essential pride. We know about the baba with his orange robes and his few possessions — the photograph of the woman, the photograph of the glaciers mouth, the chillum. Knowing these hills is sometimes the only thing that makes sense, and then we wait to return.

 

 

Saturdays

The morning sky is 9/11 blue and the Burj Al-Arab reflects in the stillness of the Persian Gulf. By the time the call to prayer is over and the sun is fully up, is still not quite hot. And this is funny to be amazed by the idea of being outside when it is not hot. But here we are, shivering against the breeze coming in and wrapping up in a towel. The day goes on – in the office a Philippine lady is leaving, her name was Grace, and if we knew that before now, we could not be sure, but she was always smiles and everyone seemed to love her. The Iranians came in full force. Children, soul mates, women in the niqba, French boys in bad jeans – they were all there with the conference room spilling over in the excess of the KFC family meal plans we gorged the spicy chicken breast and piles of chips and began to understand the complexities of the schism in the Shi’ites between the twelvers and the sixers (it is about the true decendancy of the prophet, peace be upon him). Outside the window there is the kick off of the first day of the airline industry conference. The patrol from France is putting on a good show as we eat our biscuits, a tight formation of eight planes jet across the sky leaving trails of the French flag. The French boy burns with pride, and so do we, why not. The F-16 is superior, but these escapades are commendable. And with greased hands we pose for picture and Grace, the Philippine is gone. Back to her backwater village ten hours from Manila. She is going to have a child and hopefully never come back, she is going to eat fish and coconut gravy and take boats along the sea; anything else she does we do not know. Lunch is over and in our office waits a woman from Mauritius. She has ideas that may or may not be true about Ghanaian gold and let them ride; there is no harm in her believing them. It is clear that she is a freak. And the meeting ends with her invitation to come see a hotel and coffee roasting business outside of Addis in Ethiopia. It is harder to end and she sees herself as a salesman, but finally it is over. And the French fighter jets have given room for the Airbus A380. This beast floats so gently against those deep blues of this desert sky, banking and rolling 90 degrees, climbing almost complete vertical, and we choose to be reminded of Hakeem (Ewing never really had that grace) as a giant dancing in the sky. And now we call the French boy and tell him that this is something to be really proud of, and when he says the Germans helped on the engine we tell him to forget this plane – VIVE LE FRANCE. The Airbus loops some more and even the Iranians are impressed. Into the sunset we speed under the encore of the French jets. Over a negroni we watch the polo match where a man is thrown from his horse and the horse collapse on him and the Porsche truck rush on the pitch and him immobilized in a stretcher put into the back. The night is hazy driving back with the tallest building in the world as the only landmark in getting home.

 

Yellow Cab, Gypsy Cab, Dollar Cab

Big Lights Will Expire You –

 

KALI MA

 

I Have Severed The Jugular Vein Of Sacred Bulls Against A Black Rock

During one lunar year, I have been declared invisible: I shrieked and was not heard, I stole my bread and was not decapitated. I have known what the Greeks did not: uncertainty. In a bronze chamber, faced with the silent handkerchief of a strangler, hope has been faithful to me; in the river of delights, panic has not failed me. Heraclitus of Pontica admiringly relates that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrho, and before that Euphorbus, and before that some other mortal. In order to recall analogous vicissitudes I do not need to have recourse to death, nor even to imposture.

I owe this almost atrocious variety to an institution which other republics know nothing about, or which operates among them imperfectly and in secret: the lottery.

 

Castles Made Of Sand

 

What They Did To The Game

We have sworn off baseball. Too much money, too many performance enhancement drugging, tickets are too expensive, and the players are all bitchy bitches.

We used to love baseball — spent every fall of the nineties in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, or in the upper deck of Shea Stadium — some of the chants were “show us your tits” and some of the other chants had to do with the teams on the field. WE were at that game seven, when Endy Chavez made the catch, there had been a lot invested into those mets team, and when it was the bottom of the ninth, two outs and two men on, and our slugger Carlos Beltran was at bat, of course he had to get a hit, maybe it even should have been a homerun, but a double would have been good enough to bring in the runners and walk off the field heading to the world series. But that poor bastard went down looking. He didn’t even swing.  

There was a perfect game pitched the other day, the 18th perfect game in 136 years of baseball, which is too say these things do not happen often. This is a good catch by a guy who bat .210 over a decade long career. His glove is has been moved to the hall of fame.

 

watch the video — http://mlb.mlb.com/media/video.jsp?mid=200907235699255