To live one day at a time like everything is just swell; 
To send me a Rolex so I can really enjoy one moment at a time; 
 To learn to avoid and run from hardships as the pathway to peace;  
And not taking, as He did, this sinful world
 as it is, but imagining it as I would have it; 
Trusting that He will make all things right instead of me trying to do it. 

That I may be unbelievably and screamingly happy in this life 
and even more super duper happy with Him in the next.

Amen.

Like you , LK…I too am done!  Toasted. Fatigued, infuriated, and feeling helpless.  A voice in a void that, unless I say something completely idiotic, hateful  and ruthless enough to go viral on You Tube, rises like a silent cloud to nothingness.  A voice that on Tuesday had so much more meaning as it screamed GOAL!!!! while my wife and I sat in hockey bliss, munching $9.00 fries and $10.00 beers.  A voice that delivers joy and pure devotion as it whispers “I love you,” to my sleeping wife.  Otherwise, a voice that is basically unnecessary.

We – more-so  you – rant weekly about all the horrors, cruelties, political gaffs and corruption, illegal and un-winnable wars, genocide, and on and on and on.  And yes, it’s a good thing to enlighten, to make people aware.  But even too much awareness bloats the psyche.  Like a therapy session that lasts longer than an hour because the brain shuts down from too much information, enlightenment and awareness become so much white noise, or worse, crying wolf.

And so, at least for now, I am washing myself clean of any and all responsibility of everything and anything that goes on outside my immediate circle of loved ones.  I imagine this will last for two or three days, but right now, it feels really, really good!

                          

I asked myself what I would do if this was it. If I knew for sure that say by next Wednesday everything was just gone.  My immediate bonehead ideas were 1.  Buy the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport…the fastest car in the world – and drive it as fast as it can go , which is 253 mph.  2. Buy the L115A Long Range Rifle – the best sniper rifle in the world, and shoot a bunch of Taliban guys just as they were getting ready to rape someone.  3.  Move next door to Angelina Jolie and take her for a ride in my new Bugatti.  And 4.  Drive Angie and me to NYC to find Donald Trump and punch him in the face.

Now of course, all of that is just simple self-entertaining nonsense, and I fully realize that I would do none of those things because none of those things have any true meaning.  But then comes the puzzle – why bother with meaning if this is all over – including my inherent awareness of myself?  And then that irritating God thing comes up and I have to start all over.  Was it the fear or love of God that kept me from just letting go of all restraints and tearing through this life like a mad dog?  Or was there some gene plugged in during mom and pop’s coitus?  The truth – at least my truth when giving this some heavy thought, is that one dies like one lived.  I believe that having gone so many years traveling what I assumed to be the correct path, the right thing to do, the way to be, and so on, has been so deeply deposited into my psyche that even now, knowing that Wednesday next is the end of everything, I would behave in exactly the same manner I did all those hundreds upon hundreds of past regular Wednesdays.

And so, if the Mayans are in fact correct, there will be people stealing, raping, killing, and doing all kinds of bad stuff. But I believe that those people have been struggling with keeping themselves under control all along.  The majority of us will just sit, realizing there is nothing else we can nor need to do.

As for me, my Bugatti -Jolie imaginings washed away for the comical absurdities they were, I would gather my family and try to keep them from the panic and fear that accompanies any unknown.   I would hold them close, and laugh and cry and run through memories and even discuss what is next for us since we all, my family that is, have a belief in an afterlife.  And whether that afterlife is man made fodder created to keep everyone from cracking up at the thought of death, or a mystical, spiritual truth doesn’t matter.  Hope is what has helped me and my loved ones through this life.  To drop it now would be as illogical as shooting up the Taliban.

Still, there is a tiny part of that sniper thing that gives me a smile.  Gonna have to talk that over with God next Wednesday.

                          

Here’s the link.

                          

LK usually likes starting with big picture news, following which he hones in on the effect it has on our daily lives. Today however, the local news says it all, and acts as a gigantic, shameful mirror. Dr. John takes apart the Bachmann clinic.

Here’s the link.

                          

LK, on-air, composes a letter to President Obama, explaining to him, in less than delicate terms, why he will not vote for him again, even after LK played a small role in the campaign by writing policy for Obama in ‘08. Dr. John eases the pain of the nightly news by reminding us of a time when the pharmacist, and not a database, could see your face and match it to your prescribed medication.

Here’s the link.

                          

His musings that take place on the show are worth transcribing, and work, I think, as stand alone posts.  Here’s what he had to say on Friday, 2-25-11:

                          

I finally accepted as fact that someone or some entity had been spiking my Coke Zero with LSD, or a similar hallucinogen.  There was no other way to explain the surreal headlines: the health care reform that existed in name only, the financial regulation bill that changed nothing.  It was Alice In Wonderful, 1984, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test all rolled into one.  Surely the nation’s Swami of sincerity, the President himself, the man I voted and wrote for when he was a candidate, could not have let these masterworks of doublespeak come to pass.

And so, accepting my altered state, I knew that the only thing to do was to stay away from the keyboard and the Coke Zero until I “came down”, as I understand it’s referred to.  Whatever else I may have done in my imperfect life, I have never dropped acid, so it was an unfamiliar state to me.

But the hallucinations persisted.

I thought I saw Elliot Spitzer, the disgraced ex-governor of New York, on CNN, commenting on a debate between Harry Reid and Sharon Angle, in a race that, at the time, was neck and neck.  The damned drugs must still be running through my system, I reasoned, while realizing that reasoning was not going to be a strong point while the damned drugs were still running through my system.  There was no way, from what I had seen and heard of her, that Angle could have been nominated, let alone been in contention for one of the 100 seats in our nation’s most august legislative body.

I saw Linda McMahon, who I could have sworn I’d seen at the receiving end of a piledriver while surreptitiously watching professional wrestling, running for Senate as well.

I saw an ad in the New York Times that shamelessly announced that Pee Wee Herman was coming to Broadway.  Or on Broadway.  In the state I was in, I couldn’t be sure.

I saw Juan Williams, admittedly a man who never saw a media outlet he didn’t plug himself into, get fired from that dyed in the wool defender of free speech, NPR, for saying something that every westerner who’s ever flown has thought.

I saw Clarence Thomas’ wife, a woman ironically named Virginia, rekindle a fire that had long been put out, a fire that could do nothing but hurt her husband and remind the nation that his sitting on the Supreme Court was an aberration that never should have occurred.

And so I waited, and waited, and waited some more.  I checked the pharmacological literature, and it became clear that enough time had passed for the drugs to exit my system.

Then, just the other day, I read that the United States had coerced Israel into taking actions that would result in the resumption of Middle East peace talks by giving them 20 war planes

And I connected my recent non-stop cognitive dissonance to the current chatter about something called “the new normal”.

Finally, an explanation.

Now the question is, how does one detox from this “new normal”?

                          

LK examines a key element in both the “war on terror” and illegal immigration, in a PodKast that’s bound to enlighten and inflame.

Listen (Or Right Click and “Save As” to Download)

                          

editor’s note: as LK readies himself for a wider audience in both podkast and broadcast settings, we thought that sharing his prep notes would be a good way to get preliminary feedback (like a comedian trying out new material in a small club) while letting you in on concentrated versions of themes he’s been ruminating on.  Enjoy.  Or perhaps that’s not the right word….

1.  We can’t nation build halfway around the world if the ties that bind at home are fraying, any more than I can contribute to charity if I can’t pay the rent.  We need to regroup.  Economically, militarily, and spiritually, we need to regroup.  For the time being, we need to endure sorrowful images, like the one on the front page of last Friday’s NY Times where a Pakistani woman and child are drinking from a primitive faucet, while we gather the strength to once again ride to the rescue without leaving our own citizens as vulnerable as they now find themselves.  We’ve got to let the world know that they need  to put a temporary hold on giving us their tired and poor, because we ourselves are plenty fatigued, and if not poor, struggling in ways we’ve never known in our lifetimes.

2.  The shell game being played with troops coming home from Iraq, staying behind in Iraq, and being deployed to Afghanistan is so transparent that it’s astounding anyone’s falling for it.  The speech from the Oval Office rang hollow and shallow.  When an authority figure’s dictum makes it so, or pacifies us to the degree that we act as if it’s so, we’re wearing vintage Orwellian blinders while deluding ourselves into believing that our peripheral vision’s intact.  And certainly we’re going to have no trouble at all taming a country when girls are gassed for having the audacity to desire an education and the nation’s central bank is so inept that even its attempt to hide massive corruption fail miserably.

3.  The proposed Mosque/community center within shouting (spitting?) distance of Ground Zero should not be built.  Constitutional rights and visceral emotions both take a backseat to an ounce of prevention, because there may be no cure.  God (or Allah) forbid that violence befalls the building or it’s members, and WWIII could follow post haste.  If an Austrian Duke being assassinated could lead to millions of deaths as the dominoes fell and violently rearranged themselves into WWI, the tinderbox planet we live on now could be just as easily ignited.

4.  When a 2000+ page financial regulation bill is not only toothless but has dentures that have fallen out, and no one’s read it anyway, is there any doubt that the ultra-bright Machiavellian financiers who gave us the housing bubble can’t find a couple hundred loopholes to render it impotent?  Put another way, if a few rules of chess were altered, is there any doubt that Garry Kasparov or the ghost of Bobby Fischer couldn’t spend a few days thinking the changes through and then continue to beat the pants off the rest of us?

5.  The quality of the health care my family and I receive for the insurance premium I pay is terrific.  Small detail: that premium has increased 50% in the last 2 years.  We’re in NYC.  Between the premium and the deductible I’m out 20K before I see any reimbursement.  For me, that ain’t chump change.  So what I’ve really got is disaster insurance, and I’m paying out of pocket for terrific health care.  The most recent premium hike, which nearly shocked me into needing disaster insurance, came after passage of another 2000+  page bill that nobody’s read; a bill, by the way,  that Nancy Pelosi (who years ago I predicted would lubricate the fall of Obama)  gleefully announced could not be read until AFTER it was passed.  The will of the people wasn’t done, the representatives the people elected would have been fired were they employed by the private sector, as they voted on paradigm changing legislation they weren’t sufficiently familiar with, and no one, but no one knows what’s around the bend health care wise.  That we’re in the dark is shameful, and reflects poorly on us and those who, by running for office, asked for our trust.  New Who song: We WILL Get Fooled Again.

6.  Roger Clemens and the Emmys warrant less space than this sentence took up.

                          

LK lets loose on the clowns and nonsense passing as leaders and solutions. The tragic news of the aid team massacre in Afghanistan (which came out after this Kast was posted) just fuels his belief that we’re dealing with a cultural and ethical gulf so wide it defies crossing.  While it may sound like LK’s moving to the right, one never really knows where the Kannonballs will land.  Buckle up and strap on your helmet if you know what’s good for you.

Listen (Or Right Click and “Save As” to Download)