| the blog of human failure
I’ve always had a weird tick in my head that likes to play mind experiments about abortion. I can only assume this comes from the time I got stabbed in the foot three or four times with a coat hanger in-vitro and was left for the rest of my life wondering, “what if?”
Let’s put it this way, in America women can have as many abortions as they like. I actually think that’s great, but it’s easy to imagine how it could spiral out of control. For instance let’s say that you get pregnant when you’re 17 years old. You’re a senior in high school with half a semester left to go. Your boyfriend is a sweetheart and you love the guy but you’ll be going to different schools in the fall and have no serious intentions to stay together past summer. “Mom, I don’t know. What should I do?” Abortion! Abortion abortion abortion. That’s the no-brainer of the century.
Ok, now, let’s say a different person, this time a woman in her late twenties. She’s married and has the beginnings of a successful career going. She’s putting in 80 hour weeks while she’s still young enough to do it and she’s planning on having a kid in four years when her work schedule will be at a more pragmatic plateau. After hundreds of condoms used successfully with her husband, one doesn’t come through for them and she gets pregnant. She’s not ready; she wants to get rid of the pregnancy. Again, this sounds wise enough to me.
Ok, now, let’s imagine yet another person. This is a woman also in hear late twenties. She’s married but unemployed; her husband supports the two of them. She gets pregnant by accident in a similar condom malfunction. Now even though she’s got no good reason, she’d just prefer not to have a kid right now. She thinks she’ll probably want one later, but doesn’t want one right now. Now she gets an abortion. And again I think that’s fine. I think having kids is like making pancakes on the griddle, where you have to burn and throw the first one away just to get the heat distribution right.
Now let’s say a woman is in her twenties and has four abortions in a row and then finally finds the right guy and settles down and gets pregnant a fifth time and decides to keep it. That seems Ok.
Ok, this time, a woman gets pregnant and actually has the kid with her husband. She has decided that she only wants one kid. She accidentally gets pregnant again afterwards, however, and decides to get an abortion. That seems fine to me.
Now let’s say the same scenario again, where the woman has the first kid but then aborts the second, but then a few years later gets pregnant again. Now she’s had a little more life experience and decides to keep this kid. Got that? Has the first, aborts the second, has the third. Does anyone see what I’m getting at here?
Let’s say a woman has the first kid, aborts the second, has the third, aborts the fourth and fifth, has six through nine, aborts ten and eleven, and then has twelve. Talk about the right to choose! It’s just fun thinking about. I can just imagine the different rationales. Some would always abort the first two and then swing for the third like some kind of gynecological Casey at the Bat. I can imagine aborting every other kid just for some vague notion like, “because it feels lucky.” I would love to be a mother in that scenario, and then when my kids are all really getting on my nerves I could blow up at them, “I wish I had aborted you evil even pieces of shit and conceived the odds. I wish I had done the exact opposite of what I did! Somewhere in heaven are my sweet, quiet, odd-numbered children who I should have had the good sense to swap you little monsters for in the first place. Who wants more cereal?” It gets a little morally hazy after a while is what I’m saying. I guess.
Here’s something I never understood. How come when you go to prison you’re guaranteed to get raped? This seems to be the set state of affairs for anyone entering our criminal rehabilitation system in America.
Let’s say you’re a junkie in California and you get your third strike for crack possession with intent to distribute, or you get caught in Atlanta loading flat-screens into your Tacoma off the back of a flatbed truck behind Best Buy. Now bad enough that you’re just trying to feed your kids or fulfill your dream of having a 50” plasma in every closet in your house and the man has to come in and rip the needle off the party record.
But anyway you smoked some crack or you stole some merchandise and you get convicted of the crime. Now you have to spend the next, say, ten years in state prison. That’s the punishment. You smoked something they didn’t want you to or took a few things that didn’t belong to you just because you like to watch the Food Network while you pick out ties, and they put you in a cage for ten years. Putting aside the rationale of reprimanding or rehabilitating people by putting them in cages, that’s the punishment. I don’t understand why on top of that you need this auxiliary punishment of being raped every day.
Now if you asked a prison guard or warden to a person, they wouldn’t list rape as part of the all inclusive punishment package. “No,” they would say, “rape is not the shrimp cocktail or salad bar on this cruise ship towards criminal reformation. Forced sodomy is more like the daiquiri or colada that must be purchased a la carte.” Well according to Human Rights Watch, 140,000 American inmates are raped each year, which are more rapes than all the people raped outside of prison each year. And there are about 300 million more people not in prison.
We see it in movies and read it in books all the time and have a good laugh about it. “Don’t drop the soap,” and so on, but isn’t this worth a minute of our attention? Some think of it as just another consequence of the abomination of criminal activity. Just know that the consequence for every crime, from multiple murders to stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family, is the very likely possibility of rape. I know I keep stressing this, but this isn’t a nice rape where afterward you get to sit in a bath tub with your bubble bath and your Yankee candles and soft music playing in the background while you rock back and forth and an elderly Vietnamese woman pours large cup-fulls of warm water over your head. This is the kind of rape where afterward you take your bleeding asshole back to your cage that you’re going to spend the next ten years living in and prepare yourself to get raped again tomorrow.
Now if you posed it to me as an either/or situation I would obviously pick the ten years of continual sodomy as opposed to the ten years of continuous imprisonment, but handing out both seems like double jeopardy. And aren’t you locked in a cage all day in jail? Someone should be watching these people! Are these prisoners going out alone on nature walks; how are they getting raped so much? My only consolation is that occasionally a prison guard breaks the law and gets sent to prison and then I bet he gets raped a bunch of times. That’s not much, but it’s a start.
Ah, my buddy George Carlin. I owned every book. I saw every HBO special. I saw him three times live since I was 9 years old. I owned every album without exception from Take-Offs and Put-Ons through Life is Worth Losing. I lied on my dirty mattress on the floor in my shitty studio apartment in New Orleans by myself three months ago and watched his last HBO special It’s Bad For Ya and cried. I laughed with tears streaming down my face the entire time. This fucking old guy who had every right to not bother put together over an hour of unmitigated magic as harsh and wonderful as anything else I’d seen him do. I have no higher expectations for anyone in life than I do for George and he kicked my ass.
Fuck Lenny Bruce. He creative and revolutionary, but he wasn’t funny. Fuck Steve Martin and Richard Pryor. They were insanely influential and hilarious, but they didn’t even write their own material. They were like actors in a one man comedy play. Only Carlin did it all.
There was a segment at the end of the album Jammin’ In New York that changed me indefinitely. George Carlin wasn’t really my favorite before this. In fact I didn’t really have much of an interest in stand-up comedy at all. I always liked jokes and funny movies but the extent of my exposure to pure comedy was listening to Howard Stern in the car with my dad and then late at night listening to his Jackie “The Joke Man” tapes quietly on the stereo in my room when I was supposed to be asleep. I must have bought this CD on some strange whim. Maybe I saw Carlin on TV; I can’t remember. The name of the track on Jammin’ is “The Planet is Fine” and something about George’s logic put a bug in me. The hubris of man trying to save endangered species when we couldn’t even help each other. The idea that everything is horrible and that there’s very little that we can do about it except enjoy the show. The big electron. It doesn’t hate, it doesn’t judge. It just is: for a little while.
The theme of this piece didn’t seem to me that George was suggesting that we shouldn’t care about saving the whales or that we should sit back and not care as people suffered and died around us. The point was that you could say these things out loud. Everyone can think the same thing, that life is precious, that death should be avoided at all costs, that life must be embraced and should have the same irrefutable meaning to everyone. Everyone can say these things and believe them but you don’t have to. There’s no writing in the sky that makes it true no matter how many people believe it. That’s the kind of thinking that moves like the bubonic plague through your mind, killing one third of all the ideas you hold dear as it passes from neurological village to village. My eyes changed shape as I looked at the things in this world that people believed because of moral, ethical, emotional, religious, and indoctrinatory reasons and started shoving the garbage aside.
Everyone pushing you to believe something has an agenda. More often than not they started off as scared children and started collecting simple truths about the world as they saw it or were told to see it and used these precepts as building blocks for the foundation of their personality. These unsubstantiated ideas are the support beams that hold up men’s souls and the only way they are able to validate the unkown is by eliciting your consensus. And it’s bullshit folks, and it’s bad for ya.
This is an insight that I can say without hyperbole changed my life. This was the man who grabbed my child-sized brain and pulled at it with both hands. It could have been Mark Twain or Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or Baruch Spinoza but it wasn’t. It was George Carlin.
I know Carlin didn’t like the word hero, but fuck him, he’s dead. There’s no other person whom I never met that affected me so much. Don’t take shit from the zeitgeist, be prolific, work hard and work constantly, keep a small circle of friends and loved ones who you protect furiously, treat language seriously and with respect, have a healthy disdain for religion, treasure individuals but be suspicious of all groups, and tits always look best in a pink sweater.
After Jammin’ in New York it was Brain Droppings. After Brain Droppings it was Back in Town. After Back in Town it was the Little David Box Set. After that it was everything else all at once. And then it was Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks and Woody Allen and Chris Rock and Doug Stanhope and a lifetime love with stand-up comedy that will die with me.
I don’t know what to say. I can’t say enough. My ex-girlfriend sent me a text message. My dad left a note on the front door. George said he wanted to live to be 94. He said he was going to write some fiction books. He definitely had another great special in him. I never got to shake his hand and tell him how much I liked him. How many hours I spent alone without a friend in life listening to him and how much he helped me out.
Ah, my buddy George. No one has to get out of your way anymore.
Take care of yourself and take care of someone else. Thank you. Good Night.
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