Hunker Down, Oh Turkerry, Thornily

Ah, we arrive at another Turkey-Day. In the TV-less world I reside in most of my hours, that still means spending time with family, connecting with each other, whether we’re talking, eating or simply silently sitting in the same room reading different books. But what a great opportunity to see oneself and one’s roots anew again, eh?

I’ve noticed over the past month that I tend to keep my shoulders tensed up for no gee-darn good reason a good portion of the time. So, I have now committed to consciously playing the other extreme–forcing my shoulders down. With some time, as this becomes habitual, maybe I can release that tension and keep them relaxed. It’s funny, though, because I’ll notice that I lift up and tense those shoulders when I’m doing something that really doesn’t require it, like, say clearing some plates off the dinner table. Now, those plates–they aren’t heavy. And even if they were, it makes more sense to let my shoulders relax, and allow my hands and arms to do the work: I’m exerting unnecessary energy and thus being less efficient with my body. Lord knows, I’m'uh need that extra energy for all the stuff I’ve committed to putting into action.

Well, I noticed today, as my dad was clearing off some plates that he does the shoulder tensing thing, too. It’s something that I’m fairly certain I picked up from him, simply by observation and unconscious mimicry. This is making me a bit more conscious of my body language around my sister’s one year old. That kid’s an amazing mimic. And of course–a lot of our initial learning consists in observation and mimicry. Seeing and doing.

Monkeys indeed.

I’m sitting with my the dad, my sister and her husband at a diner yesterday afternoon after getting picked up at the airport. The conversation veers to the politics hoo-hah. My dad talks about getting “those damn Republicans” out of the White House. My sister talks about how even though she likes Obama, he simply doesn’t have the experience to be president. She’s rooting for ol’ Hilary, Queen of the Damned. To me, both of them, in their way, seem to simply be repeating pre-packaged points of view that have been repeated over and over and over by the droning of the Spectacle of today and yesterday.

Me, I’m off the chart. I chime in that the election has already been decided. That the HQ’s of the two fake parties already decided who they wanted long ago and that with the collusion of the mass-stream media, the Spectacle will produce the fake democratic exercise it desires come next year. I say it’s gonna be Guiliani versus Clinton and that Clinton will win. She’ll win, I say, because if after two terms of Bush, another Republican wins, then everyone will wake up to the fact that the elections are rigged and there will be rioting in the streets. Thus, it’s better to let the Chosen One of our homegrown Vichy party win it for the sake of appearances and at least temporary social stability.

Yes, I am the nutter, as the awkward silence attests. Before I can feel too much like the late Kerry Thornley, the conversation shifts to the Red Sox. Of course, it’s not important to me that I be believed–I could be utterly wrong and anyway, being right about this sort of thing isn’t going to win me any prizes (nor should it).

Speaking of Kerry Thornley, I’m nearly done reading Adam Gorightly’s excellent biography of the late-great Discordian co-founder and anarcho-libertarian prankster, The Prankster and the Conspiracy. It’s stellar stuff, in my humble opinion. And it certainly gets me to thinking about the dangers of playing with paranoid reality tunnels. Gorightly mentions how although Thornley had once been a great inspiration and mentor to many of the 1960’s alternative culture’s heroes, once he got stuck in conspiracy obsessions he seemed to lose a deal of his sense of humor; he, got stuck in a loop and thus stopped growing while his former friends and collaborators continued to evolve and thus left him behind, with sadness but also with the force of necessity.

Thornley had served in the Marines in Japan with Lee Harvey Oswald. He later was hounded by Jim Garrison after the Kennedy assassination under the belief that Kerry had been involved in the plot to kill the president. It didn’t help that Kerry had some wierd conversations prior to the president’s death about his hatred for Kennedy (due to the murderous actions in Katanga that JFK had authorized). The man with whom he had these conversations, who he’d known by the name “Gary Kirstein,” he later came to believe was in fact E. Howard Hunt.

Thank the Dogs, nothing even close to all that has been in my life experience. Suppose it’s just not part of my destiny, if such a fiction be factual.

Today [this post was written on Nov. 22nd], by the way, is also the anniversary of the JFK assassination, lest anyone forgot.

But I’ll ramble more later. Right now, there are family board games to play and everyone’s waiting on me downstairs…