Are you lookin’ for a soft place to lie down??!! Or do you want to play??!!

. . . . Is what a certain hyperventilating football coach* used to say to his charges, way back in the way back (when I used to play).

Perhaps it’s just the weekend and Monday that I’ve had, but, yes, Coach, I am. Some soft grass in the sun. A dirty Sycamore for a little shade. Down by the river, in the hollow. Maybe you could get me a pillow?

The truth is that we’re all just looking for a soft place to lie down. People want food, they want shelter, they want family near, and they want good friends and cheer. If you give them the option to have half of it, they will take it — ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And that’s true (to paraphrase Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove) “regardless of race, color, or creed.”

Remember that the next time you hear hyperventilating about “Moslem this, terrorist that.” It is undoubtably true that many people — regardless of race, color, or creed — are evil. (We all sin in our hearts at least, as the naive peanut-farmin’ former president will confirm.) The rough nut of active evil, though, is not more than a glorified legume. Most people just want that soft place in the sun.

You’ll never know it, if all you’ll spare is an LGF minute. My discussion of the war on terror will wait another day. Consider this an open thread.

von

UPDATE: I promise to bring this back to theme.

Apparently, Spalding Gray is dead. By whose hand — his own or another — we’ll soon find out (undoubtably). This, though, rings painfully true:

“Everyone that looks like him from behind, I go up and check to make sure it’s not him,” Russo said in a phone interview with The Associated Press about a week ago. “If someone calls and hangs up, I always do star-69. You’re always thinking, ‘maybe.”‘

It’s thoughts like these that pulled me back; when I needed to pull back. And don’t lie — not here, not in anonymous cyberspace** — and say you never needed to pull back too. That soft patch of grass in the half-shade of the dirty Sycamore is worth more. It’s worth more to all of us.

In my teens and twenties, I had more than enough conversations with post-punks and artists and singers and writers and crazies and earnest football players-turned-hopeful-Kerouacs (such as myself, who never could write that crappy (or well)***). Every conversation was about the worthlessness of it all.

But life is worthy. It’s that perfect moment on a seventy-two degree October day. The moment you find heaven in a glass of mid-day gin and a GPC cigarette. It’s worth it. And sleep only refreshes when you wake up.

Sorry for the melodrama. News triggers thoughts, which triggers memories and musings, you know, which makes one forget one’s carefully-studied cynacisms. You may now return to your open thead.

*American football, of course.

**Such goes the lie.

***Larry the punk, bastardized in the only short story I ever sold, knows it well. Where are you, Larry? Married to a beautiful girl I hear? (More than hear; I was in the wedding.) It’s how it should be. (Not his real name, of course. And why do we deny gays the same pleasures of companionship? No need to answer, of course.)