[Dialogue] This sounds like it could have been given by JWM

[KroegerD@aol.com]

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Resolutions For The Damned 
A new year, a Bush-gutted, storm-ravaged world and you in need of some juicy, heartfelt pledges 
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 5, 2005 

This is the year. 

No, really. This is the it. This is the year you resolve to let it all hang out and lick the fingertips of the divine and stop holding back and stop quivering with unchecked anticipation/dread as you realize that, if you care a whit for self-definition and spiritual nuance and hot wet intelligence and deep karmic color in this tsunami-hammered, Bush-ravaged world, you are desperately needed right now. It's true. 

Alas, many are dejected. Many of the blue or Democratic or progressive or open-minded persuasion are understandably heading into 2005 feeling a bit out of sorts, depressed and bitter and angry and still just a little appalled at the apparent widespread fear-induced ignorance of a country that somehow re-elected the worst president in U.S. history. Yes, still. 

Well, buck up, jacko. It could be worse. You could be Michael Jackson. Or Janet Jackson. Or Tito. You could be Anne Coulter or Bill O'Reilly or Trent Lott, people whose souls have become so infested with rat dung that their third eye is brown. See? Feel better already. 

Or you could be Dubya himself, so utterly empty and blank eyed and falsely pious. He is but a lint speck on the coattails of time and you just know that you could poke him with your middle finger and all that would pour out would be sawdust and a bunch of tiny ball bearings. 

Did you make any resolutions this year? Resolutions to get you through? To sustain your karmic energy? To act as Viagra for your flaccid spirits? Not speaking here of the quit-smoking, be-nicer-to-cats type of resolution, by the way. This year, you need to dig deep. Get visceral. Recommit. Reconnect. Yank hard. 

Do you need a few suggestions? A short list of possible devout pledges for this, the year 2005 of our Lord and Savior, Jenna Jameson? Good. So do I. Here we go: 


1) Knowing full well that BushCo loves nothing more than a numb, dumbed-down, slothlike populace too uninformed and uncaring and spiritually comatose to speak out against his nasty war and various aww-shucks policy mutilations, vow this year to blow this inane perspective to the karmic ether. 

How? By daring yourself to become better informed about your life. About politics. About your body and your family and your lover and your gods and your genitals and the stuff you put into your body. Resolve to stop tuning out when the info comes at you; instead, seek it, learn it, arm yourself with beauty and knowledge and sex and love and health until you're so full of it you have to start your own annoying but actually relatively cool blog and then beg all your friends to post comments. 

2) Say it with me: Enough with divisiveness. Enough with useless and simpleminded, black-and-white dualities: blue versus red, Dem versus Repub, good versus evil, salt versus pepper, God versus Allah, Lindsay versus Hillary. Enough with GOP-bred ideologies that only polarize and demean and reduce down the gorgeous messy kaleidoscopic complexities of the human drama into ignorant and childlike simplicities that contain no art or spirit or soul. 

Then again, the nation has never felt quite so divided, so alienated from its original founding ideology, its own heart. Thanks to the Bush-brand GOP fear machine, there is now much truth to the fact that progressive culturally astute blue American cities and college towns are now quite ideologically separate from the red culturally bereft God-drunk welfare states. 

Yet, the wise ones say that the only way to progress is to find common ground, shared humanity. Either that, or nuclear civil war. Resolve to relish this painful contradiction and figure out a way to use it to your advantage. 

3) More dildos fewer sitcoms. Do you know anyone who lives in Texas and I don't mean Austin because Austin isn't really a part of Texas given how it actually has some culture and music and a decent university and a pulse? You do? Good. 

Hie thee to divine-interventions.com and order a Baby Jesus Butt Plug and send it to them as a gift and tell them you shall pray hard that they use it to find God. Sit back and wait for the apocalypse with a devious grin. 

4) Read more books. Book sales were way down last year, off by something like 26 million copies, and a majority of Americans bought no more than one book in the entire year, and most bought none. 

Meanwhile, something like a billion people saw the puerile "Meet the Fockers" last month and actually chuckled at the name and enjoyed watching Barbra Streisand shove her illustrious and obnoxious career into a big vat of toilet humor and bad hair and lame puns. Vow to wish Ben Stiller would knock it off with the annoying neurotic-guy shtick. Wish Ben Affleck would discover Rosicrucianism and move to Paraguay. Wish for more Cate Blanchett and less Kate Hudson. These are things you can do right now. Oh right, and read more books. 

5) Casually but unswervingly vow to double nay triple your vigilance over the Bush dictatorship and track their ongoing atrocities and add to your running count of all the major shockingly revelatory Bush-slammin' books (last count: 237) written in the past few years by former Bush staffers or media insiders who are so appalled and disgusted by what they witnessed while serving the born-again Texas daddy's boy they simply couldn't hold it in any longer. 

6) More houseplants fewer Pottery Barns. More nipples fewer Parents Television Councils. More relaxed patience less bitter tailgating. More local and sustainable less factory farmed and chem injected. More authentic moans fewer fake smiles. More Nick Cave less Shania Twain. More grass-fed less hormone blasted. More yoga less Monday Night Football. More good porn less Spice Channel. More Whole Foods less Safeway. More truthout and commondreams and AlterNet, less MSNBC and CNN and even the slightest stain of Fox News. 

7) Wait wait wait. No. 1, above, isn't quite right. It's not actually about becoming more informed and it's not just about pumping more healthy whole foods into your divine flesh and it's not just about licking more sweet spots on your lovers' skin. Not solely, anyway. 

It is, in fact, about doing all those things hand in hand with a sly and elusive energy called consciousness. Presence. Awareness. It is about avoiding the cheeseball New Age stigma that's mutilated those luminous terms and instead choosing to use them to stick yourself to the moment, to the right now, and plumbing it for all its heat -- so when you eat that organic hot dog or lick that lover, it positively curls the toes of your id. 

Do you have any idea how to do this? To be this conscious? This present? Do you know what the hell this really means, how hard it is and how unbelievably invaluable? Neither do I. Let's resolve to find out. 

8) Finally and perhaps most importantly, resolve to do all this even as you laugh more vigorously than ever at the divine circus of it all, at the great cosmic joke, realizing that these next four years are going to be just shockingly painful to anyone with a heart or a whisper of raw spirituality or the slightest hint of true environmental concern. 

And yet there you are, shaking your head and sighing and grinning mischievously and moving forward anyway, as you crank your own personal vibration as much as humanly possible because that, really, is all you can do, and all you can ever do, and it is so desperately needed right now I can't even tell you, and because if you resolve anything this year, resolve to realize how essential you are to moving it all forward, making it all better, bringing it all into more divine focus. 

See? 2005 looks better already. 


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters. 


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