the end of the world
(part eight)
((the funeral procession))






"But I feel like I knew his pain...or mechanical failure while enduring the norm, some of us fracture, others simply deform and lose their elasticity never to return to the shape they were. I wonder which is worse."


whether you like it or not, propagandhi believes in the same sense of interconnectedness that any church-going, "christian" reader of this blog does. we o'kelleys probably call this sense the holy spirit.

the muslims (let's call them "the something racists") down the street from us believe in the holy spirit too, but in a different way than o'kelley christians. "the something racists" also believe that angels are lurking around, too, logging our every action, interceding on our behalf and pulling souls out of dead corpses and delivering them to the soul patrol somewhere over the rainbow. extrapolate these minor differences out and combine them with the controversy of the ground-zero mosque, and, well, we wouldn't want to have lunch with "the something racists", right? yeah, me either.

speaking of lunch, in the past fifty or so years, charlie down at the other end of the street and his hindu buddies have been talking about not eating the flesh of any other animal. well, i am pretty sure i have heard that the holy spirit loves hamburgers, so i am also pretty sure that charlie down at the other end of the street and his hindu buddies don't even believe in the holy spirit. i could be wrong, but i am probably right.

and then there's whatshisname. we call him whatshisname because that's what his mother calls him. or so he tells me that's what she calls him. whatshisname doesn't live on our street, but he's standing at the end of it at the bus stop every morning. whatshisname talks to his dog and swears that his dog told him that what we think of as the holy spirit is really just jerry garcia and the dog is sure that jerry garcia has been communicating with all of us from purgatory since that fateful august day in 1995. the o'kelleys see the jerry garcia as holy spirit argument as borderline brilliant mixed with a fairly apropos public service announcement to not take too much acid (in moderation, of course).

based solely on my experiences with propagandhi, in the o'kelley house, kicking with joe "the something racist", hanging with charlie or trying to avoid whatshisname, it seems like there are a lot of ideas out there for that weird-ass sense of interconnectedness.

obviously, if we chose to be rational about it, we could embrace our "neighbors" and love them the best way we know how.

that, of course, would be retarded.

what we'd rather do is embrace, not our "neighbors", but the crazy. embrace the crazy that is breaking up people into groups based on everything from age to color to college football favorite team to what i eat to what they drink to what music you listen to what words that are coming out of my mouth to how much money they make to how bad those homeless guys smell to if you like apricots to fucking whatever other delineating factor you and jerry garcia can come up with.

embrace that crazy and get upset at something that you can't put your finger on. you may call what you are upset at "kevin o'kelley" and his filthy mouth. but, you aren't mad at me.

you are mad at something else, but you either can't put your finger on it or you refuse to.

and here is where o'kelley "christians" are different. i'll look at the back of the box with you. i don't know what ails this world and this world's people and this world's churches, but i'll work with you to try and figure it out...together.

we are all interconnected.

"i feel like i knew his pain."

of course we do. we all feel the same pain.

celebrate the connections. or embrace the crazy.

your call.