I believe in as little as anybody alive. OK, as anybody I know personally. Not in god, or the soul, or religion, or mysticism; not in the spiritual side of human experience, or transcendentalism, or the broad consciousness of all existence.

I view all as material, from the ground (sub-ground) up.

Then why am I so affected by religious music? 

I was listening to Willie Johnson a few days back, a Black street singer from the 1920s and ’30s who’s influenced every folk or blues singer since. Most of what he recorded was evangelical-religious, yet it’s like hearing the walls talking to me – as elemental as the studs, the lath, the overlay of plaster and paint. No one could tug me any closer to the truth.

But what truth?

Nothing that’s spoken to me outside the context of music.

Johnson’s liner-note writers tend to exude a snottiness toward his religiosity, heckling his “naive” outlook, as though he was a low-grade spiritualized idiot savant.

But how about this, from “God Don’t Never Change”: “God way up in Heaven, God way down in Hell…” Are you listening, John Milton? That simple line turns over a couple millennia of Christian philosophy and examines it for fleas.

As modern Americans, we’re in a time and place where religion is either marketed in amorphous globs – Christian Contemporary music as Hallmark sentiments wrapped in weeping slobber – or pushed through an increasingly microscopic sieve to strain out the smallest lumps of heresy. In much of Europe, you can believe in nothing more spiritual than the asphalt roadway and still be considered Christian. In much of the U.S., if you don’t stoutly refute evolution, you’re the devil’s buddy.

So what’s happened with me – my love of Willie, of the Bach B minor Mass, of the Mozart Requiem, of the Staples Singers, Clara Ward, the Coleman Hawkins Singers, the Congolese Missa Luba, Elvis and Little Richard in their quieter Christian guise?

In Catholic grade school I joined the choir, not because I had an amazing voice or could play so much as the simplest instrument, but because I loved – and still do – the haunting melodies of Gregorian chant, especially the liturgy for the midnight Christmas Mass. There’s nothing today that can beat the sheer beauty of “Veni Creator Spiritus,” though I believe in not a word of it, in Latin or English.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, when people bring up god or “spiritual experience”or “there has to be something more” or “there are other aspects to existence” or “you have to expand your idea of consciousness,” I have trouble keeping a quiet, accepting face, yet Negro spirituals, bluegrass hymns, and Renaissance masses elevate me.

Is it enough to say, “It’s all an evocation of the spirit, religious or otherwise”? Or should I file it away under “Beauty” and forget about it? Or is it that it’s more difficult to write a tuneful, soaring celebration of the second law of thermodynamics – “Oh Newton, may the joules of thy knowledge and the prism of thy light illuminate each wayward quark of eternity.”

I wish I knew.

No, I take that back. Knowing doesn’t necessarily make everything clearer. I know how my vacuum cleaner works, but that doesn’t explain the delight I take in the way it sucks up stray dog hairs or desiccated moths. 

Maybe it’s just that we’re each the sum of all the accidents of our lives, of both our experience and our internal hodgepodge. I don’t limit “internal” here to anything as explicable as genetics. It might have been the emotional effect of a passing cloud on my mother’s horizon the moment I was conceived. It might have been a random radio broadcast when I was in my crib that stimulated my beta waves.

Most likely it’s a conglomeration of little things that I could not, even with a tunneling electron microscope, hazard to identify.

I hope so.

 *    *    *    *

Song of the Week:

The old oaken bucket,

Where once I yelled, “Fuck it,”

That rotten old bucket,

That stank to all hell.

I really think I should

Scrap the songs of my childhood,

Which started out lousy

And didn’t end well.

The things that bring back memories, and the memories that expand from there…

Among the Christmas music on my computer is this collection: “Music of the Medieval Court and Countryside for the Christmas Season.” Performed by the New York Pro Musica, it was just one of a string of astonishingly beautiful albums of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance selections produced by Pro Musica founder and director Noah Greenberg in the 1950s-‘60s.

But this note isn’t about the music itself, it’s about my friend Dave Liberman – who died way too young in the 1990s – and his odd inability to deal with the world despite his brilliance.

Dave, one of the original members of “The House” on 34^th St. in Philly that I’ve written about often before, gave me several reel-to-reel tapes while we lived there in 1963. They were a wonderfully odd collection of stuff he’d recorded; some I could trace, others came I don’t know from where.

One of those tapes included my first exposure to this Christmas collection, which he must have taped from an album, because a short but rollicking piece, “Riu Riu,” had the distinctive catch and repeat that was the bane of so many attempts to record scratched LPs. For some reason, whenever I played the collection, I waited for that defect with a weird glee, scooting the tape along to pass the worst of it, hoping I could reconnect at just the right place to make it a complete entity.

Later, I found and bought the record, which I taped to a cassette many years further along, then, later still, digitized to my Mac. Now I get a sad letdown when “Riu Rui” plays wholly unmolested. But hearing it the other day brought Dave back to me.

Dave was a gentle, delightful human being with an underlayment of intense anger, which I don’t think was induced by mistreatment or evil incidents, but part of his basic nature. A budding math genius, he was in his senior year at Penn when me met, graduating first in his class while spending much of that year lying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. He could have been, should have been, almost anything. (One thing he did become was the character Dorsal in my novel No Bike.)

Somewhere in that year I was removed from affection by my girlfriend Marcia, which affection she transferred to Dave. It was painful as hell for me, but there was no fault in Dave attached to it.

Marcia and I had reserved ship space for a European trip that summer, but after the rejection I switched to flying over. Was this decision to leave my ship space for Dave? Something like that, though the details are misty. At any rate, we were all to reunite in England.

Instead, Dave decided to ingest some heavenly-blue morning glory seeds, rumored to be a Mighty Hallucinogen. In Dave’s case, they brought on the worst of bad trips. He didn’t make it to Europe, and I didn’t get together with Marcia until Greece.

I should note, here, that Dave, though generally mild, non-threatening and probably no more than 5’9”, was a compact mass of muscle, immensely strong. One time I saw a trio of tall, lunking frat boys confront him, not sure why. That usually hidden anger settled on Dave like a canopy. Fortunately, nothing physical transpired, because I think he would have broken bones.

At any rate, the morning glory seeds (or something internal) drove him psychotic, and from what I later learned, it took five cops to restrain him. He ended up institutionalized for a short period. I’ve never figured whether that mad experience was a cause for later problems or an illumination of an underlying warp.

I was best man at his wedding a couple years later. The wedding was great fun, but marriage soon turned sour. I don’t recall what he was doing for a living then, but when I visited him some time later while he was living alone in Boston, he was driving a taxi and using that incredible mind to figure out how to steal from the fares he picked up. That was the last tine I saw him.

About a decade ago, I tried to track Dave down online. Alas, there is a surfeit of David Libermans and Liebermans in the wide world. All I could find about his later days was his funeral notice, which I didn’t copy – fool! But while checking for his background, I stumbled over a site listing the annual prizewinners for best math paper presented by a freshman at UPenn.

Not surprisingly, Dave had won in 1960. I also noted that five years previously that freshman prize had been given to Robert Cantor, perhaps the best teacher I ever had for any subject.

Cantor came to a far sadder end than Dave, as detailed in a past rumen.

 *   *   *   *

Leftovers Supreme:

North Korea should be encouraged to continue its missile tests. What better gift to nuclear non-proliferation than the Dear Leader shooting all his unarmed missiles into the ocean? 

*    *    *    *

Song of the Week

tune: “Till There Was You”:

There were turds on the hill,

But I never smelled them stinking,

No, I never smelled them at all…

Though they were poo.

*    *    *    *

Finally, there appears to be, in actuality, an archaeologist at Cardiff University named Flint Dibble.

I’m thinking of starting my official bio with “I’m an agéd straight white male with no pronouns and no real respect for humanity.”

*   *   *   *

I don’t believe in UFO’s because …

1) of the asinine assumption that anything humanity has accomplished, but for which we don’t yet have a detailed origin, was left here by a higher alien intelligence. This outlook is similar to the idea (see last rumen.) that Planet Earth is too incompetent to have produced its own water or oxygen.

2) on the opposite hand, UFO adherents paint intergalactic aliens as having the collective smarts of roadkill: After crossing hundreds of parsecs of space, they mostly diddle around our back highways spooking people, make silly circles in farmers’ crops, and can’t manage to land without crashing in New Mexico.

3) we now have had fly-by examination of all the planets in the solar system, and not one shows the slightest evidence of intelligent life (in fact, everybody got so pissed at Pluto for its pointlessness that it got demoted to dwarf planet (or was it midget asteroid?).

4) intra-galactic travel contravenes all scientific and common-sense limitations. No, you and your communication back home cannot exceed the speed of light, that’s just a neat SF handoff to make galactic colonization sound neighborly. And even if someone is just sending unpiloted drones here to peek at us, they’d have to wait for said drones to reach their destination, then broadcast their observations back home, a round-trip of propulsion followed by broadcasting that would require hundreds to thousand years for the round trip — not a sensible or economic proposition. 

*   *   *   *

My latest invention:

SWD (Some Wheel Drive): Each of your vehicle’s wheels is activated independently and totally at random, thus equalizing wear on each tire.

*   *   *   *

An illustration of how, even in this world of instant information, you can discover absolutely nothing.

I bought a pair of insulated-grip work gloves at the local hardware store. I had never heard of the company that made them, Showa, so I carefully perused the extensive cardboard tag attached.

Showa has offices in Georgia, Quebec and New South Wales (Australia). The manufacturer is listed as being in Japan. But the gloves are “Made in Malaysia.”

The back of the tag has three small graphics (one looking in outline like an open book, two like a knight’s shield), each surrounded by two letters and up to ten numbers. There is no indication what any of these symbols or numbers mean. There is also a short list of “Examination Certificates,” again with no mention of what they refer to. Between the two is the usual list of ridiculous warnings, which boil down to “Don’t hurt yourself.”

The other side of the tag features three circles enclosing: 1) what might be a snowflake, 2) a hand holding a… pipe?, and 3) a small wrench next to two meshing gears. These circles lie below a photo of a worker’s hands wearing a pair of the gloves and holding a large building block – which they are about to place onto a poorly prepared line of mortar.

What I find most peculiar is that someone, somewhere, deliberately designed this tag. It did not fall from a passing pigeon.

*   *   *   *

There was a young man of Gdansk,

Who in public would lower his pants.

To make matters worse,

Near his grandmother’s hearse,

He exposed himself to his aunts.

*   *   *   *

I don’t understand drag queen story hours. I mean, I don’t care about them one way or the other (people who are scared of drag queens may be the saddest folks on earth), but how did the idea  take hold of drag queens having a particular connection to kids’ story-telling?

There used to be (and I’m sure still are) clown and witch story-tellers and those who dress up as mythical or folk figures to give bounce to a tale. But none of those became either ubiquitous or controversial. The meeting of drag queens and kids’ stories just seems to me an unlikely development. Anybody know the history?

*   *   *   *

Memphis Slim has a great song about losing his girlfriend Kay. It’s called “If You See Kay,” but as sung, the initial “I” is silent. You can pick any tune you choose and sing it to yourself.

I tend to get obsessive about numbers, but, despite my Scots/English/Welsh background, I ignore 1066 and instead get tied up in 1054. Why? Because it was a year of delightful confluence: the supernova that create the Crab Nebula, and the schism between eastern and western Christendom, one of the few positive developments within the then-Catholic Church; whenever our late-breakfast hits 10:54 on the stove timer, I feel blessed.

(As for 1066, the Normans were the scum of Europe, not outdone until the Nazis came along. They’re worth their own rant here, or even a full book at some point.)

But this year, the magic number has been 84. It’s my age, and also the age of my deeply beloved brother Rod’s death. The obsession also spills over into the calendar: Orwell’s 1984, which passed without national degeneration (that had to wait until Trump and 2016), and my daughter Cait’s birth that September.

I’ve somehow managed to sidestep a lot of what most people take for granted. Despite living on the edge financially, I’ve made absolutely no attempt to search out a career or a well-paying job. It’s not a stance taken; the urge has just never been there. Linda and I now have a (to us) tidy sum in investments, but I never read the annual prospectus, just every now and then check out whether the amount has gone up or down, with little caring one way of the other – it will change direction within the next couple months, with or without my help. Financially, I’m a true ignoramus and I suspect always will be (“always” stretching maybe another decade).

But there are some other things I should finally be catching up on that I’ve spent my life ignoring, hating or blundering against. The  most personal of these is promoting my own work. I’m goddamned proud of the books I’ve written but done nothing whatsoever to promote them or even make them known. They sit, self-published,  unread, on Amazon, along with roughly 15 million romance novels and dragon fantasies. (I think one of mine is ranked 5 millionth in whatever category they tossed it in.) 

So suppose (just suppose) I now want to promote this stuff. How would I go about it when I steadfast, insistently refuse to join social media. The idea, literally, makes me want to puke. 

OK, first step: All of you are now commanded to visit my author page on Amazon (amazon.com/author/davisderek), and if you don’t want to fork money over on one of my books, I’ll send you a free copy (postage-free if hardback, a mobi file if Kindle). I am, seriously (guffaw!), unconcerned about making money on what I’ve written. I’m only concerned about it being read. And it deserves to be read.

What else should I be learning at this late train stop? The ins and outs of science and history that I’ve missed along the way. How to be less angry at myself and the world, how to forgive my own mistakes and those of others – oh crap, that’s not going to happen. Maybe to get out of bed in the morning and not wish it was a different day.

*   *   *   *

A couple nominations for fictional character names:

• Ian Phlegming (master of nasal disguise)

• “Beef” Stroganoff (Mafia lackey)

*   *   *   *

In the last few decades, there’s been increasing attention paid to familial and spousal abusers who replicate the abuse done to them at an early age. Part of the thinking is, this is what they know, what they’re familiar with, so that even though such abuse created huge misery in their lives, they pass it along as “how things are done, how families behave.”

But something popped into my mind recently that I haven’t found covered seriously elsewhere: Can the same outlook also explain, by extension, the behavior of the ruling segments of a society, culture or nation? I’m thinking particularly of the current explosion in the Mideast between “neighbors” Gaza and Israel.

Both the Moslems and the Jews have suffered centuries of oppression, and while as individuals they have reacted in multiple different ways, both Hamas, theoretically representing the Palestinians, and Netanyahu’s government, theoretically representing Israel, have taken on extreme, abusive and damming positions that mirror, to a remarkable extent, the evils done to their people.

The fact, of corse, is that neither Hamas or Netanyahu represent their people. They are carrying on an age-old feud passed down as “normal” by their ruling caste. 

And this in itself may be a reflection of the obnoxious religions that have arisen in the area, ever since Moses (or whoever it may have been) swiped monotheism from Akenaten in Egypt, over 3,000 years ago. 

The god of the old testament was a nasty son of a bitch, though probably with good reason – I mean, if you were omnipotent and had created the human race, then watched what it developed into, wouldn’t you be pissed at everyone and everything, especially yourself? (“Lucifer, did you put weed in the brownies again?”)

Next, Christianity came along and was quickly co-opted by the Church machine that threw all the blame on human beings through the absurdity of “original sin.” Finally, Islam, to further acerbate a crappy legacy, adopted the worst smash-the-non-beliers errors of its predecessors.

These religions, arising in a small crossroads between continents, have engendered over 2,000 years of expanded depredation throughout the world. And no good, doable way I can think of to roll it back. The damage has been too enormous.

*   *   *   *

At the Covered Bridge – a restaurant, now sadly closed, near the village of Sonestown – the most heart-poundingly sexy woman ran the few tables – boisterous, succulent as ripe cantaloupe and dead-on with every order, especially the drinks.

I once made an internal bet that she would spot my empty gin and tonic glass within 15 seconds. At my count of 13, her finger shot out and

“Refill?”

They can’t teach that in bartender’s school.