Stage Direction:
 

This is a play in five scenes, with a cast of one, a 30-year old
Jewish New Yorker named Mordy, who has complaints.  Note throughout
the entire staging, Mordy is walking, or pausing while walking, or
something related to walking.  I leave the staging up to the
director and the actor; why micromanage?  It should be clear where
Mordy ought to stop, turn, pause, spin, wait, speed up, slow down,
cry, yell, and exit, pursued by a bear.  And if it isn’t clear, so
much the better for the people who bring this to the stage.  The
main conceit of the play is that Mordy is walking with a companion,
named ‘Weasel’ (whose gender is not determined in the text), who he
talks with on a long walk from about 90th Street to about 50th
Street and back. 

Scenes :

     1.   Buddha Zero

     2.   The Marrow of Life

     3.   The Poodle & the Bulldog

     4.   From your Mouth to God’s Ears

     5.   Love being a Caprice
 

Setting :

New York, now. 
 
 

     1.   Buddha Zero
 

   Weasel! 

   Weasel! 

   Weasel, it’s me!  Yeah!  Yeah!   Come on-- come on down! 
   Naw-- no, Weasel, you haven’t been outside?  It’s beautiful! 
   Come-- come on down for a sec. 

   I’m telling you -- it’s beautiful!  The whole world -- the
   whole world is beautiful on a day like today.  The magnolia
   trees in the park -- the sea lions -- Weasel, the auto
   supplies store is beautiful on a day like today.  The
   windshield wiper fluid is sun dappled.  Dappled with
   sunbeams, Weasel!  The spark plugs are gluons dancing the
   dance of the Wu Li Masters!  The-- 

   Okay. 

   Weasel, you look terrible!  My god.  Weasel, I have just the
   thing.  OK, I need to head downtown, I’ve got an errand to
   do way down in midtown.  Come take a walk with me.  Yeah,
   all the way down.  It’s not so far.  If we were in the
   country, three miles would be a perfect Sunday-- I know,
   it’s early, it’s not that early.  It’s still morning.  Man,
   if we were the goddamn Native Americans -- the day’s half
   over, we’d rise and set with the sun, we’d be chasing the
   antelopes on the plain, Weasel, antelopes on the plain. 
   Grazing. 

   11AM, Weasel.  So whaddaya say?  Come on, it’s a beautiful
   day -- look at this, New York city, the new century, the sky
   is blazing blue -- it makes you glad to be alive, until you
   see all the people.  Weasel, I want to talk to you.  I don’t
   know, I’ve had things on my mind.  I’ve just-- I don’t know,
   it’s nice out, we’ll take a walk, we’ll talk things over,
   we’ll stop and get a coffee.  Of course it is.  It’s
   beautiful.  I’ll wait for you, just throw something on. 
   Whatever.  Okay.

   Hey.  That’s a great shirt.  What is that, Gap?  J. Crew? 
   Canal?  Canal?  Wow, Canal.  Man, New York still has the
   normal people beat, we still -- we’re so uneven, that’s why
   people don’t understand us, it’s not flat, it’s not tarmac,
   it has potholes you know so it’s inconvenient, but Damn But
   if we don’t have the best uneven quality left in America. 
   We’re like the monastery, Weasel  -- New York is the
   monastery of pre-panglobal capitalism.  We are maintaining
   a proud tradition -- craftsmanship, uneven quality,
   uncertain results, personality.  We are keeping hope alive,
   Weasel, a glitch of uncertain idiosyncrasy in a sea of Wal-
   Marts.  Do Democrats shop at Wal-Mart, Weasel?  Do they see
   the contradiction?  Man, no one sees, Weasel, but New York,
   New York!  We know!

   Man, God, look at this day.  Look at this day -- it’s days
   like these that make me ashamed to spend all those other
   days indoors typing.  It makes me want to be in, I don’t
   know, Iowa.  Or Maine.  Someplace without any other Jews. 
   Someplace where the people are all white and straight, you
   know?  And bigoted.  But quietly bigoted.  Where they go
   outside and, I don’t know, trim hedges or feed the feed
   lots, or do whatever those people do when they’re wearing
   gloves.  A place where there’s no difference, no ethnic
   foods, where there’s no wasabi or salsa, where it’s all --
   bread.  It’s all white bread, or if it’s Maine, wholegrain
   bread.  But no rye.  Definitely no rye.  If there is rye, it
   has caraway seeds but it also has cracked wheat.  Bits of
   grain.  People make sandwiches on it with nothing more than
   tomato and cheese.  They spread it on their cracked wheat
   bread and drink it with lemonade, or maybe they have ham. 
   Ham.  My God, Weasel, they have ham on their sandwiches! 
   Ham!  You know, I’ve still never had ham.  I sit down in the
   diner, and I’m more than happy to get a turkey and swiss,
   but ham -- I see my mother.  I hear her.  I hear her voice
   -- “HAM?!  You’re going to eat HAM?!  As if I don’t have
   enough troubles.  As if you don’t make me worry, and you
   know it’s not even good for you, the ham, and-- do you have
   a girlfriend?  A girlfriend?  And now HAM?!”  It’s not worth
   it.  I could eat it-- what does it taste like, ham?  Is it
   like shrimp?  You know, Jews, we think all of it tastes the
   same -- ham, shrimp, human brains, locusts -- it all tastes
   the same.  It tastes like your teacher’s breasts --
   something forbidden, something, you want it and at the same
   time it repels you, it repulses you because your own lust
   for it is inside of you, like an infection.  God I want ham
   -- I want nothing more than ham.  But to betray my mother? 
   I may as well lust after my father, may he rest in peace. 
   It’s impossible.  You can’t betray your mother.  You can
   only betray yourself wanting not to betray your mother. 
   You’re born a Jew, you’re stuck with your mother and your
   hatred of her and your insatiable need to somehow please
   this impossible woman who deserves nothing more from you,
   finally, after the thirty years of devotion you’ve given her
   but who thinks she’s gotten nothing from you all these years
   -- you feed the addiction, it’s like ham, Weasel, Jewish
   mothers are exactly like ham.  Which is why ham is
   forbidden.

   You want to go by the park?  God I love the park.  Anytime
   you want to get yourself sick, get a New Yorker to talk
   about the park.  We  can’t help ourselves; we will provide
   any audience with a running stream of horticultural vomit,
   endlessly rhapsodizing about the pool, the pond, the statue,
   the sheep’s meadow, the north meadow, the field, the castle
   -- we can’t help ourselves, everything has a direct article,
   everything is known, because there’s only one of each -- and
   my God, the rest of the city is so hot, that’s why we like
   the park.  Lungs, Weasel, lungs. 

   New York, I don’t know why people say it’s dirty.  To me
   it’s not dirty.  Per capita it’s definitely not dirty, not
   more than other places.  But it is hot, I’ll say that.  It’s
   hot always.  It’s hot in the wintertime when you’re forever
   going in and out of blast-heated buildings; it’s hot in the
   springtime when you’re still wearing your warm coat even
   though you don’t need it anymore; and of course it’s hot in
   the summer when everyone in the fucking city wants to kill
   someone it’s so hot.  It’s hot. But the park, ah, the park. 
   Space.  Sun.  It makes you feel like the entire world is in
   balance.  People are dancing, just to be in the park. 
   Dancing!  They play drums -- what is it about drums?  What
   is it?  Have you thought about that, Weasel, I mean, thought
   about what it is that makes us shake our bodies in a
   particular way when a sound is repeated?  What the hell is
   dancing, anyway?  Here’s something: watch people dance when
   you can’t hear the music.  It’s mysterious, that’s what it
   is.  It’s like watching lizards flit their glottal flesh at
   each other.  Fwip!  Fwip!  Or like waves of grain in the
   wind. 

   We don’t know why we do it.  We don’t know if it’s good to
   do it -- the Dionysians say yes, the Apollonians say no.  No
   one can agree.  Thank you, Friedrich Nietzsche, I’ll go on
   with my life now.  Doo doo doo--

   We can go down Columbus instead, if you want.  Or Amsterdam. 
   Not Broadway.  Too many people.  Poking in and out of stores
   all the time.  And Broadway, I don’t like how it’s crooked. 
   I mean, you invest the time to get over there, and then you
   find you’re erasing all your gains and you’re back where you
   started.  It’s not an honest street.  Amsterdam, Columbus,
   Central Park, these are honest places.  They go from place
   to place and they don’t lie to you about it.  It’s fine. 
   Broadway tricks you.  The park, there are going to be too
   many lovers.  It’s the only thing wrong with the park -- the
   lovers.   But okay, you want the park, the park.  I tell you
   what, let’s go down Columbus but back through the park.  Is
   that okay?  Okay.  Down Columbus, back through the park. 
   See the goddamn planetarium, all that.  The cafes.  Maybe we
   can buy something at a flea market, some sort of cheap 1970s
   furniture which now has such an aura of irony.  It’ll be so
   cool.  Columbus.  Good. 

   So we’ll go back through the park.  The park!  I love the
   nature in the park -- the life!  There’s always something
   happening, there’s always a field, or, a, not really a-- you
   know what there is, there’s a copse -- Central Park has
   copses, Weasel, you know?  A copse -- it’s like Shakespeare,
   Central Park. 

   I tell you, though, the thing with the park, the problem is,
   for christ’s sake if there isn’t a lover in almost every
   fucking one of them.  God, they love to rub it in your face. 
   They love to pair off: breeding, coupling, holding hands,
   exchanging spit, dangling crap in front of the other
   person’s face, throwing frisbees -- God if there’s anything
   more inane than watching people throw frisbees back and
   forth.  You know – as if there is anything in the world more
   idiotic than joy.

   I think that’s why I’m an environmentalist, Weasel, because
   of the park.  Because here’s this beautiful work of nature
   -- I know it was all laid out by people, but bear with me,
   bear with me -- here’s this beautiful arrangement of things,
   trees, rocks, lakes, sky -- and then there are all these
   goddamn people.  And garbage, we produce garbage.  We are an
   infestation, Weasel.  That’s why, my feeling is, what we
   need to do is, make ourselves less conspicuous.  We need to
   lay low.  Because mother nature is fucking pissed off.  It’s
   not like I care about us -- I don’t care if rising tides
   swallow up Venice or ozone gives the babies cancer.  But,
   tell me this, what did the marmots do to deserve it?  They
   were totally innocent.  They were just living, breeding,
   doing what we do -- except they manage to do it without
   minivans.  And now, mother nature gets pissed, Madagascar
   gets the axe, and now there’s no more marmots.  For-- huh? 
   Oh.  Marmosets.  Whatever.  You say Tomato.

   The thing is – us, and the marmots, and the park, all of
   these, Weasel, are the same question.  Whether mother nature
   is a good witch or a bad witch.  And that question is, is,
   well, what’s the meaning of life.  No, it is.  Because,
   wait.  Because, if the meaning of life, which, I don’t mean
   the meaning, like the literal meaning or answer, like the
   meaning of Finnegan’s Wake or the meaning of a red light, I
   mean the purpose, the point, the reason to get up in the
   morning -- or the lack of reason, which is a reason. 
   Because, if there’s no point, then the point is to enjoy
   yourself as much as possible.  Whoo hoo!  I mean, making
   yourself happy may include making your conscience feel
   better by making other people less motherfucking miserable
   all the time, but maybe it doesn’t, and hey that’s okay, it
   doesn’t matter, because what matters is your pleasure. 
   Okay. 

   And if that’s true, if the meaning of life is just not to be
   so goddamn miserable, then none of it really matters, not
   preserving the marmots; not enjoying the springtime instead
   of sitting inside watching Sally Jessy on tv; not sucking
   the goddamn marrow out of life instead of living a life of
   quiet desperation – none of it matters, as long as you can 
   be as happy in front of the TV, if it’s just making your
   body feel alright, why not?

   Now, Weasel, the Buddha would say “Oh but if you are not
   enlightened, you will eventually suffer.”  Okay, but
   frankly, if you ask me, the Buddha needs a better
   calculator.  You know, fine, I’ll say “Fine, Gautama Buddha,
   fine, fine; I’ll take your suffering, but I’ll say this: all
   of that suffering is worth it for just a little bit of joy.” 
   You know?  Okay, your desire for joy brings you suffering. 
   But once in a while, it brings you joy. 

   But the Buddha says no.  He says, no, no, what you have to
   do is just meditate all day long and find the middle way and
   thus renounce your desires.  You get rid of your desires,
   you’re happy -- well, not happy, but at least you’re free of
   desire which is the root of suffering, so at least you’re
   not sad sad sad all the time. 

   Seems to me, though, that the Buddha is in no position to
   talk.  I mean here he was a prince, you know, things are
   good.  And he enjoyed it for a while.  Yeah, you’re gonna
   get sick and one day you’re gonna die, hopefully before your
   wife and children do, but until then, you know, in the
   meantime? -- it’s good.  What’s the problem?  You just, it
   seems to me what the Buddha needs to do is stop worrying. 
   Stop worrying that one day you’ll become sad, and just be
   happy now.  You’re sad later, take some drugs.

   And that way, don’t you see, you don’t have to renounce the
   pleasures!  Don’t you see?  The only reason the Buddha
   doesn’t like eating at Le Cirque is because it attaches him
   to fleeting pleasures, stimulates his desire -- and desire
   is the root of suffering.  It’s only because you want Le
   Cirque that you’re unhappy when you can’t get a reservation
   there.  But hey, if you just don’t sweat it, if you don’t
   worry about not getting the reservation, then, when you do,
   rock on!  Why the hell not?  The Buddha’s so pessimistic. 
   He’s so sure that having no emotions – Buddha Zero – is
   better than the offset of pluses and minuses.  Who says?
   You’d think with all the mental discipline he puts into
   squashing desire he could put a little into just enjoying
   the good parts and not fretting when they’re bad.

   And: And this.  If all there is, is to just live in the
   moment and forget all the worries, then maybe we should keep
   plundering the goddamn Earth and making more babies than we
   could ever possibly support on the planet, and screwing
   ourselves and getting in wars.  Who can argue?  There’s no
   basis.  I prefer country, I go live in Saugerties.  You
   prefer city, you live here.  Someone else prefers endless
   tarmac’d wastelands of strip malls and mediocrity, they live
   in Paramus.  It’s no value any which way.

   But: But.  If there’s any meaning at all, any meaning at
   all, we are royally fucked.  We are fucked, Weasel, fucked. 
   I’m saying, we are fucked.  Because whatever that meaning
   is, I’ll tell you, we almost certainly have it wrong.

   I mean, look at that guy by the Starbuck’s -- what is he,
   talking on a cellphone?  Okay, how, in the perfect world,
   could you ever need a cellphone?  I mean, I like mine.  But
   let’s be honest -- one or two times a year it’s used for
   something really earth-shattering like a death or something. 
   The rest of the time, it’s just rushing us, distracting us,
   making us too able to do too much.  Business, pleasure,
   entertainment, meeting people, plenty of bullshit – it’s
   pulling us the wrong way.  Simplify, simplify. 

   Or check out this woman with the Lottery ticket.  Lottery
   ticket.  I mean, say no more.  Talk about desire is the root
   of suffering.  Really, try to come up with a better scheme
   for ripping off the poor and making them pay a
   disproportionate share of the education budget, and all
   without them knowing the score.  Oh, and she is hopin’, she
   is hopin’, becuz you never know, yeh?  You never know, a
   dollar and a dream, one day I’m’a gonna heet it beeg and I
   gonna move out of the city and leeve nice! 

   I mean, is this – look at New York, is this the Tao, Weasel,
   is this the uncarved block?

   But you know, the meaning of life only matters when you
   don’t feel good.  When you feel good, whatever made you feel
   good is more or less the meaning of life and the rest is
   just commentary.  You don’t care.  It’s only saps like me
   who care.  People without girlfriends.  Patsies.  We care. 

   Sometimes happy people care too, because they get so happy
   that suddenly you care about What It All Means, because you
   want to spread your love around and tell people how
   wonderful it is and how fair.  How goodly are our tents,
   Weasel.  I hate these people.

   Man, am I hungry.  When you’re hungry, your world changes. 
   Should we get a bagel?  Okay, down a few blocks, good idea. 
   You know, when you get hungry, all of a sudden whatever you
   were thinking makes you angry and impatient.  I’m hungry! 
   Meaning of life!  Socrates this, asshole!  And all this
   because our caveman ancestors who didn’t get hungry and put
   that ahead of everything else, they didn’t care to hunt as
   hard, and they died.  Poor them.

   Of course, now the people who don’t pass on the genes are
   the people who aren’t filled with desire.  Clearly the
   process of natural selection favors disco-sweating hump-
   bunnies and teenage trailer trash over yuppie parents at
   forty and – of course – Gautama Buddha.

   So maybe most philosophers were hungry, you know, but
   unsatisfied.  I don’t mean just pizza -- I mean metaphysical
   completion, Weasel, feeling whole.  Having a reason to live
   and something beyond just eating pizza and beer -- because
   that’s hunger too.  But, it doesn’t fit.  The philosopher is
   complaining, so he must be in a bad mood, which means he’s
   probably hungry -- evolution type A.  Health!  But then,
   he’s writing philosophy, which both has the possibility of
   making the situation even worse and make you not want to
   make babies.  Type B!  Sickness!  People, weasel, are
   complex.

   [Pause]
   [In the following lines and later on too, a director may want to
   use lighting and adapt the text in order to make it real-
   time and happening on stage, rather than narrated.]

   I’ve felt Buddha Zero at a few times in my life, though, let
   me say.  One time, when I was in school, the university had
   a shuttle bus that took you around campus so you wouldn’t be
   robbed or raped or god knows.  You know, just for students. 
   This bus was perhaps the slowest, most inefficiently
   designed transportation system ever conceived.  I mean, you
   had to be grateful for it, cause who wants to walk a mile
   and a half when they’re drunk and just want to pass out. 
   But once you got in it, you were hating life.  The most
   circuitous routes, Weasel, going all over every conceivable
   neighborhood, and then dropping people off in the least
   efficient possible manner, scampering all over town helter-
   skelter -- it was awful.  One time, I was sitting there in
   the van, and I’m in there already like 25 minutes, which is
   a good 15 minutes longer than it would’ve taken me to just
   walk.  I have some fat woman on my right, and a smelly
   engineer on my left, and I’m in the middle, and we’re going
   in circles, and the temperature is warm, and all of a
   sudden, this late at night with the streets silent but for
   our noise, Billy Joel “I Love you Just the Way You Are”
   comes on the radio.  Don’t go changing... to try to please
   me... 

   And I cracked.  I felt it happen, Weasel.  I cracked, at age
   22 or whatever.  Breakdown.  I couldn’t take it.  It was all
   I could do not to scream, scream, scream! at the driver, at
   the fat woman oozing into my third of the seat, at William
   Martin Joel, circa 1977, at the corporate suit radio
   programmer who picked this tripe for us to listen to based
   on market research, scream! 

   But at the same time, I knew I wasn’t going to do that.  I
   felt myself dancing right on the edge -- you ever have that
   feeling?  It’s not Romantic -- you just feel that you might
   as well go over the edge, or you might as well stay on this
   side, but either way it’s just a little push that you can
   give yourself in either direction.  So delicate.  And every
   ethic that I used to believe in, they say, go for it, push
   it out, seize the day.  And so, doesn’t that mean go for it! 
   Live balls out!  What would Richard Hell do?  What would
   Walt Whitman do?  What would Henry David Motherfucking
   Thoreau do?!  They would live, live for chrissakes, they
   would suck the marrow out of life-- and so, for god’s and
   Walt’s sake, scream!  All these urges, come on, you
   bourgeois sack of shit, you future lawyer of America, you
   coward, come on, go for it, seize the moment, be a man. 

   And yet, being a man means causing pain to these fat people
   in the shuttle bus.  It means consequences, it means
   embarrassment and humiliation.  It means being impatient,
   petulant, self-centered -- full of desire.  The Buddha came
   to me in that campus van, Weasel.  Right over the Billy Joel
   song.  As soon as I realized the hollow desires that were
   calling me to scream and kick, I was quiet, immediately.  I
   was stone quiet.  Not content -- that was too emotional. 
   Dead.  I was at Buddha Zero.

   I listened to the rest of Just the Way you Are, drinking it
   in.  The electric piano -- you know the riff, Weasel, you
   know the sound I mean, do- do- dooo--- do- do dooo doo-- all
   drenched in sustain and warmth that you can’t even imagine
   playing without a pair of bell-bottom trousers and a smooth-
   haired bowl cut -- God, it was cleaner than I’d ever heard
   before, I felt each note.  It was better than drugs.  And
   then the Bridge, the modulation to relative minor –  I need
   to know that you will always be... the same old someone that
   I knew.  God, what a bridge!  The middle eight in the
   harmonic, Jesus, Billy Joel was a genius. 

   And suddenly, the people around me were suddenly hilarious,
   absurd, art.  Walking Duane Hansen sculptures.  They didn’t
   realize it, it seemed, but they were all soaking it all in
   and spitting it back out, the style, fashion dictated;
   social role, solidified -- they were astonishing.  And the
   shuttle bus circling us throughout town, dancing on the
   pavement, and all of us too obliviously absorbed in our
   destinations to be present.

   That was God, Weasel, that was God in the world right there. 
   I never forgot it.  And it was a God dead to emotion,
   dancing in the material plays of creation.  Our wills?  Our
   desires?  They were a distraction -- like a few dissonant
   notes played by mistake in the back of an orchestra.  They
   weren’t the center of the universe, Weasel, my God, they
   were a little bit of signal noise almost but not quite
   interfering with it. 

   You know what humanity is like, all its art and religion and
   families and sex?  It’s like graffiti on the goddamn Grand
   Canyon, which really would best be left alone.

[PAUSE]
 

   God, this is a hell of a day.  Weasel, this day, it makes a
   man religious.  It makes you feel yourself, feel yourself
   breathing!  Breathing!  You feel yourself just breathing, in
   and out and the air and it’s you and it’s the soot and it’s
   the trees.

   Does the Buddha allow himself these pleasures, I wonder?

   I don’t mean the contemplative pleasure you might as well
   get in a room.  I want to feel like I’m here, I want this to
   be specific, this Natural History Museum, these trees on
   this day in this still-surviving city.

   And I want it to be out there, coming from something real,
   not something in my head.  I want to believe that it’s not
   just me.

   One time, when I was stoned, I had this moment where I
   finally understood the tree-huggers.  You know, literally:
   people who like, hug trees.  It was just upstate, in Bear
   Mountain, I think.  I was stoned, and walking in the woods,
   and I felt the tree next to me, it had a consciousness.  Not
   in terms of sentience, not like it had feelings, not in
   terms of something you or I could understand or
   conceptualize -- but it was just there, and alive, and, in
   a sense, in a sense, breathing.  The tree-huggers hugged
   these trees, I realized, because the trees reassured them
   that they weren’t completely nuts.  That there is a value
   beyond what I feel like, that it isn’t just a matter of
   preferences -- I prefer trees, you prefer pavement.  My God,
   that the trees really are alive, and really are something
   independent, apart from us.  And thank God!  God, how
   repetitive, over and over, to have people wax on and on and
   on about human beings and human suffering and human
   ingenuity and human history and human beauty.  Jesus Christ,
   who the fuck cares?  What, in God’s great big universe, can
   it possibly matter what the patterns of human history are? 
   It’s the inner workings of one species on one planet,
   perhaps an anomaly, in the universe!  What the hell is the
   difference whether history happened or not?

   And yet, of course, of course, we see things from our
   perspective, yes, yes, of course  -- I know, I know you’re
   right, Weasel, but the thing is -- okay, yes, suffering
   matters, whether someone’s enslaved or not, it isn’t
   academic.  But what I mean is, cosmologically. 
   Cosmologically, Weasel.  Cosmologically.  Because if
   everything that any common sense reading of science -- have
   you been to the new planetarium?  Go to the planetarium.  Go
   see how insignificant you truly are.  Really, it’s the most
   anti-Christian building I’ve ever seen, the planetarium. 
   It’s beautiful.  You are truly amazed by the wonders of the
   universe.  You come out religious.  But not Christian.  You
   can’t possibly believe that the one creator of the entire
   universe, which as you’ve just learned is quadrillions of
   light years across and ageless trillions of years old, that
   the one creator of this had a “son” on Earth and cares so
   much about us that “he” -- HE, can you imagine!  the
   ultimate travesty -- God with a human face and a penis!  A
   cock!  Eighty three quadrillion miles across, and God has a
   cock!  And “he” listens to our prayers and affects the
   Romans and the President and, my god, it is just utterly
   unbelievable! 

   So I mean, you go to the Planetarium, and you realize, that
   any common sense reading of science has to be that the
   things that this particular species does can’t possibly
   matter to the rest of the universe.

   And if we’re the only thing that matters, well, what part of
   ‘we’?  What’s the part of us that matters?  Brains?  What if
   we’re 80% animal and 20% brain – which we’re not, but what
   if we are?  Why do we have to indulge the brain at the
   expense of the body? 

   You know what, don’t fuck over any other people -- that’s
   the rule.  Otherwise, who can say?

   Back when we built Athens and the Sphinx, everyone knew we
   were mice compared with the mountains.  Today, you have to
   farther -- out to the country, the Adirondacks or something. 
   You go out there, and you are under the bright starred sky,
   and you know, you know what I knew in the minivan, that you
   do not matter, that there is not a father, son or holy
   spirit except in your imagination -- which is fine, your
   imagination is fine, there’s nothing wrong with that --
   there is not a world between your ears that matters, there
   is not a mountain of needs you have to satisfy that matters
   more than the rainforests.  You can still feel it, even if
   it can’t be read or understood, even if it’s something that
   you have absolutely no means to interpret or comprehend, it
   is something that is there, Weasel, my GOD it is there -- it
   is there.

   [PAUSE]

   But you know, we Jews never did get nature right.  We were
   too worried.  Here come the Israelites, and all of a sudden
   there are these people around, hanging out under these
   beautiful small trees and dancing to them, and they’re
   worshipping statues and killing their babies, and we are
   fucking scared.  Because our God is in the sky -- our God is
   the one God that’s over everything, and here are these
   people saying no no no, there’s a god of this and a god of
   that, and you know, it never really made sense to me until
   I spent some time out of doors and realized that, yeah, you
   know, nature changes.  There are different moods -- there’s
   the one where it’s hot and hot and hot, and the one where
   it’s cold and rainy, or in a canyon, or a forest.

   You know, though, it wasn’t the gods of this and that that
   bothered the Jews, I don’t think, it was that these pagans
   got the planetarium right.  They understood that there was
   something incommensurable out there, that the great Hebrew
   invention of linking up God with morality -- it couldn’t
   work.  It couldn’t make sense.  When you’re out there,
   really feeling, you feel.  You want to dance and sing and
   smoke and drink and fuck and you want to do all sorts of
   things without boundaries.  Boundaries seem human.  But
   that’s all that we were about, the Jews -- boundaries.  It
   wasn’t about good and evil -- that Christian shit came from
   somewhere else.  Persia.  But it was about drawing lines,
   all these lines, everywhere you turn.  Permitted food,
   forbidden food.  Permitted sex, forbidden sex.  Permitted
   work, forbidden work.  Oh my God, every ounce of human
   activity, lines, lines, lines. 

   Thing is, people knew the boundaries were artificial,
   meaning, an artifice, a construction, a craft.  And so of
   course the lines don’t comport with the way the trees
   breathe or the dance you want to dance; you have to dance in
   the “right place,” and “right,” that’s not something out
   there, that’s something you have to build into out-there. 
   It’s totally, it really is, anti-nature.  It’s substituting
   this construction for what’s there already.

   And it’s saying, no, something does matter – people, the way
   we act, matters.  Fucking crazy!  And so, the Torah is
   terrified of ecstasy.  Every time you hear “struck by
   lightning,” it’s someone who was swept up in the moment. 
   They’re mortified of nothing mattering, the way nothing
   matters when you lose yourself and your ideas and lose
   everything that makes you something and you just – you just
   are.  They’re afraid – and I’m afraid.  I mean, that’s why
   it matters whether anything matters.  If there’s no right
   and wrong, man, why are we wearing clothes?  And hey, who
   can condemn some corporate asshole, or Republican freak – I
   mean, hey, the bets are off!

   Now, I mean, you can fudge it.  You can say, well, I go into
   nature and emerge moral.  Wordsworth.  But you could also
   say, why?  Why does nature lead to a certain morality? 
   Maybe it leads to none. 

   What’s funny is, the most real religion I have isn’t what I
   was taught on my bar mitzvah.  It’s what I feel at the
   planetarium, in the park, in the forest.  God I know exists
   precisely when  our ideas about God are most challenged. 

   And yet, you don’t find a church for that.  You definitely
   don’t find a synagogue.  We’re worried.  And we should be.
   Wordsworth was too optimistic.  “One impulse from a vernal
   wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good,
   than all the sages can,” he said.  But it hasn’t worked that
   way!  In Ancient Palestine the people who were into the
   vernal woods killed their children and raped their
   daughters!  Hitler loved his dog!  Osama likes the
   mountains!   I wish it were true that nature made people
   gentle.  Only, it isn’t.  So for that you need lies,
   stories, and more lies.  You need to tell people the lie
   that they matter, that there are Big Things in store for you
   depending on how you behave.  You can’t rely on them to see
   the intrinsic merit in good works or thinking elevated
   thoughts.  You have to hit them with sticks if they don’t do
   them.  And yet, there’s nothing more blasphemous, to me,
   than speaking of God anthropomorphically.  God’s cock.  My
   God, it’s disgusting.  It’s ridiculous.   It does such
   injustice.  It makes me want to strike a rock.  Ahh, Weasel,
   what a day.  What a day!  You are a Preacher, Weasel.

   Yeah, just pop in.  They won’t mind.  That’s why it’s here
   -- so you can use the bathroom.  I’ll wait.  It’ll be a
   second, no, go ahead.  No, go ahead.  It’s a beautiful day! 
   I’ll wait outside!
 

                       *    *    *
 

     2.   The Marrow of Life

   
   I got a phone call one time, right after my father died, and
   it asked for Mr. and Mrs. Levin -- they were the people who
   lived there right before me, but they’d moved out a fucking
   year before this phone call.  So I said to the woman,
   “Goddamit, they haven’t lived here for a year!  And my
   father just died of emphysema, you bitch, so I can’t handle
   any more of these goddam wrong numbers!”
   
   [PAUSE]