from "Another Roadside Attraction"

by Tom Robbins

It occurred to me that Catholicism is a duality of good and evil, that it is a microcosm of secular society. One cannot hate society, because within society there are loving and lovable individuals. Similarly, it wasn't the Church I hated, because the Church contained the bravery and enlightenment of many individual priests and nuns and saints.

The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living--busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing--they are busy taking over. Soon their sour tentacles are around everything: our governments, our economies, our schools, our publications, our arts and our religious institutions. Men who lust for power, who are addicted to laws and other unhealthy abstractions, who long to govern and lead and censor and order and reward and punish; those men are the turds of Moloch, men who don't know how to love, men who are sickly afraid of death and therefore are afraid of life: they fear all that is chaotic and unruly and free-moving and changing--thus, as Amanda has said, they fear nature and fear life itself, they deny life and in so doing deny God. They are presidents and governors and mayors and generals and police officials and chairmen-of-the-boards. Thay are crafty cardinals and fat bishops and mean old monsignor masturbators. They are the most frightened and most frightening mammals who prowl the planet; loveless, anal-compulsive control-freak authoritarians, and they are destroying everything that is wise and beautiful and free. And the most enormous ironic perversion is how they destroy in the name of Christ who is peace and God who is love.

High School Graffiti Art

JAMAAL THE PIMP
/BINGO THE NEW
KING
"I LOVE FAT
BITCHES"

(Found in the hallway of Wilson High School, Portland, OR)

"Security"

by Hunter S. Thompson, 1955 (age 17)

Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security had not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the majority) that we recieve the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must be laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement thay can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night at what could have been, but who wake at dawn to their now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a tread-mill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed on the shore and merely existed?

from "Ballad of One Doomed to Die"

by Federico Garcia Lorca, 1924-7
(translated by Langston Hughes)

On the twenty-fifth of June
they said to Amargo:
-Now, you may cut, if you wish,
the oleanders in your courtyard.
Paint a cross on your door
and put your name beneath it,
for hemlock and nettle
shall take root in your side
and needles of wet lime
will bite into your shoes.
It will be night, in the dark,
in the magnetic mountains
where water-oxen drink
in the reeds, dreaming.
Ask for lights and bells.
Learn to cross your hands,
to taste the cold air
of metals and of cliffs
because within two months
you'll lie down shrouded.