Since Al Gore spoke at Harvard last fall, the campus has been plied with a new slogan: “Green is the New Crimson.” I guess the university is making a noble gesture of support for color blindness–and, hence, for more traffic accidents. Or maybe they are simply admitting the validity of our suspicions about the Green Parties, with their motley assortment of ruffians, ex-communists and compañeros de viaje. On the other hand green being the new crimson will make it a lot less scary if, as revolutionaries of that ilk usually do, they eventually turn on those they claim to be working to benefit, and vow to make the gutters run green with the sap of the enemy’s chlorophyll.

This may be their hour, since the world is well set on the green-friendly policy of massive impoverishment, having previously adopted the unorthodox but surprisingly uncontroversial economic growth strategy of sucking its own dick, and then being surprised when it didn’t get pregnant. The signs of decay are everywhere. I was watching my hometown team, the Denver Nuggets, play last night, when I realized that although they’re pretty good, they still might be more accurately classified as a horde than a team, and if I saw the lot of them charging down the court at me the proper response might not be to drop back into a zone defense or whatever but to do what the Roman and Chinese Empires did on their northern borders and construct a big wall or fortification of some kind to keep them out. But they’re my hometown team, already inside the gates, so I guess there’s nothing for it but to be cautiously on the side of the sackers and pillagers.

The year begins life the same way it ends, like a person, incontinent, and can’t stop pissing itself. Then, the alternating gloom and sparkle of April feels like living in a divided country, as if from one day to the next meant crossing not just the night but from side of the Berlin Wall to the other. A season which is a natural home for that special disappointment at the collapse of a desire after having already decided to indulge it, the realization of not being hungry or horny after all, which is somehow deflating, extinguishing, like a dragon in the rain. Or the little extra embarrassment that comes from fumbling and taking a long time to do something that’s already embarrassing to begin with.

But soon the summer will come and the wide blue skies with the pulled-tight serenity of a hospital-corner-made-up bed, where, as in love, I don’t care whether I’m swallowing the sunshine or the sunshine is swallowing me. The mind flies up and away, and the body is lucky enough if it gets to follow. I spent my best summer in such a way, traveling around Europe with a friend of mine. We almost had to travel together, or at least in company; me, because it’s the opposite of a recluse’s instinct to fling themselves out into the world, and so I need a push, and he, because of having a distinctive but dependent character, like an adjective.

With money shrinking and the world generally decomposing, such things may become more difficult now. Even Harvard, which often seems not so much a mere wealthy entity as the root from which wealth springs, has been dug out of the ground, skinned, chopped, and exposed. In this so-called economic crisis there seems to be a lack of clear beneficiaries and innocents, as if the Vikings, sailing home and seeing their timber halls and golden roofs, erected and swelled by the smoke and ashes left behind down south, and knowing there would now be no other source of plunder, diligently set to pillaging their own shores.

A Russian historian recently claimed that Russians have historically sold out their freedom in order to conquer a great empire, and one of the government’s own favored media ovaries claimed that Russia had no choice between becoming an empire or a colony. And sure, it has become the largest country in the world, but most of that is uninhabited Arctic desert. I really don’t see how Russia has proved itself any more adept at empire-building, or to have sacrificed itself for any greater gains, than Canada, a country that calls its money the loonie and is so timid that it remained a colony for five decades after its colonizer had ceased bothering to govern it. But Russians must have convinced themselves that they possess a wondrous and priceless domain, otherwise they wouldn’t have piled up mountains of tanks and bombs to defend with such great vigor their birch trees and mud. They’re almost as bad as North Korea, about whom I recently saw a news item alleging “Tension on Borders”. That’s basically all North Korea is, a border plus tension.

People like Mitch Albom aren’t armchair philosophers but philosopher-armchairs. The sportswriter Bill Simmons said that a rivalry like Duke-North Carolina doesn’t depend on the people involved, that it’s all about the buildings and uniforms. Well, after all, the same thing has been working for the Catholic Church for hundreds of years now. Hearing and seeing the steady flow of Tyrekes and Dajuans in college basketball, I’ve realized that being a letter in a ghetto name must be a terrifying ordeal, never knowing what you signify or into what dissolute company you will next be thrown, jangling against your companions without pre-constructed harmony like chimes in the wind. If I could get full by pantomiming the motions of eating, I would have found my way to God.

I believe that no one has simply had the courage to dive into the thicket and find out whether God is male or female, and I believe that beliefs are too serious a thing to be taken seriously. Winter has become a form of nostalgia. When a civilization is smashed something is crushed too in a grain of sand. Wind is the only part of the landscape companionable enough to travel with me. A sign in the dining hall the other day encouraging everyone to eat mushrooms enticed by listing all the delicious metals they contain. Walks on the street are replies. I stand between two cultures the way the Great Wall does. My dream is to climb inside a vase, protected forever by the sanctity of pretension.

I was not protected at all when I tried to fly into Denver yesterday in the face of exceedingly quarrelsome weather. The wind had filled the sky past the breaking point and broke forth in incessant heaves and blows. It kicked up so much dust on the ground that the whole plain looked on fire and smoking. For a target as wide as the earth the ground nonetheless seemed as elusive and coy a target as a minnow, as the plane lurched and danced and jerked back like a drunk trying to lunge in for a kiss on a reluctant date. There was an abortive attempt to go to Cheyenne to refuel; apparently the pilots ultimately decided, as I did, that braving the cyclone and the whirlwind still beats Wyoming. After twenty more minutes of buckling and disputation with the elements the plane headed to Colorado Springs. I wondered whether the situation would really be better there since it’s only like 70 miles away, but a sort of magic pall descended as we approached. I suspect, after all, that God favors Colorado Springs more than other cities. Though I might have reconsidered the in retrospect perhaps ill-advised decision to wear my “Jesus is my health insurance” shirt had I known we were going there. We eventually got back to Denver not too much behind schedule, though not before the airline people had given themselves the chance to make and break numerous silly promises. They kept saying everything would take 10 minutes: 10 minutes to land, 10 minutes to make it to Cheyenne, 10 minutes to Colorado Springs, 10 minutes to refuel on the ground. 10 minutes must be the airline version of the Five Year Plan: not so much a specific temporal prediction as a vision of a golden time in the near future when all good things will come true. If only I could get an airline to predict that I have 10 minutes to live I would be greatly reassured about my health and longevity.

A wet snow falls but blows over and fades from the ground within a couple of hours. It’s sort of like being invaded by Guatemala. Winter disease hangs over the whole city like some kind of minor Puritan retribution. God stands in the kitchen, not in the streets. I see an old beggar lurching from side to side down the street without bending his knees, as if a patter of earthquakes were shaking him forward. A human alarm clock, seeming to exist only to mark the passing of time, but slowly shorting out from being submerged in fluid for too long. Seeing the bums in doorways and alcoves makes the street appear like the barbarian sack of Rome in reverse, as if the gray walls of the city had advanced into the forest and were pillaging the ruins of the tribal camp. Which after all is basically the history of the United States. The best thieves don’t subtract anything, they add themselves. Watching the bums, I think that they may yet, like the Romans, wind up converting the conquerors to their own language and way of life. The world advances daily towards the nomadism of the homeless.

I notice that those disclaimers at the end of movies and TV shows claiming that no animals were harmed in the making never see it as worthwhile to reassure their audience that no people were either. On the other hand, not having harmed any animals is often the best thing that can be said about a movie, and more than can be for God’s creation as a whole, although it could of Satan’s realm, since animals are not supposed to have souls to be tortured. In fact, in the interest of putting their best foot forward, that is probably the message inscribed over the gate of Hell. I find it unlikely that there would be something like “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” It would be too demoralizing for the employees to see on arriving at work every day, particularly as they would likely be the only ones to see it, since Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, and humanity along with it, is being dragged through time backwards, leaving a pile of ruins behind it (which is more or less how I entered ski school when I was five), and so cannot well see the shape of the afterlife to come until it’s through the gate. Anyway, “Abandon all hope” could be written just as well at the gate of Heaven as of Hell, unless God has started governing more democratically than we’ve been led to think.

It’s probably best to only profess a religion that you no longer believe in. You’re no longer a living tree with petrified bark, but only taking shelter under one. And while the dick may not be excited enough anymore to fill the hole, it was once, enough to break the seal and sow its seed, so you still have a stake therein.

You know how news anchors have lots of sheets of paper scattered around on their desks that they shuffle periodically even though they read everything that they have to say off the Teleprompter? That’s like the Bible for those that talk to God direct. Not given this advantage, I’m left to look up through the black branches of the trees, the wrinkles and cracks on the face of the winter sky. Mind you, this is just my posture of boredom, since without the divine Teleprompter the Gospels for me is a book whose authors, after telling their story once, thought it was so good that they decided to tell it three more times. It’s a good thing writers of bloated biographies haven’t thought of this. Then again, the life of the Savior, even with being told four times, only gets 175 pages in the New Oxford Bible, whereas the life of Mahler apparently merits several thousand despite only being told once.

In any case, I ask spiritual questions not when looking up at the sky but when beating small children, since I feel the most kinship to God then. And I ask myself: when will the loan come due? Because in giving over the earth originally to a band of asset-less nomadic maniacs out of Africa God made a loan that was decidedly subprime. Fortunately a total lack of scruples can be just as good as solid equity and, after burning off all the other branches on the hominid family tree above the level of advanced ape, humanity was able to claim possession of every inch of earth not in the clutches of penguins and conceive itself a spiritual being, with even its most sordid rivalries mediated by language and governed by laws, since all the rivals now came from the same species. In any event, God, not having been born the day before, but rather the previous week at the very least, had already protected himself in this investment by collating all this accumulation of sin along with the original debt and off-loading it to a Special Purpose Entity of his own: Jesus.

I don’t wear a watch, but I would wear one with the back plate facing out.

In their college dorm rooms I notice that girls generally block out every available surface under some sort of coral reef of fluffy pinkness, as if they were trying to establish an outer limit or ideal form of cutsiness that could endure in its little cubby-hole of eternity, detached from its environment and plowing through the surrounding darkness forever like an ark. A cubby-hole of eternity is where Friedrich Nietzsche is now, beyond good and evil at last, where we will all no doubt arrive when we reach his advanced state–of decomposition. This might be a golden age for him, since now, between marketability of particular skill set and general economic conditions, most philosophers will probably get a chance to philosophize with a hammer. And the eternal return has something in common with freedom in America today, the freedom of satellites in orbit, whose unobstructed velocity at every moment is straight out to the stars and away from the sun they circle around.

Why do Palestinians and Israelis incessantly contend for possession of the same meager little plot of land, when it’s those who have never seen it or can only peek at it only over the boundary fence of exile who get to possess, in image form, an infinitely more beautiful Holy Land? I’m not sure you can quite call it a real contest, since when Israel shoots rockets for two days hundreds die, while even after years of practice the Palestinian rockets still fly so errantly that I don’t see why they don’t just turn them around and aim them downwards at the launching stand. After all, that’s the only way to be sure that a missile will hit its target. I suppose that’s what the self-detonation is about. But I don’t get why the beards are all in such a rush to blow themselves up and ascend to God’s Kingdom, after seeing that the dusty brown jail that everyone is fighting for is the best set-up He can apparently arrange for His favorite peoples.

I saw an apartment building last night with one single balcony still strung up with Christmas lights, the rest of the building black and unlit. It reminded me of Lebanon. Or so I would imagine from a distance; I haven’t visited the real Lebanon, as it strikes me as a bit like leaping energetically into a pile of scissors. Whole civilizations have come trampling down upon that little bit of coastline more than once, sweeping along vast languages and religions, but not sure what they should bring to hand to attack it, kind of like me, as an inexperienced Mortal Kombat arcade player in the mid ’90’s, flipping through a range of weapons and finally just mashing the controls all at once. I always thought of the Holy Land as the few dredged-up golden flakes from the river that glitter in your hand, after the sunshine on the surface made you think the whole thing awash in gold.

In any case, the languages won’t last. The different languages in my mind barely all hang on, and that’s a considerably less war-torn region than the Middle East. They’re like sandals tied to the protruding blades of a straw roof on a rainy day, and every tug on one when you want to use it threatens to detach some whole section. I have a feeling that the tongue is a fish trying to slither free of any attachment, any sound that ties it to a fixed identity, but its root binds it down to its place of origin, and the sounds of that place’s language are those that the captive fish makes in banging against the walls of its cage.

The religions, on the other hand, might go longer, but all the immortal gods so far have gotten outlived by their own holidays.

If Jesus had survived to get old, would his career have turned out like Mick Jagger’s rather than Jimi Hendrix’s? Would he have started to tour the world repeating his biggest hit miracles? If he tried to perform a new one would his followers have started booing and yelling out: “The new stuff sucks! Wine into water! Wine into water!” After reading the Gospels would they have bored each arguing that the acoustic version of the Sermon on the Mount was way better? Or maybe, with the involuntary moderation of old age, he would have given up the orgiastic weekends of amateur alcohol production and curing of (the perhaps resultant) blindness and become a recluse, like a piece of paper consumed by fire curling up at the edges rather than, as happened, a too-long folded up poster pinned open on the wall with thumbtacks. In any case, fortunate as his fall into imperfect life may have been, it’s probably best that he got caught on that two-armed tree branch rather than crashing any farther down the tree of life. A savior with a tail might still get displayed in the position of honor above the mantlepiece, but probably as a trophy head rather than on a crucifix.