Day: February 28, 2008

What It’s LIke

/ Steve Patterson / Leave a comment

It’s like slow-motion, the rest of the world passing ’round you, oblivious, in blurred color, you in black and white.

It’s a piece of a music like a razor, flashing out of nowhere, and you can’t stop bleeding memories.

It’s not being able to come down.

It’s not all right.

It’s aching with all your heart for a soft, warm summer night, sitting outside and drinking good wine with old friends, and all you see is snow on frozen ground. It’s slowly watching your friends lose interest.

It’s yearning for things that will never come again.

It’s not being sure, at any given time, whether or not you can really keep it together.

It’s everyone wanting things you can’t give.

It’s knowing things others never will and which you can never truly explain.

It’s like nothing anyone can really do or say, despite their best intentions.

It’s like silence.

It’s like this.

They Walk Among Us

/ Steve Patterson / 2 Comments

Oh dear…now I’ve done it.

We’ve recently had a dust-up with some local censors putting the screws to a middle school play about–of all ironies–bullies. The upshot, some parents whined, the school administrators caved, the play gets cancelled. Typical fascism.

Anyway, Bob Hicks, former lead theatre critic for The Oregonian, wrote a perfectly well reasoned piece on the subject:

arts-scatter

Which was fine, except I, in full-puffed gills, Keith Richards waving a ratchetknife, take-no-prisoners mode, took exception with Bob’s statement that “censors have the best intentions.”

Expect heavy rain.

Here’s my response, along with the illustration I would have posted had art-scatter had that option:

I know you’re a gracious, polite guy, Bob. I can be too. But sometimes I’m not, and this is one of those times: censors do not have the best intentions.

What they have is a jones for power. They crush those who disagree the slightest with their orthodoxy because nothing must interfere with the fragile little snowglobes in which they make their fragile nests. Here’s what the pecksniffs, hypermoralists, and others bloated with a delusional sense of importance teach kids: pretend to be creative and we’ll praise you and make you feel all cuddly inside, and everything will be mondo groovy, and we’ll give you a brown felt unicorn and a cup of cocoa. Color outside the lines, and we’ll make you you wish you’d never been born, you snotty little clot of rancid waste.

Censors are agents of the thought police.