KEEP THE SABBATH WITH ME

weekly dispatch from hell

My next door neighbor in New Orleans wanted me to join Hillel. When I said no, he said that’s OK, all you have to do is keep the Sabbath. He 's right. I've tried. I kept it for seven years when I lived in the Ozarks. The Buffalo River doesn't allow motor boats. You float in your canoe for 120 miles of white water and let the dragon flies mate on your back. Politics you talk with your friend, a retired school teacher, the only other Democrat in the county. You mostly nod your head in agreement at the unfairness of it all and have whiskey on his porch and watch the sunset. Those were the days of regular unfairness in an America when you could nod your head and sigh now and then. The survivalist a mile up the road would have gladly cut off that head if you nodded the wrong way, but he was felon who lived off his wife's disability checks. The hill he dug for his survival trailer filled with bean cans and guns, collapsed on the tin roof, and buried his computer.

When I left the hills of the Buffalo River the TV came on and the world came rushing in. The techno-termites were hollowing the republic. Millions of people were fired from their jobs by a baseball-hatted tee-shirt-clad large autistic ketamin'd Muskrat lording it over the suited vassals of a crazy new emperor. This couldn't have been better rendered by Rabelais or Daumier.

This is the world? Keep the Sabbath? Who are you kidding? People are living in a trash heap of mangled history. The melting pot is boiling over. The salad has e-coli. The all-you-can-eat buffet steams listeria, salmonella, norovirus and rotavirus. To enter this paradise you need a gold Faberge egg stamped by an AI border agent. Emma Lazarus on the New Statue of Liberty reads, Welcome ye gilded thieves murderers psychos and sadists to the New Gilded World.

Could anything worse ruin my Sabbath? Hardly. What to do short of calling up Blake’s angels of wrath? Another substack? Another fish in the ocean? The pandemic squeezed people into words, the words spilled out on screens, verbal streams that used all the channels of communication. Phones ring in synch with the sirens of ambulances and police cars. People are submerged in the ocean of words, humanesque fish that do what fish do: eat each other, fight for attention, and waste everyone's savings of memory, money or empathy. I moved from the wilderness of the Ozarks to New York City where there are as many people as there are trees in the hills. In New York the verbal ocean is at its deepest and loudest. Are our bodies hardware driven by language? Do we even need them now that fake bodies speak as well or better than we do? Was Auschwitz an avantgarde? That is the question the smart fish, the octopi, are asking. That is the question the film "Fish Have no Psychiatrists: A Day with Andrei Codrescu," is asking. Directed and shot by Julian Semilian on the day I moved in New York City, it is full of electric eels. What's going on?