Sean Rima

Hey, there!  My new book of poems, "Wild West Show" is now available at this link:  http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/wild-west-show/8462899.  Check it out!

              What is good art?

            The question hangs in my head like the gray rain falling through the trees, my mood apprehensive on this damp and drippy Monday morning.  Within the next couple of weeks, I’m going to release my first mass-marketed book of poems, entitled “Wild West Show”.  It’s my first serious venture into self-publishing, and the first time my stuff will be available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.  Up to now, I’ve been satisfied with the odd magazine publication, and handing out to my immediate friends the latest poems Xeroxed and spiral-bound at the local Kinko’s.  Now, I’m sending my baby out into the world, into the Deep Dark Woods, and I can’t stop asking myself, “Is this good art?”

            For over twenty years, all I’ve ever wanted to accomplish as a poet is to produce one decent book of poems about America, and of my bizarre journey through it.  The idea was to capture, in verse, the dual nature of the country, of its beauty and its ugliness, its magnificence and its tawdriness, in equal measure, as honestly as I could.  Though I’d been writing for years, I don’t believe I really began writing this book until the day after September 11, 2001.

            On that day, a fuse was blown in my head, a righteous fire was lit, and the poems started pouring out of me, and the wave of it didn’t subside until just recently, upon my arrival in Texas.  Of the hundreds of poems I’ve written since 2001, I found 80 pages that seemed to accomplish the original goal of “Wild West Show”.  Of course, on any artistic journey, there are surprises that occur along the way, things you cannot predict in the intention of it.  With this cycle of poems, I found that the more objective and honest I was in describing America, the more objectively and honestly I tended to describe myself.  In this way, the book became strangely personal, and even, at times, a little uncomfortable for me to read.  I haven’t the faintest idea how other people will react to it. 

            And so, in my apprehension, I’ve been staring at the damn thing for days, fretting over the question, “Is it good art?”  I don’t know.  I have a sense that it is, but sensing something to be true is still a far slog from conviction. 

            Without question, it is profane, disturbing, hilarious, romantic, grotesque, elegant, insipid, brave, cowardly, brilliant, stupid, horny, and raw.  If I sit here, and with remote control in hand, I surf through all 900 channels on the Idiot Box, I will see every single one of those words personified, as reflected back at me from the funhouse mirror of American pop culture.  If I’ve captured even one thin slice of that culture in these poems, then I guess I’ve done my job, and should stop obsessing on this crap.

            Is it good art?

            No more or less, I suppose, than “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” “Star Trek,” Girls Gone Wild! and “The Grapes of Wrath,” if that makes any sense.  You tell me.  I look forward to your critique.

            Whatever the hell, I’m going out for a smoke.

SR.

        There are two kinds of crazy, and only two kinds.

        There’s the magnificent kind, the fun kind, the kind born out of a certain measure of narcissism, with just the right amount of raw talent and drive sprinkled into the mix.  Squeeze it through the cracked prism of a crappy childhood, or divorce, or heartache, and what shoots out the other side is a backwards talking midget in a smoking jacket, dancing next to a walking dead chick in a blood red room.  You get “Twin Peaks”.  You get David Lynch, a rambling nerd whose personal issues and twisted nightmares have manifested themselves into some of the coolest, most disturbing, and yet purely elegant works of cinema the 20^th century ever managed to produce.  Crazy, yes.  Totally freaking bonkers.  But weirdly honest.  Mystical.  Revealing.  A dark mirror, held up to us all.  And gazing into the funhouse glare of it, you want desperately to look away, but you can’t, you won’t, and in the looking, you cannot help but feel expanded, despite yourself.  You are more than you were.  That’s the crazy of David Lynch, Beethoven, and Vincent Van Gogh.  It is also the crazy of John the Baptist, Henry David Thoreau, and Mahatma Gandhi.  That kind of crazy never goes out of style, and there’s never, ever enough supply to match the demand.

        The second kind of crazy isn’t quite so much fun.  This generic brand of Bonkers Biscuit doesn’t rise in the fiery hearth of an artist’s soul, far from it.  This is the kind you’ll discover in the cold body sweat of a common, ordinary douchebag you wouldn’t look twice at.  The featureless douchebag sitting in the corner of the restaurant, or passing by you at the library.  The zitty, jerky douchebag renting Star Trek IV and “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” at the video store.  The unremarkable douchebag whose existence in this world is so mind-numbingly dull, he must contrive for himself a whole new reality in which to live. 

         Call it Planet Douchebag. 

        Think of it as another dimension, a reverse reality existing alongside our own at a slightly higher vibration.  And in the basement apartment of Planet Douchebag, Our Hero, quietly, to himself, is both the victim and the savior.  His persecution is unrelenting, stalked as he is by the vast forces of darkness and shadow agents massed against him, including (but not limited to) the IRS, FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, LDS, PGA, Homeland Security, George Bush, Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Military Industrial Complex, the Corporations, Bristol Palin, the Catholic Church, the Communists, Capitalism, the Freemasons, the Skull and Bones, Benny Hinn Ministries, the Girl Scouts, Jay Leno, Nickelodeon, the Screen Actor’s Guild, the L.A. Times, Joel Osteen, Cheech and Chong, the Association for Retarded Citizens, Ghost Hunters International, the Dewey Decimal System, the lingerie section at Wal-Mart, Bank of America, the Home Depot, Starbucks, Robert DeNiro, Playboy Enterprises, the mailman, the UPS guy, Las Vegas, and the Goth chick with the big knockers working the counter at the comic book store.  Even Alex Jones could be a replicant, inserted into the general population by the evil Tyrell Corporation, programmed by his designers to misinform the public and keep a watchful eye on the douchebags.  Ultimately, it’s the douchebags and the deeply boring goobers of America who will save ‘our way of life’, for they and they alone are savvy enough to see through this complex nettle of lies within lies and dark conspiracy.   

        Of course, the further out to sea one drifts on the riptides of The Second Kind Of Crazy, the deeper the plot thickens, until even one’s own thoughts are questioned.  Is there a chip in my head?  Are they watching me, even in the bathroom?  Have the IRS implanted miniature DVR recorders in my cat’s eyes?  Is my ex-wife a robot?  The wider the drift, the deeper the questions, until the paranoia is so pervasive, all other realities are lost, fading into the horizon like the last sight of land.  At this point, there is no option left but counter-action.  The truth of it arrives, perfect and crystalline.  He sees the path before him.  In his douchebag mind, he knows, he understands, that the only way to save the innocent morons of America is to burn down his own house, and fly an airplane into the side of a building.  Then everything will change.  The corrupt system will come tumbling down, and in the smoldering rubble of it, a new society will rise like a phoenix from the ashtray.  And in this fresh, young world, they’ll build marble douchebag statues in his honor, and produce douchebag documentaries about his boring and insipid life.  They’ll get his high school girlfriend on-camera, gazing mournfully into the lens, and blubbering through her tears, “I treated him so horribly!  I never should have left him, and broke his heart!  How was I to know he was going to save the entire human race?  I’m so…ashamed!”

        Whatever the hell.  I suppose in order to enjoy the First Kind of Crazy, we must endure the Second, and the odd douchebag coming along with a bad wire in his head, a Bic lighter, and a tank full of gas.  In the words of Job--his crops gone, his herds scattered, his house trashed, his daughters sold into slavery, and his head and feet ravaged by scabs, blood, and pus:  “Shall we accept only good from God, and not trouble?”

        Sitting here, in my bathrobe, smoking cigarettes and watching “Twin Peaks”, I am unsettled by the flashing thought that there’s probably only a sprinkle of atoms separating these two kinds of crazy…and at the age of 42, I’m still not sure which team I’m playing for.  Oh, I’m not seeing nano-spiders crawling up my pant leg to insert a microchip in my brain, and I’m fairly certain Alex Jones is not a replicant.  But then again, I do follow the teachings of a two thousand year old hippy who walked on the water, healed the lepers, and leapt up from the cemetery after being nailed to a tree…?

        No, that’s not crazy, that’s “faith.”  I am perfectly sane.

        And I wouldn’t hurt a fly.

        I’m sure of it.

        sr.

Copyright 2010 by Sean Rima.

              Just watched an interesting bit on “The Simpsons”.

            The camera panned out from Homer’s yellow head, to the whole family sitting on the couch, to their house, to Springfield, continuing way, way up until the whole Earth is shown.  And then we move further out, beyond the solar system, to the edge of the galaxy.  Then we’re looking at a soft rain of galaxies, until there are so many, the countless galaxies look like snow.  Soon, the millions and billions and trillions of galaxies begin to form subatomic particles, which immediately start to bond with one another.  The galaxy-atoms continue linking up until they stitch together the double helix of a strand of DNA.  The strands interweave with other strands, becoming molecules, the molecules lumping into mass, the mass becoming organs, bones, and skin.  The skin turns a deep, crayon yellow, and, once again, we are looking at Homer Simpson’s head.

             Beyond being a fine example of some truly clever animation, the cartoon begs the question:  What if all we know, and all we are, and all we’ve ever been, is just a speck of a speck of subatomic matter hidden away in the genetic code of Homer Simpson’s head?  If we accept this to be true, then we also must accept that our known universe could also be a bit of dark matter in a nugget of two-day-old gopher crap.  Or perhaps in the cluster of molecules lying at the edge of the nipple of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s left breast?  Moreover, if our entire reality, our known universe, our paradigm, is just one of countless paradigms coexisting at relative subatomic vibrations, could the whole mess of it be one continuously contracting and expanding thing, and could that thing be God?

            If so, does the idea of it diminish God, in any way?

            If not—and I freely admit that I believe it doesn’t—then, in a sense, God gets even bigger, and we become smaller than the smallest small our best physicists and theologians have ever contemplated. 

            Now, that’s a bit of perspective I can use. 

            Makes getting cut-off in traffic or losing your parking space seem deeply trivial in the great, shifting expanse of it all.  Hell, makes World War II seem trivial.  If nothing else, it forces us to us to re-catalogue our earthly concerns and worries into the smallest boxes possible in the cosmic closet, and sheds a ray of neon on the rather depressing book of Ecclesiastes, whose author warns, “This, too, is meaningless, a chasing after the wind…”  Really, kids.  All of it, meaningless.  Even “Avatar” in Hi-Def Super 3-D on an Eyemax movie screen.  Even, by God, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts.

            Now, this next thought will really boggle the crap out of that fruit and nut bowl you call your conscious mind:  It is an accepted truth under contemporary Laws of Physics that most of Everything is really just empty space, in that we can’t determine what lies between the subatomic particles, and so we call that stuff Empty Space.  But what if it’s not empty at all?  What if…what if…thoughts and emotions have mass?  What if the soul has energy, a physical energy that acts upon all that so-called empty space we assume exists between the atoms of The Great Big Giant, a.k.a. God?  Would not the two most powerful forces for either creation or destruction in this vast reality be, in fact, love and hate?  In other words, if your day sucks, then doesn’t everyone’s day suck, whether you’re aware of it or not?

            Jesus, my head hurts.  Glad I wrote all that down, before it slipped away.

            What was I talking about?  I’ve forgotten already.

            Oh, look.  “Jackass 2” is coming on in fifteen minutes!

            Okay, gotta run.  I want to record this.

             sr.

 Copyright 2010 by Sean Rima.

PORN STAR Chick? or his wife ELIN? You decide.