07.04.07
His Royal Weirdness (Tom Robbins)
This is an entry dedicated to dispense in bits the wit and peculiar insights of one of my favorite authors,
His Royal Weirdness,
Thomas Eugene Robbins.
–>Our Similarities bring
us to a common ground; Our Differences allow us to be fascinated by each other.
(Mae, Haidee, and Ohna instantly come to mind.)
–>There is no such thing
as a weird human being, it’s just that some people require more understanding
than others.
(You, Mr. Robbins are weird… but it’s alright, I understand
you since I am also one who requires more understanding than others.)
–>There are many things
worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
(Do you hear that George Bush?!)
–>It is never too late
to have a happy childhood.
(Lester’s philosophy? Ha ha ha)
–>To achieve the
impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
(This reminds me of one of Jostein Gaarder’s characters who
said, “I want to think a thought so hard I can’t think it.”)
–>The highest function
of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. The words “make” and
“stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached.
I love you for free.
(Yes, I love you for free… you know who you are.)
–>Hold on to your divine
blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find
out you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means. Indigo.
Indigoing. Indigone.
–>Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
–>We’re
our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from
ourselves.
–>Society had a crime
problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.
–>Teachers who offer you
the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they
would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be
received.
–>The sky was the color
of Edgar Allan Poe’s pajamas.
–>The afternoon passed
more slowly than a walnut-sized kidney stone.
–>When they tell you to
grow up, they mean stop growing.
–>Human beings were
invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to
another.
–>>Philosophers have
argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but
materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or
dancing cheek to cheek.
–>If you believe in
peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, act lovingly; if you believe
every which way, then act every which way, that’s perfectly valid— but don’t go
out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what
you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the
world, change yourself.
ART
–>In the staircase of
life, Art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.
AUTHORITIES
–>In order to be
respected, authority has got to be respectable.
IDEAS
–>Ideas are malleable
and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse—and the better
the idea the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn
into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly
helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at
the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with
the people who are attracted to it, until the last nail breaks, and who
invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly,
sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are
made by masters, dogmas by disciples…
TEQUILA
–>Now tequila may be the
favored beverage of outlaws but that doesn’t mean it gives them preferential
treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the
central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh
dew of the dog lands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and
thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila,
the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying
virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water
of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!
EQUALITY
–>Equality is not in
regarding different things similarly; equality is in regarding different things
differently.
EXISTENCE
–>Should one be shallow
enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon
learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats…
LOVE and PERFECTION
–>The bottom line is
that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and
only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that
makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating
the perfect love.
SOUL
–>If you need to
visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a
dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a
packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software
designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the
Mystery. The one that can never be solved. Data in our psychic program is often
nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply
booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find
acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar
and mundane more than a little embarrassing. More immediately, by waxing
soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic
participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And
on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.
