I am a Very Important Person, and the Situation is Dire Indeed

A good collection of the Tim Young's work has now been published at the Shunpiker Wiki page.

Poems here.

Prose here.

Quoting here from "How Not to Start a Cult."

"Look," she said, "We are on the Titanic, and we are going down. We are all going down together, get it? Now you can be one of those dumbasses running into the staterooms, stuffing their pockets with valuables, or you can be like that guy who just got into one of the boats reserved for women and children and refused to get out.."

She paused and took my hands in hers, fixing me with her hazel eyes, "Or you can be like the members of that glorious band. The ones who kept playing music through the mayhem....kept pumping out beauty even when they knew all was lost. Now who do you want to be?"

I took a deep breath, kissed her hands, and said, "Couldn't I just be one of those Swedish guys in the movie? They lost their tickets in the poker game, and never made it on the boat." She punched me in the arm, hard.

Claire did have a scheme for raising some funds for the cult. We had to cover printing costs, cat food, and donuts, after all. She had recently returned from a trip to Bangkok, and had brought back a big bag of enormous, brightly colored hats made by mountain tribes in the north. They had little beads around the crown, a large star pattern on the top, and in the center a tiny tassel that stood straight up at attention. They were beautiful.

Claire's idea was to sell them on the internet as anti-depressant devices. She had printed up an instruction pamphlet that read as follows:

 When one is feeling glum, blue or downcast, or if the situation seems particularly
desperate, bleak or hopeless, do the following:   

 1) Enter a room with a large mirror and a straight backed chair facing it. (Nota bene:
  standing in front of the bathroom mirror may be used if this is the only option.)
2) Dim the lights, or light candles.
3) Sit in front of the large mirror with the Hat on your lap.
4) With back straight, eyes focused on the mirror, slowly place the Hat on your head.
  (Here Claire had drawn a diagram with arrows showing precisely how this move was to
  be executed.
5) Then say the following: "I am a very serious and important person, and the situation
  is dire indeed."
6) Keep the Hat on for as long as required.
7) One may repeat this treatment as often as needed with no side effects, other than a
  drastic deflation of ego and a radical realignment of priorities.   

We sold out in a week.

I've had a lot of great friends. Few were genuine wizards, fewer still Kali worshippers. Almost none were closeted lemurs. I am reading these poems today- and they recall me to my duty to Art in a country where the lawyers outnumber the poets 50-1.

What is this duty? Paint bright beauties hopelessly on infected wounds. Cut, to heal.

This position was of course disproved by rigorous criticism long ago. Tim would say: Hail, Rigorous Critic! Have some pie!*

A contributor to this blog described our late friend very well: if any man alive could have gotten him to believe in God, it would have been Tim.

Last year, The Viceroy and I performed a small funeral ceremony for Tim at the mouth of the Elwah on the Olympic Pennisula. It began in town when we went to the Dollar Store for supplies. ( I have often commented that the Dollar Store - or any craft store - occupies a place between the living and the dead. It seemed appropriate.)

We found a basket, filled with candles and honorary items. Among these was the Power Bear - the Viceroy's secret sports totem, a small reflective key chain aluminum and plastic Safety Bear, with it's secret words.

We walked out to the mouth of the Elwah river, hiking to the bellow of the digeridoo. We launched the basket into the river, drank a surprisingly good bottle of ordinary wine, dumped another into the green waters. Not the Ganges, but he'd been there already, in flames on the pyre of the cleansing fires of Kali.

It stayed a while, caught in whirlpool, unwilling to leave until it's flame extinguished. A friend later pointed out that the digeridoo calls the spirit close. I do not believe in spirits.

It ended with a joke - a pickup truck pulled up on the far bank playing Aerosmith. Maybe it was Journey. Some bloated classic rock. A joke. Jocko-serious, a phrase I learned from Tim.

The Serious Joke.

*Declare your own holiday.
Eat pie.
Have phone sex with a friend
while eating pie.
Tell the truth when it
scares you
just for the thrill of it,
then have some more pie.
Dream up a different
festival for tomorrow
and the day after that,
but always include pie.