Since father & son considered this particular weekend their private,
Anti Mardi Gras festival, the elder declared:
“Time to strip away the mask and face our own surprising face;
I threatened to tell you  --  and now we’ll see,
                                 that no paper pater I be:
 

        Trying to wake-up is the struggle to make something out of nothing,”
                      and the neighborhood brass band began tuning up
                              in preparation for the impending parade.
 
 

“I have broached this matter before, obliquely and subtly,
but the days of youthful ginersnaps and childish mimicry have fled,
(least they’d better fled!), and it is for us to confront these
thirteen lucky words head-on and dead-eyed,”
he suddenly leaned close in to the lad’s face and squintedly sneered:
“Sayyyy --  didn’t you once play your evil twin on
The Young And The Unbearable?!” a query which thankfully
went unanswered due to the increasing din in the street;
father took a deep breath and raised the volume (not to mention quality)
of his speech to match their surroundings and continued.
 

“The one fact you never find in all the words of all the would-be-ers
regarding this curious conceit of our family tradition is that:
      Trying to wake-up is the struggle to make something out of nothing –

the truth is: you are not trying to change a mental state of sleep
to one of being awake;
for a ‘condition’ to exist, there must be something to be IN the condition --  and there is no such ‘thing’ in you to be there;
the condition IS the something,
(or for the benefit of evil twins on the opposite coast:
the something IS the condition).
 

The Invisible Man struggling to keep himself from having to face his actual condition by an endless expression of concern over his wardrobe –
that’s who you and all amateurs at this are,
(not to mention everybody else on the planet)” –
                      a flagboy ran by --  could the indians be far behind.
 
 
 

“A common rebuke amongst mortals is: ‘Control yourself!’ --
indeed, the distinguishing mark twix thinking-man and instinctive-beast
is his singular ability to control his behavior.

To be civilized rather than savage is to have yourself --  Under control,
so too to be awake & enlightened rather than asleep & confused:
but how is such a thing possible: how can YOU control YOUR self?
If your SELF is subject to YOU controlling it –
its condition would already be as men say it should be.
If water had the potential to teach-itself, or make-itself  --   dry,
it would perforce BE dry --  and not wet” --
                                      (the tubas were getting louder).
 

“How can a person who is asleep shake their self awake? –
how can a mind that sleeps --  wake itself up?
One of mind’s most significant features for the few is that
it consistently looks for and expects to find --  wisdom --   always outside itself.
By nature, the human mind, wants-to-know,
and by instinct does it believe that what it does not know,
some other human mind does –
and some other human mind can know how to grow corn and build a mill,
but no other human mind knows anything about the human mind,
or about any of the multitude of things it has invented
that you do not know.
But those ordinary minds outside our family are forbidden to realize this;
for if they did, civilization would collapse!
No more culture, no more art, no education, religion, history --
                         all story telling --  shot to hell!
 
 

To help keep man from having to face the fact that
his ‘self’ is but the anthropomorphism of thought,
his mind is programmed to believe that anything he wants to know,
and does not know  --  some other person’s mind does.
(And you think I can be abstruse & elusive, [a dance team long before your time]).
 

Regarding all matters intangible --
no human who’s ever lived ever knew any more about any of them
than you do this very instant: a bullet proof, wells-fargo-fact;
man knows this is so, but is routinely made to act like he believes someone else
CAN know the very things he knows men cannot know.
I tell you my boy, it’s enough to make a drummer get a haircut.”
                                (And speaking of that).
 
 
 

No matter what they call it; how they verbally cut it,
how they try to camouflage it,
trying to: awaken, enlighten, or ‘change’ in any other described fashion,
your condition of consciousness, mind, spirit or self
is the snipeshooters struggle to make something out of nothing;
to sew the invisible man a new suit and thus bring him into being;
I swear, it’s enough to make a blind man on a float
shout to the essence of life as he passes: ‘Show us your tits!’”
 

The elder slowed momentarily (as he would sometimes pretend to do),
tossed the boy his antonymous costumes &  pushed him toward the door:
“Yeah, I know: it would be real easy to take what I have said as metaphorical,
but you would be strikingly in error;
what I described is plain, simple, clear and obvious fact --
if you persistently look right at it, and have the potential to ever see it;
all of the thoughts, plans, methods, tricks, ideas & schemes you have regarding changing the condition of your consciousness from one of distorted sleep
to enlightened awakening
is nothing more or less than an attempt to create something totally out of nothing” --   he shoved the kid out into the street
as they joined the secret second line –
“Note that I have not said that it is impossible,
but I double-damn garuntee you that it is  --  until you realize for yourself
exactly what it is that you have been unwittingly attempting to do:
 
                       Make something out of nothing! --
                            is there a sweeter song than that.
 
 
 

......(and don’t forget to tip tina).”
 

                                             J