in short, it's brilliant...and in it's spirit, I bring you:

EDIT TO: CB

"well, I've seen a ten-mile, festering gash in the earth's crust in Iceland. 

it was a wound...all blood-red and yellow puss lava...horrible...it was 
flesh-earth...and painful to see but impossible to look away...but we had to leave 
‘cause a sandstorm blew in off the glacier and blotted out the midnight sun."

EDIT TO: CB

"well, I've seen Muhammed Ali.

I was the token white boy in an otherwise all-black soul band, and we were 
asked to play at the Black Muslim's Mosque #12 in Cleveland. I am The Devil in 
their theology and I was not made to feel welcome, but up walks Muhammad Ali, 
chuckling, shaking his head and says 'Now this boy's got guts.' then he 
shakes my hand...or rather, he wraps his hand around mine like a cave-in, an 
avalanche of callouses and scar tissue. then he spies the PA mixing board and 
yells 'Is that a radio? I wanna be on the radio,' and walks off. I can still 
feel his grip to this day."

EDIT TO: CB  

"...what I saw in Hamburg, Germany in 1985. 

I was stranded between trains, with not enough time to slide over to the 
Reeperbahn and gawk at the whores, or even to grab a bite to eat. so I just 
walked around.  I turned one particular corner, and stumbled upon a big taxidermist 
shop, and in the display windows were hundreds of stuffed animals...only each 
animal was, in fact, a combination of animals. There was a duck with a 
lizard's head, a squirrel with duck feet, birds with fur and weasels with feathers, 
and so on through every possible critterly permutation...and all were posed 
picnicking in a mock-Wagnerian forest scene.

Behold the ingenuity of man!—-I thought—-although it wasn't the sight of these 
recombinant animals that has stayed with me (that was some bent, Germanic 
attempt at black humor), but the brilliance here was that we—-unique among all of 
earth's creatures—-have the ability to slap some goo between two things 
and—-miraculously!—-make one new thing. 

Glue! It's glue that truly sets us apart from the squiggling, squirming 
biomass that surrounds us.  It's glue that has enabled us to make everything from 
pencils and pyramids to envelopes and rocket ships. I am aware of some 
animals that use adhesives to stick their houses together or cling to slippery 
rocks, but I ask you—-does a spittle-built termite mound look cozy? or have you 
ever seen a barnacle playing Scrabble?

And the social anthropologists are all wrong. Forget about 
tool-making...even a monkey will use a stick to bust-up a beehive to get at some honey.  And 
forget about fire...according to Greek mythology, Prometheus got into a hell of 
a pickle by stealing a flame or two from the gods and slipping ‘em to us.  
I'll grant that fire did give us an edge on other species, but this glue idea is 
something we came up with ourselves (as opposed to simply re-purposing a 
fortuitous lightning strike)...and this ability to reorder the shape and structure 
of our world is truly a skill normally reserved for gods and the forces of 
nature. If we-—in our infinite wisdom—-survey our surroundings and see that 
something isn't right, that two things that don't go together should  go 
together...if we want a weasel with feathers...well, we and we alone on this planet 
have the power to make it so.

Ecco homo glutium!"

EDIT TO: CB

"yes, i've seen wonders..."

EDIT TO: CB

"i've seen criminals... but..."

EDIT TO: CB

"I saw Dave Hamilton drop his hair.

In 1965, high school was class war...the Collegiates—rich, preppy and 
college-bound—versus the Greasers, who like me were lower class, third-generation 
immigrant kids new to the suburbs, deflected onto the vocational track and 
destined for trade schools, autobody shops or-—if we were lucky—-the Army.

And Dave Hamilton was our Leader...the King Rack, the top, full-steam-ahead 
Hood. But no mere thug he...Dave was a Continental Greaser, an elegant breed 
that favored neon mohair sweaters over crisp, white button-down shirts, slit 
pocket-ed, cuffless gray gaberdine trousers with a small belt on the butt back, 
Banlon socks, Stacy Adams lace-ups or anything with Cuban heels. Mandatory 
accessories included a large, pink rat-tail comb in the rear pocket, a silver 
I.D. bracelet and always...always a black leather car coat.

Note that that's Hamilton...not Hamiltono or Hamiltoni. We had the 
vowels—he had the Irish redhead pompador, and it crowned him so gorgeously that we 
dark, stumpy Italians could never come within a ‘Vette's-length of this much 
class.

And that hair was everywhere...in the boy's john glowing in the center of a 
puff of Camel smoke...in the window of the principal's office where Dave was 
once again sent for some surly infraction...and out in the school parking lot 
bopping to the Four Season's latest as he held court after detention. Cursed 
with a high, squeaky voice, his leadership style was silent and passive...he 
just did...he just was...and through his total resistance to any kind of 
authority and non-compliance with their rules, we got our cues as to how he was 
parsing the world into ‘cool' and ‘not cool.'

Both the Collegiates and the Greasers had their pet bands. I played drums 
with The Disciples, and since we had a beconked black lead singer with a Harley 
and Buddy "De Bug" Vincent on sax, we played all the Greaser's parties, bike 
runs, car club rallies and funerals. Great gigs...lots of beer and slutty 
Catholic girls who were keen on all kinds of rebellion. And nobody seemed to mind 
getting their James Brown or Link Wray through our homemade speaker cabinets.

The Collegiate's band was The Rebel Kind. They played strictly British 
Invasion through rich parents signed-for, store-bought Vox and Sunn amps and got 
their stage clothes on Carnaby Street via weekend trips to London. They were 
Jagger skinny and Daltrey pretty and we kicked their asses on a fairly regular 
basis. It didn't matter...their haughty, fabulous girls remained unimpressed, 
and there was no crossover contact that I can recall...except once when at a 
Battle of The Bands, Kathy Worthington tripped over a guitar cable and I caught 
her by the tits.

Hamilton, of course, considered this whole long-haired thing to be a pile of 
pussy shit. Nevermind that moptop culture was becoming huge...it was a threat 
to everything manly, blue-collar and Elvish. It had bumped surf music off 
the radio. It enabled our high school's lowliest squid to acquire some status 
by merely donning a polka dot shirt. And our parents thought The Beatles were 
cute. Cute?...rock ‘n' roll?. This was a disaster...the established teenage 
hierarchy was crumbling, and the noble Greaser was rapidly becoming an 
anachronism.  

Then one day Dave Hamilton showed up at school with his hair combed down.  
His clothes, his shoes, the chip on his shoulder...everything else about him 
was exactly the same, but this shocking, apparent capitulation to the new pop 
culture brought lunch trays crashing to the cafeteria floor and teachers to lose 
their places in their lesson plans.

...and brought even more heat down upon him. Suddenly, Hamilton's hair was 
the most important thing in the world. This was not submission after all...it 
was subversion. In one brilliant move, he had co-opted a threatening cultural 
trope and redefined it as a symbol of rebellion. He was immediately 
suspended, the high school banned long hair and one ex-Marine gym teacher with a buzz 
cut started patroling the halls with scissors and going after any boy whose 
ears he couldn't see. Both Collegiates and Greasers who'd let their hair grow 
dropped out to attend Griswold Academy, a trade school in downtown Cleveland 
that didn't have a dress code. One family sued the school—-they were Quakers, 
and to them, long hair on their kids had religious significance.

Dave peaked early, I guess. I saw him a few years later, after he'd fallen 
asleep, drunk and drugged, and had burned off one of his arms to the elbow.  
He'd been working for several years in a car scrap yard near downtown, then met 
and married a girl named Ellie and had moved to a house trailer in a 
one-intersection village half way to Youngstown. Dave liked the isolation and lived 
for the local fishing, but Ellie could't stand the isolation, so they split and 
she moved to Florida. His parents got divorced when his father declared 
himself gay.  

Dave still had all of his red hair, tho.

yes, i've seen geniuses..."

EDIT TO: CB

"yes, i've seen wonders..."

EDIT TO: CB

"i've seen marvels..."

but...

EDIT TO: CB

"I saw heroin roll throw my lily-white suburban neighborhood house-by-house.

oh Freddy, Freddy my crazy cousin...
lover of so many women
for four years you kept a full time job, went to college at night, and had a 
$100 dope day habit...jeez what courage...now that was a man!...'til his 
folks came back from vacation and found him hanging in the basement...

EDIT TO: CB

"I saw Vikki Singleton cum."

she was the most sexual woman i've ever known.  one time we were hanging out 
in her backyard.  hot sun. hot day.  she said 'hey...wanna see something?', I 
said 'uh...sure' and she took off her jeans, lay back on a lounge chair, 
turned toward the sun and spread her legs.  in a few minutes, she 
came...hard....'the sun fucked me,' she said."

EDIT TO: CB

"i saw myself be sick for eleven years over a priestess.

she was everyone's art-babe-muse...oh i was so in love!...twenty years later 
i hook back up with the guy who married her (my best friend, of 
course)...called him up...i was so nervous..."WHAT" she snarled into the phone..."um it's 
chris butler (pause...no response) "uh...is Steven there?"..."STEVEN" she 
shrieked...and drops the receiver...nothing...not a word to me.  and i got shock 
treatments because of this cunt???

EDIT TO: CB

"WHAT???

well, i saw a beach with pink sand that was so soft that you'd sink in up to 
your shins.

...but i also saw my brother-in-law smashed on magic mushrooms think about 
taking a swan dive off a cliff onto the jagged coral...'Don't worry,' he said, 
'the rocks are my friends.' And this was after i'd spent the entire day 
snorkling and playing tag with a parrot fish that was--I think--in a good mood.  
can fish be happy? can a fish have a sense of humor?

EDIT TO: CB

and i saw a Jehovah's Witness blow his chance at The Rapture.

...by selling me a used car and lying about it's condition.  who better to 
trust than a JW, I thought?   he said his job was translating The Watchtower 
into German. "Yep...lotsa good miles left in that car...lotsa good miles."

EDIT TO: CB

"and i saw the club I was playing in burn down in the middle of a song.

my band had just replaced all their gear after everything was lost in another 
fire barely a month before in the club next. door.  'Not again,' we said, 
and grabbed gear and cables as the flames came up throught the floor. the harp 
player just made it out with my bass amp as the building crashed down around 
him. we hauled everything three flights of stairs to an apartment across the 
street, but sparks landed on the roof and soon that building was on fire, too, 
so we dragged everything back down the back fire escape to a music store. we 
stayed up all night soldering stuff back together, found another club by noon 
the following day, built a stage that afternoon and played that night with 
our shoes sticking to the wet paint. we won...now that was courage!"

EDIT TO: CB

"I saw the searchlight in Antibe harbor...

...from the balcony of a little house in a medieval village up in Les Alpes 
Maritimes...and smelled the Mistral, fat and moist with thyme from the Rhone 
Valley and pine from the Swatzwald and thought...it doesn't get any better than 
this."

EDIT TO: CB

"and I saw a rainy moonrise...

...while standing in the doorway of a warehouse in Nyhavn, Copenhagen, with 
two great friends and have never felt closer to anyone else ever...and thought 
it doesn't get any better than this"

EDIT TO: CB

it doesn't get any better than this

EDIT TO: CB

no...it doesn't get any better than this

EDIT TO: CB

"I bother you? with your history of schlock? I saw The Move before you 
joined and dumbed them down...before you stole Roy Wood's idea for E.L.O. and 
turned it into an arena-sized audio turd. and your production style is 
cringe-worthy. and I bet you don't feel guilty about any of this...do ya?"

END