remnant 5: “an artist has an obligation to be en route” [George Carlin]
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It makes me immeasurably sad that George Carlin has died, as he had to, as we all must.
I cried spontaneously and without warning for several days after Kurt Vonnegut died, as he had to, as we all must.
And that sudden welling of tears and sadness came again at the end of this video of Carlin being interviewed by Jon Stewart:
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This is not an exaggeration: Beyond the great fortune of my having been born to Rose and Keith Thomas; having been raised in their home surrounded by Green Eggs and Ham, Go, Dog, Go, and then too many other books, card games, and board games to mention; and having sat in the classrooms of brilliant, kind, and powerful teachers (namely Lynn Harrill, Harold Scipio, and Pat Taylor), who I am and why I care about this world through the power of words can be traced without a doubt to my mother’s proclivity for not doing as she was told—we used to “split a beer” like friends when I was in early high school and she introduced me to George Carlin albums that we would listen to and laugh like friends.
Eventually I had most of Carlin’s albums memorized in the 1970s, and I also added Richard Prior’s routines. This blatant plagiarism led me to be the sort of class clown who used other people’s words to deflect his own fear that everyone else would figure out that he was mortified of himself, of who he was (or was not), and who he would become (or not).
In junior high I was fitted with a full-body back brace for scoliosis and the next four years were mostly low self-esteem and the tensions of nerdom fitted into a quest to be an athlete that likely was the roots of the