It Always Ends With a Whimper….Final Mind of Mully Biz Haus Shoppe

Best Experienced With:                 Radiohead;         Fake Plastic Trees

(Please right click on the link below to open the suggested background music to this evening’s gathering in a new browser window.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUJP0BwWB5Q

There are three things I generally buy extra of when at the store:   light bulbs, paper towels, and toilet paper.    You can really never have enough toilet paper, light bulbs, or paper towels in your home.   You can buy extra of these because you are never going to give up any of those three.   For example, you might buy a whole side of beef and then become a Vegan a week later.   You may choose to reduce your sugar intake on a Sunday morning when you look in the mirror and you’re not quite as sassy as you were the previous weekend.   None of us will ever reduce our use of paper towels, light bulbs and toilet paper and all of us will smack ourselves in the forehead down the road, at ten o’clock on a Wednesday night, when a bulb blows and there are no bulbs in the house.    Plenty of sugar things, half of a side of beef.  No light bulbs.

In a folder in a desk drawer….down below….to the left of where I type is a folder filled with non sequiturs;  begun and never finished blurbs because they were either too ridiculously bad to see the light of day or because the twenty minute “Cohen Rule” had passed and I could not finish them.   One was based on Kurt Vonnegut’s quote “we are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane” and that one would have been pretty entertaining, but I fell asleep on the flight back from Boston and never finished it.   It involved flying monkeys, fire breathing unicorns and castles made of sand….which normally do not accompany a Kurt Vonnegut quotation.  The fire breathing unicorns would have made it special.

Another began “we Irish were marketed as drunken potato eaters, come to steal the jobs of folks who had immigrated six or seven years before us…which is why we were immediately shipped southward on trains to win the War of Northern Agression.    Which we did.   Because we Irish are the toughest beings on this planet.”   That one then digressed into the closing of the Godrej & Boyce typewriter factory in Mubai, India and how challenging it must be to sell and market typewriters these days.  Not as challenging as selling and marketing Mexico as a tourist destination while bodies stack up like cords of wood throughout the border towns.    A third began “it is quite possible that when all of us over the age of thirty pass on, entire daily newspapers like the Boston Globe and NY Times will be two pages long.    Thankfully, I will be dead.”   That one would have finished with my worry for the youth of today….their lack of a sense of style, truncated sentences, emoticons instead of adverbs and adjectives, and complete lack of interest in Harvard Business Review case studies.    Both of these would, of course, included wombats, some sort of punk music and a mythical beast such as a Griffin or a Chimera.

There are several hundred of these.   Lying there in a file folder, never to be finished.    Like first dates that you never follow through on with gusto and vigor.

Given a long enough event horizon, all things are taken out to the woodshed in the back and shot in the head. More important, most things should be taken out to the woodshed and shot in the head.  Happy Days learned this with the “jump the shark” episode, the 2011 incarnation of Guns & Roses with a really, really fat Axl Rose as pictured above in the yellow smock will learn this, and Sarah Palin is ridiculous proof positive that most things have a natural lifespan.  One day, they should disappear like Jackie Paper and flat out never be seen, nor heard, any longer.   Was going to simply take the six months off to heal up the fused wrists and crank it back up here on Singles Awareness Day in February, 2012; however, this second incarnation of Mind of Mully has run its course and will be no more in seventy-two hours.

The wrist?    Thanks for asking!    Looks cool inside….here’s the new, Steve Austin, inside of the wrist.   Have been practicing my Wolverine skills and have a pretty good handle on how angry I have to get before the blades come out.    As the Foo Fighters opined in “Monkey Wrench”……”temper, temper…..”   Here’s how they’ll both look soon.

Tested the rebuilt wrist on the guitar for the first time last weekend and played the song you may, or may not have, cued up above there when you joined:  Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees”.   I play this song every day…once in the morning and once in the evening…because it is a ridiculously perfect and wonderful song.  It is the Riemann hypothesis of songs, built of prime numbers and never quite provable.  Began learning guitar to learn three things:   the entire Social Distortion song catalogue, “Everything About You” by Steve Poltz, and “Fake Plastic Trees”.     This song took five looooooong months and seventeen quarts of blood, bled slowly through my left hand fingers to learn…and it remains perhaps the finest and most perfect song in the universe.     You have all had your own personal reasons for visiting this site.   I wrote here to learn to play guitar.   It was my head fake to distract myself from something I remain relatively awful at and it worked.   Would choose a “best experienced with” song to learn (a song most certainly bereft of F chords and B chords), pull up the tab on one computer, type the MofM thing here on another computer during the breaks (or when the cats would howl at what was certainly a murder happening in the office) and slowly but surely learn, or not learn, the song.     Faulkner just rolled over in his grave when I typed this paragraph.   Again.

As some have noticed (and as other have emailed), have gradually privatized all five hundred thirty four entries in Mind of Mully (Classic) and Mind of Mully (Biz Haus Shoppe) over the past two weeks.  Have shipped the original versions, scribbled in purple Sharpie marker on the backs of random brown shopping bags and stolen sheets of loose notebook paper, to the Smithsonian for your children and grandchildren to read one day.    The dashboard shows the shutting down…..was a fun time with you all.    74,500 reads here and 53,200 reads over at Mind of Mully (Classic).  That’s a lot of silliness and good music.

This last one is the last remaining public treatise and tonight, it is dedicated to my father.    If my father raised all six billion of us on this planet, there would be far less strife and far more laughter.   The single most important thing Dan Mulligan Senior taught me was an abiding love and respect for women through how he treated my mother and sisters.   The second most important thing Dan Mulligan Senior taught me was how to laugh…loudly, with purpose, and as often as possible.

For better or worse, there is only one natural conclusion to most stories, given a long enough event horizon.  This conclusion is “we all fall down”.   This conclusion is neither positive, nor negative, it simply is.

No one does “we all fall down” better than T.S Eliot.   God speed, thanks for reading for the past five years, and good bye.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us – if at all – not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer –

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

 www.votemully.org The People's Choice.