This question, asked by 10 year old John Morris of Nebraska after watching the recent Hollywood aliens-come-to-kill-mankind-movie called Skyline, has baffled generations of people until now that Zamboni gives answer.
At first glance, you might think it is simple racism. But looking at it closer, is it not having to do with the Cress theory of racism in which all white people secretly want to be black and so persecute people of color to eradicate this “dark” urge within us?
Perhaps, as the great Dr. Shinholderz, philologist of Bratislava University says, it has to do with our fear of the unknown and hence we send those we fear to face what we fear.
Actually it is just simple racism. Remember my little friend, as long as we look closely, things are exactly as they appear.
Fight back! And watch Othello with Laurence Fishburn by the Shakespeare- he is like almost the last to die! I see this movie on long flight to Transylvania, with failing soundtrack dubbed into Ukranian it is still classic.
“Only the most superficial people don’t judge by first impressions” -Oscar Wilde
The above question comes a befuddled theatre goer, Franz X., from the city of San Francisco who saw a “crazy show” at The Magic Theatre. Even though I, Zambonesman, have not seen this play ( I am banned from entering theatres because I am too much a distractment for viewers, my intense eyes drawing their focus and making actors forget where they are) I do in fact understand this event of fantasy that you have seen because I saw a picture of the star, Taylor Mac dressed as a lily and went into a trance.
The five hour play you have seen, complete with people singing to you in the restroom while you pee and lots of flower costumes and copulation simulations of myriad sort, is about nothing less than why we live and the dreams we need to fuel this living.
Can a lily become a man wearing a tuxedo who is talking to you while a giant turd ballet proceeds in the background and flower girls have hairy chests? Yes.
Can a voice make you cry about the moments in your life that were too little, too late? Alas, yes.
Is it possible to marry everyone and everything in this world? If we want to do more than just survive, if you want to live, yes.
Is it possible to sit in the middle of the stage with strangers you have got to know close enough to smell them while the actors must step around you? Yes. Why? Because you must play the hero of your own story, centerstage.
So Franz… The Lily’s Revenge, which makes you sleepy one moment, then makes you shock with laughter the next, then makes you cry too— it is a mess, a great big soupy, odd, intoxicating mess with no apparent order but with a divine order nonetheless- LIKE LIFE! And just like life in pre-berlin-wall fall Eastern Europe, after 5 hours you will crave the kiss of a bald man you have never met.
Zambones had sited Craig, back row fourth in from left- and yet perhaps as my reader Naked Crayon so keenly saw, Esmerian also , first man in the third row from the bottom.
Read the faces.
Craig’s face says, “I know the secret”, Esmerian’s says, “not sure about the secret but I like the question.” (And he sets himself apart with strange lab coat, whereas the man standing next to him is so buttoned up, head looks like in danger of popping).
I suppose either side, you must choose for yourself, Zamboni has.
This question comes from Anticucho, again from Lima in Peru.
If by “food” you mean what is the fuel for love, what gives love it’s power, then Zambones, I myself, will know.
Desire, sexy feeling, is the Fruit Loops of love. Let me explain this complexness. When we eat sugar we feel great rush like we can go all day- but crash and feel empty quite soon. So attraction, which seems to be so key to love, is alas, only the tiny match that burns in briefness. This is not to knock sweets like Cannoli or ice-cream, which are high on Zamboni’s reasons to keep breathing. Or to knock sexy time which not so brief for Zambones, but sometimes last two, three, even four minutes. But I have tiger blood! Awe!
Friendship is more the peanut butter and honey food for love. They don’t get lots of pictures in food magazines, but these humble ingrdients can keep you going a long time. Once I lasted a week in my twenties living in the hallway broom closet of the Chelsea Hotel with nothing but a jar of of each. Friendship, well, for love to last you must have something to say to this person after Fruit Loop time or else sunday morning will be awkward.
I consulted many things for this question, Plato’s Symposium, Fabio, Danielle Steele, my favorite tree; and they all pointed me towards one thing which is the main dish of love, the Coq au Vin, the Duck a la Orange, the Pigs Blood Soup with Cherry Dumplings. It was not what I expected, nor you:
Patience.
The above song is worth even more than words of Zamboni. Frank is worth three Platos, concerning love. Evidently he was a tough son of bitch to love, but that didn’t stop anyone.
It is 1962 inside the Princeton Bric-a-Brac. One of these faces in its expression holds the key to unlock the most appropriate attitude to have toward life and all it may befall to you. Look closely, who is it?
Me, Zambonesman has often realized the truth in the saying,“if you look at anything long enough, it becomes interesting…” There is one face here that grabbed me! That sees the moon within reach and the end of the world and the horrifying onset of casual friday and looks at life like the sublime joke that it is. Can you find him? Within a rotation of the earth I shall reveal whose face, but can you find? Can a face show that a man wears no socks?
No it is not the great Frank Deford, third from right, bottom.
Double click to enlarge- then seek! And tell me your guess in the comments..
Many of you know the axiom that goes something like this, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
This is about as true as , “if you have one crumb of cheese, then you have the start of some nachos.”
It is a dangerous cliche. Yes, it is “true” but first ask yourself before you step one thousand miles: Do you really need to go that far? How about The Grand Canyon? You haven’t been there yet and it’s only an hour away. Take a bus across town- there’s that Ukranian restaurant that you’ve heard about. After all, as the Yugoslavian mail carriers say, “one thousand miles away, people still cough.”
1000 miles is a long haul. I once trudged through 1,238 miles of tundra because my brother Tenzin married the daughter of an Inuit Chief, and in those poor college days, I had not money for sled dogs. It resulted in frostbite and hypothermic madness but the taste of wood roasted seal fat makes me soon forget this. To this day, I vomit when I see snow.
So go on your great journey if you like, but think first of this. The spot where you stand on is itself the very end of a 1000 mile journey.
Todays question comes to Zambonesman from “Naked Crayon” in Massachusetts: “How does someone (me) get another person out of her head and consequently out of her life? The goal is to completely banish the other person from thought, night dreams, day dreams etc. Is there a way?
A good question Ms. Crayon, and of course, despite its difficulty, Zamboni has answer. I was once very much in love with a snake charming white witch from Bulgaria named Dracka who gave me as they say, “the old heave ho”, for a man much younger than me and also an alternate on the Bulgarian bobsled team.
For months I am pining for this woman, crying tears, thinking of her, trying to smell her in the wind and so forth. Then one day, after fasting for a week and spending 72 hours in a sweatlodge with the Winnebago Indians in Nebraska, I had a vision. In this vision, I see a coyote, but is actually Peter Coyote, the actor, and he told me this in his resonant voice:
“Zamboni my man, every rain drop has to do her work.”
? I replied confusedly as you can imagine. He explained.
“See man, the work of some people in this world is just to haunt you, to stay with you forever, even if you only saw them once on a train, or for one night, or three months, or ten years.”
“But Mr. Coyote”, I say to him, “how can I move on from this, get this witch out of my head?”
seeker, mystic, actor, biker and visitor to Zambonis brain
“You can’t, but like the raindrop, it doesn’t ever really disappear, it just evaporates into something else.”
The I remember the water cycle from Estonian school. Something about water becoming air, moisture…then water again? Arrows going this way and that. It is very foggy as I was most often in the head nuns office being beaten with a Birch branch for questioning the teachers.
Finally at the end of my vision, I asked, “so will I ever be free of this longing?”
And Coyote answered with a big toothy tricksterish grin, “you don’t want to be.” And with that -poof- he was gone. And I was just left with the sight of his chest covered with massive tattoo of a coyote.
So my friend and reader, sometimes the truth from Zamboni is not what you want to hear. You can never “get a person out of your head”, but you can transform that feeling into something else. Just listen to it closely.
Zambones has spoken. Now hit the word “comments” below and ask me the next question I may answer- thanks to You!
The above question comes from a Zambones reader with the unfortunate name of Sal Manella, from Spokane in, according to him, Washington.
Sal, this baseball great is guilty, but I’m not concerned just with this biceptual enhancement of his giant loins. He is guilty of Hubris, that tragic flaw of pride and self-importance that has brought low so many great men. Zamboni has watched some baseball in his life, and he notice whenever this Bonds hits a home-run he cross the plate and then look up to the sky like he is thanking God or Jesus. In my recent conversation with God I asked him whether he was personally responsible for some people home running and making others strike out or get walked. This he says to me, “are you kidding me?”, which I interpret to mean that God doesn’t really care about making home runs. “Besides,” Yahweh added, “if he like me so much, how come he trade in the body I give him for the Robocop version?”
In my long life I have seen many things. I have seen a skinny boy from San Francisco with a penchant for redheads and smoking Camels hit safely in 56 games. His name was Joe Dimaggio and without abs of Titanium he gets Marilyn Monroe into sack. I have seen fat guy named babe Ruth hit 714 home runs, and that is the record, still for me.
And is sad to me, because isn’t that what we’re all guilty of? Thinking we are not naturally good enough so we must always be adding. News flash to you great Barry Bonds- Zambones forgives you, but you didn’t need it. You were already perfect enough for the Perfect Game.
Todays question comes from Jerome in Cincinnati, Ohio., age ten, and the boy asks, “How rich will I be in the future.” Yes, ten.
You know Jerome, this is not the first time I have heard this question from an American young boy. As the years have gone by, I get less “what will I be when I grow up,” and more of the question you ask. Show me the money, like this Jerry McGuire in american movie, yes?
In my village growing up, I was the orphan child of poor cheese farmers. We had little. When their biological children got an apple, the core fell to me for gnawing. If the cats brought in a squirrel, after it was cooked in sour beer I was given the feet to suck. But my parents always made sure I was warm, fed, and without fleas. They went without so that I might have the books I craved to read and a luck charm around my neck made of walrus teeth. Did I crave money and material things? Of course. I once lured a neighbor into a bear trap to take his Sony Walkman, I know what is this desire for riches.
Jerome my young friend, you may or may not be rich, but this won’t have much to do with your happiness. I don’t know if a ten year old reads science journals, but Zamboni does and I recently saw an interesting study. This study asked people about their levels of happiness that they felt, and they found something strange. People who were poor and struggling, or simply had very little, did not report lower levels of happy-feeling. Yes it was stressful if someone just lost their job, but overall, people who simply had less, seemed more content than those with higher incomes. Instead of poor and miserable- it was poor and happy. So to ask Zamboni how rich you will be is sort of like saying “How many bumps will be on the nose of the grandmother of my true love?” What does it matter?
A Latvian card shark I knew once was fond of saying, “rich or poor, your farts still smell the same.” I cannot say I totally agree since this man lived on nothing but canned sardines and plum brandy and hence his flatulence smelled like indescribable horror, But I understand the metaphor all the same.
This being said; there is nothing wrong with money, and if you want to keep as much of it as you can, follow this advice:
Never use credit cards.
Don’t buy lattes.
Diversify investments.
And most important of all, remember these two words: Compound Interest.
great zamboni 