IT BREATHES ME

2:30 a.m. Start route. First tube. No cars.

2:36 One skunk.

2:38 Swerve around discarded paper bag, beer cans. No moon. Replacements. Police.

2:39 A kitten in the ditch. The Turtles. New white gravel reflects on brights.

2:40 Gliding hawk or owl.

2:43 A single rabbit.  Remove seat belt for right window deliveries.  Happy Together.

2:48 Meet oncoming headlights. “How is the weather?”

2:51 Mist. Slow wipers. Pair of raccoons. Fat raccoon hides in the ditch, looks back.

3:00 a.m. Hit first benchmark, right on time. Thirty-six down. Bagging some, banding some.

3:08 Android alert: New York Times. Scan headlines.  Queens of the Stone Age.

3:11 Stop sign. One motorcycle followed by one car. Unusual amount of human activity.

3:13 Branch stuck under car.  Drive in reverse to dislodge.

3:14 Motorcycle and car stopped ahead on County Road 2500 E. Window down. “Is everything OK?” “Just didn’t want to slide on the slick pavement.” “OK, be careful.”

3:16 Baron von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun.

3:22 A little Pet Shop Boys.

3:23 Fox!

3:25 Birds playing chicken with headlights, fly up from pavement along 2600 E.

3:28 Slurp of coffee. Marlboro peppermint snus. “Wud’ve I wud’ve I wud’ve I done to deserve this.”

3:40 Corn stalks half dry, brown.  Didn’t notice yesterday.  Elton John. Teacher I Need You.

3:42 Predictable barking dog runs up to window.  Phone battery down, plug in. Elderberry Wine.

3:47 Hippie rarity. David Crosby. If I Could Only Remember My Name.

3:49 A few minutes early.  Missed farmer’s truck leaving for work. Catch him tomorrow.

3:58 Alice’s house now empty, dark.

4:00 a.m. Second benchmark.  Halfway done. Running a little early.  Incomprehensible tweet from insomniac Sponberg.  Pass through Broadlands.  Run both stop signs. Rain long stopped.  Warm.

4:10 Stop to void on CR 100 N.  No stars.  Lonely tree on landscape dark as shadow.

4:12 Sing along. “I wonder who they are, the men who really run this land. I wonder why they run it with such a thoughtless hand. What are their names and on what street do they live? I'd like to ride right over this afternoon and give them a piece of my mind about peace for mankind. Peace is not an awful lot to ask.” Could have been written yesterday.

4:16 Glide through silent Allerton. Turn off music. No signs of life, not even a rabbit in the gardens. Deliver thirty more.

4:33 Exit Allerton. Cricket chirps.

4:42 Three mile stretch of nothing in Vermilion County. Flip open paper to scan for angry letters.  Champaign-Urbana glows 30 miles off. Nobody seen since the motorcycle.

4:55 Erik Satie piano music in the form of a pear.

5:00 a.m. Turn on NPR News. Republicans announce they will “disagree completely” with Obama’s jobs plan, one day before he announces what that will be.

5:02 Turn off NPR News. Return to Satie.

5:03 Semi-truck on highway 49.

5:04 Brake for two young deer.

5:10 Coyote dashes into corn.

5:12 GPS screen as blank as the sky, save for single straight line, CR 2800 E.

5:15 Closed RR crossing, detour through Homer. Three cars. Marathon Station, gas $3.75.

5:25 Turn onto last gravel mile before Homer Lake.

5:32 Woman walking dog. Still very dark.

5:39 Homer Lake Road. Man jogs, wearing reflective tape.

5:40 Slurp tepid coffee.  Slight pain in chest.  Think about mortality. Contemplate how Satie piano music compares with Ryuchi Sakamoto.

5:43 Conclude South Homer Lake Road run. Lake still. No sunrise until Daylight Saving Time.

5:46 Train whistle three miles off.

5:49 Slow down for deer bounding along corn rows.

5:51 The last mile. Birds start to chirp. A rooster crows. Pre-dawn clouds looming and black.

5:58 a.m. Final paper stuffed into orange tube. 157 papers total.  Dawn behind me. Gnossiennes plays on, indifferent.

WARREN

Around 4 a.m. the other day, three cub coyotes, testing their adolescent oats in the middle of County Road 500N,  stared into my approaching headlights.  At the last minute, when it was clear that this big thing coming at them wasn’t a burning bush or a wayward tree, they ran off together into the cornfield.

It is my impression that coyotes abandon their companions, their siblings, after a while.  I could be mistaken, but by and large the older coyotes I see run alone.  Deer, on the other hand, continue to associate much longer and sometimes even the young antlered stags can be seen leaping together in pairs over fences early in the morning.

Fall, winter, spring and summer, I drive the mean back roads of Champaign and Vermilion counties and I see a lot of weird animal behaviors.  Whatever god or evolutionary force designed the waddle of the skunk had a perverse sense of humor.  Rabbits zigzag, almost as though they were daring you to run them over, but I understand that this is a protection against hawks.

This summer, when I wasn’t delivering newspapers in the dark, I spent a fair amount of time reading philosophy.  One theory I have is that most of the world’s philosophy — particularly that of the last 100 years, and most particularly that of the French —  was written for entertainment rather than enlightenment.

Probably about a century ago, about the time Wittgenstein said “that of which we cannot know, we must not speak,” the French philosophers thought, what the heck.  Let’s just make complicated stuff up.  It’s all just language anyway.

So, for me, this was the summer of four things: 1) Jacques Derrida, 2) coyote cubs, 3) obtaining an old Smith-Corona typewriter, and 3) arguing.

(To recklessly summarize Derrida, try this.  All language is ambiguous.  There may be a central meaning and a marginalized meaning.  If you take the marginalized meaning and make it the central meaning, you throw everything out of whack.  It’s called deconstruction. * Then, if you’re a smartass, you’ll make up a pun in French. )

I argued with my family.  It’s nothing new; I’ve argued with them since the start of the Iraq war, if not before.  This summer, when I wasn’t sweating and reading Derrida, I argued with my family about language and God.

I’d like to point out that the word “family” is ambiguous.  I’ve decided to retire this imprecise word and split it into two other words.  I have chosen the words “kin” and “brood.”  Kin will refer to parents, siblings, and all the other relatives that at my age are largely relegated to greeting cards and holiday status.  Brood isn’t the best term to use for referring to the mate and the children and any subsequent additions that may be coming down the line (not yet, please), so I’m still working on a better term for that crowd.

The kin are the ones I’ve been having the argument with, mostly about Biblical literalism.  Every single last one of them, bless them, seems to believe that every word in the Bible is not only true, but that they themselves are capable of explaining what every single word in the Bible means.  Or else.

Despite all the translations, multiple transcriptions, old illiterate monks with bad eyesight, centuries of corruption and changes, misprints, typos, international languages in differing alphabets, and bugs squashed against the scrolls mistaken for commandments, they still think it makes literal sense.  Nothing deters them.

For me, that kind of literalist perspective in the attempt to prove God’s existence  (apart from being an utter linguistic impossibility) destroys mystery and awe and demonstrates the absence rather than the presence of faith.

My most vigorous opponent in argument has been Warren, the father-in-law of my nephew, a relation for which there is no known English word.  Warren is a true believer, educated and articulate.  Among the things he insists are true are that Jesus will ride down to earth on a white horse, that Noah was born with white hair and red skin, that the earth is 7000 years old at most, that the human lifespan before the Great Flood could approach 1,000 years, and that if evolution were true we shouldn’t be able to suntan.  He says he reads the Bible “the way it says it.”

If his views were in any way devastated by the recent story about the Bible Project [LINK: http://news.yahoo.com/jerusalem-scholars-trace-bibles-evolution-092932128.html], wherein Jewish scholars have been working for 53 years and counting to trace the evolution of the Bible, he didn’t let on. That project has shown the many changes and mistakes in our current books of the Bible, including the “prophecies” that had been added into the texts after the events already had taken place.

Do I have to add that Warren is a Republican and a fan of the Tea Party?

Come to think of it, the Tea Party’s use of language actually resembles the arguments of modern French philosophers, finding new meanings for words and tap-dancing around reason. Sarah Palin’s explanation of Paul Revere’s ride — it was a noisy warning to the British that he wasn’t going to give up his guns — might be related to the deconstruction method of seeing stories in a new way and reducing history to non-existence.  It sent Palin’s followers scrambling to Wikipedia to edit the past accordingly.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, testifying to Congress, gave us the extreme expression, “I don’t recall remembering.” Derrida would have been proud of such dizzying wordplay.

Senator Jon Kyle stated that “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does”  is abortion, before retracting it with a textual analysis that claimed it was “not intended to be a factual statement.”  I actually think some people understand this explanation. They realize that language is manipulable and the literal is impossible, just as the French philosophers have been saying all along.

And then there is the queen of French linguistic philosophy, Michele Bachmann. On the one hand, she insists that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, and on the other she recommends books that claim Southern slavery was a benevolent time and a good system for establishing stable Christian families. She let her husband Marcus push her into politics because of her belief in the Bible verse, “Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands,” but she explains that the real meaning of the word “submissive” is “respectful.”  She must own a different Funk and Wagnalls.

Whether you are reading the Bible or running for President, you can use language to your own advantage. Literalism is impossible. Can we accept that this is the bottom line?  May we?  Mais oui.

The problem is that human animal behavior often reveals people herding together in tribal and warring packs, following like sheep the so-called authorities who play on their fears or say the things they want to hear.

Better still, they behave like frightened rabbits trapped in a pen, another word for which is a warren.

* FOOTNOTE
* I got into a rather heated argument once with someone who assumed the title of the Susan Sontag essay, "Regarding the Pain of Others," meant "let us consider the pain of others." Given that the book deals with violent imagery and photography, I insisted that the essay meant to explain "how we LOOK at the pain of others," since "regard" (in English and especially in French) also means "to look at". Sontag was, of course, playing on the multiple meanings of the word "regard." The "correct" interpretation is that the meaning of the title is undecidable.

YOU WILL HAVE BEEN WRONG AND WON'T REMEMBER

Moloch fucking killed poetry, just as Moloch did the air, water, and earth, even the moon for all we know, took Whitman’s liberation and crammed it into a useless degree program, with right ways and wrong ways and bottomless scorn, shaming the expressers, correcting the hopeful, becoming the decider, critiquing those just wishing to smell a gardenia again, a carnation, using old semiotic systems to re-encrypt the banality of goodness, dashing the mere glimmer of a dare-I-say-it dream upon the profaned, plastic oil littered stelae of packaged Machu Picchu tour trams. And the vain protesters nuzzle their way into the web, clueless, providing the new dictionary of sneers, neologisms that deflate all humor, morph joy into Schadenfreude, archiving away generosity in long abandoned dust-buried subway stations, and the Good Gray Poet’s arm over the shoulder of a comrade becomes a television commentary for the news entertainment industry without the slightest sensation. The electricity of touch was the first thing to become extinct.  No one remembers that. No record exists. The pliant organ donors die before the billionaires and in the end it doesn’t matter, who is to say the cocktail party with the excruciatingly perfect cocktail dress and purchased smile sculpture is preferable to the shit-covered egg plucked for hunger from the straw in the shack with the tin roof in the vertical housing in the valleys of the impoverished town of Bucaramanga?  In the end, I say, I prefer the egg, I prefer to watch the cocktail party on TV, a black and white TV without cable, and if the picture goes out when it rains, I still have the egg, for now, and the rain.

But know ye this, O Congregation of Moloch, you will have been wrong and won’t remember, you don’t remember the name of the street corner where you stood when they threw bottles and hosed down the marching or which side you were on, what colors your cheerleading uniforms bore as the blood flowed down the streets and while you faintly remember thinking, “It’s not time,” at the time, and now, the echo is faint, you think, “Later, later, later does seem a familiar song, one I might sing even now without looking it up in the Hymnal of Despicable Thoughts, although it is quite possible that I only heard others singing, others saying, others preaching, others chanting, perhaps while Walter Cronkite spoke, I don’t remember, and yes I have heard of Laos and Chile and might generally be able to assemble the map pieces, jumbled in a jigsaw, with a hint regarding their shapes, is Guatemala squarish?, but listen, as if it mattered, time passes and what happened then is not what is happening now, this time it is different, this time I will remember, if I have time,” you say, but the truth is, you will have been wrong and won’t remember.

Validation of a life on the verge of exhaustion or extinction comes with the thump of the stamp in the passport, the status travel that the congregation, one by one, stands to announce in sharing time, humbly as a peacock, these necessary mission positions and dining undertakings in Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Peru, Turkey, Colombia, Ukraine, New Zealand, with a quick stop for espresso in a Paris bistro for two weeks, they call it living well, revenge, yet unacknowledged torture, varicose veins standing in lines, uncomfortable sensations in the stomach, sunburn, salt water in the snorkel mask, sad altitudes, forced itineraries no better than the memories of production standards meetings minutes, minutes in the boardroom and the hospital, same deal, far, far away.  Not travel that is desired at all, but lust for having traveled, for telling of having traveled, for showing the artifacts of having traveled, just as the poet loathes to write, disdains to compose the undeniable truths, these heartbreaking facts, this awful editing, the blood that flows from the chewed fingernails.  But, to have written!  That is something else.  To have written is to have the refuge and the reward and meaning itself lasting longer than the day on the beach, the rough draft, the sand crabs, the italicization and missing quote marks, the forced relaxation, dietary changes, mundane addictions, and odd toilet papers of the world.

Is that snow I see outside my window again? If I stop writing for a week, force myself to abstain like a Zen monk without wine, fasting so my consciousness hovers above my desk or hammock, out of body, seeing myself in this state of dis-composition, this is not a pretty picture, unbearable in a sense, but the meditation sets in and reveals: some faction of the world must relinquish life first.  Better over there than over here, as they say, better they die than we do, for now, although inevitably, every number wins the lottery, every number completes, war or no war, civil rights marches or gay pride parades, the funerals are coming, more rapidly now than ever, more and more, visitations, obituaries, familiar dead, faces that fade and tones of voice that sound funny in the recordings that were preserved for just such an occasion as this.  And all the members of the congregation begin to forget what they were supposed to remember to forget and what they were supposed to forget and who, and that disease begins to infect them all, the disease of not remembering, the disease of blank stares and horror at what was forgotten more than what was remembered, most of all for what was deliberately forgotten, of what was ignored, of the deaths that preceded over there by the congregation's will, the deaths that they thought could forestall their own, and for what, which could be formulated into a question if the difference between a question and a statement made any sense to anyone in the congregation any more, even at all, even a little, even an atom's worth if difference. Now I will try to remember. I have to follow the incredible shrinking man as he crawls down between the stitches of the white Fruit of the Loom underwear he once was able to wear, now to live within the threads, slipping with brilliant resolve past eternity

– March 8-10, 2010

THE LAST SAINTHOOD

An Orison Viagra for the start of the millennium

Clinton's mind, this dawning day, and history
All are clear. Four young deer skitter
Across the gravel road beside the wood,
Above which he can see the shooting star.

One hundred more newspapers yet to go,
One hundred more orange tubes he has to stuff.
The headlines echo "HIV and Democracy:
Extinct, Extinct, Extinct"

To search his recollection was not hard.
He knew the past and, now, could cite it all,
Like walkers in Fahrenheit Four Five One,
He'd memorized Nineteen Nine Nine events,
That late but final freeing of our needs
Of human flesh. It came late, yet it came
And came to stay and came again, in rerun.

Government then prepared us for the end,
Decreeing that the lie would never hold,
The nucleus had loosened, spreading outward
To the rim. Our secrets would be told;
No detail could be spared.

They should have stocked the cellars
To prepare for the millennially rotting chip
With rice and beans and tuna fish.
The water must be purified. We all make do.

Now Clinton brings the news, his new post, door to door.
We have swapped responsibilities, switched roles and class
In a new century, after the fall.
Politicians are the poets; once-professors dig the wells.

He hears the AM talk shows as he drives,
From Pittsburgh, Georgia, Ciudad Mexico.
Dialect and twang and tongues reveal
Their pasts, not now perverse,
Since the lie has gone away for good.

The white crane circles Hiawatha Lake, assessing ice,
In search of landing sites. That trampoline in tatters,
Suspended in a tree, might well suffice.
A pickup truck is hauling pigeons in a cage
Back to the homes they would not home to in their rage.

That orison Viagra rose Niagara-like into the skies,
A prayer of pride and shame and fury, on that day that day.
A mixture iodized, a purifier for the water in our cellars,
For the years we wasted, back before the martyr lay,
Slain the saint of oral sex, the crippled grin, the sad device.

And all knees bent and all heads bobbed that day that day.

Once Barney knew the glories well that Monica had owned,
How she knelt before the offering, its modest point and dull surprise,
Described in court as quarter-thick and penta-length, this stele.
Clinton's arms, outstretched to sides, reached phone and Betty's page device.
The crucifix position, with his back against the desk and Barney sees, envisions,
How the issue came to rise, how the spew of ecstasy and ivory,
A guilt of gilded declaration, fireworks so fixed in time,
History's propulsion, with a splashdown rivaling Apollo's,
Upon the fabric blue, like ocean waves of icon matter,
Pattern worship object for tomorrow's classroom text..

Once Maxine grieved her race, the chains that bound them,
Chains of iron metamorphosed, link by link, to family ties
Unearthed by the founder's love for Sally, how he put his aged hand
Deep in her reproductive roots, his fingers striving, reaching out
For the excuse of ownership and finding naught, an emptiness
So black and rich that Maxine rubs her checkbook to her cheek,
Her chest, in vain, also in search for kin and coal
That might have changed, compressed itself to diamond roses,
Ropes of helix DNA, men twisting in the wind.

And Mr. Hyde thinks of his last transforming, when the draught
No longer served his lust. The child he grunted into life
Now gazes down from far across the continent,
His slavish drool imposing heat on Mr. Hyde's unhampered head.
That child, now grown, had driven spikes between two unions,
Severed vows, imposed a prophylactic curse, a vampire Frankenstein.
The haunting passed and absolution antidotes concocted
In the House of Usher. Webs dangle from the furniture,
All weeping sacrificed.

And Newt, who licked the cantaloupe, comes out of hiding,
Longing openly for Clinton's taste, a sample of her melon sliver,
Fragrant oval crevice where the whitish jet of blissfulness
Splatters nose and teeth and tonsils, such abandonment of haste,
But he can only wish that it were his endeavors
That made monitors ablaze, that hit the books, that flat recorded
Lessons in the way to please and pleasure. His was not the orgy
Taken to the grave yet made eternal, etched in the stone tablets
And the wooden schoolroom desks where children carve
Our nation's new publicity, since privacy was slain that day that day.

Now saints all and the radio explains to Clinton
Wrapping up the paper route
Of fishing spots in Arkansas, of copper flies if weather please,
Or nickel lure those sunny days,
Or fun in hunting squirrel meat.
Another caller tells, confessing, to the station, so routine:

"I have fucked at dusk in flowers on the Croisette by the beach in Cannes.
I have fucked along the railroad tracks of Rome.
I have fucked on grassy mountainsides outside Xalapa, Mexico.
I have fucked in crashing waves and underwater.
I have fucked in doctor's offices in Bogota, Columbia.
I have fucked in a tent in Yellowstone.
I have fucked in a sleeping bag at Big Sur, by the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
I have fucked in a carnation greenhouse in Denver.
I have fucked in a mobile home outside Miami.
I have fucked in the doorway of a quaint European hotel.
I have fucked while dining in a Paris restaurant.
I have fucked in an ancient stone windmill on a Greek island.
I have fucked in the back seat of a car on Sunday afternoon on a country road outside Urbana.
I have fucked during a Wim Wender's world premiere movie screening.
I have fucked in the Louvre and in the Chicago Art Institute.
I have fucked on the equator.
I have fucked in Golden Gate Park.
I have fucked while listening to "A Chorus Line."
I have fucked in a moving car, while driving.
I have fucked in the back of the bus.
I have fucked on the nude beaches of the former Yugoslavia.
I have fucked in my parent's house.
I have fucked in a very clean park in Zurich.
I have fucked in cyberspace.
I have fucked in the Denver Public Library.
I have fucked on a train leaving Barcelona at midnight.
I have fucked in London.
I have fucked in France.
I have fucked in somebody's underpants.
I have fucked in ancient Mayan ruins.
I have fucked on hotel balconies overlooking the Caribbean and the Pacific, in Veracruz and Maui.
I have fucked in prison.
I have fucked in graveyards."

Owing to the fact government pierced the lie,
Removed the veil,
Destroyed the split between all thought and deed,
There was no difference,
Just like Jesus always said.

To tell the children? How to not?
Or let them overhear?
Sit them down at the beaming hearth and listen, listen well.

A spring of urine, arc transcendent,
Leather in the kitchen cupboard,
Hot and red the spanking bottom,
Anus, mouth and organs pulsing,
Missionary impositions,
Ancient multiples in India,
Those who touch themselves, no other,
Those who cannot touch forbidden,
Fruit insertions maharaja,
Fingers, feet, and penis proper,
Impotence and faithful sadness,
Pure and pervert anesthetic,
He who knew a thousand others,
She who singly had accepted
Stranger's commands for another pat
Of butter on the plate,
And those with fantasies beyond
The reach of an ability to state.

Children read these books and hear the stories told.
Uncle Remus limps to woodshed archives.
Look at woodcuts of affairs official,
A new national geographic.
The box was opened. Christmas came.

A line of 2000 women, naked, standing tall and short, obese and willowed, black and pale and Asian-eyed, those who disdain and look at broken watches, those who gasp and remember rapture, and Clinton must service all, bowed down, his penance for a time, but not eternity, so we may be forgiven, long forgiven, long forgotten what to our forgiveness would be due. Is there time to pay the penance? Who had guessed such penalty was joy?

Still, there is time. The clocks have stopped, the pre-ordained disaster when the numbers rolled around and hit the marker, the millennium, the dates and figs of flavor while the Senators spent their final hours dissecting spots of semen and measuring the penis, counting pubic hairs that danced atop a soda can.

He yawns and sees the ranch house nearing.
The radio plays on, the national confession.
Hillary is sleeping, waiting, outstretched everything
Beneath the goose down comforter.
He's coming back where Y2K had leveled all,
Us all, and nothing more could be sold by showing skin.
We were sated by the secretless of life,
The end of privacy, our home.

A sonnet must be written for order
To be found. Composing thought in heaven,
He sits beside the wood stove, where even
Owls peer in and quiz him. Fence and border
Crumble dusty, like disgust, and are gone.
He could write a speech or he could wander.
Smoke ascends to roof. He waits for thunder.
There is none. Peace in Saskatchewan,
In Vegas, Bombay, Durban, Monterrey;
The world, an image nation, one at last
And free. Clinton stirs the ashes. Night's passed.
Time to rouse mate, roosters and a new day.
"Ask not where finger ends and synapse starts.
We're dreaming; flesh is what composes hearts."

© 1998 Springer-Petrie, Inc.

Rantoul and Die, for old times' sake

My review of Rantoul and Die, first posted in 2006, is revived here in commemoration of the current new production in Los Angeles. I should note that the publicity for the new production (http://www.rantoulanddie.com/about.html) refers to people here as the "ugliest" people, who live in the "grimy little world" of central Illinois, which pretty much confirms my first impression of this Mark Roberts sitcom.


RANTOUL AND DIE

The first act of “Rantoul and Die” repeats an old fable about a scorpion crossing a road on the back of a turtle. Or maybe a rabbit. There is disagreement on this point.

The animal is inconsequential. More to the point, playwright Mark Roberts does not tell the story in the traditional sense. As usually told, the scorpion rides over a body of water, not a road, on the back of the animal. The scorpion promises not to sting the animal. After all, if the animal drowns, so will the scorpion. Halfway across the lake, the scorpion stings.

"Why would you do that?" the animal asks when the scorpion strikes, and the scorpion, although about to die, claims he has no choice. It is his nature.

“Rantoul and Die” takes the sting out of the story. In Roberts’ version, the scorpion strikes because it is his nature... and then goes on to kill another day.

After the first act of the play, my fear was that Roberts himself was like his specialized scorpion, the stinger shown on the ad for the play. He could make vicious fun of the low-rent service employees of Champaign County and enjoy watching the local audiences laugh, unwittingly, at themselves.

When someone writes a comic play about rural Americans, the operative word is usually "affectionate." You can spoof them, even ridicule them, but in the end there is some feeling for the bizarre and simple foibles of the characters, characters you have come to know and love. Think "Junebug." Think Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart." Think Larry Shue's "The Foreigner."

“Rantoul and Die” is given a smidgen of this sensibility in the second act, with the entry of a new character played by Joi Hoffsommer. As Callie, the manager of the Dairy Queen, she spoonfeeds the afflicted her soft serve ice cream while rattling off the reasons for her quirky behavior, her fondness for her 13 cats, her early memories of Peanut Buster Parfaits. Her unaccountable bursts into one-note laughter, a sound that trails off into the far distance, is a kind of laugh you are likely to recognize.

The first laughs in the first act on the night I attended were drawn at the first mentions of 1) Rantoul High School, 2) Rantoul Dairy Queen, and 3) vomiting while giving a blow job when drunk.

"Rantoul and Die,” act one, contains a similar degrading string of jokes, plus a constant stream of explicit sex talk and foul language. Whether these jokes emerge from a place of superiority and condescension is hard to tell, since Roberts writes in lengthy, personal program notes that the play was written "during one of the most insane, self-destructive periods of my adult life."

But why did he write it? These are not stories from his life. I doubt he would be associated with any of these characters. By the second act, there is a sort of sympathy generated for a character, brain dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The final image of that character falling to one side is inexplicably funny and almost moving.

Mostly, though, I think Roberts deals in the stock in trade of the Los Angeles television and movie industry: contempt. I don’t think he is willfully mean toward his characters; he merely writes in the language which he’s most familiar, and I don’t think it’s all that funny unless you are willing to laugh at the people themselves, the characters in his play.

"Rantoul and Die" is not by a long shot the worst play I've ever seen. I seriously tried to consider if it would have a chance to be performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where they are known for their midwest rural shit-kicking comedies. But I think the answer is clearly "no."

The problem is, at least in the first hour of the play, nothing happens. It is not “plot-driven,” the reviews admit, hard pressed to discover any story or theme at all.

The performers can't be faulted. Nor can the director. These are well honed, professional performances. I laughed at non-joke lines because of the delivery given them by Mike Trippiedi and Anne Kearns, not by the jokes themselves, which often seem incongruous (or randomly ascribed) to the action and characters.

Just hours before the play began, I flipped channels and landed on the redneck comics on Comedy Central: Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and a fourth guy. I was impressed at their timing, their wit, and their interaction with the audience, despite the trailer park stance and crude perspectives about life in rural America.

I didn’t feel bad identifying with their rural, redneck jokes. You sort of know they’re kidding, that they identify fondly with the people they are making fun of. I’m not sure I got that impression in “Rantoul and Die,” where the people behave the way they do because "it is their nature" -- in this case, to be venal, unfaithful, violent and stupid. Other than “sweet” (but perhaps also mentally challenged) to describe Callie in the second act, one would be hard pressed to find other adjectives to apply to the characters in “Rantoul and Die.”

I originally posted comments about “Rantoul and Die” on this site, so that my lawyer friend could read them and argue with me. We Tweedledee'd and Tweedledum'd back and forth heatedly. There was never any intention for those notes to be read or published openly. Mark Roberts found those notes with a Google search and was offended, not surprisingly, in what he saw as a personal attack. I guess it is my nature to write criticism. I’ve done it for too long. Far too long. And, in keeping with the correct telling of the parable, both scorpion and target got hit by this particular poison.