But I LIke Being Highfaluting!

He gives us all his love
He gives us all his love
He's smiling down on us from up above
And he's giving us all his love

He knows how hard we're trying
He hears the babies crying
He sees the old folks dying
And he gives us all his love
Now if you need someone to talk to
You can always talk to him
And if you need someone to lean on
You can lean him.

 He give us all his love

   He gives us all his love
    He's smiling down on us
   From up above

   He gives us all his love

There's a movie no one remembers called “Cold Turkey.” It starred Dick van Dyke and it's premise was that a economically depressed town trying to win a challenge posed by a cigarette company. If all the inhabitants would give up smoking for a month and if they succeeded, the US gov't would establish a defense plant in the town, revitalizing the economic base. Of course, the cigarette company does all it can, in secret, to sabotage the town's attempts. They especially pursue the one guy who you would think would've quit smoking years earlier, the town's doctor, Dr. Procter, who chain smokes and sounds like he has last stage COPD.

In the end, the town suppresses the temptations from the evil cigarette company and wins the right to have the plant built there. The last shot of the film is a slow close up of the now plant on the horizon, with about five smokestacks belching the blackest smoke you've seen. In the end, the town really lost.

The music playing over the shot is Randy Newman's “He Gives Us All His Love.”

From the lyrics alone, you'd think this is reinforcement of the Christian belief that God has your back at all times. It ain't, if you know Randy Newman. Newman is saying, “Yeah, God sees all the misery and He's doing NOTHING.”

There's a reason why Norman Lear put that song over the last shot of the movie.

The moral of the movie goes back to it's opening, the town limps along w/o many jobs but, the townsfolk were doing ok anyway. They had each other. They could depend on each other. That's all they had, was each other. That was enough without reaching out towards some savior, be it God, the free market or gov't.

**

Before you go an paint me an atheist, don't. I have no problem with someone who's facing a really shitty life's choice and has no answers anywhere but turn to religion. What answer does pancreatic cancer have but one very ugly one? I've seen it too many times where some event happens to someone and there is really no good answer, or if there is one, it's an answer that does little to assuage the trouble. People will claw, grasp and scrape for anything to get relief. I'm going to stand in their way?

If nothing else, you turn to your friends who probably cannot excise the problem you face. They're there to listen, carry you along somewhat if they can. We've all faced situations like this. I myself can remember one where I found out just who I could depend upon. I was surprised at how few they were.

Without going into the whole story again, because I wrote it here once, I needed the support of some friends and when I told them what kind of support, which wasn't money, a place to live or anything tangible, but only their voice, 90% of them melted away. Wow...

Two people stayed and stood up and those two I didn't figure would have either but their moral sense of indignation was enough for them to cry “FOUL!” about what I was going through.

Once that situation I went through was completed, for several months after I'd chew over how so many of these so called friends abandoned me so easily. It was probably the first time I went through it so that's why I ruminated on the whole thing. It was new to me.

Do I fault them? Not particularly, because there were times I was called on to stand up and doing a real quick mental calculation of what it might cost me, I ditched them. I was no better. It's a dog eat dog world out there my Dad used to say and loyalty is a rare commodity. He went through his trials alone sometimes and told me to “don't worry about it, people are people and guess what? I'm one of them too. I'm human, so are they” So stop holding yourself or they to such a lofty height when all people can do, at best, is stumble and trip their way through life.

Still, there are a precious few that you can rely upon when things turn to shit, or you'll find out just who will stick around, quickly enough to help you in a pinch. Those ones you hang onto with a death grip.

In the day to day schlepping we all do, all we have is each other. The real trick is though is to learn that you have yourself to rely on. Only through struggling do you learn that lesson.

**

Yeah, I think too much and been accused of this years ago...Christ, I hear Newman's song last night and I chew it over like cud and spit out this crap, just to get it out of me. God, do I love to hear myself talk.

Ok, to lighten this pastoral sermon up, I'll tell a perfectly tasteless joke:

Two women are standing by a bin of loose potatoes in a supermarket when the first women picks up two potatoes and remarks: “These potatoes remind me of my husband's balls.”

The second women asks surprisingly: “Are they that big?”

“No,” says the first woman, “they're that dirty.”

There, that joke should balance out this pretentious piece of crap.