Georgie...

"And my head is down and I'm called a clown by comedians that grace/ The living stage of every page of worthless meaningless space/But I swear to you before we're though you're gonna feel our every blow/We ain't bleeding you we're feeding you but you're too f*cking slow" ("The Moon Upstairs" from Mott The Hoople's Brain Capers).

I learned my Carlin like many of us did, born later into his prolific career: I found Class Clown on vinyl among my parent’s stuff. At the age of six, there stuff was my stuff to, and I loved looking at all the big covers of those vinyl records, wondering at a world that bore no relation whatsoever to the Great Space Coaster (oh, if only I had known! exactly how much of a relation there was.

I loved the fact that, an adult was picking his nose (clean up to the elbow, it seemed), and that, from what I could glean from all of this, that this record was probably “dirty”. However, I didn’t listen to George Carlin at that time, which is good, because, like the time I tried to read Eliot when I was 15, I wouldn’t have understood a goddamned thing.

My mother was big Carlin fan, as I found out later, for a couple of reasons;
1. He was Irish.
2. He was a recovering Catholic.
These were reasons enough, given that my mother was Irish and her side of the family had been Catholic until my grandfather had a beef with a Priest over tithing, and thus, my brother and I were never baptized into any religion, thus, damning the both of us to forever walk outside of the light the Lord.

I didn’t really notice, and neither did my brother, aside from never having our friends around to play with until much later on Sundays. My parents made this up to us by getting jelly donuts on Sundays, which we would eat with big glasses of milk, while my parents read the paper, watched Meet the Press, drank coffee and smoked Marlboros.

My father, he who would fetch the donuts, was also a big Carlin fan, and, in fact, owned the aforementioned copy of Class Clown. My father, whose father was an Episcopalian for two minutes sometime in 1909, was not religious in any sense of the word, but instead an idealist for whom the world always disappointed, loved Carlin’s “fuck you” world view.

My mother and father split up about eight months after I graduated; evidentially, my mother, too, was even more of an idealist for whom the world constantly disappointed, and this included my father, and our house, and me, I felt. Nothing like working ten hours at Taco Bell and come home to a collapsing marriage that isn’t your own, but your sense of family, and self, and history.

It is necessary to give you the background on all of this, because, by this point, my brother had moved out by this point, and it was me and my father in the house that was still haunted by my mother, because it was full of her stuff. She decorated it, after all, and we had to live in the womb she’d created called home. Except that instead of warmth and home and hearth, it was rancor, confusion, and the cold spot where someone used to be.

The first order of business after my mother quit home and the town where we’d lived, was to get cable. Indiana was finally getting cable (yes, this was the Nineties!!!) One of the first things my newly single father and I did together, in our new status as a duo, was get hammered and watch George Carlin’s 1992 special Jammin’ In New York, on a rerun, as I recall…

Wait! By then, I had gotten hammered on premixed screwdrivers with the Deacon, and listened to Class Clown, no, wait it was AM/FM, but whatever…

Anyway, while drinking beer with my Dad, and howling ecstatically at Carlin’s riffs on language, realizing that he possessed a poet’s love of the symbol (by this time, I did understand Eliot’s attention to symbol) as well as linguist’s ability to dismantle the assumptions about phrase and instead, work with the actual information, to find truth in humor and humor in truth.

Zesty! Tangy!

Carlin possessed the rarest of gifts; He was confrontational without being cruel, prickly without being a prick. He understood, as well as anybody, that the institutions we hold as sacred cows are just as good eating any other cow. He understood, better than most, the nature of the New Right, and spent the better part of his career cataloging every shoddy shitty thing they did. Carlin eruditely pointed out on Maher’s Show that “Germany lost the war, but Fascism won”. How true is that shit?

So, as Carlin hits his stride with his deconstruction of Gulf War I (DICK Cheney and COLON (sic) Powell), I looked over at my Dad, the Goldwater Conservative, laughing his balls off, and I knew, I knew, that this Magic User, the lefty that he is, and his father, had transcended the ideological, and that my Dad and I were essentially sharing a world view-we just differed on the ways and means that people are fucking stupid-just like Carlin.

As the show wound down, my Dad, semi drunkenly, shambled down the hall, and a few minutes late, shambled back. He brought two cans of beer into the living room, and a stack of vinyl records. On top, was a vinyl copy of Class Clown, and underneath that was the Allman Brothers Band Live at the Fillmore East. He handed me a can of beer (Coors, if my memory serves). We partied. Everything was gonna be alright.

As I woke up this morning, and blearily read the ticker at the bottom of MSNBC’s tragicomic Morning Joe, I just layed there, broken, sad. Then the texts came.

You know somebody like Carlin would not likely out live you, yet, I have not really known a world where he was not there, touring, putting out comedy specials, making me laugh. I know that when I go to see my Dad later this week, its going to be sad, but, in all likelihood, we’ll do his bits for each other just as we always have since that night all those years ago.

Georgie…

Oh Georgie…

UPDATE: Via The Deacon...

Carlin's Obituary...By Carlin.