Hollywoodaholic

If you’re consulting a Mayan calendar to figure out what’s going to happen in 2012, then maybe it’s true; the apocalypse is near. Because you’re freakin’ crazy; and if enough people are that ignorant, paranoid or insane, I suppose anything’s possible.

The scholars all tell us the calendar marks the end of an age, not the end of the world. But who listens to scholars, anyway? What do they know?

The ancient Mayans like the ancient Incans and most other ancient civilizations were into astrology – they studied the stars. This is most likely because they didn’t have television, Blackberries or iPhones. Heads were tilted up to the sky at an awkward angle all night instead of hunched over looking down toward their palms all day and night. We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?

So it’s not the end of the world; it’s the end of the Piscean Age moving into the Aquaurium age, or something like that. Bellbottoms might be coming back. That’s pretty scary, but it’s not the end of the world.

Every narcissist (self-obsessed) civilization or culture since the cracked up dawn of man has imagined the world would end on their particular shift. It used to just take a lunar eclipse or a passing comet to send people in complete panic running for the exit doors. But like I said, we’ve come a long way. Now it takes technology.

In 1939 it took radio – a broadcast by Orson Welles of H. G. Wells  “War of the Worlds” imagining an invasion from Mars. In 1962 it took ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads – and the possible mutual destruction of two paranoid nation superpowers during the Cold War. In 2000, it took computers – and the wide swept paranoia that their circuitry would implode during a digital do-over.

So what does it say that, in 2012, all it takes is an 800 year-old calendar put together by people that ran around half naked and played basketball with decapitated heads? Doesn’t that seem like one giant leap backward in the people’s progress of paranoia?

I don’t want to take away anyone’s fun. We all had a blast in the 1980’s re-deciphering every stanza of 16^th century seer Nostradamus for clues to our imminent world destruction. In 1987, we even convened millions of concerned souls to meditate to hold the planet together during the Harmonic Convergence. It must have worked, because Gorbachev unexpectedly threw his arms up, declared the arms race to build bigger and better weapons of mass destruction as total madness, backed down, and effectively ended the 40-year cold war between the Soviet Union and America.

So in the spirit of optimism and ‘been there, done that,’ I offer instead …

10 random things to look forward to in 2012 besides the Apocalypse.

1.  Mad Men season five. Where Sally Draper finally calls her mother a ‘bitch.’
2. The Republican Reality Series. Let’s face it; no show has offered more entertainment value these past few months than this family feud between rich science-deniers, bigots (nod nod wink wink code phrase, “we want to take this country back”) and the brain dead trying to out-asshole each other.
3. The Summer Olympics in London. Personally, nothing bores me more than watching athletes run around a track, but the opening and closing ceremonies come on like Cirque de Soleil on crack.
4. A new desktop PC with an awesome processor that can handle Arma II without lagging.  (My son added this one.)
5. A job. And if you have a job; an easier job, where you aren’t doing the work of three other workers who were laid off to keep corporate profits relentlessly moving up during a global recession.
6. Adele’s next album. I just pity the poor bloke who broke up with her since the last one who is going to be eviscerated and castrated by these songs much to the delight of music-lovers everywhere.
7. Game of Thrones season 2. Okay, I admit I watch too much television and should probably take up star-gazing again.
8. The Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Heath Care Act in June. Why am I fairly certain of this? Because despite their conservative majority, the high court are mostly strict constitutional scholars … plus they need to make up for the most idiotic decision ever passed – Citizens United; which gave corporations the same status as people, but with an unlimited ability to donate to an election candidate through Super PACs.
9. Occupy America, Spring Edition. Yes, as winter passes, the 99 %-ers  will be in full bloom again like you have never seen them before, putting on such a massive display of passion and solidarity that will finally jolt the patriotism and shame of a enough 1%-ers to actually admit they wouldn’t have gotten there without riding on the backs of the 99%-ers, and raise our collective consciousness just enough to truly usher in a more enlightened age of Aquarius. Maybe the Mayan calendar was right after all.
10. Obama’s inevitable re-election. I figure I lost most of you haters during the Republican primary ‘assholes’ remark or with #9, but look at it this way … What leader was better equipped personality-wise to never lose his cool, never panic, never get too emotionally frustrated, and to lead us with a steady and stable demeanor during the most hyperventilating natural, political and economic disaster-ridden period of our history than … Spock?Happy New Year, everyone!

Tough negotiations with VP at MGM

After slogging this blog for a couple of years, I’m entitled to one incidence of shameless commerce. We’re offering a TeleSummit on how to Sell Your Script on December 14. Early registrants before November 10 get $20 off. It’ll be a good, informative event. Workbook included. Bonus TeleSummit download on how to protect your script. Questions will be accepted during webinar.

I watch Bill Maher, religiously. Every week. Like church.

He speaks truth to power in a manner so cool and rational and funny, it’s refreshing and entertaining beyond shit.

No matter who the guest or panelist is, he has a way to instantly disarm them with pure reason. It’s hard to argue when someone is brandishing the cold, hard, indisputable facts.

Unless, of course, the subject of religion comes up.

Suddenly, this cool, calculated rationalist begins ranting and raving; practically foaming at the mouth about gullibility, ignorance, stupidity and the ‘fairy tales’ of the believers.

To quote Shakespeare, “Methinks thou doth protest too much.”

How is a raving atheist spewing contempt and intolerance for believers in Jesus or any other faith any different than an evangelical Christian on the other side spewing condemnation and intolerance for heathen non-believers?

They are really mirror images of the same basic intolerance.

Who CARES what someone else believes? Nobody really knows. Why does it bug you so much, Bill? If someone wants to believe in Jesus, Mohammed, Scientology, Leprechauns, or the magic underwear of Mormonism, what’s it to you?

Sure, if someone uses religion to incite hatred and violence and war (as so often has been done throughout history, past and current), then expose it and condemn the hypocrisy of the agenda behind it. But don’t become one of them.

CNN has a religion column and 90 percent of the people who post comments to the column appear to be atheists angrily mocking or condemning the idea of faith, God, or religion. Religious columns online provoke more responses from atheists than actual followers of one faith or the other. What does this say?

Again, methinks they doth protest too much.

I have a theory that many atheists, and probably Bill Maher included, are burned believers. Why else would they get so riled up over what someone else believes?

At some time in their lives, perhaps in the early devout Catholic upbringing of the half-Jewish Bill Maher, they fervently believed in something. Maybe it was the power of prayer. Maybe it was the saving power of grace. Or maybe it was a miracle that just didn’t come through. They lost a parent or precious loved one or even a pet; the bully unjustly got away with his crime; or their parents stopped loving each other and divorced. So they threw away prayers or faith in anything beyond belief in the random cruelty or callousness of life, and embraced pure rationalism.

And now, any time someone else brings up faith or religion, it stirs their blood and those inner emotions and triggers a deep anger at something they once might have believed in and have since lost. How DARE someone else have faith in something?

It’s just a theory.

But I would also remind atheists or non-believers attempting art that almost every great masterpiece in the world of art or music was inspired by faith in something bigger than, or beyond the ego or rationalism of the artist.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (that’s Jesus in man’s ‘Joy’ there)

Mozart’s Requiem

The Beatles “Let It Be”

Michelangelo’s Pieta or David or Sistine Chapel

Even a secular artist such as Paul Simon found his greatest inspiration in gospel music when he composed, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

And what would Soul Music – think Marvin Gaye, Al Green or Otis Redding – be without the ‘soul?’ Probably just lifeless, uninspired programmed crap like the Black-Eyed Peas, “I Got a Feeling,” who’s only inspiration appears to be greed for a dance floor remix that has a shelf life about the same as milk.

John Lennon sang “imagine no religion” in his classic, “Imagine,” but he wasn’t talking about God or faith. He meant the use of religion by men as a form of control over others. And keep in mind he wrote this song after extensive experimentation in primary therapy writing cathartic songs like, “God,” and “Mother,” where he was screaming about the loss of … well, his mother. It happened when he was young. He probably prayed to have her in his life and felt betrayed. And he got angry. And later … he protested too much.

But he must have made his own peace eventually forgiving everyone else their silly beliefs in faith or God or religion or alcohol or pills or magic underwear, because one of the last NUMBER ONE hit songs he ever had was the very positive and cheerful, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”

It’s all right. It’s all right.

Here’s a simple test to determine whether you believe in some form of God or spiritual life.

Have you ever meditated? Do you believe in the power of meditation?

We’re not talking prayers. Prayer is ASKING for something from above or beyond yourself.

Meditation is LISTENING for something beyond yourself.

If you believe in the power of meditation, then you are not an atheist.

Because meditation is going within yourself to find a silence or inner peace beyond the chatter of your own mind.

It’s letting go of the ego or mask of identity you’ve created for yourself that pretends you really are separated from anyone or anything else.

It’s going within to find that inter-connectivity.

In physics, it’s called The Unified Field Theory. Everything in the universe; solid, gas, or liquid is really just dancing particles of energy suspended in space. Everything really is just ONE thing in a field or matrix.

In metaphysics, this inter-connectivity is called the Collective Unconscious, or Universal Consciousness.

In religion, followers call it God.

And to poets and dreamers, it’s called … Love.

Believe in that, Bill, and you just might find the inner peace and tolerance that evade holier-than-thou zealots who simply can’t “live and let live,” or “Believe what you want, and let believe.”

Believe in that, Bill, and you just might believe again.

I believe in you, Bill.