the embree sisters.

George Carlin was a prophet for the common man and he died of heart failure yesterday. I saw him play here in Columbus back in the late 90’s and it was a canned performance meaning the same bit he did word for word in his recent HBO special. But it was still fuggin’ funny.

I can still remember being under the influence of a medicational herb in college and watching George Carlin’s special on HBO that came out after the first Gulf War. He was pointing out how the two guys in charge of that war were “Bush and Colin…someone got fucked in the ass!”

At the time, I made a comment to my buddy Carl that these people thought he was just telling jokes but he was really changing their brains. I remember the mental image of a series of shocks to a brain that fizzled with electricity, growing a little bigger each time. I was way big into the Tool Aenima album and connected that performance to their song “Third Eye.”

In the foreword to his own book Braindroppings, Carlin made a point of saying that he wasn’t for one side or the other but that his loyalty and interest lay in watching the human race circling the drain of history with the disintegration of American society and culture. He was one in a million and he worked every day for each of us to better understand the absurdity and ridiculosity this world has become.

George Carlin, like Kurt Vonnegut, taught me that if we can’t fix the problem then we may as well die choking with laughter.
Creative Commons License photo credit: summer luu

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