How Much Fun Can I Have Before I Go To Hell?

Maybe it’s Omaha. You get to a place where you can’t go there any more. Like Hemingway said about the war. It was there but he could not go to it any more. And you can’t go into that darkened bar and play the fool for the patrons of the arts. You can’t believe that America is a great country so it deserves great art. What the hell could that mean? McDonald’s is a hamburger so it deserves great art. Jesus is God so he deserves great art. And what is great art anyway. Some dimwitted college professor with tenure and a bad case of herpes decides what’s great art and when he writes about it in The New York Times it becomes the Word of God. Please. But this is Omaha and you can’t go any further. You get out of the car, off the bus, deplane and un-board the train. You lay your motorcycle down in the road and just hope nobody hits it. You are stopped dead in your tracks and a man comes up to you and says when this war’s over we’ll kill everybody we meet. And you move on alone. You move on because you’ve got nobody to go see and you don’t want to hear about the Supreme Court going deaf. That’s their problem. Your problem is moving and staying put. All together now. All together now. What is your problem? It’s the trouble with going nowhere fast. Where is nowhere and how fast can you get there. You heard about a kid in New Orleans wearing a t-shirt that said: “How much fun can I have before I go to hell?” That seems like a legitimate question. Why don’t the big brains work on that one? Why don’t the preachers talk about that one? No way, Jose. We don’t get into philosophical and theological issues such as resolve: how much fun can this boy have before he goes to hell? We can’t debate that. We’d have to take the whole country apart and start over. And first we’d have to define what fun is. And the whole thing depends on what hell is. And you’re just in Omaha overnight thinking you can’t go on. You can’t go on even if there is hell out there that you could go to if you could just figure out how to have fun. You don’t know. Tomorrow, they’ll bring you your bike and say ride white boy ride. What will you do then? Try to explain Omaha? It could be beyond the scope of the discussion. So you rent a room and wait. And you never know how much fun you could have had before you go to hell.