If you desire something a bit more active, visit MuseHead’s renegade spawn Totally Baked where you’ll find some blackened soul food for your mind.

Kindest Regards,
The Blogger Formerly Known as MuseHead

BIFF: He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.
HAPPY: Don’t say that!
BIFF: He never knew who he was.
CHARLEY: Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

—from “Death of a Salesman”

“Don’t let it end like this.  Tell them I said something.”
—Pancho Villa

I gave it my best shot but couldn’t hold the numbers. For a while it looked like MuseHead was a rising if modest presence, but then the stats graph started bouncing like a bad heart. Ultimately it collapsed and MuseHead flatlined into semiconsciousness. A few folks trickled in to pay their respects, but even they mostly kept quiet.

MuseHead was determined to break rank, to be bold, unrepentant, and idiosyncratic. In order to provoke thought, amusement, and discussion, MuseHead went out there—sometimes waaay out there.

But MuseHead wasn’t able to find its audience. A couple of folks got mad, some smiled, a few even joined in; but most just shrugged and passed by. The subject matter was not what many people wanted to click back to. Perhaps the pushy irreverence was a bit much for some of the saints. And for the pagans the religious element branded the blog unclean. Even “The Door,” the self-proclaimed “pretty much only religious satire magazine” and notorious skewer of Benny Hinn and other high-profile God guys, rejected MuseHead as over the edge for its readers. Dissed by the devil? MuseHead was too profane for the godly, too godly for the profane, and too non sequitur for nearly everybody.

Ironically, within days of launching MuseHead, a new Books & Culture arrived in the mail with an article by Alan Jacobs titled “Goodbye, Blog.” Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College and a former blog addict, tells why he no longer spends much time following even his favorite blogs. Weary with the blog scene, he’s now only an infrequent visitor to the blogosphere.

I mention this because it seemed an ominous portent at the very moment I was bringing MuseHead to life. Yet I thought with a little insight and plenty of attitude I could break out of the pack. Like the penguin standing among thousands of others in the Far Side cartoon, I sang at the top of my lungs, “I gotta be me!” And like the cartoon, few looked—at least for long. I lost the wager.

A few did look though. Thanks to those faithful few who encouraged me to keep going. Thanks to the MuseHead feeders. And thanks to those who actually took the time to comment (even if you did disagree with me). You’re the bright ones in the herd. We still claim the heights—though, unfortunately, the numbers aren’t on our side.

I had fun and the self-imposed demand to post something new each day was a great writing discipline (this is the 73rd consecutive daily post). I even discovered a few things I didn’t know I knew. I got to preach, posture, pontificate, and perform. I have no apologies or regrets for MuseHead—other than the fact that not enough people knew that I was famous.

So tomorrow’s post is the last one. MuseHead will idle online for awhile in case you want to get your final shot in (moderation is now off). But then MuseHead is history. Deleted. Erased. Nuked.

Some bona fide famous last words that seem appropriate for the occasion:

“Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”
—Tolstoy (1828-1910)

“Dying is easy.  Comedy is difficult.”
—Edmund Gwenn (1875-1959)

Tomorrow then.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I can feel them slipping away. The moments. The only ones I have. Going. Steadily. Relentlessly. Irretrievably.

I remember the day God saved my keister. I met with an old-fashioned preacher man who had an Amish beard and a voice so deep he could summon whales. In his office I bowed my head and prayed simply: “Make it stick.” The preacher man then spoke over me like an Old Testament oracle, quoting a scripture passage I had not yet learned: “Satan has desired to sift you like wheat.” That was it. I said thanks and went home, wondering what was in store for me. It was January 1979.

Since then I’ve done a lot of stuff. Some good. Some not. I’ve taught high school and college. I did the pastor thing for awhile (quite crappily, I have to admit) and then launched a small non-profit organization. In the last six years I’ve made nearly thirty overseas trips to places like Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, India, Russia, Canada, and Bangladesh. I’ve tried a few radical things in my own backyard with mixed results.

Sometimes I stare out the window and try to add up my life. I’ve got a beautiful wife and four kids who love me a lot. I’ve got friends who seem not to mind proximity. I live in a house that shames me by its niceness. I’m not broke mostly.

Yet I often catch myself straining against the rope, a rope that is getting shorter each day. My greatest fear is going out with a whimper.

One cold afternoon in Petropavlovsk, on the Kamchatka peninsula of eastern Russia, I started a poem that begins like this:

I don’t want to die
With dreams to spare
But one alone, and flare
To ash

a whisp of smoke the air
dissolves

After four years I’ve never finished it. Maybe that’s all I have to say. I want to devour everything, then detonate like a suicide bomber and send a shock wave that rattles the earth. Sometimes I get screwed up, comparing my cards against the hands of the high and mighty. But I know there’s only one real game in town and the path to glory reads Via Dolorosa.

Damn the lures and the deals and the poster people. Damn my adulterous lust for the praise of men. Damn my consuming hunger for significance. Damn it all.

I am tumbling toward negation, falling to “the still point of the turning world” where I hope to find, must find redemption for what cannot be redeemed. All I have is what’s left. All I have is the day before tomorrow.

I want glory. Not empty praise or polite attention, but well-deserved recognition by a whole LOT of people. As Pliny the Elder wrote: “True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read.” That’s the very definition of MuseHead. Obscurity is not an option. MuseHead is brilliant and throngs of people should be streaming to this fount of enlightenment.

I know chasing glory isn’t spiritually correct. I’m supposed to nurture humility and let God lift me up in due time. But it’s become obvious to me that God and I have radically different concepts of due time. I’m due, man, and I can’t wait around for Deity to figure it out.

Cicero understood me at least. “In men of the highest character and noblest genius,” he wrote, “there is to be found an insatiable desire for honour, command, power, and glory.” That’s me: highest character and noblest genius. How can anybody read MuseHead and not see that?

The words of Diderot ring in my ears like prophecy: “The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.”

Democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

but
sometimes truth comes sheer and armed
to the teeth, blistering
asphalt, shattering
pillars, splitting bones
and hairs, flaring
its manifold,
feral vassals, once benign, now
transmuted by crucial
proximity, now
disposed (like saltpeter/sulfur/charcoal),
when sparked by mercy
or wrath, to go
boom.

The shallow, crass, and inane get all the press, adulation and allegiance.

The economy is our state religion, media stars our prophets, politics our prayers, and sex our Eucharist.

We have no moral high ground.

The mirror is our favorite view.

More than anything we want salvation; more than anything we hate the road to it.

I’ve never met a Christian I want to be like.

Convenience and security are our highest values. Christians add a third: divine approval of the first two.

For ourselves we make allowances for everything.

We are masters of irrelevance.

Deep down, we are all Machiavellians.

Denial is our greatest asset.

There. I feel better now.