We here at All God’s Lonely Men do go out from time to time and, whereas we do not consider our duty to be as one standardly defined as journalistic in nature, we do strive to bring a certain amount of verisimilitude and real-life experiences to our postings. In doing that, one would naturally be expected to draw from one’s own every day life and that is what we have done here. For your amusement.
On the Death of an Entertainer
July 7, 2009
All wrapped in white linen
Today, as uncounted multitudes throng the streets of Los Angeles for reasons both obvious and oblique, we here at All God’s Lonely Men would like to take this opportunity to express our condolences, as well, and mourn the passing of an entertainer extraordinaire, a showman the likes of which this world may never see again and, in doing so, perhaps reach a level of understanding that can help contextualize this great performers impact on, not only our society, but on our collective culture at large.
Joe Bowman, 84, of Houston, Texas, died on the road – as he had lived – just hours after completing a performance near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had stopped for the night in Junction, Texas, some 700 odd miles out of Albuquerque, 300 miles from Houston. He was almost home.
Joe Bowman was “The Straight Shooter.” Joe Bowman was “The Master of Triggernometry.” Joe Bowman was a sharp-shooting, fancy-roping, card-tricking teller of old west stories, a cowboy. And the world is poorer for his passing.
He could shoot out a piece of tape covering the hole over a washer thrown in the air. He could cut through the edge of a playing card at 30 paces. He could plug three shots into the center of a 50-cent piece in less than a second.
It was a heart attack that took him.

The Entertainer
Mr. Bowman was not born into a show business family. He was born the son of an auto mechanic. But as a child growing up in Asheville, North Carolina then later Houston, he and his older brother Mark consumed a steady diet of cowboy culture at the movie theater. They also consumed a steady diet of the cowboy code, of Tom Mix and Gene Autry morality, leading him to say later in life, “What I remember is the morality of the westerns and of the cowboys. That’s all that westerns were: morality plays.” Good and Evil (with the capital letters). Right and Wrong.
What did it mean to be a cowboy? According to Gene Autry (or at least the PR team who created content for his fan club) it meant 10 simple things.
- A cowboy never takes unfair advantage – even of an enemy.
- A cowboy never betrays a trust. He never goes back on his word.
- A cowboy always tells the truth.
- A cowboy is kind and gentle to small children, old folks, and animals.
- A cowboy is free from racial and religious intolerances.
- A cowboy is always helpful when someone is in trouble.
- A cowboy is always a good worker.
- A cowboy respects womanhood, his parents and his nation’s laws.
- A cowboy is clean about his person in thought, word, and deed.
- A cowboy is a Patriot.
Please note that #10 says “Patriot” and not “jingoist”.
Please note that cowboys are kind and gentle to small children, old folks, and animals. Please note that a cowboy respects womanhood and is free from racial and religious intolerances. Please note that a cowboy always tell the truth.
That’s not really that hard of a row to hoe, really, when you think about it. But in our present star-obsessed environ, where even the whiff of celebrity drives the crass culture-consuming public into some kind of love-hate ecstasy, made fat and angry by a steady diet of glossy tabloids and an internet redolent with tastelessness and barely contained hostility, the very idea of a man tipping his hat or helping a stranger or uttering those anachronistic examples of forsoothery, “Sir or M’am”, seems alien to us or, even worse, laughable.
Of Joe Bowman, his son Mark of Austin, Texas was reported to have said in his obituary, “Those old westerns were his whole value system. He lived by a code and saw things in a way that just doesn’t exist anymore.”

I spied a young cowboy
Even into his 80s, Joe Bowman was on the road, like a cowboy, perhaps lonesome but not lonely, entertaining, educating, enjoying. With two six-shooters, he could keep two targets in the air until he ran out of bullets. And when he talked, he told stories of a time, perhaps a golden-age as fictional as any, where right and wrong were subjects that mattered to men and the line demarking the difference was not to be crossed for pleasure or profit.
His son Mark said, “He could never quite accept a world in which Roy Rogers no longer counted.”
Gene Autry’s Code (along with other cowboy creeds including the vaguely disturbing The Lone Ranger’s Creed that includes the statement: “That a man should make the most of what equipment he has”) can be found at www.elvaquero.com/The_Cowboy_Code.htm
A memorial site for Joe Bowman: http://www.joebowman.com/
Foorsoothery may not necessarily be a real word, but I found it here to mean “an archaic term, especially as used in modern literature.”: http://phrontistery.info/archaic.html
All God’s Lonely Men
July 4, 2009
God's Lonely Man
June 27th, 2009
All God’s Lonely Men
Today has been another New York Saturday. I got up early, around eight, took a shower, and left the apartment as fast as I could. I hate being in the apartment on the weekends. It’s too lonely. Just me and those books and the dirty floor and stacked up dishes. The loud music from the cars parked in front of the playground across the street, the mothers screaming at their children. Screaming at them.
I hopped the train into lower Manhattan, kind of the East Village, around 2nd and Houston, and watched Sam Rockwell in Moon at a really groovy indy movie theater. The kind of place Woody Allen characters go to watch movies and banter.
Listen, I love seeing movies by myself. It’s been one of my greatest private pleasures since I was old enough to go to the movies alone. But in the thirteen months I’ve been in New York City, every movie I’ve seen, theater or home entertainment, I’ve seen entirely by myself. I’m starting to find the experience more than a little depressing. I need a discussion partner, a banter-buddy. I need a Woody Allen character sidekick – the old Woody Allen, not the current, creepy Woody Allen. I need someone to talk to.
So I hit the streets and wandered. That’s what I do on the weekend. Get up early, get out of the apartment, get out of Clinton Hill/Bed Stye, get out of Brooklyn, hit Manhattan and wander. At least I’m around people. There’s not a lot of interaction, not a lot of talking, all though I have had a few impromptu conversations. Those are more along the lines of the cranky old man shaking his fist at some jack-hole driver and me shaking my fist, too, and then we walk down the block together commiserating about these damn drivers and declaring how glad we are that we don’t drive and then, at the appropriate time, we fall out of step with each other, one moves ahead and the other drifts behind and the moment is over.
This is my social life.
“You should blog,” my friend said to me last weekend (my real friend. Not an imaginary one. I think. I only see her once or twice a month. She’s never met anyone else I know. Her visits are usually preceded by moments of intense emotional stress. Sometimes accompanied by blinding headaches, the type that are so bad you lose vision in one eye. It’s like this: I have a terrible week at work. The stress hits me, reaches a crescendo, say on a Friday night, then some time Saturday, as I haunt the Met or poke around in the park, I get a text message and we meet in a bar. While I wait, the pain starts, the hot poker digging around in the meat of my mind, just behind my left eye, then the vision, a bright spot, painful and intense, and I sit there at the bar and grip the stool until she emerges from the flare, like she’s walking through a wall of smoke, like a ship breaking through a fog bank, she emerges and she says things like -)
“You should blog.”
“What the hell would I blog about?”
“I don’t know. All of that stuff you gripe about all the time. You should blog about that.”
Blog.
It’s a verb. It’s a noun. I still get irritated when someone uses “party” to describe something they intend to do instead of someplace they plan to go. Can I blog?
Am I blogging?
“People will think I’m weird.”
“What people?”
“The people who read my blog.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, a little head shake, a little smirk kissing the corner of her eyes, her hand drifting across my forearm on its way to her beer. “It’s your BLOG. No one’s going to read it.”
Moon was about loneliness. That’s what I think. The movie is about what happens to us when we’re left on our own for too long, when machines are our only companions, when we hold on too long to the scraps of a life that isn’t ours any more. I won’t get all spoilery. It’s a good movie. That’s what I think.
I ate pizza for lunch today.
I liked going to the movies.
It’s very hot today.
I’m not sad that Michael Jackson is dead.
Am I blogging?
Is this a blog?
I watched another movie about loneliness recently, the quintessential New York lonely boy movie. The hot summer, hot sun, hot streets wandered in desperation, I can’t sleep nights, I just want to work long hours, would you like to have coffee with me, loneliest portrait of any isolated character ever to chew his way across the silver screen movie.

Paul Schrader
In the DVD extras, Paul Schrader said when he was writing Taxi Driver, he’d spend weeks at a time without talking to a soul, crashing at an ex-girlfriend’s apartment while she was out of town, unemployed, just cranking through two drafts of the screenplay, channeling onto the page all of the alienation and isolation and despondent dejection this city has to offer the sensitive writer boy who thinks too much.
At one point in the film, during his nonstop, steam of self-conscious internal dialogue, Travis Bickle quotes Thomas Wolfe’s essay “God’s Lonely Man”, totally missing the point.
Travis believes no one else feels like he feels, he feels like no one can. He’s alone with his aloneness and only he can appreciate the depths of his separate state. He’s miserable, yet he does everything he can to make sure no one gets close to him. Travis Bickle is in self-imposed solitary confinement. And he likes it. As if his isolation makes him special.

Thomas Wolfe
But Wolfe’s point is that loneliness is universal, that it’s one of the cornerstones of human experience, that everyone feels it, feels it constantly. He said, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
So Travis gets it wrong. In our loneliness, we are united. In our loneliness, we are not unique, we are never truly alone.
According to Thomas Wolfe.
I don’t really get headaches before my friend shows up. I just thought that was funny. A little foreshadowing before I got to the Taxi Driver bit. It’s a legitimate literary device. Foreshadowing.
We are legion, we lonely many, we warriors of solitude. We are an army of wanders, locked in loose formation, gathered to fight the battle of intense introspection, haunting the streets and bars and sidewalks of this citadel of seclusion. We are all God’s lonely men. And we like it.
Am I blogging?
Is this a blog?
Fools for Love
July 4, 2009
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.
There is one truth we’ve found to be self-evident when considering the entirety of God’s lonely men; they are all, inescapably, inevitably, in one way or another, fools for love.
It seems to be an affliction manifestly intrinsic in the species and one that will unavoidably expose an otherwise recondite Romeo for what he truly is – a big, fat pansy.
Witness the painful public enpansification of the soon-to-be former Governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford. Plenty of politicians commit political seppuku because they compulsively crave the intoxicating ego stroke of extramarital dalliances. They’re politicians for Christ’s sake – they thrive on attention. And after their infidelities are eventually exposed by salivating citizens of the fourth estate, driven to frenzied apoplexy by the whiff of a salacious tidbit, they all stand up in front of the cameras and stiffen their upper lips and battle back a slight hitch in their voices and bat away tears that just won’t quite come (because they’re not that good) and ask for our collective clemency.
What they don’t do is go on and on about the object of their affections. That don’t sit down with the AP and breathlessly choke out purple pronunciations like, “This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” the AP reports an overly (or overtly) emotional Governor Sanford proclaiming. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford wipes his tears
He almost had me there. There was almost a hint of poetry to his whiny declaration. If only he’d said, “ … but a love story all the same.” Or “none-the-same.” Or something. But, at the end of the day, he is still just a politician and not a poet so he will get a pass for his lapse of eloquence. And, more importantly, he is now exposed, to God and man, as being a great big sniffling sissy.
Who goes on and on about the woman who got away (or done them wrong or never noticed them)? Pansy men. Lonely men. Sissies. That’s who. And who will never get the girl of their dreams because they look weak willed and weenie-fied when they go on TV or show up at a party or stand on the sidewalk outside their apartments at three in the morning and cry and say things like, “You are my soul mate!”? Back-peddling jack-holes, that’s who.
When the Argentine love story broke, Sanford looked like a human being, a man torn by his undeniable love for a woman forbidden to him and awash in a sea of guilt over humiliating his wife and children. Then he descended into whiner mode which, admittedly, made him look a little pathetic, but we lonely men could sympathize, we fools for love could empathize. But now that he’s sliding back further, closing the curtain of born-again bullshit over the story and saying things like, “ … love is not a feeling. It’s a choice. It’s an action.” And admitting to further “indiscretions”, “mistakes” where he “crossed the line” with an unnumbered series of women, our sympathy dries up.
Listen, fools for love do foolish things, but they embrace their foolishness (even while often resolving they won’t get fooled again) and God’s lonely men ruminate on loves lost or un-won. What they don’t do is hide behind the veil of recrudescent romanticism when it suits them only to abandon their position when they realize they’re pissing away their political future. If you are a dreamy-eyed romantic, you are born one and you will die one (quiet possibly alone) but you won’t turn it on and off as it suits your public persona. You can’t.
The last time I saw him alive, He was standing up on the bride’s side Shouting his objections at the groom.

God's loneliest poet?
Next week: All God’s Lonely Men take a field trip to a distant, mystical land called The Bronx to visit the site of the penning of perhaps God’s loneliest poem by God’s loneliest poet. Things will happen.
This story isn’t about her, anyway.


