# 142:
there’s no turning back.
The mob is in control.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
But Seriously Folks
Thank you ladies and gentle worms. Tonight, I’m going to start out with a tribute to all of you. That’s right, a musical tribute to human beings.

♪ Hey there!
Yes you there!
Didja know there,
That you’ve got:
Two legs,
And you’ve got:
Two arms,
And you’ve got:
Two brains,
Inside your head, yeah! ♪
Needs a little work.
But seriously folks, I just want you to know I’m a believer in clean comedy. Yeah. Clean comedy. That’s my thing. Clean comedy.
So, these two bars of soap were walking down the street and they’re having a really heated argument. This one bar of soap is getting furious—out of control. So the other bar of soap says, “Hey! Don’t work yourself up into a lather!”
Oh yeah, it’s clean!
I was just talking backstage with legendary comedian Buzzy Vava Voom. He just flew in from a 37-year run at Joey Knuckles' Steak and Stein in Lost Wages, Nevada, and boy is his airplane tired!
“Buzzy,” I said, “what’s the secret of your success? How do You be funny?”
Buzzy says to me, “Kid, don’t get too personal with your humor. Nobody wants to hear about your personal problems. So if you really hate your wife, don’t do wife jokes because the audience will see that you really mean it and they won’t think you’re funny.”
So, taking Buzzy’s advice about keeping my personal life out of my humor, for those who have seen me perform before, I won’t be doing the bit about the wacky arsonist, the naked parking attendant, or the bit about falling in love with grandpa’s cow.
“We don’t get many guys in here with big penises.”
The guy with the big penis looks at the five dollar bill, looks at his beer, looks back at the five dollar bill, then looks at the bartender and says:
“How come?”
(Sustained, awkward silence)
“But seriously folks, you know, my wife is such a bitch . . .”
~ by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
I Knew A Young Man

I knew a young man
Who drank warm water
Right from the faucet,
From his cupped hand.
Everything he did,
An act of defiance,
An act of strength,
His way through the world.
They sent him to the war
And he didn’t last a week.
~ Poem and photograph by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
My Afternoon With Alex

The charming and erudite host of Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek, is surprisingly sardonic off camera. The studio audience—about 100 split between members of the general public on the left side of the theater, friends and family of the contestants on the right—had plenty of opportunity to ask him questions during down times between segments, sampling his slightly cynical sense of humor.
I asked if he'd ever been a game show contestant; if he would ever be a contestant on Jeopardy! before he retires; and how did he think he'd do as a Jeopardy! contestant.
He said he'd been a contestant on a few game shows, but would not be a contestant on Jeopardy! because then someone else would have to host the show, and "he might be better than I am." How would he do as a Jeopardy! contestant? Trebek said he would probably do well against his "peers." Then, looking directly at me, he said, "I see by your white hair that you might be one of my peers. I would crush you!"
A middle-aged man in the mostly middle-aged audience asked, "How do you pronounce all those foreign words?" He answered with overemphasized, drawn out speech: "W-i-t-h M-y M-o-u-t-h."
I also talked to crisp-toned announcer Johnny Gilbert, asking how many tapings per day the winners do. He said they tape five shows a day. For Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings to win seventy-four consecutive games, he had to win five games in a row, then get up the next morning and go win another five games. Whew indeed! The show tapes Tuesdays and Wednesdays, three weeks a month, nine months a year.
Gilbert introduced two of the three Clue Crew members who were at the taping—Sarah and Jimmy. When the pair stood up and waved to the audience, I saw that Jimmy was wearing a maroon hoodie with "HARVARD" emblazoned on the front in big letters. Yeah, OK. You're smart.
A Few Candid Moments
A fortyish woman asked Trebek what his favorite karaoke song was. He replied, "My favorite karaoke song?" then turned his head to the side and pretended to spit on the floor, saying: "I hate karaoke."
Another audience member asked him what he thought about rap music. As he began to criticize it, he seemed to pause and take a quick scan of the audience, then said he disliked most of it because of the bad language and negative references, adding that he thought it was a bad influence on youth. "Not all of it is bad, but most of it," he said, apparently not wishing to condemn the entire black youth culture.
Surprise! Trebek Doesn't Know Everything
When one of the contestants incorrectly answered "era" instead of "eon" in response to a science question requiring a three-letter word with two vowels, Trebek told the young man that "era" was not a scientific term. One of the fact checkers disagreed.
(Era can be generic, such as the era of horse and buggy, or scientific, such as the Paleozoic era.)
Trebek seemed to think "era" had only a generic meaning. But after the fact checker disagreed, he walked over to the front of the stage where a semicircle of fact checkers are located in a pit behind computer screens and telephones, and picked up one of their dictionaries. He seemed genuinely interested in making sure he had the correct information, although the staff photographer who took candid photos during the taping of the show moved quickly into position to take a few shots of Trebek studiously peering into the dictionary. He lingered just long enough to ensure a good publicity shot.
Trebek Is 73
When asked what books he's read, Trebek said he reads a lot of nonfiction, "political stuff," and also likes novelist "John . . ." and then couldn't think of the author's last name until an audience member called out: "Grisham." Then he mentioned finishing a book during a recent trip, but could not remember what it was. "It'll come to me," he said. It didn't.
So even the sharp-witted Trebek, adjudicator of all knowledge, cannot escape the symptoms of an aging mind. Or perhaps it was just overload, considering all the data that had passed through his brain by the last taping of the day. It was the fifth and last show during a day in which he'd already articulated 264 questions with but a very few misspeaks. Is this reassuring to those of us who worry about occasional memory loss? I don't know, but I'm gonna keep playing.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
I Am Born
W hen did I start? What is my first conscious memory? You might as well ask when my Being burst out from Nothing and became Something.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Who created this artwork?
© All Rights Reserved
# 229:
as if we were all heart transplant surgeons,
waiting for the call.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Genesis Of Mail
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And
the earth was without mail, and void. So God said, “Let there be mail,” and
there it was.
2 God saw the mail,
that it was plentiful and multiplied, and so God divided the occupant from the
personal. And God called the occupant, “Junk,” and the personal, He called,
“Personal.”
3 Then God said,
“Let there be a postal office, and let it divide small boxes among those who
would receive, though it be more blessed to send.”
4 And God said, “Let
there be stamps, bulk rate, and second-day delivery.”
5 Finally, God said,
“I will make a mailman in my image, after my likeness, and let him have
dominion over the mail, and postcards shall read he them.”
6 But later, the
Lord God said, “It is not good that the mailman should be alone.” And so he
caused a deep sleep to fall upon the mailman, and took one of his ribs, and
made He a mailwoman, and brought her unto the mailman.
7 The mailman said,
“This is now bone of my bones and employee of my civil service. She shall be
called: mailperson.”
8 They both were
naked, except for their bags.
9 Later on, the Lord
God planted a garden, in the lower east side of Eden, and there He put the
mailpersons He had formed, and the postal office of which He had made thee it.
10 After that, the
Lord God commanded the mailpersons saying, “Of every tree of the postal grounds,
thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of collective
bargainings, thou shall not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof,
thou shalt surely be attacked by all manner of dog and die.”
11 But the civil serpent said unto the mailwoman: “If ye eat of the tree of the knowledge of collective bargainings, ye shall not die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat of the tree, then, your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing of work stoppages and calling in sick.”
12 The mailwoman
desired the fruit of the tree and did eat. She gave also unto the mailman and
he did eat. The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were
naked, except for their bags, and so they sewed many fig leaves together,
making postal uniforms.
13 Suddenly, the
Lord God called unto the mailman and said, “Why hide you he in underbrush
thus?”
14 And the mailman
said, “I am looking for my chronograph!”
15 Coyly, the Lord
God said, “Who told thee that thou had no wristwatch?”
16 The mailman
answered, “The mailperson whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the
tree, C.O.D.”
17 Sternly, the Lord
God said unto the mailwoman, “What the hell is this thou hast done?”
18 The mailwoman
replied, “The civil serpent beguiled me.”
19 Unto the
mailpersons God said: “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of the civil
serpent, ye shall drive in tiny Jeeps, and delivereth all manner of mail to
distant places of dwelling which in turn shall contain multitudes of rude dogs.
I will greatly multiply thy sorrow, and in sorrow shall the mailwoman bring
forth tiny mailpersons. They shall multiply in the earth, and shall be cursed above
all cattle, above every beast of the field, and above all manner of living
thing, except for used car salesmen.”
Somewhere There Is A Boy

Somewhere there is a boy
Dreaming of a horse,
A horse of his own,
A part of his soul,
A horse he would ride
Through fields and meadows,
Through shadowed woods,
A horse he would greet each morning,
Spend all day with,
Kiss goodnight.
Somewhere there is a boy
Dreaming of horse,
A horse like the one I see here,
Standing in a muddy pen,
Looking wistfully out at me
As I walk by,
This horse,
Alone all day long,
Dreaming of a boy.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Painting by Jessica McMahon
© All Rights Reserved
# 79:
If it lasts too long,
the poet is probably faking it.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Incarnation
D o I believe in reincarnation?
June 13, 1776: Had dinner with the Jones tonight. A little rain. Going to fix the wagon tomorrow.
Babies are born with a full visual capacity to see objects and colors. However, newborns are extremely nearsighted. Far away objects are blurry. Newborns can see objects about 8-15 inches away quite sharply. Newborns prefer to look at faces over other shapes and objects and at round shapes with light and dark borders.
~ Text and artwork by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Easter Brunch at the Country Club
~ Text & Jesus insertion by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
My Light

M y earliest memory is of a large white house, something like a Southern plantation house fronted by Greek columns, blindingly white, glimpsed through the windshield of the car my mother was driving. I was about one year old. She left me there, inside this large, white house. I never saw her again.
It was a place for orphaned children. After my mother realized my father would not leave his own wife and children as he had promised, the pressure to put me up for adoption was evidently too great to resist. It was 1951 in Southern California and my mother was from a proud military family. She loved me, I was later told, but the situation was unacceptable, especially to her parents. She loved me, but everyone agreed that “a boy should have a father.” It was a solution. It did not make everything all right. Nothing could do that. After all, we’d been together every day during my first sixteen months of life. She was my mother.
My insecurity was born that day. If I could lose my mother, my home and everything I’d ever known in such an instant, then what was left? Who could I trust?
I grew up seeing the world as a threat, expecting to be rejected by everyone, expecting to lose everything. I expected abandonment. My fears were fueled by the cruel and abusive parents who adopted me.
This is my darkness.
I also grew up seeking the truth about my first year and a half of life, hidden from me for so long. In the process I learned there is much about our lives that is hidden by pretense and artifice – hidden by others; hidden by ourselves. And in this search, in finding the truth, in finding myself, I have found a healing love far stronger than the darkness of my troubled soul.
This is my light.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Fever
I was about 12 years old and my fever kept rising.

A few years ago I put my vision into a poem.
THERE IS WILDNESS HERE
There is wildness here,
Raw and raging
Beneath this exterior,
Pulsing.
There are visions here
Of soaring over lifetimes of leaf-filled trees
And rust-colored hills,
Over yellow fields,
Over oceans.
There is forgetting here
Of the small things people say,
The small things people do.
There is a last angry echo
Of the unheard voice,
The deeper self,
The truer self,
The wilder self
That wearies of all man-made things.
There is a silence here
That grows and infuses,
Like the melancholy tint
Of an old photograph,
An old photograph you walk around in,
Examining with wonder the frozen, yet flowing
Moments of a life.
There is a wildness here
That rises like an immense stone,
Floating impossibly
In the pure blue sky
Of a secret spring.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Castle in the Pyrenees by René Magritte
© All Rights Reserved
Collections
I’ve never lived anywhere very
long without cats. My grandmother collected stray cats, and so did I, having
about a dozen when I lived next to a farm.
I collected small metal cars
and loved to drive them around cities I made from colored blocks.
When I was 17 years old I raced
my Ford mustang at Irwindale Raceway and won a few trophies.
I collected 45 rpm records,
songs I heard on the radio. I listened to them over and over again. Each week
when I went to the music store for my trumpet lesson, I bought a new “single” to
add to my collection. I pretended I was a disc jockey and would announce each record
I played.
One summer I won a contest on
radio station KFWB by being the first caller. I talked to disc jockey Gary
Owens and he sent me a Gary Owens coloring book and KFWB bumper sticker.
I collected family photographs,
all the way back to stiffly posed portraits of great-grandparents, arranging
them in albums. I collected my family, my parents and grandparents, my sisters
and brothers, my wife and the many years of our marriage, the companionship of
my sons, the infectious laughter of my blonde-haired, blue-eyed granddaughter.
I collect memories, and as I
grow old they reveal meanings I’d never fully understood. I collect the acts of
kindness I’ve received and try to pass them on to others. I collect wisdom and
continue to learn and relearn the lessons I’ve been taught from those still
living and those who have passed on, their words still speaking to me.
I’ve collected my many
shortcomings, my failures and my sins, for which I ask forgiveness in my many
prayers.
I collect the joy and the sadness in
this world, the tragedies and victories of the spirit, the damnations and the
revelations. Sometimes it’s all too much and so I pack some of my collections
away in boxes, knowing I can always unpack them if need be, knowing I’ll never
look inside some of those boxes again, knowing all things change and life
should move forward, mindfully forward.
My house is full of things useful and decorous, impractical and silly, remnants of a long life. I look at these objects and they remind me who I’ve been, who I still am. Someday I’ll leave all my collections behind, passed onto others to forge new meanings, so grateful for having lived here on Earth awhile.
~ Text and photograph by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Music Of Sound
S ome people are more visual, some more audial. For me, it was always sound that penetrated my senses deeper than anything else.
Near the end of the school year Mr. Westman asked me to meet with him at one of the outdoor wooden lunch tables. “Russell, I’ll be giving you a grade of D on your report card,” he gravely intoned. “I want you to know that this is a gift.” All I could think to say was, “Thanks!”
~~~
Moon in all your splendor knows only my heart,
Call back my Rose, Rose of San Antone,
Lips so sweet and tender like petals fallin' apart,
Speak once again of my love, my own.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
# 65:
the tide pushes me back,
then pulls me forward.
I try to balance myself
between its inevitable,
contrary motions.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Tombstones
When I was eight, I dreamed I was standing outside my school on the grass with my classmates, waiting for my mother to pick me up, when the boys and girls around me began to sink silently into the ground. Where each had stood, a tombstone rose. I was alone, surrounded by tombstones.
Now that I am old, old and older, the tombstones are real.
~ Text and photo by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
# 6 & # 7:
there’s a little bird that dies.
Or:
For every bird that dies,
there’s a little bird that flies.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Cultural Somnambulism

The switch was made,
yet amazingly,
no one noticed the horn.
~ Text & horn morph by Russ Allison Loar
~ Painting by Leonardo da Vinci
© All Rights Reserved
# 46:
you must pray for them.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
# 73:
Keep the door open.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
# 139:
to be bad. Hope comes when we expect the future to be good. Joy comes from experiencing happy moments without the need of the past or the future—the joy of a blissful now.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Monster Trucks and Sausages
Someone gave me free tickets to the monster truck show at the county fair, entitling me to be among the privileged few to witness a huge, elevated truck smash into a motor home.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Photograph by FlagWorld.com
~ From My Incarnation.com
© All Rights Reserved
The Truth
The truth has always been here, long before it was written about, long before theology, long before philosophy.
The wisest among us are interpreters, but the truth is eternal and cannot be changed by the interpretations of human beings.
~ Text & photograph by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Flying

I can’t remember the first time I dreamed of flying.
But oh how natural it seemed, like becoming my true self once again, unrestricted by gravity. No more up and down, just here and there. Each altitude a sovereign space.
I was flying,
Swift and sure
With the lift of a hand,
A miracle on demand.
But more than the addictive bliss
Of flight,
Or the intoxication
Of height,
I was most proud
Of my position above the crowd,
Most proud
And most alone.
I was the only one.
Out of loneliness I descended,
And flew closely by,
Urging all to try.
But not one would leave the ground,
So sadly I ascended
And flew once more above them,
Unnoticed,
Without sound.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Scene #19 by Cristian René
© All Rights Reserved
# 64:
while others are just out for the drive.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Wake Up!

At some point, you must set aside what you want to happen
and realize what is actually happening.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
My Writing
- I Hate Poetry.com
- Writing A Poem.com
- Writing About Sex.com
- Writing About Love.com
- Writing About Family.com
- Writing About People.com
- Writing About Work.com
- Writing About God
- Writing About Life.com
- Writing My Mind.com
- The Worst Joke In The World.com
- My Incarnation.com
- Whingy Whang.com
- Stretch Coyote.com
- All My Sites