Why So Black?

  Living in coastal northern California, the smells of redwoods, green weeds, and patchouli permeate my environment; as do the sounds of Bob Marley, The Dead and Tom Petty (yeah… I haven’t figured that one out yet).  All of that was cool enough, I guess, until I quit drinking.

  I quit by choice. My choice. There was no intervention or A.A. or tragic incident. Only spite… It seemed that every malady I sought medical help for was diagnosed as alcohol related (including a rattlesnake bite). I swore to myself and anybody listening that doctors would never again be able to “default” with that “diagnosis”.

  I then found myself engulfed in some sort of hypno-brain-blanket malaise. Like being stuck in an elevator with soap-box hippies listening to the muzak Easy Rider soundtrack. There was only one cure…metal. Heavy metal. Thrash, death, even the metal of which very few will dare to speak …Scandinavian Black Metal. Oh yeah…anything and everything metal (when does Metalocalypse start again?) I can’t get enough; Nor can my son. We are not skinheads, tweakers or troubled 14 year olds. We just love the metal.

   One day a regional haiku contest blew through and became a school project for my son. Upon reading the rules and previous winners’ entries, I felt violated. I wanted to lay fetally in my shower and wash away the swaying bamboo, green tea, shiny pebbles and wind chimes. Blblbluggh. Like being forced to suckle a giant peace-pacifier when the entire community is already at maximum passivization saturation.

  The contest rules sucked. There should be a metal haiku category. Thrash haiku. Death haiku. BLACK haiku… Haiku that would make the Buddha himself burn his own temples.  O.K., maybe not quite that dark… (my gnomes need the Buddha)  And so it begins.

                                                                                   Let there be black…

                                                                                     Bob Pike