Degenerate Art

Art's not degenerate at all. He's raising a family out in the Fraser Valley, RV sales are booming, and he's a Knight of Columbus, or freemason illuminati or some such thing.

My own degenerate period started at the age of 12 and proceeds apace.

The Otto Dix painting to the left hung on the wall of my Montreal flat. I worshipped at the altar of Sylvia Von Harden, portrayed in the canvas, secretly appointed her the patron saint of Quebec; she's got that No Future, harlequin in a graveyard look that acted on me like a magnet in my formative years of degeneracy.

I hail from a generation of degenerates in denial. When society said reform or die, we all folded up our tents, and enrolled in 12 step programs and drank anti-degeneracy potion. Stood in circles, held hands, and blurted it out: "Hi, my name's Paulo, and I'm a degenerate." Applause and knowing glances all round. One or two furtive glances, and nervous titters. With a name like Paulo, how could you not be a degenerate?

Daily double Question for the Degeneration X file: supposing you do succeed in obliterating the memory of doing the psychotic split on shrooms, or acid, or whatever else you were shovelling down your throat while riding the musical parabolic ark of Deep Purple, or Boston, or Robert Plant screeching while you raced through the streets in your chevy II, isn't it more fun remembering it?... Or suppose you buy the line that you have to be cured of something, and you expose the madness of your youth in a dramatic, heart on the sleeve, sin-regurgitating posture, in a vain attempt to elevate your recreational inclinations into the equivalent of being raped and beheaded by a Janjaweed field marshal.

Daily statistic from the Blog survey people - twenty three per cent of degenerates think Omar Al-Bashir is the name of an Egyptian actor who writes bridge columns.

To degenerate is to fall from one's race or kind, to be reduced in the ancestral virtues of excellence. It's organic. Unfortunately, there are no official inverted pyramids on these falling away patterns. Degeneracy, like beauty, is in the eye of the accuser. Hence the expression, all too often misappropriated by the inquisitors, "you fornicating degenerate", and applied to those of us who cling to degeneracy and produce offspring to observe the gentle, organic tangent of the genetic code moving into new, unforeseen directions.

I am degenerating into unconsciousness....