So, what’s it going to be that finally ushers us to dinosaur status, that is to say, poor Otis dead and gone. Will it be global warning, some jerkoff who thinks God is giving him instructions getting his hands on nuclear weapons, or the swine flu? There’s no shortage of candidates out there for eradicating humanity off the face of the planet. Some scientists even say that with the population scheduled to hit 9 billion by the year 2050, that Mother Nature herself will make some sort of “adjustment” and eliminate 80% of humanity, sort of like what we humans do with our wildlife populations. That adjustment usually involves wholesale slaughter of the targeted species that we figure has overpopulated some tedious suburb of some tedious little city.

How ironic if the entity just above us in the food chain, the earth itself, decides to give itself a tick bath to keep us pesky humans down to manageable levels. We’re already helping the cause of eliminating the “excess” humans among us by letting 13 million a year starve to death on a bountiful planet, another 6 or 7 million to die from drinking poisoned water and killing untold millions per year in a never-ending series of wars and genocide campaigns. We also kill ourselves in a thousand other ways; smoking cigarettes, crashing our cars, ingesting chemical additives in our food, getting real fat, not exercising and dropping dead face-first in our food, all sorts of creative ways to kick the bucket before nature takes its course.

And these same scientists for years have been saying that humanity is a hazard to the health of the earth. So, the argument can be made that human death is good for the planet since we’ve been poisoning it ever since we stood up on two legs. We’ve also been industriously eliminating our rivals from the animal kingdom, one species after the next. And now they tell us we’re heating the joint up and if we don’t cut it out the ice caps will melt and turn Disney World in Florida (and the whole state with it) into an underwater theme park for scuba divers, if there are any of them left after the Big Adjustment. It could also be that Space Mountain will become the anchor for a new giant coral reef visited only by the sea life that we are so industriously eliminating just as we have the many land species that got on our nerves.

So, fellow human mammal creatures, pick your poison: devastating plague, nuclear holocaust or being slowly simmered to death by global warming and then having our disintegrated corpses washed away in the ice cap melt floods and consumed as plankton by whales. What’s it going to be? It all sounds pretty far fetched, no? Well, here’s another wild fantasy: Mankind will start acting responsibly, stop spending so much time killing one another, pay attention to the environment and start being the caretakers of the earth and all the creatures with whom we share it, like a good little dominant species should. Naaah! Now, that one’s a real whopper! Let’s just keep on partying like it’s 1999 and have our fun before natural selection selects somebody else. It was nice being the head honcho while it lasted, though, no?

A huge thanks you goes out to all who attended the BEAT BREAST CANCER CONCERT on Sunday afternoon, and those who could not attend but sent a donation. The house was rocked, a good time was had by all and money was raised to fight The Beast. On behalf of Bob Crespo & Big $penders, The Tash Brothers Band and The Fossils, we want to thank the audience for making us feel welcome and special and for their love and generosity. It’s never to late to help some outstanding women who are now in big trouble. Send donations to:

AVON WALK FOR BREAST CANCER, c/o Debra Ielpe, 20 Clent Road,  Suite #2-M, Great Neck, New York, 11021

The pen is mightier than the sword, and love is mightier than the pen. One act of kindness can change the world better than a thousand laws.

When you boil down any social problem, the root of it is always the absence of love. When you analyze the positive aspects of society, the bottom line is always the abundance of love. It’s a simple concept, too often overlooked in the convoluted dealings of man. When you love your brother, you will not do him any harm, either directly or indirectly. When societies are formed, when laws are written and when policies are formulated, they can be of no worth at all without being based upon love. Look around and see what the results of turning away from love have been; war, poverty, corruption and hatred.

We all feel love, a whole lot of it. We love our families, our friends, our nation and we talk about it all the time. We write poems and songs to its glories, and  beautiful laments the emptiness we feel inside when love is lost. So it’s not like people are unaware of love or that it is an old notion that has gone the way of the horse and buggy. It’s just that we apply our love too selectively, and somehow consider that love is not applicable to every aspect of our lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. When loves guides every decision and every relationship, every life gains worth, and every act becomes an expression of love. There is no one alive without the capacity to give and receive love, and no area of life that would not be vastly improved by love’s guidance. Love does not steal, love does not hate and love does not murder.

What is war but organized murder on a grand scale? Love teaches us not to kill, but the act of war removes the personal liability for the act of killing another human being. No soldier in any army has a personal grudge against any soldier from another army. That man has done him no harm, but having been trained and ordered to kill that man, a soldier does so without hesitation, because that is what armies do, they kill. Who is guilty of that man’s death, the man who ordered him killed or the man who’s hand took his life? That is a question that would never need to be asked if love was the first consideration in dealings between nations. 

Greed is what causes wars, and nothing else. It may be greed for wealth, for glory, for power, for land, for resources or simply greed for ideas; the spreading of your own ideas and the annihilation of the ideas of others. If your idea was all that great to begin with, no war would be necessary to spread it, its merits would spread it throughout the entire world in the space of a year. More likely, your idea is a good idea for you and those who agree with you, but if it is an idea with no basis in love, then few will embrace it and no amount of bloodshed will make it acceptable. There is no vindication in military victory. That only plants the seeds of future wars when the vanquished turn the tables on their conquerors. They will live for the day when they do the killing and the marching in victory parades and the announcing that their loveless ideology will replace your loveless ideology. And more men, women and children will die cruel deaths before their time.

And while it is no sin to grow rich, what is poverty but an absence of love? In too many places in this world, the few have taken the lion’s share of the wealth at the expense of the many. Is there any better illustration of this sad fact than a castle surrounded by thatched cottages and malnourished serfs? The legacy of that mental image lives on everywhere, with the rich living privileged lives of shameless excess while the poor literally starve. This year, pretty much like every year for as long as can be remembered, 13 million people will die of starvation, and another 5 to 6 million from drinking contaminated water. The vast majority of these people will be small children, too young to understand why their lives are over so soon, before they had a chance to live or to make their voices heard.  

Other than their devastated parents, who loved these children? Certainly no one hated them, but they might as well have. The absence of love is what  killed them as much as the absence of nutrition and sanitation; the faceless, benign indifference to the suffering of others. Are these children extra people? Does anybody have spares? Few people lift a finger to help the starving, including the leaders of their own nations. And while there are many wealthy nations in a position to end this benign slaughter of tens of millions of helpless human beings, many countries are speaking instead of giving over millions of acres of life-giving farmland to crops that will produce fuel for cars. How many more will starve then?

So the cycle of poverty and starvation continues, and from deprivation and desperation arises theft, and the culture of theft, out of which rises corruption. And in this pervasive corrupt culture, the wealthy practice theft on a far grander scale than the poor could ever imagine. In this foul atmosphere of death, theft and corruption, it is only a short walk to war. What we are left with is isolated pockets of love, fighting the evil of greed, theft and corruption that kills our brothers and sisters every day. All this because we have left the essential ingredient of life out of the daily equation of living and dealing with others. Love is the answer, love is the only glory, love is our only guide to true civilization, and civilized behavior, where no killer of men earns the nickname “The Great.” Love is kindness and bestows dignity on our fellow man. Love is still the only game in town. We ignore it at our own peril. Give love and give life. It is one and the same.

Come to the BEAT BREAST CANCER CONCERT at DJ Ryder’s Rhythm & Brews, 3297 Long Beach Road, Oceanside, New York, 11572, (516) 992-8174. All proceeds go to the AVON WALK FOR BREAST CANCER. SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 26, 2009, 2:30 PM. Donation: $10 bucks cheap plus FREE FOOD.  The Bands:  BOB CRE$PO & THE BIG $PENDER$ – THE TASH BROTHERS BAND – THE FOSSILS

People are just as happy to see each season go as we are to see it arrive. Everything gets on our nerves after a few months, even Springtime.

Sunday afternoon Bob Crespo & The Big Spenders play a live gig, always a joyful time for the band and hopefully for our audience. Sunday, however, will be a very special show. We will be playing for the Avon Walk For Breast Cancer in a benefit to raise money for breast cancer research, treatment, and awareness. Breast cancer is a disease that takes the lives of over 40,000 women every year in the United States out of 185,000 stricken with it. Our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our grannies, our cousins and aunts and dear friends. Cancer is a cruel and debilitating disease and everyone reading this has lost somebody to this horrible sickness and known people who have survived it only by going through a special hell.

As for myself, I’m playing for my niece Elaina, a breast cancer survivor, the only child of two of my best and oldest friends and my wife Louise’s Goddaughter. Her mother is my wife’s sister Susan, who stood by her daughter when she got the news with the fierce love of a mother and the heart of a lioness. Her ex-husband Greg is Elaina’s father and she was the light of her Godfather Michael, Greg’s younger brother who was lost to us way too young, at only 35. Greg and Susan married as youngsters and like most kid marriages it didn’t work out, but what did work out spectacularly was Elaina, one of the liveliest, smartest, strongest and half loony human beings you’d ever be lucky enough to know. She’s a walking, talking good time and great company.

A little over 2 years ago she came to New York from where she lives in Florida to say goodbye to her father, who was losing his years-long battle with cancer, battling the demon with laughter and defiance like the joyful madman he always was. Elaina rarely left his side at the hospital for the last few weeks of her father’s life, feeding him what he could hold down, washing him, keeping him company, holding his hand, comforting his parents and small stepson. When his time came, she was there, and all during the funeral she was an amazing presence. She insisted on celebrating Greg’s life, for he was a lover of life and living. Hundreds of people came to the wake, many flying in from all over the country to say goodbye to a special man.  

For two days she greeted and comforted her father’s friends and family, then fed them afterward at her grandparents’ house, somehow holding herself together right through to his burial. It was during this ordeal that she felt something in her own body, a lump in one of her breasts. So when she got home to Florida she had herself examined, and sure enough, it was The Beast, come to torment her this time. So she flew back to New York and consulted with the doctors in Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital, who assured her that the treatment in Florida was exactly what they would do. She had just gone through this routine with her father and knew exactly what questions to ask, and what were her options. 

And so began her own journey into hell. Her options were not good and she began the chemotherapy and radiation that wracked her with pain, cost her her hair, and severely injured her body. All the while she continued to run her restaurant, being a trained chef and a natural people magnet, never showing the world her agony. Her mother would drive her 3 hours to her treatments and she would come back physically devastated, but always bounced back in a day or two. This went on for months and Elaina never flinched, never sought anyone’s pity or fell into the “why me?” mode. She fought back hard, laughing in death’s face and defying The Beast to change her spirit. 

She drew strength from her mother and stepfather Victor, her four grandparents, her many aunts, uncles and cousins. If the phone rang at 2 A.M. in my house, I figured Louise and Elaina to be good to yack until dawn, so I sent my love and got out of the way of the immense healing power of female bonding and went to bed. Love is the best companion to an ailing body and Elaina is lucky enough to have so many people in her life eager to shower her with theirs. And in truth, she had a lot of love in the bank that she herself had generated in her short life, and now it was time to collect. There is a reason for everything in this life it seems, and when she needed it most, the electric, love-inducing burst of life that is Elaina had earned a ton of interest on the love she generated. 

And that was all that we could do, pour out our love and support, since we are helpless in the face of cancer. There is an impotent rage that fills us when a loved one is stricken. And so there is all the more reason to fight cancer with all we’ve got. Elaina is alive and well and whole today, one of the lucky ones, and for a lot of reasons besides her powerful character and all the love and support she was shown. First, she was educated about the disease, and her self-examination detected the lump. Second, she acted swiftly and without hesitation to get the best medical help she possibly could. And thirdly, the doctors today have more and better tools for fighting cancer every year, and the earlier any cancer is detected, the better are one’s chances of surviving. 

Unfortunately, so very many aren’t as lucky as Elaina. The least the rest of us can do is try to give what we can for research, treatment and, just as importantly, education to promote cancer awareness. Knowing the enemy is vital, and knowing your medical options and the inherent risks involved in each of them is important. Knowledge is power. Unfortunately for more than 40,000 women every year, these weapons and our limited knowledge are not enough and we must move towards a cure. Maybe someday those 40,000 deep and wide rivers of love and life and wisdom that are our sisters won’t be lost to us forever. Until then, we do what we can. The only thing I have to offer is my music and the ability to make crowds of people aware of women like Elaina. Sunday afternoon, (see the ad above for the details) The Big Spenders will be playing our hearts out for Elaina and thanking God she is still among us, just as beautiful, just an joyful, smart, funny, loving, strong and just as nuts as she always was. Elaina, this show is for you, sweets.

Being an eldest child is difficult because your parents are new at the job. Their only training was the on-the-job variety, and you were their first major project. Try to be forgiving about the scars and that regrettable electric socket incident. They did their best.

Got a call this morning from a tele-marketer from a cemetery, trying to sell me a grave site. At my age, my first reaction was: “What, you know something I don’t?” Then I realized that this was just another person performing a job I had no idea existed. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t recall any time as a child when I longed to grow up and be a grave salesman. I was too busy daydreaming about becoming the centerfielder for the Yankees, a fireman, a cowboy, a soldier, a cop, a sailor or a movie star to wonder about how people acquired the six-foot deep holes where they got buried. There were precious few astronauts back then in the Analog Age. It was a brand new job and one where the first guys were replacements for space monkeys, not exactly the stuff that little boys’ dreams are made of.

No doubt the lady who called me up offering me eternal comfort and tranquility (How would she know? She sounded so convincing!) didn’t aspire to her job either. That would be even more odd than yearning to be an accountant, a job everyone knows about. So you start thinking about oddball careers, and what else might people do with themselves that would occur to nobody else. So you do a little research, make some calls, and compile a list. And lo and behold, you find some unusual occupations indeed! Consider doing this every day:

METH-AMPHETAMINE LAB TECHNICIAN: Unlike your colleagues in legal laboratories, you operate in trailer homes, abandoned barns and corrugated tin sheds. You mix some very volatile substances without benefit of a long white lab coat, safety equipment or ordinary sanitation and hope that:

A – You don’t get raided by the police                                                                   B – You don’t get robbed by crazed meth-heads                                                 C – You don’t blow yourself and the immediate vicinity to smithereens                 D – You don’t get tortured and murdered by rival drug gangs                               E – All of the above

If you answered “E – All of the above,” you’ve only just glimpsed the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the drawbacks of this job.

THE GUY WHO COLLECTS ROAD KILL: When you see a dead animal on the highway or your local street, notice that it’s not there the next day. And no, those carcasses are not disintegrated into dust by all the cars and trucks that add insult to death by mashing the poor thing as flat and wide as bed sheet. A special guy in a special truck comes along and cleans up this bloody, furry mess and hauls away the squashed remains. A worse job than his? His assistant.

PORNO MOVIE MAKEUP ARTIST: What, you thought all those bodies were smooth and perfect? While they might be very near perfect, in the glare of the Klieg lights required for filming, special makeup is required to make certain body parts, how shall we say… glisten. That’s two sets of lips that need careful attention. These jobs are hard to get, since nobody ever quits or retires. They die very happy, though.

OPRAH WINFREY’S WARDROBE PERSON: There’s only so many times you can let out a dress or assure somebody that they don’t look fat when they are. And when your boss fluctuates in weight from year to year from chubby to Buick-sized, you’re likely to be putting in a lot of overtime and scouring the old Roget’s Thesaurus for synonyms for “full-figured” and “robust.”

HAIR PLUG INSTALLERS: Few doctors dream of using their long and very expensive educations to create an army of silly looking doll-hair men using their pubic hair, but the big dough these insecure baldies lay out is too tempting to actually cure sick people for a living. As an added bonus, there are few emergencies in the middle of the night involving hair plugs, so your weekend golf game and mistress visits are seldom interrupted.

MATTRESS TESTER: This job was not invented by Al Capp, who gave it to his comic creation, Lil’ Abner. There are people who’s job it is to test mattresses, by (how else?) sleeping on them and reporting to the designers on how comfortable or uncomfortable they are. This job, while not too intellectually challenging, is nonetheless considered a desirable career path. Line forms to the left.

JACK DANIELS BOTTLE CAPPERS: In the Jack Daniels Whiskey distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, tours are given of the place. It is a fascinating education on how corn whiskey is made. It begins with the hand-made and carefully charred oak barrels in which the whiskey is aged, and then moves on to the automated factory process of actually bottling the whiskey, all kinds of tubes, machines, conveyor belts and automated boxing apparatus, until the very end, when the full bottles in open cases are rolled to a half dozen very busy ladies who then screw the caps on by hand. After that, another machine adds the plastic cap wrapper and seals the box. Why this one function of a hundred different operations is done by hand is never explained, but hey, in this economy, a job’s a job, right?

MENS’ ROOM ATTENDANT: In many a fancy restaurant, catering hall or hotel, you find a men’s room attendant. Outside of severely disabled individuals, are there many men who need assistance to relieve themselves? Handing you a paper towel after you wash your hands doesn’t seem like such a vital pubic service, and whatever tips these men receive are hard-earned for having to spend their entire workday among some decidedly unpleasant smells and sounds.

PET PSYCHIATRIST: More of a scam than an actual job, these people figure it would just be wrong to refuse big dollars from people with more money than brains. Kudos to them.

BUNGEE CORD MEASURER: While this might on the face of it seem like a frivolous occupation, considerable pains are taken to hire individuals with a good grasp of mathematics, the elasticity of the bungee cord when combined with various body weights, the safety margins required, and completely free of psychotic tendencies.

HISTORY REVISIONISTS: This is a booming business these days, which can only be attributed to the scarcity of real jobs in this depressed economy. Why else would anybody undertake the task of convincing the nation that the Bush Administration was The Golden Age of America? Here’s the selling points for Bush The Younger Nostalgia: 

The Bill of Rights is overrated                                                                               War is its own reward                                                                                   Letting a city drown is an exercise in market forces                                               Taxing the super wealthy is a sin                                                                   Financial industry regulations are for sissies                                                         Science is for Jesus haters                                                                                   Being smart and reading a lot is show-offy

It’s a challenging job, made even more so by the fact that there’s a really smart guy in the White House now who’s paying attention to what’s going on in America and doesn’t have a giant ranch to escape to so he can clear brush for weeks on end while the Vice President runs the country for the benefit of his billionaire buddies. But, undaunted by the magnitude of their task, the History Revisionists are out in force, predicting an end to life as we know it and wishing the president of their nation to fail. Now, if they’d only throw in a set of stainless steel steak knives at no extra cost, maybe they’d make some sales.

Don’t be be too harsh on fools, drunkards and screw-ups. Somebody’s got to make the rest of us look good.