Flowers for Bill

I owe a great deal to late, great Bill Hicks.

Hicks was a stand-up comic, but only when it was easier to consider him as such instead of what he truly was - an angry philosopher, a common man who had touched the eternal and who wanted so much more from life than is usually possible. It pained him more often than not to just walk among us.

He was lonely, and it seemed he carried the loneliness of our entire species with him.

I have a painting of Bill Hicks I purchased from an artist in London. Lately, as the season changes, and with it the vulnerability of my heart, I've been noticing it, pondering it.

Every once in a while, I go on a Bill Hicks binge. I pull out all my mp3s of his stand-up, all my bootlegs, tapes and DVDs, and go through them all again. Sometimes I even laugh despite having long since committed most of his sets to memory.

When I was 18, I was turned on to Hicks through the band, Tool. I had already been a fan of subversive stand-ups, but something about Hicks punched me in the stomach.

Since that time, I've learned over the years to expect certain personal revelations to later be discovered as established paradigms. You know the feeling, as a kid you think you're the first person to consider perhaps not everyone sees the same colors you do, but because we all use the same words no one ever realizes it, or you think, hey, maybe time is an illusion, then you wander into physics and find an assload of theories on the topic complete with impossible to understand equations and 50-year-old books saying the same thing.

You feel validated and naive at the same time, a state I've learned is not so bad to be in as long as you don't stand still.

With Hicks, my own misanthropic, angry urges were validated, uplifted, made whole. Then, he took me further out, and revealed to me my own ignorance. It was a glorious age to feel this way about yourself, and I was forever changed.

As I've gotten closer to the age Hicks was when he died of pancreatic cancer, his aura of mysticism has diminished. I've come to realize the source of much of his ranting. Noam Chomsky and Terrance McKenna, Timothy Leary and Carl Jung - the illuminated few I too have devoured and re-devoured with healthy skepticism and a pinch of salt.

At first, his allure was the connection he offered, a connection to concepts and sensibilities about reality I thought I was alone in, or had yet to consider.

Now, as with a great book you return to with new found wisdom, Hicks offers something else. He too was a Southern man of humble origins; he too yearned for meaning, and he never compromised his convictions or doused his flame.

This is what he offers to me now - a reaffirmation of what is important in life. When I have grown soft and forgotten how much is worth my attention, how much is worth my righteous indignation, how much is worth my anger and my passion, Bill slaps me in the face and puts out a cigarette on my forehead. Bill reminds me of the difference between what matters and what is empty.

I recommend you do your own research. Download some of his work. He is astonishingly relevant, and there are too few who carry on in his name.

His grave is not far from my home. My wife and I have placed flowers at his there before. I think it may be time to refresh them.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING MAY OFFEND YOU