One of my favorite lines is from George Carlin:  “If God’s so great then how come everything He makes dies?”

I recently came up with a great title for another book that I’ll probably never write (thats probably a sure-fire sign of artistic burn-out when you keep coming up with great titles for books you never write):  “GOD LOVES YOU AND YOU’RE GOING TO HEAVEN:  And Other Crap” by Ace Backwords.  More heart-felt spiritual wisdom and sardonic bullshit from good ole Ace (is it any wonder no publisher in the world would touch me with a 10-foot pole?).

But thats my basic hunch, anyways, on what happens to us when we die.  The God who created us eventually takes us back to His heavenly bosom.  Whether we go there immediately after we die, or whether we have to take the scenic route and work our way through countless further lifetimes of mortal bullshit before we get the big pay-off, of that I’m not sure.  But I strongly suspect there’s a Happy Ending awaiting for all of us eventually.

The problem is:  In the meantime, this life often strikes me as a form of pennance.  A weird realm of purgatory filled with endless horrors and tragedies and pain and suffering that comes flying at you from every direction and every angle.  A great Hindu master once said:  “This world is the realm of unsatisfied cravings and desires.”  Its like a maddening form of cock-tease.  We rarely get ourselves all the way off.  And rarely for very long.

In the meantime, I’m busy working on my next, probably-never-to-be-published book. Its about my homeless  life living with my feral cats in the Berkeley hills.  As usual I’ve got a good title: “KITTIES IN THE MIST: My Life Living Amongst a Tribe of Feral Cats.”    And I’ve even got a good first sentence:  “December 12, 2007: After several months of living quietly amongst the tribe of feral cats they have gradually come to accept me as one of their own and have even been making inscrutible ‘meow’ like sounds that I’ve yet to be able to translate into the English language . . .”

So now I’ve just got to write the damn book.  Which’ll be hell to write, I’m sure (“Genius is such pain!”).  But then, like I said, we probably don’t reap the heavenly stuff until the next life.

There were about 150 tents crammed into the plaza in front of the city hall building.  It was like a little, instant village.  The scene was mostly quiet and laid back aside from a couple of homeless black guys that were threatening to kick eachother’s asses.  The people were mostly clean-cut or hip, bohemian types — it wasn’t the homeless squat I had expected.  The beautiful green lawn had been crushed and replaced with hay and wood chips which gave a carnival air to the site as I circled around checking out the different booths.  They had a library tent.  An information tent.  A first aid tent.  A painting tent where you could paint pictures (a little kid was painting away as I passed). And there were hand drawn protest signs everywhere with the usual slogans: “GREED KILLS” and “OBAMA CAN’T DO EVERYTHING,”etc.  There was also a drum circle.  And a Buddhist prayer group sat in lotus silently meditating.  There was a make-shift shrine for the Iraqi veteran who got his skull smashed by a police tear gas canister (so the movement had its prerequisite martyr).  And a shrine to the great hero Oscar Grant.  And there was a food booth with two cute chicks behind the counter serving up a mountain of free pizza slices and sandwhiches and coffee.  “When the moon hits your eye, like a big occupy, thats amore!” While I was standing there a clean-cut surburban house wife dropped by and donated a big home-made peach pie.  So they were getting a lot of support.  And of course there were mobile TV trucks lining the street reporting on the Big Story.

A couple days earlier there had been a big riot on the streets of Oakland.  Mostly started by a band of about 100 black-clad “anarchists.”  The police shot off tear gas and the protesters set off bonfires in the streets.  The usual.  They smashed out the windows of the local Whole Earth Foods grocery store and covered it with graffitti.  They also smashed out the window of a little asian dry-cleaning joint in an expression of their displeasure with Wall Street greed.  Sure.  They even smashed out the windows of the local Burger King.  The home of the Whopper for gods sake. Have they no shame?  At one point the protesters tried to occupy an abandoned building from which they threw bricks and firecrackers at the cops.  So it was a real street battle.  Over a hundred people got arrested, most of whom didn’t live in Oakland.  But I heard it got massive TV coverage (not that I watch that crap).  “The eyes of the world are on Oakland!”   So Oakland was kind of glowing in the spotlight after years of having an inferiority complex to San Francisco and even next-door neighbor Berkeley.  There was a sense among the crowd that they were Where Its At.  At the least they were now part of a hit TV show.   The “liberal Hollywood filmmaker” Michael Moore even showed up the next day to check out the site.  What an original fellow he is.  A liberal Hollywood filmmaker.  Not too many of those.  Sure.

I walked down to the Burger King, bought a Whopper with bacon and cheese, and ate it at the site to show my solidarity with corporate America and good-tasting meat products.  A group of people were standing around listening to a black guy make a speech (everybody got their allotted 5 minutes of free speech). The black guy was middle-aged and clean-cut and soft-spoken.  “The reason I’m here is because my house got fore-closed by the banks,” he said.  And that kind of summed up to me what the whole thing was about.  American society was falling apart  so people were banding together in fear, voicing their discontent and trying to collectively figure some way out of this looming hell.

I walked back to the food stamps office and hung around outside the building smoking a cigarette while I waited for my number to be called.  A white, young hippy-looking guy came over and said:  “Can I buy a smoke for a quarter?  Nobody’ll give you a cigarette in this town.”  I gave him a smoke just to be contrary as usual.  He was one of the guys who had been tear-gassed and arrested a few nights back.  After telling me this he seemed to pause and wait for me to congratulate him on his heroism.  But I wasn’t quite up to it, to his apparent dissappointment.

“How long do you think the Occupy Oakland thing is going to go on?”  I asked.

“Probably at least for another year,” he said.

Holy shit, I thought.

Lately I’ve been getting on this Beatles fan message board and arguing about all things Beatles (www.abbeyrd.proboards.com ).  Recently the subject of discussion was the song “Angela” by John Lennon about the ’60s radical-slash-revolutionary Angela Davis.  It was from Lennon’s political album, “Some Time in New York City” when Lennon was hanging out with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and at the height of his radical chicness.

It was odd because I have a weird personal connection with both Angela Davis and John Lennon and that fastly fading period of history.  One of the main reasons Angela Davis got fired from her job at UCLA was because of her comments in 1969 that “the UC regents killed, brutalized and murdered the Peoples Park demonstraters” and her repeated characterization of the police as “pigs.”

Lennon also weighed in on the Peoples Park riots. This was during his famous Bed-In-for-Peace period and he was reaching out to just about every media outlet. And he did a live interview with Scoop Nisker (a guy I still see around town) on KPFA (the famous “underground” radio station of the day) where he basically advised the demonstraters to “man the  barricades with flowers.”

Forty years later Peoples Park is still very much here.  And I hang out there just about every day with all the other homeless bums.  It’s basically become a homeless squat these days, with homeless people flopped out on just about every square inch of grass.  Life is ironic like that, ain’t it?

But some people still remember what Peoples Park once was and what it meant to so many people.  To give you an idea of what a happening place it was back in the day, I recently came across an old flier for a Peoples Park Benefit Concert at Winterland in 1970.  The line-up featured, among others, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Santana,  Steve Miller, Boz Skaggs, and Credence Clearwater Revival.  And tickets were a whopping 5 bucks.  Man, those were the days!

But those days are long gone, alas.   Like I said, my life just keeps getting loopier and loopier.

I always wondered if there actually was a species of red-assed snakes or if it was just some weird mixed metaphor he came up with off the top of his head.

I only tried spare changing once when I was 19.  It happened by accident.  I was walking down Skid Row in San Francisco with my doomed pal Fearless Frank and we happened to be talking about the subject of panhandling and a passerby heard me say the word “spare change” and handed me a dollar.   I thought, “Man thats easy.”  So I gave it a try.  I sat down on the sidewalk on Mission Street.  The second guy I asked for spare change was this businessman and he turned around and shouted at me.  “SPARE CHANGE?  FUCK SPARE CHANGE!”

I was so humiliated I never tried it again.  Except for this one time.  I was sitting against the Cody’s Books building drinking a cup of coffee.  And this little old lady walked by and put a quarter in my cup.  I fished the quarter out of my coffee and figured I’d better quit while I was ahead.

(This was the introduction to the old Web Site of Ace Backwords.)

Hi. I’m Ace Backwords. I was born in 1956 and died at some unspecified date thereafter. In between I did a bunch of stuff. I recently, at age 46, actually learned how to log onto a computer. So it just goes to show you can teach an old dog new tricks. In fact, if you had an infinite number of dogs clawing away at an infinite number of computers throughout eternity, eventually they would write the collected works of Shakespeare. Or else the Web Site of Ace Backwords. So that explains how we’ve gotten here so far.

Perhaps some biographical data is in order here. I’ve written this out 3 times already, but each time I hit the wrong button (apparently) and the thing disappears into the bowels of cyberspace, or wherever it went. So I’m already chagrined at this great loss of literature. Anyway, it all began a long time ago in a place not unlike here, only different. I hitch-hiked out to Berkeley from New Jersey when I was 17. By 19 my life had crash-landed into the dirt. Literally. Spent several years sleeping on an off-ramp overlooking the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Published my first cartoon in the late great Berkeley Barb on the weird date of July 7, 1977 (7-7-77). I realized shortly after that I didn’t have the talent to make it as an underground cartoonist. But lacking any other discernible talents I spent the next 15 years trying anyways. In between I published 10 issues of a punk rock/art tabloid Twisted Image 1982-1986) and managed to accumulate a bit of minor league fame as a fanzine cartoonist and pornographer. Leading up to another stint of sleeping in the dirt with the other homeless bums (1995 to 1998). And the rest is history. Or a bad joke. If there’s a difference.

So that brings us up to the present. I’m back and I’m Backwords. I have a new book out, published by Loompanics: Surviving on the Streets: How to Go Down Without Going Out. Why, its fabulous. And you should certainly order a copy today (www.loompanics.com).  Meanwhile, I’m going to press another button and see if I lose this fucXing writing too.

………your cyber-buddy ACE BACKWORDS…over and out…..

The picture above is an unexplainable blob of computer protoplasm. I’m told it’s not harmful, but if you stare at it too long its been known to lower the sperm count of laboratory rats. Many scientists believe that the enclosed graphic emits some sort of psychic/cyber aura designed by the heinous mad-men at Yahoo Global Headquarters to render us completely under their power; mere pawns, slaves of cyberspace forced to toil for the rest of our days in front of a computer typing and viewing god knows what, helplessly hypnotized by the Yahoo overlords of cyberspace as they surreptitiously suck the brains out of our very frontal lobes while seemingly embarked on the harmless diversion of creating and reading web pages on the computer screen. Don’t move. We have you surrounded.

(Originally published December 14, 2002)

Yesterday was the first big storm of the rainy season. It rained in sheets — cold, icy sheets — for 24 hours straight. And it’s still raining today, with 3 more days of heavy rain in the immediate forecast.

Rain is a source of dread for the street people.You can see it in their faces as they huddle under awnings and doorways; that vibe of steely resignation. And the first few storms always seem the worst, because you’re discombobulated. By the middle of the season you sort of get in sync with the rhythm of the thing. And then the last few storms of the season are the worst, because by that time you’re just sick of the whole grind and craving the sun of summer.

Last night we hung out under the porch of the Student Union building. A bedraggled band of urban campers we were, with our wet pants and wet socks and wet backpacks. Mostly we sat there, grimly, smoking our cigarettes, and smoking pot, and trying to think of something to talk about. (The talk of the day was a newspaper story about a couple that had just won the Lottery twice in one day, something like a trillion to one odds, they’d been buying $20 worth of tickets every day for the last 15 years, something like “$120,000 spent until they finally hit the jackpot, and then TWICE in one day, unbelievable!” — this is the kind of stuff the street people talk about when we’re huddled under an awning all night watching the non-stop rain pour down.)

So today, Saturday, I was feeling particularly bedraggled, because on top of everything else, the rain wiped out the Telegraph Street Fair, which is the peak of Christmas sales. So we had to pack up our vending table and our fabulous “Telegraph Street Calendar 2002″ and just hope that next weekend, the last weekend before Christmas, it doesn’t rain, too, and completely wipe us out.

So I’m standing on the corner with my half-broken umbrella, in my wet, soggy clothes, and no money in my pocket. And this middle-aged, suburban housewife-looking woman comes out of this expensive store with her Christmas shopping. She’s about 35. Perfectly coiffed, every hair in place, even with the storm. And she’s got on an expensive rain jacket, and she’s got a nice plastic rain-hat on, and she’s got a big, expensive umbrella. She is PREPARED for the rain. She probably has to only brave the storm for the 30 feet it takes her to walk from the warm, dry store to her warm, dry car, and then into her warm, dry suburban home. But she’s PREPARED, man, and she’s not gonna get a single drop of icky rainwater on her warm, expensive skin. Except that she rushes off the curb to cross the street to get to her car, and she steps right in this big, huge puddle. I mean, she plunged in there almost all the way up to her knee. And I burst out laughing because it was so funny — here she’s taking every possible precaution to stay dry, and now she’s soaking wet anyway. HAW HAW (I admit I have a cruel sense of humor). And the lady hears me laughing and she turns and gives me a look, and if looks could kill, I’d be dead. But she probably figures there’s laws against suburban house-wives beating bedraggled street people to death with her expensive umbrella. So she thinks better of it and rushes off down the street, dragging her soaking-wet pant-leg behind her.

And I turn around to head up the street with a big smile on my face, and this car goes blasting down the Ave and hits this big puddle of water and splashes it right up into my face and all over my shirt, like getting hit directly in the chest by tidal wave. And I’m sputtering and coughing and cursing. And all the people who had seen me laughing at the lady are now openly laughing at me. And, in truth, I didn’t find it nearly as funny.

But in a way it was great. Because we always get our karmic payback sooner or later; usually there’s just more of a time-lag between the karmic cause and the karmic effect. So at least I had gotten it over with.

(Originally published) September 3, 2008

Hello. I’m Ace Backwords. I’m presently 51 years old. Future plans include growing old and dying. Preferably in that order. I’m presently living in the bushes in the Berkeley hills in a sleeping bag with 3 feral cats, 2 squirrels, a pack of grouchy raccoons, and a blue jay in a pear tree. I can be reached at acebackwords2002@yahoo.com . Or else go to a street corner, ask for a guy name Bill, tell him the secret password, and then quietly leave your message in a bottle in the nearest dumpster. I’ll get back to you shortly.

(Originally published August 16, 2007)

I’ve always been sexually fucked-up.  Is there a more apt phrase than that?  “Fucked up.”

I once tried to analyze my sexual problems. I quickly concluded I suffered from a combination of virtually every sexual dysfunction, block, and perversion known to man.  So I was fucked.

Any mistake you could make, I made them. The fool who fell in love with a whore? That would be me. The sap who tried to give his most tender, vulnerable heart to a cruel, mean, castrating bitch and then said “Ouch”? You’re talking to him. The sap who tried to “save” a mentally insane speed tweaker who was hell-bent on destroying herself? You’re talking to him.

The short story is: I suffered from extreme sexual obsession in combination with equally extreme sexual blocks and repressions. Let me describe it this way. One night I was hanging out with a bunch of street people atop these steps overlooking the plaza. One of the street people’s male dogs was desperate to get to a bitch in heat that was strutting her stuff down on the plaza. How that dog strained and surged against that leash. His constant whines of frustration and agony were relentless. That dog could not be pacified. Nothing could take his mind off the biological urge to score some doggy booty.

I could relate. What annoys me is: people regularly tell me I’m on a “self-punishment” trip, that I’m “doing it to myself.” Funny, I don’t remember constructing the invisible leash that held me back. I don’t remember creating the complex series of psychological actions and reactions that just seemed imbedded in my psyche from the word go.

There was one woman I was “in love” with for 13 years. A total bitch. To be fair, having somebody like me direct their obsessive vibrations towards them for 13 years is enough to bring out the bitchiness in anybody.

I’m not proud of this, but some nights, during the peak of my madness, I would ride my bike down to her house at 2 in the morning. I’d camp out in the vacant lot across from her bedroom window. Obsessively wondering if she was in there. And with whom. Sometimes I’d wait for an hour, until a car pulled up and she got out and went back into her house. Alone. “Whew!” Finally I could go home. Who can explain that? Well, there’s 6 billion human beings on the planet, and I guess if the drive wasn’t relentless, we wouldn’t all be here. Nature is always flinging its seeds around. And maybe we males are just helpless servants of the biological imperative.

Ahh, the things we do for love. Like walking in the rain and the snow when there’s nowhere to go, and gunning down a room full of people, and hanging ourselves from the nearest tree. Call me romantic.
I fell “in love” with 5-and-a-half women (I’m still not sure about one of them). Each one of them was absolutely beautiful. And each one seemed to take one more chunk out of my soul.

The last one was this beautiful, crazed little waif of a teenage runaway who hated virtually everything and everyone in this world. Including me. Alas, my love was not strong enough to overcome her desire to slam huge quantities of pure crystal meth into her nervous system until she was completely mentally and physically deranged.

Now, I’m 50 years old. And I look back at the whole grand passion play of my youth with feelings of …  well, it changes by the moment: feelings of regret, disgust, dismay at my foolishness, and this weary sense of it all having slipped away from me somehow…

(Originally published July 7, 2007)

There are national holidays, and local holidays, and personal holidays; those days that live on with particular significance in the personal home movie in your mind. July 7, 1977 — 7-7-77  — is one such date for me. I got my first cartoon published on that date, almost exactly 30 years ago.

It was in the Berkeley Barb, the legendary local underground newspaper. One of those strange relics of the ’60s that was still puttering along on its strange orbit by the time I hit the scene in the late ’70s. I still remember the thrill as I nervously approached the Berkeley Barb newspaper rack around 7th and Market in San Francisco, in plain view of the domed City Hall building. Opening up the rack, THERE IT WAS! My own comic strip. Taking up half the back cover, in color no less. After all these years of being on the “outside looking in” of the media game, I was finally on the other side of Alice’s mirror.
I had worked for a month on that comic from my off-ramp crash spot on Fremont Street. That had been my homeless home for the last year. It was a beautiful spot, actually, on top of this man-made hill at the foot of the Bay Bridge, with a panoramic view of the entire San Francisco Bay. I naively expected (ahh, youth), that since I had worked on the comic for a month, I would be paid for a month’s labor (ha ha). So it was a shock when I got my check for a meager $30. But, nonetheless, I was now a Professional Artist. For better or worse. And plenty of both, actually.

Now, 30 years later, I look back, wistfully (or is it disgustingly) at my youthful self and my youthful dreams. Hi, Youthful Self. Like the Bob Seger song goes: “If only I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” Ignorance may not be bliss, but it often beats reality.

Now, 30 years later, I’ve strangely come full-circle. Homeless again, at age 50. Maybe its just a matter of getting old. So many of your youthful dreams didn’t pan out. You end up at such a different place than where you thought you’d end up. After all the years, all the scenes, all the people, all the sound and fury signifying everything.

I’ve got my money’s worth on this spin of the karmic wheel, that’s for sure. And yet, after all the trips, after all the triumphs and tragedies, there’s this strange emptiness in me.  This hollow feeling. This feeling of my life having reached a dead end. This “what-do-I-do-now” feeling.

Over the last 30 years, I tried for the fame-and-glory trip. Got my name in all the papers, got thousands of people telling me I’m great, and thousands more telling me I’m an asshole.

I went on the spiritual trip, spending years meditating and chanting my mantra and trying to worship God.

I went after romantic love, falling in love with a half dozen beautiful women, spending years chasing after them like a dog chasing after its own dick.

I went on the “community service” trip. Trying to find ways to contribute to society and humanity.

I went on the friendship trip, making hundreds of friends, trying to “relate” to people, and stave off the loneliness that has dogged me always.

And yet now I’m at a loss for What To Do Next. It’s not that I’ve “seen it all, done it all.”  It’s more that I can’t think of anything else that I really want to do. Can’t think of anything that would bring me happiness or fulfillment.

Well, I could type blogs on a computer screen. Maybe that’s the answer. The missing piece. Yeah. I’ll be sure and get back to you 30 years from now to see how that one panned

(Originally published February 5, 2007)

I recently caused a minor stir on the Comics Journal Message Board when I made an off-handed remark: “The only contemporary artists that I consider in my class are R. Crumb and Charles Bukowski. Of course, the world doesn’t share this high opinion of myself.  But then, I don’t think much of this world, either. So we’re even.”

Which inspired many posters to respond by pointing out that I’m actually a piece of shit, and how dare I speak my name in the same breath as these Great Men, and etc. Which hurt my tender feelings. But, of course, the reaction was understandable because, face it, its obnoxious to gas off the way I did. So what the hell.

But it made me wonder: Does it really matter what anybody thinks of you? Or even what you think of yourself, for that matter?

In fact, I’ve been called a “genius” before. I’ve also been called just about the lowest things you can call a human being who walks on 2 legs on God’s green earth. And just about everything in between. It’s quite a spectrum of opinion. (The only one that really hurts is when they call me a “bore”  — and I’ve been called that plenty, too.)

Right after Kerouac published On the Road, the reviewers practically ripped him apart. They not only denigrated his literary talents, but they went on to point out his utter worthlessness as a human being and etc. And yet, 50 years later, people are still reading and enjoying On the Road (whereas, I suspect most of his critics are no longer as widely enjoyed).

I’m a big sports fan. And, of course, the audience always has the right to boo or cheer or hiss or yawn to their heart’s content (that’s a big part of the fun). But it always annoys me to hear some slob sitting in front of his television set criticizing these world class athletes. The latest one they’ve been heaping abuse on is (the unfortunately named) Rex Grossman, the quarterback of the Chicago Bears, the losing quarterback in yesterday’s Super Bowl. Oh the abuse they’ve been showering on this guy. WHAT A FUCK-UP he is, what a TOTAL LOSER, we’ve GOT TO GET RID OF THIS BUM, and etc. This guy Rex Grossman happens to be a world-class athlete, just a great, great, magnificent athlete. You don’t get to the Super Bowl if you’re not. And just once, I’d like to see some of his “critics” spend 20 weeks getting hit on the head by 300-pound monsters, and then see how accurately THEY throw the ball.

I’m always fascinated by how other people see me. Mostly because I have no core of self-esteem, and really don’t know WHO I am (so maybe some of these other people can give me some clues).

The other night, I was sitting on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette with some other street people, when this car pulled up to the curb  — this group of Christian do-gooders  — and gave me a free bag lunch, and then pulled away. Just as I was starting to put the bag lunch in my backpack, a cop car pulls up. The cop walks over and gives me the flashlight treatment:  “I just wanted to see what you were putting in your pack.” I guess it looked suspicious, me putting it in my pack just as the cop pulled up. “You got me, officer,” I said as I opened up my pack. “A peanut butter & jelly sandwhich.”

But the point was:  After several decades of being a contributing member of the community, this is probably what most people think of me: As either a “bum” or a “criminal.”

Last month, I was desperate to make some money. So I took some of my own books  — books with my own work in it that the publishers had sent me as contributer copies — down to the local Used Book Store to see if I could sell them for cash. I figured the buyer at the book store would be highly impressed. “Wow, a Published Author” and all that crap. But instead, she looked at me sternly and said: “These books look BRAND NEW. Where did you GET these books?!” She thought I was a shop-lifter who had stolen them.

But its always like that. Whenever I start to care what people think of me, whenever I put my ego out there, I’m setting myself up to get my bubble burst.

Often, I question my motives in all this. Like, why am I even writing this stupid blog in the first place, putting myself out there in front of the public eye to be ridiculed and/or adored? I concluded my motivation is pretty much split down the middle: Half of it is a compulsion towards self-expression (or “gassing off” if you’re less favorably disposed).  And the other half is a need for attention. Because face it, one of the most primal urges of a baby is a cry for attention. And sometimes it works (“AHH!  Tittie!”). And other times it don’t (a slap in the face and “SHUTTUP you brat!”).

And, like most people who attempt to go The Great Man route, I probably put myself before the public as a way of trying to compensate for my low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness by winning the approval of the audience.

And now that I’ve done that with this magnificent blog, I finally realize that, yes, I truly am great after all.

Or maybe not.