WEBVTT

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And then I'll just
go-- if someone

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asks me to read "Lucky Life"
the title poem I'll do that.

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This is called "The
Sweetness of Life."

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It's about mushrooms.

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And there was a book
came out many years ago.

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The Mushroom and the Cross,
I think it was called.

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And then Civ 101, and it
shows that all religion

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came from ingesting mushrooms.

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And I had a friend who taught
world civilization or history,

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and he was an ex-Catholic.

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And they're the worst.

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And he loved to prove
that there was no God.

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There was nothing.

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And so I told him about--
well, I told him about Ezekiel.

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He'd never heard of Ezekiel.

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Ha, Catholics don't
read the Bible.

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And I told them about
Ezekiel ingesting

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what in the King James
Version was called a roll.

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I told him it was a
mushroom, and he went crazy.

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And then when he came
across that book,

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he just taught about how
everything was mushrooms.

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So this poem is for my
friend, Kevin Riley.

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It's called "The
Sweetness of Life."

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"After the heavy rain
we were able to tell

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about the mushrooms, which ones
made us sick, which ones had

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the dry bitterness,
which ones caused

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stomach pains and dizziness
and hallucinations.

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It was the beginning
of religion again--

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on the river-- all the
battles, ecstasies,

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persecutions taking place
beside the hackberries

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and the fallen locusts.

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I sat there like a
lunatic, weeping, raving,

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standing on my head,
living in three and four,

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five places at once.

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I sat there letting the
wild and domestic combine,

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finally accepting the sweetness
of life, on my own mushy log,

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in the white and
spotted moonlight."

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