Winter Manifesto of 2010

Winter Manifesto of 2010


nigh on twenty years
the twenty four hour bug flies away
people begin to tell the truth
that trophy shelf of bum steers and slanders
happy collecting dust behind a sacred cow
won't fall off the brackets
this long here
the tin throne begins to answer
cronies quit giving you the run around
they drop the tools of graft
and shift to dull resistance
it's a chilly place to work into
hip deep in snow
the plow milles distant

Buddy Film

peroxide blond has my back
up the row of gyroscopic stainless steel stools
got bullet warts in my back from standing up
patella wedges in slug frappe
got the riteous limp while rousting
blue plate specials that need their ass cooked
a row of them in watch caps and CPOs
you know I haved to jack on the wharf rats
Fake Yellow pathologically quiet and cruel
futzes in the passenger seat
the Slumlon scrap leather trench coat
a million scars to the yard
covers the hoary brute

Class of '75

In a town that saw the rabbit run
those first two decades of fun
were blocks of ice in the sun

twelve years of school
jerkwater town and the fool
remorsing at home on a stool

steeped in hair and bone
thirty years alone
airs out the hemp cologne

Singing At Night

I'm waiting for the 11D, it was later than usual for one of my trips downtown, hence ranker desert for a trip home, and my nerves, my nerves were not the steel thread they can be earlier in the day in a less ugly spot on the map . The police don't cruize past Heinz Hall quite as often after 11 pm. The duplication of '11' is bad for people with superstitions. It is only suprising how fast secular humanism can run from danger, and the cultural district starts to look bowery. This evening I was only one of two people waiting for the bus on Penn like two live chickens waiting for Colonel Sanders. And in the nervous fearful minutes, passing like heavy dumplings in rank stew, it seemed good, at first, that the the other guy struck up a conversation. He was working on his career in music. Country western.

The number '11' is never good, and the letter 'D' reminds me of a report card. The hopeful musician beside me asked if I knew when the bus was coming. This caused me to trip up. I have this thing I call the "Fred Rogers Reflex," which is an irrational need to sustain middle class courtesies while standing in a hell hole. I fished my bus schedule out, so to give a neighbor the exact time the bus probably won't arrive. I could see for myself the hollowness, since the bus is never on time, and the act of pulling out the paper schedule was an autonomic beourgoise ritual. People are supposed to be helpful, my ass. It was late, and the grunting of 'it's supposed to be here' would have been sufficient.

The musician warmed up immediately. The deceptive nature of common courtesy had been a regular tool in bag for people like Ted Bundy and Albert Desalvo, and less catastrophically, the pimply, sandy haired man nearest me launched into his recent past. "I just come up here from Nashville. Music industry in Nashville is all fucked up. I hear the music industry up here'll at least give a man a chance."

Going play by play, I was unaware that there was a country western music industry in Pittsburgh. A church or two got converted to recording studios a few miles out of town, and the outfits don't bring in much with the collection plate. The fact that this was happening against the humorless flanks of Heinz Hall brought optimism down a couple notches.

"Just bought this guitar at a pawn shop" He had his ax in a cheap boogie bag, like a body bag for a crumby instrument.

It's like saying 'that librarian is three inches taller than Roberto Duran.' I lost the rest of my respect for the singer because pawn shops are the outside worst place to buy a used guitar. You can score a good one anywhere, cheaper, unless you are the jerk I met at the bus stop. To strenthen his argument against Nashville, he said he's written more songs than Merl Haggard. Some people have more cavities in their teeth than others. He stepped closer to me and launched into one of his songs. He was smiling out a song he was proud of, and he was standing uncomfortably close. Had the bus come sooner, I would have heard less.

Federal Curling

Played on skates and ice, the sport of curling hasn't caught on in the US as much as it could. I've seen it done on television, and don't get too excited about it, but it's a sight to behold, and I was reminded of the exotic sport just this morning after reading an article about our national economic strategy.

For overview, a burly skater hurls his curling stone, a heavy, burly round stone with convenient handle, forward on the ice, towards a target. As the stone glides to target, two 'sweepers' skate ahead of it, corn brooms in hand, preparing the surface of the ice, both knaves furiously and comically sweeping the ice. Our federal government has taken the role of sweepers in the area of world money management.

This new governmental role as 'sweepers' has emerged because there are relatively few highly profitably large scale corporations. Rather than fostering new corporate development evenly throughout society, the gov is protecting the few, the proud, the really really rich.


There are a lot of too wealthy curling stones, but not enough to help a ten percent unemployment rate and a declining standard of living off the ice.

Curling is a dull sport, and looks like paralysis compared to our glorious and brutal hockey, but it deserves respect in much the way you can't park in front of a fire hyrdrant. Need I say it is loved in places other than my own private state of confusion, and it has provided a model for purposes of greater understanding. Still more convenient, this sport has some of the characteristics of an exotic global dash for the cash. It is unsportsmanly conduct on the part of the Fed, though, to sweep.

Senile Musings: Accepting Your Movie Role

There is a hard numerology at work. The number of times you have seen a movie impacts, directly, the role it will take in your future. I watched Taxi Driver seven times, and began asking imaginary foes if they are talking to me. But that was a long time ago, and at midlife, my 19 viewings of the film Frankenstein is defining me.

I'm turning into the old man who played his fiddle. The Monster turned up at his shack in the Bavarian woods, and the blind hermit musician welcomed the huge, ugly crazy quilt of human parts. The kindly old cheese introduced Frankenstein's monster to the violin. "Music good." And to the grape. "Wine. Fucking good."

The hermit was an archetype of refined and marginalized individuals everywhere.

dates and fates

A few years back, I was looking for a date. So I ran a personal ad on Craigslist, stunning athletic male seeks leopard-skin pill box bomb shell, nothing freaky. I'm a plain kind of guy full of hope, and soon I got a response, then a meeting for coffee, with woman about my age of a half century.

She seemed nice, at first. Though, too, she expressed that her life at home was troubled, a husband had absconded with their life's loot, she had grown kids that didn't like her. The former boyfriend who committed suicide for no reason known to her, and they were dating at the time, made the nads shrink. There are some 'don'ts' in picking your mate. On the more normal plane, she had a job. She said she was a medical transcriptionist at a local psychiatric hospital. A well connected hospital.

We were chatting pleasantly on the phone when she told me that she had checked my psych history on her computer at work, and she was pleased to find that I have no history of mental illness in the United States for as far back as everything private went on-line. If I went nuts before then, like in the 1980s, I'm doing a great job of hiding it.

Using only my first and last name for her inquiry, she was able to find out if I had my head examined in New Zealand, and she could even find out if a general practitioner had prescribed me a psychiatric med, such a Xanax. She might have had half a romance novel in front of her if I had been involuntarily committed.

My date with an apparently unstable transcriptionist caused me concern. An amazing breach of privacy is possible by way of plain folks and an ominous network of computers. The right to privacy has been altered for the worse. On a bright spot, I'm probably playing with a full deck.