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.

Piggish Banking

I wish this didn't have to sound like a Nervous Whiner Gets Hit With A Bill type story, but this having happened right after the federal bank bail out can bring it out in people who are normally cool as cream.
Put up with me while I explain.

My auxilliary checking account with, oh I won't say which bank, had been left in a poet's state of limbo. It was opened mainly to do transactions through pay pal and ebay, and my nerdy attempt at being an internet Tarzan mostly flopped. Haven't sold anything on ebay since early post-Bill Clinton.

So I didn't look as eagle-eyed as I should have for a while. The last bank statement tells me I owe the bank $181.00 in overdrafts. They added a nine dollar monthly service charge like mice on cotton, and when the remains of a weak but wiry bank account was all eaten in those fees, they shot out of the bull pen with an $8.00 a day overdraft fee. I slap shotted myself to the phone, with the depressing statement in hand.

The game of phone processing, digitized, shake-the-little-weasel-off-our-tails tactics were as annoying as your last chat with a bank by phone. I managed to get them to close the account and stop the overdraft fees from continuing, and thus growing into a Stimulus Package for Bank Swine. Just now I'm sounding out an F. Lee Baily/Johnny Cochran/Barry Scheck speech to lay on some petulent bank manager. I'm going to ask, nice as Marsha Clark, to scratch the fees and refund the money they stole. With Cochran waiting to get in the game. It should come off at least as good as Lance Ito at a weenie roast for not-well-liked jurisprudentials.

Parting words on the brass agates of banks, they're criminals. Criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals.

Another Fatuous Policy Statement

A certain local city council person is pushing a bill that would force all used car dealers in the area to place tall shrubbery in front of their wee places of business. It's a beautification effort with flies in its Noxema. How are we to buy used cars if the lots are hidden behind a forsythia?

From Fort Duquesne Tunnel to the fresh air of Brentwood, Rt. 51 has about 300 sweet looking, old school used car lots. That stretch of about four miles, all of it mighty bad road, is, smooshed pavement alone, a heap uglier than chain link fence and used cars. And don't come screaming at me that used car lots all look alike. They are diverse, each it's own oasis, each a living thing. Hillary Clinton would probably like them.

When I rattle my muffler driving the stretch, I always think about what life must be like in the trailers and bungalows with fenced in cars. The lots are limpid little tracks of dirt with ginger houses for the used car salespeople to sit in. I always imagine them as tall, firm, honest men, waiting to sell their next car so they can get the wife the Serta Perfect Sleeper she needs for her back. What kind of fiend would want to hide that in bushes?

Local History Piece

The legs were fucked from about twenty miles of biking all over the west set of hills, not sure if there's a name for the whole deck of trashy mountains, but I cruised the West End, also the South Side, then did the crack pot of side walks along Route 51. There, too, were other crazy quilts of bad road, when I stumbled onto Boggs Ave.

Boggs is in no way ugly, unless you are too analytical to live there. That's likely, but it's a good place to see while walking the jangly touring bike 50 degrees up the cracks and pot holes. Even, and I say especially, if there are little kids are out in a stunted front lawn, working on their futures like Harvard freshmen.

........

The ancient Hebrews were aware that there was an advantage in stationing high on the hill side. The mob of brats was aware of it too. Not that they planned to be where they were, they just knew my legs were cooked because I was walking my bike straight up the hill, like the last poor asshole they saw doing likewise, looking too weak to out run a coyote pack of rotten kids.

It's trade offs in life, like the black eye for the team, that keeps the legs some hurting spaghetti for the true runner's high. Bike riding heightens the senses. The gangster babies were all working together on something, on someone's sloping stump of lawn between a house and Boggs with it's pot holes. They were enunciating the phrase, "Hey Asshole."

None of the brats was more than three feet tall, yet they were organized and orderly in front of the shitty ranch house, with no grown ups around to tell them to shut up or to teach them something even filthier than what they already mastered.

Just the term 'ranch style' brings out the worst in my thoughts when it has to do with shitty frame houses glued into rock and more little brick and shingle dumps. It's still no reason not to like this particular part of town. I'd be proud to march down the street any day with the locals carrying rakes and torches. The kids could help by throwing rocks at people from out of town.

They were taking turns saying, "hey asshole," all smiling like mindless adult convicts who thrived on boiled cabbage and kielbasa. Most of them would be aquiescing to exactly that, but this scene was so fucking adorable it almost took my mind off how bad my legs hurt.

...........
One of my former girl friends from when I was in college came from this part of town. She told me once that her mother taught her to take her earings off before getting into a cat fight in a bar, and her mother taught her how to call someone an asshole. Mom said to emphasize the second syllable if you really want it to hurt the other cat. The phrase 'hey asshole' is almost always used to convey authority, like saying 'attention' over a loud speaker. There ain't no fucking loud speakers, if I may sort particulars with the brats. 'Hey asshole' is used like a Crescent wrench in the tool box of pranks and intimidation. It's used a lot all around town, so I had to see the kids as being off to a good start in the whole mess. Somewhere about the tenth time one of the brats staightened shoulders and said, 'hey asshole,' a little girl who had been showing top drawer leadership in the excercise took notice of me, the bike, and two fucked up legs not liking to push the bike. I could see she hatched an idea.

This kid had the genes that made the place what it was and probably still is. She picked up this hard thin tree branch about as long as her height, and ran at me with it raised, stopping just short of me. Looking up, smiling, she said directly, "Hey asshole," and then tried to whack me with the stick. I caught the end of it with my hand and held onto it for a few seconds. While she pulled on her end, leaning back and still smiling victory and the kill, she said like Edith Wharton, "let go of my stick, you asshole." It's what Edith might have said to someone if she grew up on Boggs.

With my legs hurting again by this this time, pained patellas in red Jello, runner's high running thin, I was getting a wee bit demoralized by the vitality of a she-thug the size of Thumbellina. I let go of my end of the stick, and she fell on her ass on the pavement, but she got the better of the fight. I kept walking my bike up hill, with all the kids together reminding me how I was perceived by them.
At that point in the afters, they were yelling at me together, Hey Asshole. Been losing most of the fights I've been in, last twenty years in Pittsburgh. Not a good place to outsiders.

The Secret Ingrediant In a Dentifrice

There is a method to mystery, and a road map to fascination. Both can be discussed in terms of ingredients. The harder it is to scare up all the spices, the more people prick up their ears when you describe the soup. People open their wallets without resistence when they are trying to obtain some intangible thing that important people have. Mystery is as much in the description of objects associated with power as it is in assembling the graven images that look like the supernatural.

The property of being clandestined figures neatly into the occult. The secret ingredient in Crest. Here, one of my favorite limericks from a National Lampoon bought in the 1970s:

A hygienic young woman out west
asked the cowboy who sat on her chest
will this cause tooth decay
why no mam I've heard say
it's the secret ingredient in Crest

For mystical reasons, this dumb limerick still makes me laugh.

Pig Trouble

Pigs. First it was trichynosis, and now it's swine flu. That's a lot of guilt for the farm animals to have to carry around. You have to remember that they didn't mean to contract a disease and spread it to people. Yet they have to carry the social stigma, as if they were all one collective Typhoid Mary who should have had the decency to wash her hands more often.

But to get down to the cases of how bad life is, my new dilema is that Jews asperse the character of pigs and won't eat them, and Christians eat all the ham they can choke down, so love it or hate it the pigs get either eaten or looked down upon. Or blamed for the latest bio-engineered virus.

So like people, chipped or sliced.

Fiction Fragment from a Novel I'm Writing

...........................
We could of all been mean and selfish about this wild fire of law enforcement that put all of us together in a syphlitic make-do world in rural West Virginia. The 1980s did us all in, and in the late 90s we wound up living all close together on the same dirt road. But we're not too down about it.


Sharing music among friends is redeeming. No matter where you sing. Some nights Rosie takes out her violin and lays down a clutch of partitas by Bach. She's no slouch about the things for which she keeps the passion, and some of her perfomances put the shadow of J.S. Bach in Rosie and my living room, listening proudly with his feet comfy in the chicken shit and straw.

Clyde Smith was pretty sharp on our spinnet piano, sort of a jazz standard machine from the cold war era, and when Bonnie sang along, it was hard to fathom that trained and lovely voice coming from a woman who might resemble Joe Stalin if she grew a mustache. You can see how any place can seem like middle America when music is part of the daily routine. It says everything about the natural goodness in people.

Appealing and Squealing

In the world of fund raising, an appeal is performed after someone gives money to the organization. It is a second request, for more money, because though that which was already given was received like people being pleasured, a circumstance arose requiring that more dough is requested. This post is different. It is a appeal to people who haven't ponied up squat, and I know you didn't, because it's just me at this little round up here. You haven't bought my book, "An O.K. Corral of Poems," and you should. Just hit the button to your left and play ball.

Last week there were two local news articles, at least, in which the hurd of nonprofit cultural oganizations got their chance to bemoan the recession of 2009.
I've been making a shit storm about independent artists, we who don't get tax incentives, you can't write little me off on your income tax forms, oh, no, any financial support you waft my was is simple free enterprise, my book of poems for your greenbacks by wire. Why the lowest earning, dirt poorest men (some of us) have been cut out of public funded programs! Squeek!

A poem by one of my pen names

Exiting the Sinus Cavity
by Al Mooseprocter


is it true that a man can be sneezed?
if left in a snowdrift like Amundsen
denied the proper seal skin
fed foods not indiginous to foriegners
then a moose could inhale such a victim
last such mishap was mine
I rattled inside the head of that windy moose
I bellowed for liberation
made the single phone call they give you
in captivity
culpable tracks leading to moose
demands ordered out of that predicatent
could not amble out of that hostile three foot sinus
I was suffered to find my way out
and was trampled
the moose did not even sniff

Disclaimer, a big hairy one

Before anyone goes ape, I would like to assure everyone near and dear that there is no validity to my ficticious accounts of a fiefdom I call, "Brusistan." My proposed and hoped for comic opera, titled, "The Prince of Brusistan," is a work in progress, while in the mean time themes and variations of urban renewal have been bandied about with some caprice. There is no such city sanctioned renaming or rezoning of the Perryhilltop neighborhood. It's the same fine place it has been for my past decade of residence here. It is with artistic licence that I have been calling this part of town 'Brusistan.' I have been refering to myself, in works of prose, as "the Prince of Brusistan." This, too, bullcrap. But it's art.

The Boomerangs in Brusistan

To bring you up to speed, the North Side neighborhood in which I own a shanty has been renamed. It was called 'Perryhilltop' but I renamed it, after me. The new name for 'Perryhilltop' is 'Brusistan,' a newly christened third world American slum. I am a proud and productive resident of Brusistan.

As far as I know, one of the few manufactured goods made here in Brusistan is boomerangs. All shapes and sizes. Made of durable industry standard materials, each hand made. Thus far I have manufactured some of the best rangs any rollicking rowdy individual could love or dream over. My boomerangs, properly thrown in good weather conditions, return. The industry standard 'rangs, made of five ply cabinet grade baltic birch plywood, perform a diverse family of arcs, runs, sweeps and encirclements. They do the tricks that boomerang experts world wide recognize as throughbred horse-like elegance in motion.

By goodness, they describe a ramping tear-drop shaped flight in the air above a good sized sports field. The first arc travels near eye level away from ground zero, then takes a short sharp run up and around, most of the way back to the thrower. But not entirely. A great boomerang will slow down on the return sweep. Just over it's tender's head it will go into small circles, like a falling maple seed in nature's helicopter configuration, gyrating gently to fertile soil. A world class fine 'rang will lower itself down to you, spinning and circling, which is how these fine sporting devices say to you, "Catch me, catch me. Take me you, fool."

A champion boomerang is like a champion horse. It looks great standing still, and it looks great in motion. It has a pleasing disposition. It has a proper sense of self and community. Unlike some people and places I could mention.

The State of My Ass Address

I'm in tight-woven navy blue gaberdine, a serious rayon neck tie, and white button down collar. This post pre-empts other blog drivel. This is an important, once a year thing, like a medical exam, but with personal fancy and screamed out through a bull horn while driving around and around the downtown cultural district there about Penn Avenue and Liberty. It's where I'm at, and I'm belting it out the way US presidents do the State of the Union Address.

I'm old enough to croak of more or less natural causes, depending on how you look at it. When you are 35 years old, you are too young to die. Fifty-one is a reason to be more careful. It's a good time to be sagacious, if possible. A calm, goal oriented approach to gluing my personal history into the scrap book of now is in order.

Here, here. The project on the front burner is boomerangs. I am in the process of refining some of the boomerangs I first made om 2005 and 06. Some of the 'rangs made back then were better than others, and I am in the process of filing, sanding and re-sawing to produce a family of boomerangs to make you proud. You will be proud to own a relic from my studio here in Perryhilltop, a neighborhood I think of as my own personal third world fiefdom, named after me, Brusistan. A boomerang producing third world slum in Pittsburgh.

Making A Holiday

A friend of mine invented a name for the year end holidays. Ramachriskwanzooka is Ramadon, Christmas, Kwanza and Hanuka smooshed into a pablum of holidays that both the friend and I have had trouble, in the past, digesting.

I have hated Christmas songs from the origins of my acrid consciousness. Too, and though I may be homely, I boast of being truly averse to materialism. By nature, by natural selection of good taste, and not by the years of studied left wing thought, the mixed solemnity and greed makes me gag.
Nativity scenes remind me of wards where they tube feed crack babies. And then there is all the religeous conflict among Jews, Christians, Muslims and all alliances that hate the rival grouping for color, creed, mode of operation or cut of costume. From Thanksgiving till New Year's Day there is a reason per second to attack or flee. It's the time of year that thieves come out of the woodwork. I get depressed. Without the aid of good thought, the holiday season serves as nothing but a cold sheet steel sliding board into the freezing, rotten winter.

There is hope. In creative intelligence. The holiday, Ramachriskwanzooka, may include the entire late fall and complete winter. It remains a baby food of pureed hope and happiness, but it is an honest holiday for the bleakness of the weather. People around these parts, by and large, are missing a few spokes, by world standards in achievement. So until the month of April, it is a good idea to fertilize the barren mud with contrived spiritual mumbo jumbo.

A better reason, yet, for the four month holiday is that winter is slow physical degradation. I need a lot of brisk physical activity in warm sunlight to be all that I can be, in terms of joy and achievement. All winter the dearth of what is needed leaches away the life blood. To help, there isn't a transfusion, or an exorcism, just a home remedy for the blues. Winter blues. Invent a celebration.

At The Risk Of Being A Bore....

........there may be a soft warm membrane that separates what people believe from what is. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan claimed to have believed that the housing market was stable and secure all during the decades long process of real estate costing more and peons earning less. Or while peons took two full time jobs instead of one, just to eat and shit. It was either in the Chairman's immediate interest to ignore the financial erosion of the middle class, or else the communiity with whom Alan interacts kept Alan in a state of ignorance. But I'm feeling plucky and pontifical at the same time. Alan is a big victim of the pink tarp that separates what one would like to believe from what is. Or it separates immediate self interest from the victims of poor thinking, e.g. the wee folks with name tags and generic macaroni and cheese for dinner.

I'm boring you with this thrumming moral rant because just about everyone has been forced or allowed or encouraged to accept a view point that serves immediate best interest. It has become impossible for people to make a decent assessment of circumstance, and impossible to originate and complete a corrective course of action.
There. I've made myself yawn. You're boring, sometimes, too.

Bigotry and Hatmunching

In the early days of television it was common for game show hosts to say, "...I'll eat my hat." The expression isn't used much now. On a related point, references are no longer made to rhubard, especially not on the news when reporting the weather, and no one at all in those days said, on television, they were, "happy as a pig in shit." On this Monday I am going to eat my hat, check the rain on the rhubarb, and I am happy as a pig in shit.

The Pittsburgh Steeler's sixth superbowl victory feels great. I feel unreservedly proud of the home football team. And its a situation in which I got proven wrong about one hundred sixty thousand things relevant to major league football and this town. Certain prejudices just got corrected by yesterday's Superbowl victory.

From lotsa years back, and putting into this that I'm a transplant to the 'burgh' and come from a family of sports dysfunctionals, I was under the impression that the team wasn't worth its salt. I thought Big Ben was a poor choice, I thought he was going to retire from injuries before managing to became a star in history, I was prejudiced against people who have had a lot of concussions, and our great quarterback did what great people do to clear up doubt. Santonio Holmes seemed to me like some sort of flash in the pan when I first heard the name on the news (I almost never watch an entire football game) and now it is impossible for that first impression to be true. The two plays, a first pass through Holmes' arms, and the completed touchdown pass that won the game, was as thrilling as it gets. All in all, it appears that the team is the "real deal" and I had thought otherwise. I'm eating my hat about the Superbowl, and there are more hats to munch on.

All the while that I was expressing my doubts about Ben, some of my die hard Steeler fan friends insisted that he is the 'real deal.' Their ability to see the talent in the sports figure deserves notice. It's a lot of hearts and minds deep in a fine city and champion team. The future looks better, my collection of hats is depleting, and the eradication of prejudice feels good, like winning the Superbowl.

Buy My Book: An O.K. Corral of Poems

There, to your left, is a 'buy now' button, and underneath it is your opportunity to support the arts directly, by buying a copy of my book of poems, "An O.K. Corral of Poems."

The title is to suggest that the group of poems is meeting in the lot between two buildings to settle all hash now and forever.


Here's one poem from a very large group of lyric combattants:

Becoming Respectable


back then
the low life went where the hot shots went
the latter group gloated

My pal drove a Pontiac LeManns
faded yellow
with wide black stripes that did not augment its design
may I borrow your Wembly tie

A Dippy Moratorium

A pile of wet rags. That's the kind of peace that has accumulated in the rain barrel below the hole in the ceiling. I make sport some recent quixotic political campaigns. One man political campaigns. The high brow literary/rhetorical Rambo lone hero swell guy vigilante but with no violence, just words type of lone warrior struggle. I'm calling a temporary truce. I'm gonna be nicer, as if I was making a new year's resolution, but not, just tired of busting a nut on nit wits. Peace, pricks, peace. The next series of posts on this blog will be so positive and free of animus that you will shit.