Saturday, December 17, 2011

Alienation Network

I think I got a digitized 'you was eye-balling alert' on facebook. Actually, it was, "Boy, you been sending freind requests to people you don't know." So much for the Will Rogers/Dale Carnegie thing. I'm regressing. Invertebrate.

While I'm cooling off under the half ton of granite, there will be the self-appaisal and self-bashing, the kind of both that are exhillarating on days you don't get hit with the great acre-wide fly swatter in the sky. Electric reproach. People I never met feel I have intruded on the their climate controlled Christmas. Like I was playing jump rope in their walk-in closet.

Sending the request is like the Manson Family creepy crawling in people's delux ranch house with security system and professional support system all switched to pick up body heat and call the cops.

If it isn't some evil Freudian analyst getting the goods on you and making you a slave to your own admissions of inadequacy, it's Facebook, Google and all the tech companies you depend on to socialize, now that people are allergic to strangers. The alert I got sounded like someone ratted me out for sending them a friend request, when Facebook streams names and faces of supposed mutual friends. Granted, it's titled 'People you may know,' but it's also one in an infinity of corporate Rollodexes wired with alarms and traps. It's a Montessori school caged in razor wire.

This should be where crone maturity helps, and it does. A little. And then it comes back to hurt again. I was made to see the old crones who have to sell insurance or what ever till they croak, eating all the rejection and taking affirmations in having learned to take it as part of a job, and not an indication of personal scabies. All the while, the individual looks old, seedy and frozen in a tundra of lost essence. All things are essence. Such as the feeling of being a poisoned rat. I feel vitiated. Like I'm exiled to a store front office where people reject my sales pitch. While trying to be social and happy.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Being Nowhere

Hole. Sphyncter. Rictus. Pick any word, dear readers, there is a town named Albion, Pennsylvania, and per act of dark sentiment, an idyl, I once drove onto that burg's main street in the hatchback. This town looks innocent, store fronts, all six of them, painted fresh and white as the Klan.

There's a branch office of the First National Bank, so puny and frail, like it had little to lose. There were scatterings of farm and cottages, last time I looked, also cows and horses a quarter mile from a park in the center of town, and there was a six story commercial building that used to be a bank and now processes billions of welfare claims.

But that can be written off as a by-product of social progress, like bologna or liverworst. There are about six streets in Albion wide enough to let three horse-drawn buggies block traffic on. That's a total of 666. Well, no. I added incorrectly. Still 666 popped up on my inner adding machine. I fudged the numbers. But it's still an indication that Satan may pop up in smoke.

It's a frightening and legendary number. I get this shit from my crystal ball. There's evil in this green United States town called Albion. Nothing to be concerned about. An ordinary mark of the beast. Like certain cows. Certain oxen, too.

Oxen have power. Drinking establishments have power, too. There are cerain rocks and heaps that exude fragrant unique charisma.


I went into a bar and got a beer.I remember all too much, but that was the last thing that made sense for the next few minutes. Then trancendental heightened resolution.

Glancing back at a small and cheery bucolic outlay of small town personage there, I couldn't claim total inner unity with this cornpone. Hush my mouth. There was an unused coin operated pool table in the back of the corner bar. Having zero entre with the Appalacians, slingshots in the back pockets of bib over-alls, I decided to play a rack of pool, kill the beer, and leave before I'm made to feel less like a resident of Albion, Pennsylvania.

I put a quarter in the stainless steel slot and pushed in the metal sliding quarter snatch, eager to ease the nerves with gentle sport. The mechanism jammed.

I heard the balls, all mocking sixteen of them, dislodge from their pool ball residence inside the table. And they stopped, neglecting, as normal, to roll and clatter into the rear portal, like the pool table's wide wooden asshole. Indulge the histrionics. I'm fast. The balls failed to reach their destination, and I was unable to play pool.

Notice a stranger in a jerkwater town. Self-consciousness. Something the romantics rant about. "What are the customs here?" I asked myself, as told to do by my great big social science prof at college. I did poorly there. No good answer was arrived at.

At last moved to action, I walked to the bar and waited for the wan, drawn bar maid. She drifted my way, and I said, as carefully as possible, "I put a quarter in the pool table, and the balls are stuck inside the machine....."

I use the elipsis because, in soft nasal twang, she stopped me from explaining further. "You gotta kick it," she said, free of guile. College boy on this side of the bar, I gleaned, verbatim, I should walk back to the pool table and kick it.

This made sense. A blow to the table could dislodge the balls. If I kick the table, the pool balls will be jarred into cooperation and come rumbling home to papa. Note the point of origin at which views less explored come out to play in the rural sunshine. And in a honky tonk.

I kicked the table lightly, once, just to get a sense of how the tootsie might adjust to getting slammed into hard wood. Mr. Foot said back, "Don't get carried away, Hoss." I kicked the table three or four more times, but the balls stayed stuck. And because of nervousness, I may have seemed clumsy. I'm not.

Next try I kicked the table in a different location on it's dysfunctiional green felt form. I didn't notice just then that I was drawing attention. Just as I kicked from yet another position, this time winding up, I was paralyzed with the report of loud inquisition.

With a bass southern drawl, a tall hay seed hollered, "WHAT IS THAT ASSHOLE DOING?"

While still paralyzed, the girl-wheat-shaft behind the bar said, in her plaintive voice "The pool balls is stuck. He's kicking it." Then came, instantly, the idyl flash of comprehension. Animosity flutters off.

The rubes now knew why I was kicking the pool table. They misundertood, at first, my behavior, because they kick things all the time, and it never looks as dippy as my little performance. There people are called, "shit kickers." Now their emotions changed from fear to enlightening. "Kick it, kick it," they chanted, in a warm, spontaneous and unassuming fervor. Set free from paralysis by the outpouring, I gave the table a more socially acceptable style of kick. It was sort of like a drop kick. But with added finesse, for the on-lookers. It was like I was responsible for their fragile sense of closure. The balls cut free and rolled, sonorously, to the table's buttocks. There was cheering.

It took my usual of about nine minutes to shoot fifteen balls into holes in the sides and corners. On the way out, the fast nod to the town folk was practiced from years dealing with this type of social immediacy. I'm glad to have shared the confusion and pleasure. Any kind of realization might be a good one. I hope that room full of hicks remembers the experience with the same kind of love as do I. The family of man is a trip.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Tossing A Life Line

The computer is defragmenting, with the moving picture on the screen of molecules gadding whimsically between a pair of test tubes. When it's done, like it's time to wipe it's ass, a digital drain spout appears, vortex circling into the cyber-shit I dive into first thing every morning. Habits are always degrading.

There's no such thing as cyberspace. I'm still annoyed at the culture that grew from our failed dot com craze of 1990s. Great at holding a grudge, everyone was thrilled and smug about the new language, and the new Silly String jet of fresh perception. 'Cyberspace' was believed to be something so brilliant and accessible and intangible that it had to do a better job than God or Jesus at making them better off. And better than people who don't dig computers. I was still a pink ludite in the 1980s, and my ass is still stinging from the alienation that resulted.

I won't be mistaken for Noah. Last time I got a directive from on high, I was tripping. It was, like, take the things that made you an asshole, and place them in the forge. Then do an Aldous Huxley on the way people drink you in. Sell something. Wear a decent suit. Talk like a powerhouse.

You have to take your own turd-in-the-punchbowl dysfunctionalities and build an arc from the goofy timbers. The new salvation is in jettisoning from the boat the giraffes and zebras who might steal your job or default on the rent. Like Satan, a rhesis monkey is a liar. But you needn't sail alone. You will be needing an entourage when the raft of drift wood beaches. After the deluge, it's gonna be a gas.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Dickhead's Fables

#1
I was watching a rerun of The Untouchables, the black and white cop show from the wholesome 1960s, and there's a scene where a gangster pulls out a huge folding knife, pushes the blade through the back of an apolstered chair, and says, "See, with an eight inch blade you can kill a guy, like this."

Looked like a good idea. Better than trying it from the front, with an oyster shucker. Immediately, I went online to my favorite knife seller, a web site convenient as all get out, and like Jimmy Stewart stuttering, they had in stock an eighteen inch stilleto lock back knife with an eight inch blade, for ten bucks. I placed an order. It's a babe. Of all things, the quality of cheap tool steel has been improving wonderfully. The US is a debtor nation, and any four year old with a paypal account can cop a blade you can X people through a lounge chair with. You don't get blood on you jammies.

#2

Deer round these parts grew lazy and trusting. Now don't y'all call PETA or the game warden, because this is all a kid's game of pretend, the buck behind the house is real as black plague.

The stiletto is in the inside secret weapons pocket of my Gap knock off of a Levy jacket. The knife is a cheap knock off of something Guido's utilize in film. The shoes are mail order from Wallmart, special for walking on modern synthetic office building floor. I'd like you to be fair enough to see how changing times are reflected in a different-from-last year fashion statement. It's punk.

I won't really try this at home. I just have to visualize charging into a large deer, doing a job on it before it realizes how serious things are. First I'd just stand still, looking calmly at the herd, like ususal.

#3

Everywhere you looked, downtown was convivial as a barnload of white people doing the Hokey Pokey. We're a barn dance. Farmers. Farmers that drifed here thanks to the industrial revolution and failing family farms. I love it here. We have major league sports.

The dot com craze of the mid nineteen nineties made this town perfect because you can have anything cheap, and be anything cheap. That latter grace is because people are too inchoate to challenge each other's posturing. Why in Boston, people like me get picked apart. You can be anything you want here, because all folk are comparably delusional, made equal by mercury in the fish sandwich.

I'm optimistic about the whole crock of shit because. I'm armed with a brand new trademark weapon. I have my costume selected. My suit of lights. I believe I am a type of torreador. An unrecognized torreador. A bullfighter is quest of understanding. Toro. Toro.
#4

None of this is real. It's about what can happen. I'm singing loud, deep, sonorous. The power ditty spiritual number I'm gutting off fills the passenger compartment of the paddy wagon. They picked me up like a blue plastic sack of empty beer cans on trash day. Using a long, cruel twist tie, like they close trash bags with, I can't use my hands for anything but finger snapping, and it's a pitiful rythme section to such an inspired type of song. I'm making it up, trying to drown out the siren, people in the wagon are squirming and bitching. We're like a a string of charms on a bracelet, linked together in this paddy wagon, going bumpety down the pot holes.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Power Futz

My premise is that too few Americans are in the strong and sane social economic models of yesteryear. The 'new you' could be more strapped and less represented in Washington. You may be a direct victim of formalized, duplicitous, aggressiove dissempowerment. But that's a little ham-throated, and I mean to make sense.

In range of most memories, there once existed organized consumerism. Middle class interest groups grew an A cup in their training brassiere on a plan to buy merchandise only from suppliers that comply with the consumer's political agendas. Ralf Nader convinced short dimply people they were entitled to product safety. Sweating over-forty types in warm-up suits and station wagons were encouraged to speak out, to drop a monkey wrench in commercial cogs, free of retaliation, because faceless powder puffs are entitled to be heard. I'm rebelling. I'm rebelling aganst the soft machine, and hard one as well, our stupid middle class and our fascist, mind controlling government/industrial complex. I don't know why I keep saying, 'our.' I feel alone with a strategem.

Bad Mamma Walmart beat that hope of consumerist empowerment to submission with her rolling pin, fresh imported flour smoking off her hygienic full body apron. There is no power left in consumerism. Not cried over above, joe smith in lower case letters can no longer make money in the stock markets, money markets, day trading pop stands, internet instant coffee mug magnate, you-have-an-order while the fat boy in a bathrobe drinks coffee type money earning ventures. You can't earn shet-tzu dung by working the resourses avalable to you. Whether by design or default, the dude in the Lazy Boy recliner is going weak. Here's my cutesy-pootsy unifying theory to go with this crap state of affairs.

I futz with things. No certainties. No captial investment. The freebies, the blog, youtube, craigslist, and a print on demand sevice that allows you to upload your compositions online, and thus offer a book for sale to the public. I futz with plans to design lines of merchandise, attempting to get a main stream manufacturing concern to run and sell said merchandise. The lost continent of free thinking is being futzed, by yours truly, on nearly all free internet publishing venues. A house philosophy based on Milton Friedman's economics is being applied here, in my ever whimsical bumbling unspectacular way. Results are obtained. More and faster than the fat cats. The way to recover economic vitality is to futz till something pays.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Much Like Bosnia

Relations with the deer are getting worse. I was riding my electric bicycle on the trails along Riverview Park. Rounding a hairpin curve, I was caused to stop at the sight of a score or so of them. All but a few were fashionably prone, very Christian Dior, evenly and angularly spaced, as if Buckminster Fuller had composed the grouping. It was an arresting sight.

A tall standing doe gave me that can't-you-please look that these snobs seem to practice in the mirror. Then she turned to the fauns and said, "Call one of us if Abe Lincoln starts talking to you." A twelve point buck lowered it's rack at me, more dissappointed than hostle, and said, "We're resting."

As I buzzed away, a scrawny punk six pointer jeered, "Hack. Third string Marlon Perkins investigator!"

Deer Antics

I'm half-out of this because I'm an athiest, but people are a religeous animal. And they might be right. I could fry like a snack food for being a blasphemous little crumb.

Disposed to Unitarian Universalism, though, diverse spiritualities are allowed to be their sweet selves in my camp. Again, it is the herds of deer that brought another worldveiw to mind.

I was returning from a ride on my electric scooter, coming up the steep dirt embankment behind the house. About eleven
hundred tiny bungalows once filled the acres of wooded area behind my shanty. Left for decades to rot, most were demolished, leaving all the space needed for the animals that have been walking with a source of light. Deer are enlightened. There was another chance meeting.

An eleven point buck lifted a hoof in a warning gesture, the way your home ec teacher used to indicate you need to be very quiet. The usual shunning behaviors the deer had been using on me like a social science was spared, and obviously this was not for lack of mistrust on their side our two worlds. The congregants silent, and still, a doe got up from the ground and paced easily among the group, speaking whispers to individual members of the flock as she did so. The buck turned to me, again with the please-just-contain-yourself attitude that I've grown used to. It said, "We're conducting a service."

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

A Portly Fess-Up

Pardon me for squeezing the tube before looking where the sink was. I feel like I made a mess, and am ambivalently contrite. Some blog entries ago, I posted a claim to having had invented the acronym 'WAMF.' I was a hasty putz, and did not google the acronym. After having claimed to have invented an urban slang for 'witty ass motherfucker,' I was all Gloomy Gus to find that 'WAMF' is in use as 'Wide ass motherfucker,' and as 'White ass motherfucker.' From my heart of hearts, I had no intention of imfringing, defaming or plagiarizing. I thought up 'witty ass motherfucker' and the acronym 'WAMF' my own motherfucking self, and remain proud to have thought of it and shared it with dense, cruel humanity. Again, I am sorry, and admit to having been a jerk.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Orange Rides Again

Me again, Orange Fitz, and again, ma just loved a bright orange sunset so she named me 'Orange.' Guess you already know my history, if you don't, I used to be a movie extra, now I'm just fucked, but I wanted to lay my poor grizzled old head on your gentle shoulder and fess up to what's been twisting my big, gangling balls. I'm a poet, god damn it, and I'm getting treated like an asshole. Let me tell you some of it.

I attended a poets conference down in Tulsa, and hooo-weeee, who the hell'd expect a group like that to suck eggs. I read some of my best work aloud, then sat back and took a moral drubbing at the hands and lungs of those rat-shitting snobs. Fucking near all the bastards insinuated, one way or another, that I wasn't on the same level as all them creeps. One asshole has an MFA, so naturally his poems about ferns in a pot are better than mine, usually about men kicking ass off a Harley. Then some turkey insists her work is on a high spiritual plane, and people like me are an Earth bound piece of shit. Good Christ, she had hair like a used Brillo. And then this guy actually stood up to say that he's doing terribly important work on behalf of Somalian gingevitis patients, which makes his poems better than mine no matter what words he shit out on eight by ten copy paper.

I been called a lot of things, in my time, and here I was being called a lesser mortal in room full of purported egalitarians. You guessed right if you said I have a burr up my ass.

All I got left is the words themselves. And a busted down Winnebago to live in, and a disgruntled ex-wife who knows a lot of ex-cons without much to lose, so I'm kinda on tinter hooks most of the time. All the old guard I grew up with is either elsewhere or dead,and there's nothing left to do with this sorry old life but compose the rhyming verses of me, biker, film extra, old fuck up with a dangerous woman in the wings. Of course, I'm hurt and angry with that poet conference, a man my size can hurt, same as you little pussies. I can see a fine sunset out the window of the Winnebago, I have my pen, paper, thoughts, consciousness and the right to walk around. Fuck them people in Tulsa.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Spiritual Math

I'll do the math for you. If you are fifty four years old and lived for 21 years in Pittsburgh, you can subtract from your age the first 33 years, which is the age at which Jesus Christ bought it.

Sound like a good deal? Well, you have to live in Pittsburgh till your soul freezes. Till you no longer need to make sense. When you no longer expect it from others, and let yourself babble along with the illiterate rabble. Rhyming is a symptom of the process. It's known to come about following a brain injury. Mine is a sore train wreck. But I accept this black hole like the gospel.

And I never would have seen the light and the numbers had there not been a conversation in front of my shanty. I was trying to read The New Yorker on the front porch, as the conversation illustrated why this town can't pull itself out of oblivion. Five city workers were standing at the perrimeter of a grave-size oblong hole in the street. Shovels in hand and the city works truck idling near by, the men were standing stark still, talking about the many things that make them the very soul of Pittsburgh.
"If I make the next pay grade, I'm gonna upgrade my package in Vegas." One of the men said to the group. They all acknowleged the close relationship between pay scale and package deal.

"Well, I been taking my free time at the Rivers Casino, but I'm planning to see Vegas before too much longer." responded another.
Perhaps it was the foreman who boasted that he had a time share unit in Las Vegas, leaving him no chance of having a vacation that didn't serve the need. "You know, there's a hotel in Vegas costs $25,000 a night. Michael Jackson stayed there."

"If you won the lottery, would you stay there, at $25,000 a night," one of the men asked the group. All responded in turn, orderly as nuns, "Yeah, of course I'd stay at a hotel where Michael Jackson was. If it was the same room he was in."

Agreement was expressed around the oblong hole. They would all stay at the hotel if they won the lottery. It sounded as if only a fool wouldn't. Like, "Yes, I'd buy the Hope Diamond," or, "Naturally, I'd turn my heart to philanthropy," but their vacation packages were the only things that would change if they were suddenly filthy rich.

Virtually all topics of discussion crossed the same simple criteria. Pay grade. Las Vegas. The Lottery. It sounded as if the city works had geared itself to the price of vacation packages, time share units, and smorgesboards. Food splendor was another topic discussed around the oblong hole. None of the men were skinny, and they talked with extra ardor about the food, all they could choke down, at a favorite hotel in Vegas. Drink is a curse of the working class. So's Vegas. And gluts of fattening food.

Prophecies are tendered like the coins in a slot machine. A plethora of earthly heavens are there for the taking, while you enjoy your paid time off from your job digging holes in the street. if you win the lottery, you can quit your job shoveling asphalt. The next higher pay grade places you closer to the celebrities, and surely, the lottery could put you right in the Rat Pack's lap, inspite of them all being dead. If the workers won the lottery, the Rat Pack would all come back to life. Resurection in Vegas. Dead town, Pittsburgh.

Friday, October 7, 2011

More Optimistic Tweets

She has a trace of a beard and a case of tardive dyskensia. This is hacked out with appropriate guilt for making sport of the infirmed. It's gauche to ask if her habit of spitting is autonomic or something she hopes to perfect, practicing like a concert musician in her assisted living unit. But to be fair, few people don't practice something ugly.

The highrise is right next to my first bus stop of the day, first of many, in both directions, and I would be less averse if she didn't pace around in loops and cross checkings, with legs of her journey coming too close to me. Within inches. I'm averse to being spat on.

Since I'm being both honest and reprehensible, like a clown spinning plates on sticks, there's some points to discuss on her side of the topic, like she was there first. She had been utilizing the bus service before I began, and like I should go eat broken glass, the extra nice benches and lucite enclosure that grace the bus stop are only there because of the sensible modern highrise facility. Everywhere else in the hood there's a nest of cracked cement and mud to stand on while waiting for public transport. No shit, the system did put all kinds of people in circulation. People who in years past would have been kept in a vault. On the other hand, I'm still a lousy prick with a phobia about people who are sick and interactive.

But this young autumn day is a regular poultice. I feel better about everything, for there is a moment of clarity worth flicking across the breakfast table. I've been making a practice of pointing a stick at things that indicate an improving quality of life. The woman who paces around, wrecklessly, expectorating in all directions while sporting a Van Dyke has been wearing brand new glasses. They look like the kind of glasses lawyers, social workers, women professional people in general wear, and it's an improvement in both her looks, and in the way that social progress looks. Nice new glasses on that social progress.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Men's Parade

Honest, honest, honest, this is hacked out devoid of homophobia. It's supposed to be presented in good humor, cherios all around. I'm using the situation in a hearty, playful, gutsy sort of manor.

The event so named 'Men's Parade,' named by me, and fessed of free will, was moving and humanizing, as well as traumatic, so I'm going to let the true name for it shine, let it shine... More than a statement about the Pittsburgh gay community, in 1991, there was one night a month upon which a billion gay men would march through Oakland in a dazzling show of solidarity. Intimating that I'm a straight man, only slightly to the left of Jack Webb in Dragnet, one unique night etched the parade on my indellible yellow legal pad of life experience.

It was probably in September. I'm not that meticulous about dates, such as when I bought the leather trench coat at a Goodwill store. It cost five skinny dollars, fit immaculately, was of wonderful quality, and was identical to the coat Richard Roundtree wore in the original movie 'Shaft.' It draped properly, praise God. This was twenty years ago, at which time I had great hair. Since I'm working up to some sort of point, I'm the tall, willowy, nervous type, thus people have been calling me a fag since I was nine. I'm not. I'm straight. Willowy. Nervous. Wearing a leather trench coat that choir directors and synchronised swimmers would die for.

The power and glory of it all was that for no reason what ever, I decided to wear my new coat to Chief's bar, which was normally a semi-styling dive bar full of diverse mottled hipsters. But one day a month it filled like an aquarium with male homosexuals dressed to the nines. Honest to whom or what ever, I am just a silly straight fellow who hadn't been livng in Pittsburgh for very long.

I had no idea it was Men's Parade on that evening I wore that beguiling leather trench coat, walking more than a mile along the very route the men marched, together, joyous and overwhelming.

This all hapened at the very time at which simple new relationships had been forming. I had been making a lot of new friends in Chief's bar. Up until that catastrophic parade, there, as far as I knew, were no arch questions being asked about my character, background or groin yearnings. It was pure coincindence that I entered Chief's along with a thick stream of men all coming into Chief's Bar, all dressed fantasticly and all in rare form. I was not in rare form, though. I was almost my usual self, but a little off my graze from the mile walk in the jubillant, stunningly dressed, queer throngs.

I was not marching with the gay men. I was walking, to Chief's bar, alone, a male molecule encapsulated in the leather trench coat like the one Shaft wore in the original movie. But all the straight friend's, and gay one's as well, that I'd met thus far at Chief's all at once thought that I had dressed up special to share in the mass celebration of male gayness. In fact, they all, at once, assumed that I was gay. At the same time judgement was being passed among the bar flies I had come to see as friends, total strangers were taking a fancy to me. Guys were putting their hands on me. Making overtures. Striking up conversations, by the cock hairs of Zeus. There was no place to sit and took forever to get a beer because the dump was so crowded. I was getting groped. Then the walk home was the mirror image of the walk there, the streets and sidewalks a dense and random parade in celebration of men, men, men. All of whom thought I had dressed up special for Men's Parade. I was getting groped. Guys were making passes.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Making Up Words

This post is nothing to sweat over , you might do without it,I'd say go ahead, give it a read. Processing the info plucked from the droll universe that surrounds us all, I invented an acronym.

Since it might catch on, I want credit for it, and it could win a spot in the dictionary, I must needs to stake my claim in the frontier soil that word origin is. Gentle readers, I coined the acronym 'WAMF.'

"WAMF" stands for 'witty ass motherfucker.' I am a witty ass motherfucker. I am a WAMF. I'm a funny guy. Ask someone. Go on. Try it.

I am at least as scintillating and evanescent as Winston Fucking Churchill or Ogden Fucking Nash. In fact, I'm fucking near Noel Coward, minus a couple brownie points for provenence. That can happen to anyone, especially us riveting soiree' crashers who might be playing on the dark keys.

I'm one of those fuckers who look cool in a smoking jacket. Or a fucking lap robe. With the big business out like lasagne noodles. I'm a WAMF, fuckers. So go ahead and use my addition to modern language as you will. Pretend you're all cutting edge and hip. Just don't forget where the fuck you heard it first.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Learning To Shut Up



Hey, ya. Name's Orange Fitz, my real name. Ma was a ceramist, name of Allethia Fitz. They always give their kids wierd names. The wife dumped me a decade ago, let me keep the Winnebago. It don't run no more, so it's a sheet metal trailer with a grubby windshield. Mike's been letting me keep it behind his barn in exchange for doing odd jobs.

Had to use a stage name, Vince Viccars, in the last career, now I'm using my given name. Had to get back to where I began.
See, the trouble started long before that break up. I was having me a career in film. Till I done got myself blackballed.

They was big on giving jobs to bikers, when I rode west on the Harley, round 1962. Ain't had one of them bikes in a coon's age. Wife took that, along with everything else, except my digs. I was an extra in near all the flicks that needed a herd of bikers to ride through town and tear up the place. Seemed like I had it made. Long way up, same distance down. At the height of it all, I got a two second speaking role in 'They Saved Hitler's Brain.'

Since you're wondering what happened, it was something you couldn't anticipate in a thousand years, unless you was one them Hebrew/Americans that produced cowboy flicks since before the Great Depression. They also produced biker flicks. And a certain sci-fi flick. Ain't going full into details, but you never know where people got sore spots. All I said was, "They was on to something."

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Romanian Chairs

Bellevue is a dry town, but a drinking establishment is in walking distance, spitting distance, if you will. I was waiting for the 14 bus just a cock hair out of town, no good place to sit, in front of the road house called the Rusty Dory. What the fuck is a 'dory?' What ever, the last place I went to shop is a Red, White and Blue thrift store, located right off of route 65, where I bought nothing. There was a close call with a leather trench coat that came near enough to my size to spark a mental picture of me in sadist regalia. Makes sense, somehow, that people would have secret lives in a town that forbids the use of alcohol. But a man burdened with unrelated guilt has no right to judge others.

The remorse was for pissing. There's a Burger King an eight lane jog across 65 from the thrift store, both still in Bellevue proper. Like a thief, I snuck in and used the men's room, and didn't buy anything. I could hear the invisible voices, saying, "There, that is the man who pissed in here, and now the door is always locked, and you have to ask at the counter for the key, because bastards like that lousy thrift shopper did what he just did. Fucker." Pricks like me abuse corporate kindnesses, and it's the commoner who suffers for it. Reminds how a term paper I wrote in college, titled 'The Ethical Suicide,' landed me a C-, and I didn't bother with grad school. Now I ride the bus. Standing guilty and alone, an ugly American, soon I had company at the bus stop along the highway. And again, I was still alone, though now among others.

Two men appeared from across the street, both quite old, very pale, one in chinos and a checked sport shirt, the other in blue work pants and a checked short sleeve sport shirt. One on the two men was carrying chairs. They were speaking, smiling their words to each other, in a rush of an Asian dialect. Both ignored me when I smiled and nodded in their direction. Both though, seemed to be thrilled with their purchase at he thrift store.

If I could understand their language, all doubt would be erased. They were talking about their two Romanian chairs. Stealing glances though, I saw on one of them the word 'Romania." It was on the underside of the hardwood seat, the chairs stacked in front of them, one upright, the other inverted. They were cheap, sturdy early American style, the kind supplied to nursing homes and group homes and condominiums owned by the tasteless middle class. My legs were hurting.

I was aching for a friendly conversation, as well as for respite from the heat and the burden of my own weight. But only a true ugly American would initiate conversation in what might be someone's second language. And I'm a cute son of a bitch, when I'm not pissing in some fast food joint where I'm not wanted. Two people close by, and no one to talk to. And two chairs left unused, like they weren't there to be sat on. With the two bleach skinned old men talking to each other, and no chance at all at any sort of kinship forming on my end, I decided to make a seat out of a pile of rocks, fresh clean rocks trying and failing at decorating the front parking lot of the Rusty Dory. Like the two chairs, it was uncomfortable, and it couldn't have looked good for a man to sit like a child on the ground, while two men remained standing beside the highway in front of their second hand furniture.

I've always admired the stoicism of the Asian peoples. One would have to be, to sit for more than a few seconds in a patently uncomfortable chair. Or, for that matter, to remain standing for as long as it takes for the bus to come. When the bus finally came, I waved the two men enter ahead of me, like a good American, like to allow them their best opportunity in finding seats and some free space for their ugly Romanian chairs. These are the silly rules I live by.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Checkered Flannel

Brad was in an ugly mood. He was pounding beer in a road house, the television news covering the Feenis County Fair, and the regs, mostly farmers and tool and die men, were talking about Linda LaMote.

"Hey LaRue, what year was she Miss Feenis County?"

"Don't remember. But I was driving that F100, I know that."

"What's that got to do with when she was Miss Feenis," Donnell Yokes asked.

These were all slow talking men, with whole minutes passing before replies.


"I crashed that truck two years ago, so it's a ball park figure."

On the nineteen inch black and white screen a local news personality was interviewing a husband and wife taffy pulling operation, with the Ferris wheel and concession tents in the background. The homely couple, both with white paper cunt-caps on their heads, did their laughing tug of war as they talked, both ends of the taffy gangling out of their hands like a low hanging scrotum.

"It ain't about liking to do this," the rotund, thin haired lady puller told the interviewer. "it's about just doing it. It's what we been doing since 1963."

The men seated like red flannel crows around the horseshoe bar were still talking about Linda LaMote. "She been in a lotta movies, since being crowned queen here." The comment sounded dangerously sarcastic, though LaRue's inflections were nearly flat.


"I wouldn't fuck her with my worst enemy's dick," Brad bellowed out, before he had even bothered sounding out the words in his head.

The outburst came as no surprise to the rest of the patrons. Linda had been invited to appear at the fair, and turned down the invitation. No one was ready to forgive her for doing a thing like that. Or, rather, for not doing a thing like that.

"Ain't that a crime of ommission?" A sincere and dry shot at humor by Larue

"Damn straight," Brad agreed, this time, at least, thinking before he spoke.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Book Biz (at total fabrication)

I got Katie's permission to use her novel, "Opening Rings" as an example of the power of words. Katie came to me just after she left grad school in Massachusetts. "How do I get my novels out of the middle class?," she wrote to me. Hundreds of writers write to me, most after reading one of my books. My home address is always on the inside cover. Nothing to hide. I got no aversion to strangers. The six dobermans cased in razor wire around my mobile home are there like a half dozen lawn jockeys. Katie is one of the people who make me proud to be an independent publisher.



I got right back to Katie, that time. "You write what you need to write," I told her, practically ordering her into the kind of action I want. And without that dumb bourgoisie hestiation a lot of women, and certain men, authors get a problem over. I have been publishing all kinds of lady's books through Brass Plane Publishing.

Katie didn't waste any time putting out exactly the kind of work she had inside. I told her, "You get fucked up over that MFA program, you could get a bad reputation with the agents. You get that, you won't have books like "Inferiostomy," or your book. The one I told you I like."

"Shit," she said. "My daddie tried to get me to give it all up for the law firm he owns." There you are. "Fuck no," I says. Brass Plane Publications puts your books out without you having to go that route. Fuck no.



The little lady who wrote "Done Ragging" is also one of my protoges'. She's a little firebrand, married to a guy who races stock cars. Somewhere in the Ozarks. I'm gonna be heading up that way on the Harley, so we can talk about a deal I'm working out for them. Lisa Smith told me that her MFA is as good as a visit from pest control as far as getting you published, and Lisa's on her second book, made here in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.

Right here are two women who have done great for themselves by way of Brass Plane Publications. My wife's right here with me, and I wouldn't fuck any other broad with your dick. It's all business between those women authors and me.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Following Uncle

We are/were close blood relatives, and there was a resemblence between us. We both have/had weak, timid chins, and we both have/had goatees that come/came and went with our chameleonic whims. He was a writer and critic, so the crap am I. Uncle passed at 55, I'm 53 and expect to reach at least 56. It would only be fair, considering that Uncle got famous while in his late 30s and I'm still treading the wet July air, as if the stuggle will lead to something. Uncle was best known for his work as a jazz critic, before bowling a strike with his book on the subject of graffiti. This is the reason I've turned to the subject of criticism. There are two movies that are for the most part long forgotten, and someone has to make the world know both were prescient.



I have in my private film collection a copy, on durable VHS format, of the low budget masterpiece, "Surf Nazis Must Die." On the surface, it's a schlock account of a cabal, eventually thwarted by honest American law enforcement. While the lead conspirator has black hair and post-Vietnam drooping mustache, how could anyone not be alarmed by the supporting cast of Nazis, most of whom were platinum blond. The flick could be clasified as mere cops and robbers, with neo-fascist theme, but the key word is 'surf.' Obviously, the West Coast has been spawning Nazis like violets in spring. And they can't all be just hanging ten and cursing minorities.


Not housed in my own collection, I had the good fortune of renting the B-classic, "They Saved Hitler's Brain." In this work, Der Fuehrer's scowling noggin is in a jar, kept alive with the same chemicals and electrodes that worked so well in, "The Brain That Wouldn't Die." Lucky for us all, those chemicals have been kept a secret, though I'll bet you a bowl of popcorn that Dick Cheney and half the CIA have it on paper, secured to their refrigerator doors with an ABCs magnet. It's just common sense. Why stay dead when you don't have to?

This movie also featured men and women with hair the color of Andy Warhol's wig. And wigging the late Hitler did. The only time he smiled was when the antagonist thugs were winning. Towards the end, as the virile fascist thugs fell into defeat, a look of abject horror came over the severed head in the inverted pickle jar. Knowing now that both great films were more than light entertainment, it's my duty to warn the public.



Of what should everyone be warned? Surf Nazis. Hitler's brain. Norway. No longer flexing oiled pecks on the beach, they have mobilized.

I'm in the middle of a sticky law suit over my publishing venture, Brass Plane Publications, but none the less I am willing to risk further persecution to squeeze off a more detailed account of what is happening. You too can see your manifestos and sagas looking more like a real book, and it won't cost you eternity in electrostatic brine. Just $5000 down and a modest editing fee, and you too can be an important author, like myself. Suffice, for now, to know that what you need to save the world is just a money order away. My new book, "They Killed Bruce's Novel" is available in hard cover, soft cover and astroprojection, $19.95, in the format that best saves you from advancing tyrany. Good day and good reading.





P.S. There is no such entity as 'Brass Plane Publishing.' It's purely fiction.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Inferiostomy

The apartment was a cavern in the basement of a huge Victorian rooming house. When the manager of the building decided to let me have it, I overheard him say to old Mrs. Sullivan, "Yeah, he belongs down there." And I did. It was a thin slice of concrete blocks making half the basement my hole, my tube, my damp cool burrow. It came with a floozy wood poster double bed, like a peon's cheap replica of Henry VIII's guest lodgings. The orange fabric couch smelled like someone's sweating ass, and there was a comfortable vinyl lounge chair in the living room, near a floor lamp with Mad Magazine plastic megaphone shades. I was a young bachelor as much as one might be ink-drawn in the same puerile mag. Anyway, that was how I saw myself, like the kind of young man who would look natural smoking a shiny new apple pipe, if it was the norm at the time, which it wasn't. I smoked Camel filters during that import year. Later on, as I grew and changed, I switched to Marlboros. Lately I've been smoking the gamy generic cigs called 'Raves.' Very hard on the throat and chest, I'm wondering if the nagging cough will ever clear up. Bronchitis, I'll bet ya.'

I grew in that cinderblock cave. It was my first time away from the town I grew up in, doesn't deserve a name, but there was some Rebecca From Sunnybrook Farm going on when I moved from jerkwater to urbanized. There was a small, prim, girlish shelf of books in the bedroom, beside the king size bed and cartoon floor lamp, and I took to reading most nights, after a nice day at the little mop job. There was a copy of Frank Conroy's "The Subject Was Roses," which featured a long preface explaining how the author grew the compulsion to write the book. There was a worthless second edition of 'Portnoy's Complaint,' a few experimental fiction works from New Directions, in that tentative composition book style cover, and some shitty potboilers by famous authors who got lazy. And then there was the subsidy published novel that changed my life. The only book I took with me when I 'closed the book' on my year in Rhode Island is titled, "Inferiostomy," by D. P. Reters. After reading it, I corresponded directly with Mr. Reters, as his home address was printed right under the date and copyright warnings. "No lawyers, pal," it read, "You plagiarize me, I pull up on the Harley and crush your head."

In the preface to 'Inferiostomy,' D.P. explains that when people read an important work of fiction, they, in the metaporical sense, grow their first short curly hairs all over again. It's not a 'rebirth,' as many Christians like to bruit, but rather a second, third and forth (et infinitum) puberty. He stoically assured his readership that once they read "Inferiostomy," they would be able to, on an emotional and spiritual plane, shave their bush and start from delta one each time they began one of Mr. Reters many self-publications. He further explained that this is not feasible with books published through Random House or Harper and Row, because they only print books made to lock people into a state of near-death adulthood. "I can't read any of that garbage without seeing this dim light at the end of the bogus cave," D had shared.

The premise of Inferiostomy is that people have to cut their dirty, hopeless negative senses of self out of their own little minds if they ever hope to have the the magnificent self-esteem they are entitled to. It begins with the antagonist, a mean, homely research scientist, designing an electronic device, to be planted in the brains of people like the one I used to be, which is why, from the git-go, the book had such a profound effect on me. Reters was way ahead of his time, as when the book first appeared, they were only doing this stuff to monkeys. "Sure,' the author had written me, on his lined pink stationery, 'it was monkeys first, people next. No fucking way I'm waiting for the creeps to get to this literary giant." They won't get to me, either.

The handsome, young protagonist, Little Brucie, takes interest, at first, in the mad scientist's research. He's been going to the library every day after he gets home from his little mop job, trying to figure out how to resolve his feelings of innadequacy, which, of course, was the very thing the antagonist was trying to capitalize on. Little Brucie found a series of articles in the Providence Eagle about the research. "What if some type of brain implant is just the ticket?" he wondered, as he paged through a stack of local weeklies. I won't ruin the whole experience for you, since you can still get a copy, reprint I should say (the author passed, after a heroic battle with lung cancer), of "Inferiostomy" through my new publishing house, Brass Plane Publications. You'll find a lot of my novels, as well, and should you see fit to do your own thinking and writing, I can help you get your opus between glossy covers for a low fixed rate.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Solitaire (cool your jets, it's fiction)

An eccentric person has no right to balk at some teasing, maybe some outright ridicule. They said the guy who designed the steam engine was nuts, and I hear tell his wardrobe was even more conservative than mine. Mrs. Henry next door says I look like I'm dressed for a flood. They're capri pants. Men in Italy wear capri pants, I think. I know the ladies do, at least, and this is supposed to be a genderless society. But lately Mr. Paul has been ragging about the motorcycle I bought. He calls it a 'rice rocket,' and he's at least half right, I should have bought either American, or anyplace other then my bikes birthplace. It's like the child of Rube Goldberg and Aileen Wuornos. A real piece of shit. This is another bad year for appliances and transportation. I think I'm getting arthritis.


Then, last year, it was the chain saw. Like usual, and I know I'm a bit of a schmuck, I got one out of a discount warehouse online, which made me wonder if it employed bald headed Jews with a short temper, like the places I used to shop in when I was kid. Society is changing much too fast for the average guy to get a grip on. Same as the goddam bike, there's something fishy with the idle screw, you can't adjust the thing properly, so there's problems with the chain saw. Either I burned out the engine, or else it needs a new spark plug. Doesn't matter at this point, because I lost interest in the project I had in mind.

There's a sweet old couple in the shanty in back of my hovel, and they keep rubbing it in about how reliable their chain saw is. All their appliances work like gems. And then they have to lay it on about the weeds I have growing. I asked if I could borrow their weed whacker. "Ain't sure I trust a man like you with a gas engine, Little Brucie." Imagine that, a 92 year old bag calling me 'Little Brucie.' I'm average height! And the name is Bruce, not 'Little Brucie."

"Them weeds is grown too thick to cut down with a weed whacker. I'd go at them oaks and maples with a chain saw, if you ever get one that works." Even her husband thinks he's a comedian. There aren't any trees. They are weeds with thick trunks, and I think their weed whacker would handle them just fine. Not really sure, though. It isn't my province.

People in this borough are clannish. That's why I don't seem to connect to well with people here. I moved here a long time ago, been waiting for my life to fill in and get more sympatico. It never does. I just live alone like a washed up hermit. Watching the afternoon movie, cashing my disability checks, saving a few pennies a month for a new saw. Once you go off your schedule too long, it gets hard pick up where you left off. Living in the boonies, like this, can have a bad effect on your outlook.

I was planning to perform a massacre with that chain saw, and now I'm just tired. Arthritis gets much worse, and it will all have been an idle dream.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Pet Theory

This post is posted in case anyone claims credit for my pet theory:

It's called Big Bruce's Pet Theory of Organized Religion. It states that some people have a genetic predisposition for pontificating, and this trait accounts for the popularity of religion, and for the direction religeon takes.

Absent of this gene for Baptist style hard ball preaching, people might find other explanations for life on Earth and for outer space, as well as other views on after-life. Or there could be no religion at all.

More pet theories are in the works.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Little Black Hearts

the real one went to vinegar
mishandled young wine disolving the blob
now it's a chicken giblet
so I read dense books
then write electric replies
they write back with little black hearts
no such thing on my keyboard
just one year out of date
the organs change that much
heartless

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Scooter Tale

It's a cruel economy, and this pedestrian is in a pecuniary nose dive. My last car got hauled to recycling glory a couple years ago, and ever since, each day has been visited with dreams of transportation less depressing than a city bus. So I've been exploring some options of the two wheeled kind.

Sure it all looks easy, breezy and cute. A nice looking guy or gal zipping down Penn Avenue on a mod looking Vespa or Honda motor scooter. Looks like a charming little way to get around. Well, there's a grim subset of factors that may determine just how easy, just how breezy one of those motor vehicles truly is. I'm working on the problem, right now, having bought one of the very dirt cheapest imported bikes available by mail order.

" Why doesn't he join a support group and leave hard, greasy, hairy chested work to people who are playing with a full deck?" a burly biker might interject. That is how an experienced motorcycle personage may well respond. "Why should I care what a misguided novice learns from his own poor judgement?" some heartless, illiterate gear head might add. But for people who value the process more so than the outcome, my experience buying a motorscooter off the Internet has been a newsworthy farrago of steel parts and poor communications.

I know you will like hearing that it took over two months to assemble the 50cc scooter, and I could have done it in eight hours if the instructions had been written by someone both familiar with the bike and fluent in English. To further the insult, a sane engine mechanic can put the things together in one hour. If you're planning on doing something theraputic, don't get a cheap-o ride mail order.

Like trying to find your ass in the dark. Unless the project is a total failure, there is a moment of clarity when, like in Come Back Little Sheba, a big gluteus comes bounding over the horrizon. I got the scooter to work, but arrived at it worse for wear. It was mostly the abysmal instuctions. Here are some of the things that went terribly wrong.

I hadn't planned on breaking some dainty cuticles removing it from the package it came in. The thing weighs more than I do. It's jangling, greasy parts were bolted to a steel frame inside a cardboard box as thick, tough and cheerful as a brig in the Somolian Navy. While the thing was delivered nice enough by truck to my dystopian hovel, there was no way possible to get it up the two flights of concrete steps between it and the front door. Don't mind that it had been raining all day, so there was no good option of putting it together road side. The best kind of muscular pain was in the works, but first I had to chew through the box and unbolt a metal fixture. Once that ordeal, pain of a thousand stubby bolts, was complete, I had to drag the heavy parts up the steps, to the kitchen, which is the only room in the house that's suitable. Note that no one comes here for dinner. The heavy lifing act was well in the hernia/heart attack zone. Soon false hope arrived when I managed to get the front wheel on.

What happened next caused me to think that it's clutch lever was some sort of Flying Dutchman, or else someone in the Smiling Happy Communist Motorcycle Factory #6 forgot to put one in the package. It said in the instructions that it had one. It doesn't. The wispy motorcylcle was manuactured in China, and has no brand name. It's a generic imported bike. The political prisoner who wrote the instructions seemed to wish the thing had a clutch lever, or he hates Americans, and is laughing at the thought of guys like me taking it the hard way. It took over a week to acertain that it has some sort of hybrid clutch, not quite an automatic, but made for people with miminal riding skill. This was worse than The Manchurian Candidate for the way it disolved ordinary cognition.

The battery was scary because you have to pour a sinister plastic package, like a cross between a bladder implant and a part of the space shuttle, into six or eight matching holes, all eager as puppies for a nice drink of sulfuric acid. There was no way of knowing exaclty how to do it without getting third degree burns, suffice I got through that part, but then came the next thing someone in the imported bike biz should have known. It said in the instructions that the battery had an overflow tube. It didn't, so the time spent looking for it was both frustrating and pretty as meat packing. Motorcycles are called, on the street, a 'crotch rocket,' which caused worry about an explosion.

I won't continue to cry over everything that destroyed my nerves, but by the time I got the engine running and ajusted, it was nearer to the Second Coming than hoped. I haven't learned, yet, how to ride it, that will start in a week or so, when I fully recover from stress injuries and a nervous breakdown. Shouldn't be a problem. I'm a quick study.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Poems Wrote This Morning

Conscience

not guilty of rain
mayhaps
or of causing pain
or perhaps
destroying grain
maybe

having too many babies
rabies, scabies
men and ladies
guilty
maybe
guilt
in the air
like a dragonfly
and I've done nothing


Lassitude



with lips parted
I'm running fingers through four day stubble
makes an ocharina sound
can't make a tune of it
just one odd tone
the head
a piano
sinus strung for music
I am hollow
tonal
alive
but not moving

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

La Stradaroo

On a typical day banks get robbed and buildings get surounded. One time I was down town, walking near Fifth Avenue Plaza, when first two and then, like stern rabbits, dozens of cops plowed into the perimenter, cop cars accumulating in a dense formation around busy Penn and Liberty Avenues. It looked wonderfully organized, with police storming into a branch office bank, all in all, size of a Kinko's copy store, all happening half a block or less from me.



Heading to my bus stop like normal, I just happened to be coming toward the incident, walking at my normal clip along the flank of Fifth Avenue Plaza on a gorgeous summer day.



People were at their all out best, just then, as the spectacle with police action went like a rodeo popped up all of a sudden. People who normally walk past each other with polite disregard smiled. "Someone robbed the bank," a tall stunning black woman said to a passerby, who smiled back and said , "Lotta Po-lice." Other people smiled along and shared the words "whole lotta po-lice." Whatever happened in the bank was probably in the can, in one sense or other, within a few seconds, and nobody seemed to be watching. It was something you couldn't miss if you wanted to, and a teaming narrow side street between Penn and Liberty was remarkably cheerful and personable. 'Normal' is a marvelously adaptive word, in these parts.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Squatter Heaven (short fiction)

It gives one an erection long enough to knock the pot of gold out from under the rainbow, like a curling stone. Bing clack, under the prismatic arch.

She's an object of lust. We been seeing each other for about two months now. Together and seperate, we've been testing a series of herbal teas, all used for centuries, to methodically rejuvenate each and every organ and gland, brain and nerves included, like shining all shoes and pressing all seersucker. We've made it a project to fix as many organs as possible, without reserve.

.

The significant other and I have been shacked up in a miniscule one story house, barely more than an elongated shed with pitched roof, set on the mountaintop directly above Route 28. Down below us we have a rock garden composed of basements set deep the whole way down, half a mile, to 28. They picked that side of the hill clean of standing houses years ago, and no one's hot as pepper to build anything on an undermined plunging hill. Damn nice, the cement nooks and crannies cake walking at random down gentle dirt and weeds


A most unfortunately hostile neighbor hates me because one of his people had a motorcycle like mine, and got arrested. Then turned queer. And then he was killed. Killed. And he was riding a motorcycle like mine.
Not certain what to do. Embittered people have this tall trajectory. Always lands near by, damp and unwanted.


This relationship between Lorrie and me is doomed because my new number one has a kid with some tubular bingle-bungle growing out of his head, that being our sweet talk for long bony horns, and I'm affraid I am not prepared to commit to it's upbringing. He's a tiny triceratops. Call me a pig. The saddest thing for me is that my girl's family has high hopes for me and her. They are dazzled into thinking I'm responsible, and I don't mean to do it. I can't help having more personality than the general run. Appalachia. Will have to close the book on this before too much longer.


The new bike that I just got re-opened something that shut down a ways back. I used to be a lounge lizard, sunk to no where, and now that I'm mobile again, albeit on a 50cc generic motorcycle from off the internet, the seeds inside are germinating in the soil of endeavor. Can't make nervous types stay still

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Motor Bike



cheap knock-off
she was made
in the silverware thrown down stairwell factory
where labor is so cheap
a laughing boy can have it all
made in China

Friday, April 22, 2011

Recent Poems


Battered


mom had an electric mixer
seemed like an electic insect
with pincers head down in the bowl
with rotating tusks in the batter
spine hunched in the kill
her tea cakes came out like angels
so I grew into this sort of brute
half kind
half brutal
mixed
inclined to use force
inclined to use reason
mixed
mad
common





Pissed

importance, you bastards
I could change to zillion bats
skitter in the falling leaves
make the 17 year locust
sound like harps
I could fill with nitrous oxide
make whipped cream
and torment you
this body is without water
no collogen
no oxygen
bone and titanium screws
from the wreck




Bird


living room
basement apartment
pet rooster perched like buffalo nickel
young lady says she was in jail for stealing cars
getting the keys off close relatives
and passed-out targets at parties
the bird flapped pillow feather wings screaming
converse like a disc jockey
share-crop sight of the giant television
be a family



Rock Slide

I want the pain
won't move
or wince
rain of dust and pebbles for the overture
I won't open the umbella
landslide is big tit nature
sound of scraping and cracking loose
sight of cheap frame houses unmoored
gotta look up to something
gotta give
I'll give a dime
first rock that kills me





Back Woods

grimly he assumes
he has to take control
repetition
has to hear himself belt it out
he had moments full of napalm and laughing gas
there's you like a baby rabbit
he can come at you with a goose gun
leap bow-legged over barb wire
he will repeat the story about inhalents
he savored spray paint
woofed an aggressive kitchen of solvents
mad cow






Renovated Former Dump



they took out the wooden steps
cased the beams in faux aluminum
in dark modern blue
the row of basement doors were cinder blocked
swan sun glass hue to match the siding
secure entrance assured by an autistic engineer
it has some racing goggle replacement windows
tropical insert court yard
I used to study the moon there
shoot the shit with some shit heads
on webbed chaise lounges
when it was a dirt square
been fine somewhere else





Flying Bugs

locust treadmill
rolling black belt to the check out
flying insects a ribbon in clouds
grocery stores on every corner
tire stores
feed mills
weevils dusting the brown air
grasshoppers loaded with radiation
scabies
rabid froth
vermin with lace wings
tinting the air black





The Redness


red roof on the manse
red undies pop out when they dance
red trance

red letter day ahead
red eye gravy on bread
red thread on the rubicund literary bed

red the type of skin blushes
red bush fillling four cubic inches much
my drunk red luck
chance to get fucked
chuckles


Smither


garden of little things
the voice is too soft
makes you step up to the spikey terrarium
captured mantis centaur anemone squid
thornweed timothy asparagus sticks
lettuce moss centipede
ants in a black leather trench coat
once inside
it has you
makes you smither





Turning Cold

been keeping the heart in a Mason jar
it was opined I wear in on the sleeve
that's only whining
I'm inclined to store it in glass
only take it out when desperate
only when praying to the West
for money
or praying to the East
for learning
been burned
then froze
on a shelf with peppers and tomatos

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Fear Of Illness

I just got a message on my answering machine, bruiting of disease. The spinach I bought at the grocery store is being recalled because it may have been tainted with salmonella. The automated massage said it was for spinach I bought over a week ago, and had already eaten. They knew I had the spinach because I used my "smart shopper" card at the check out. I trust that a public health robot is examining my medical history right about now, with clinical dispassion. They don't need to get their semiconductors in a knot. I'm fine. Though I may never feel the same about spinach.

You should see my fore arms balloon when I eat some. Haven't sung a sailor's jig all day.


So while I'm recovering from the panic attack, I get a visit from Little D, not his real name. He hasn't been coming around as much since he got hitched. I guess it's safe to tell the weasel that I'm off my graze. Just got a scare. Don't have my sea legs. Should have known all along Little D was a slow acting snake in the grass. All he has to know is that you have a soft spot.

"I know a guy you can talk to," Little D boasted, practically in my face. I used to think of 'a guy you can talk to' as a teacher or responsible small business representative. Maybe I gave the twerp too much information by declining his offer to help me initiate a frivolous law suit. A creep like Little D sees that as an opportunity to twist the purpose of moral scruples. Like it's dumb enough to have them, and a bigger waste not to use the trait, in others, for personal gain.

He moved in next door a few years after I found a two room hell hole in a barny looking wood aparment complex with spindly stair cases. Little D quickly established himself as an indispensible companion. The way an item can. I once had a vacuum black head remover that was so helpful in controlling acne that I thought of the plastic syringe aparatus as a companion.

You can kill a million scabies with a cream, and it's so legal you get the poison from the doctor. People think like this when they are stewing.

Maybe a year before my spinach trauma, Little D hitched himself to the hairy fore arm of fortune. This was about a charter school that didn't allow him and all the other litigants to serve the slum community. They were all veterans with hinky records, and had been supposedly entitled to hiring preferences.

Answering the phone is like drinking from an alien creek. Praise technology for the answering machine. It told me I could have salmonella. So when I decide to just answer the phone, myself, it's Barry Scumbag, attorney at law, wants to talk to me about my experience hearing of the tainted spinach, and more importantly, did I eat some.

"I ate some, Barry. I ate the whole bag of spinach. With some croutons and dressing. No, don't think there was anything special about the toast chunks and salad oil, how can I help you today, Barry."

Barry was trying to get a word past me the whole time I was talking. Couldn't wait to ask Barry if he was the one who told Little D about the class action law suit that he seemed to fit into like, like a hand in a silk glove.

I let Barry get to the point. I fucked up. I should have said I was puking blood.


I'm getting time frames mixed up. I could die of salmonella any minute, and I just got off the phone with Barry Scumbug. Little D tried to shake down a charter school about a year ago. For some reason, he and I are still speaking.

Little D worked like a charity martyr, calling everyone he ever met, asking if they liked spinach, and if so, did they know it could kill them. Barry, the professional, would emerge from the rear, soon as someone said they were sick. Alright, it was a month ago that I ate queer spinach and got an automated warning not to eat it on the answering machine. Getting nearer the present, Little D's new bride has been complaining something awful. Seems she is acutely ill. Symptoms something like salmonella.

Now both Little D and Barry Scumbag have been calling me ten times a day. Seems there's a legal loop hole. Might still be able to sign onto the Spinach Caper. Meantime, a local songstress is rounding up singers who lost their voice from puking real hard after getting sick off the spinach. She's been calling here. Nice voice. A little raspy. From all the puking. I hit the play button on the answering machine, and hear, "This is LaVoris Crackman, and I need you to help me sue."

It's hard to convince people I'm healthy as a horse and happy as a pig. LaVoris was calling from the dressing area at her club, The Pink Camel. It's owned by the gay Libyan cat. They say he's hung like mule.

"Come on sugar. Tell LaVoris what really happened to you. When those bad food handlers made you ralf up blood."

"Well, they scared me, LaVoris. That much is for true."

Somehow, I knew that if I went for this thing, I'd be wearing a hair shirt loaded with Noxema. There would be discomfort, salved with something made for women with bad skin. I'd be wearing the unwashed hair shirt to bed, with people. Other people. Lay down with bad people, wear a greasy hairshirt. No. I'm not waking from this greasy.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Farming

swing the wire basket full of eggs
rope the sun with pendulous milk
her white bonnet and white trimmed black farm uniform
repells animal fluid
her galoshes adore soft synthetic pastures
wondrous quartz gravel trails rove artifical peet
the bog smell is piped in

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Pissed

importance, you bastards
I could change to a zillion bats
skitter in the falling leaves
make the 17 year locust
sound like harps
I could fill with nitrous oxide
make whipped cream
and torment you
this body is without water
no collogen
no oxygen
bone and titanium screws
from the wreck

Befuddled

you have to fish it out
I've been wrenching gleet in the basement
roof job has me swimming up ladders
I tried to chase predatory carp
in a chimney
fast greasy gold fish with teeth
hard to concentrate on the school
got away
a pipe broke
Old Faithful with thick fluid umbrella
gushed away my compass
I need it
can't find my toes

April Moebius

falling for the same phone prank
april fool
paging mike hunt
course figure eight like orbit
kinked in the center
tormenting me
calls me where ever
at work
at home
a fun seeker
stalker
joke

Friday, January 28, 2011

Resurecting Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises

Here's some of the old school credo:

1. This house is my studio. I used to call my studio 'Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises.' Haven't been calling it that lately.

2. Inside the studio, a whole gang of projects have been, and still are,under way. There's no longer a name for the whole shebang, but it's the same hive of activity. Products made here include boomerangs, throwing knives, folding knives, jewelry and sculpture. There is always some visual art being poduced, and there is always one or more small businesss plans in progress.

3. There's a house philosophy at work at all times, based on Milton Friedman's economics. It's an encompassing school of thought which states that both the economy and macro-culture are in poor shape, and leftist Keynesian economics must be replaced with an erudite method of applying free market economics.

4. Creative intelligence is to be valued, loved, worshipped. There is to be a new heirarchy in creative thought, which places on the highest plane creative work aimed at the development of earning operations. People can't function very well without money.

5. Private support for the humanities is to be encouraged. Tax deductible cash support for nonprofits is to be discouraged. The nonprofit cultural community is an unfair business practice, and is a bane in providing, at public expense, material support to base opportunists.

6. My studio supports the position that low earning Caucaission Men are an oppressed minority in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and should be eligible for affirmative action, same was women and protected minorities.

The name changed but the goals are all the same. I am in the process of resurecting Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises. It's a little like the Esalen Institute, and a little like Spahn Ranch. The new name for my studio is "The Spesalen Institute of Deviant Ranching."

Monday, January 24, 2011

Libertarians Meaningfully Floundering

Free market economics is believed by a giddy few to be the only path to personal freedom. According to my hero, economist Milton Friedman, without the right to free speech, the indivdial can't bargain in the processes of free enterprise, and usually winds up like a victim in the movie "The Conquorer Worm," featuring the late Vincent Price. One must be able to ply one's trade and enter into agreements among risible prosperous merchants, if there are any. Or do what I'm doing, which is to dry up like a pimple.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Going to New Lengths to Communicate

Genteel poverty is a concept that has some status in New England states, and almost none here. It's something of a watchword of mine. If peaceful, dirt poor and scholarly people were to fill in some of the very cheap slum properties here in the Observatory Hill area, it might be a start towards intitiating a less pitiful state of affairs than our most conspicuous norm.

I suggested years back The Fair And Equal Access Campaign be formalized, to open public revenue sources to individuals in the community who face hardship and who are, and have been, unspoken for through affirmative action. Open new revenue sources to low earning Caucaission men.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Squeezing the Inhumanity Zit

A zit is a wispy duct that engorged with pimple germs. Soon it's a maraschino cherry size blemish right on the puss.

Old Loughner, with a freshly shaved head and maniac smile, looked like a big zit in the newspaper. People have been spouting off like Mount Saint Helen's about the shooting rampage, characterizing it however best scratches the self-expressive itch. As a concerned citizen I feel everyone should, in his or her own way, try to squeeze the zit out of existence.

If only it was so easy. There's always something gross left on your face when you pop a pimple. Passivity. Best option.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Moped Conversion Kits (alternative transportation)

One of many new projects at the house here is mopeds. I'm installing conversion kits, and can't wait to begin testing these things out this spring.



Am also considering some imported mopeds available mail order off the internet. Small gasoline engines are the best option with which to reduce dependence on gasoline. It will provide a cheap alternative to public transportation, as weather permits. Mopeds I am working on now will be under 75 pounds.

Mopeds are a nice way to reduce parking congestion, are easy to store, safe.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Off In The Chlorine Clouds

pouring it into a turquoise espresso cup
with escutcheons surrounding the loop handle
the standard mix of ethanol
stained green with lime gelatin
quadruple whammy
we are overtaken
our synthetic delivery system of joy
giving up whacked in measured doses
we are not whole
till the apartment is all pure chlorinated water
we share the need to be in an aquarium
new age of pisces
and we are changing


Friday, January 7, 2011

College Bowling

Of all my studies at a state college, there was one course that stayed fresher in mind than most, and which remains a wellspring of meaning and metaphor. And when learning stays alive like this, for nearly thirty years, I'm able forget, for a moment, what a rip-off and abomination higher education has become.

It wasn't math or science or philosophy, or even the English Lit that I still bang around behind me, like tin cans tied to the honeymoon Chevy Nova. It was the phys-ed requirement. Oddly, I haven't been to a bowling alley more than twice in twenty years, but the course in bowling I took has been so dear to the heart that I sometimes stare at my gym bag and blast Lulu's song "To Sir With Love" on the portable stereo. That instructor turned the college course into a 'special relationship.'
He was a man with a method, and a man who believed in bowling. It was more than a sport to him. As much as a really good score, like 150 or better, he was a sportsman who appreciated the human form in motion, and could see in his work young people flowing through space like Baryshnikov, though on the other side of the tracks. It's not all about winning, which is great, because I wasn't planning to.

He seemed to take a special liking to me. More than once, when he had a chance away from prying ears, he confided that I was among the most graceful bowlers he had ever seen. When it was my turn to roll, he would often watch from directly behind, and admire my four steps, the clockwork timing in pushing the ball forward (most important component of proper bowling method,) the pendulous backward swing of gravity as the keggler takes the ball behind the fourth rib, then that final step and the release. Speaking of release, this wasn't the first time a gym teacher seemed to enjoy watching the way I move my ass.

During his lectures on the subject, the instructor made his point that bowling was sensual. The sight of the ball curving into the pocket, leading the orgasmic crash of pins, is like creation itself as falling pins add up on your score sheet. And then all the hidden meaning.

A seven-ten split, for instance, reminds me of how hopeless the economy is. A gutter ball mirrors all incidents of human failure, with descent into dark nowhere. My last girlfriend was a gutterball. She thinks the same about me, and we only went bowling together once. That's how precise the sport of bowling is in reflecting the warts and moles in human nature. A strike is one discrete unit of victory. Twelve strikes in a row is a perfect game with a score of 300. Angelic. Angels are said to be perfect. And when you pick up a spare,it is redemptive, like picking up the pieces of your shattered social life. Just now, my love life is an open frame.

That teacher was probably married with kids, but like so many athletic coaches, it is across their own genders that they find the secrets of the soul. He took me aside once to tell me, personally, how a bowling team is the most important relationship in a man's life. You can't compare family responsibilities to the obligation to fellow man. Score too low too often, and you could be off the team all together. Or you might just bring the whole team down, if you don't force yourself to excell. He told me again that I had beautiful bowling form, and might have a future, if not as a pro, as a man among men. At the bowling alley. With men like him.

But when all was rolled and scored, at the end of the semester, I got a B and not the A I thought he was going to give me for my phys ed requirement. The dissappointing grade may have reflected some disappointment he felt, as if the love of bowling could be unrequited. Then, too, he may have been a closet queen who hoped to score with a lithe young stallion bowler, maybe the prettiest horse on the lanes. That course in bowling made me feel pretty.