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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.