house pet saga (continuing podcast)

This is another poetry recitation, with tambourine bashed and bonged on for ambient sound.  Enjoy,


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Me and Noodles: a cat saga

 

 

The cat and I are both senior citizens.  So says the government, so it can decide what to do with me, health-wise.  Productivity- wise.  As an economic unit, like one errant ion in a beaker on a lab table behind where the Illuminati meet, fuckers, and it calculates the  liabilities I pose to the government.   The kittie cat is old.  I'm fifty five, which is geezerland in the Planet Youth.

Noodles is remonstrating the loss of her friend Ramon, the scarred and jovial alley cat that used to live down the street in an abandoned domicile.    The dump was demolished, and poor Ramon fell victim to Pest Control, thanks to a community better informed about the dangers of feral cats.  The furry dears spread rabies.  Bite babies.  Infect people.    It took all nine lives from some of the most colorful feline vagrants.  I miss Ramon as well.  He fathered many, many cats.   Some fine.  Some not so fine.  But he was prolific, and I shared in his pride.   Noodles was spayed. Taciturn about the family way of life.   She is a great lover, and not a humanitarian.   It is my problem to convince the world I am not a total prick.   Being soley a lover is a good philosophical position.  For its clarity.

"Fuckers whacked Ramon.  Caught his poor ass in a box trap, and Xed the poor old bastard.  I loved that guy," she grumbled, with a low growl to accompany her clear, refined English.   Noodles is a talking cat. We live alone together in the  urban third world.    I keep a baseball bat in reach.  Don't fuss.   Be sociable.  Be open to screwy alternaive life styles.  I don't fuck with yours. 

"Well, crap, Noodles," I said, "I think maybe you and I have been closer since the Cat Massacre of 2004."

Noodles called bullshit.  "That's becuase you quit letting me out of the house, Tonto."

"Well fucking Pest Control might get you if you go outside. It is for your own safety that I must be such a dick.  About letting you go outside.   There's cat rustlers on the prowl."

 I tried to de-escalate.  As was trained to do when I worked night shift at a god-forsaken half-way house for minimum wage.  It was people who flipped out at all hours of the day and night at the half way house.   My cat wasn't really fllipping out.   But she was surly.  I had to intercede.  Give her a Shiatsu.  Foot massage.  Anything she wants.  Anything she asks. for.  She closed the matter.  "Nice digs you keep here, Ranger," she said, and lay under the reading lamp.

Gong Recitation

At Field





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itty-bitty podcast: poem recitation

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Shit,  will be combining shorty podcasts into long ones as soon as possible.

short fiction: Green Christmas

 

Green Christmas

 

Otis Wilkins was coming. He'd been gone for ages, and was borrowing some coed's Dodge Dart to make the trip to Erie. Cub Bartholomew dissappeared for four months, and came back to town by bus, via forced exodus or jail. Coming home to Erie is better than making a new one someplace steel. Matilda Chortleman was acting as social director. Dean Gibson put out the greenbacks to rent the hotel room. This was to be a green Christmas, even in a snow squall. Thus far there was four feet of anal retentive water piled up in drifts on the sidewalk. But this was to be a party for people with imagination, and no respect for the truth. It was passe'. Inconsequential to them. To "all the young dudes," as David Bowie put it. Viva Bowie. They have effrontery.

"We don't let concrete stay solid any too long" was their collective watchword, when they were students at the state college I find distasteful to mention. They were the avante guard and the underground and elite, some of them former members of a punk band. People wove baskets. Did ceramics. Copped a look. Gell-mousse slashing forelocks. At times, glitter. That was 1981-1983.5, before they scattered. For a while. There's been reunions.

The importance of having a green Christmas was to deny a deep shitload of snow in 2012. Going on a bell-ringing 2013. Creepy number. Not that your new friends upstairs are superstitious. Some people are, hint.

Green is a liberating color. Lets you cross the intersection. Makes oxygen. Earth Mother shit. Thought you'd like the image. Gazongas on an earthy fertility fetish. Green is a durable symbol of youth, envy, fertility, and take a powder, the whole green Earth. Money, too. Forgot to say 'money.' I could load myself with female hormones at any moment. I had college courses in feminism. For some reason, I may not be conveying the spirit I'd hoped for. A green branch is more bendable.... Enough. It was the symbol of the new way for that spot and time slot. And not only green.

They discussed at length the stupidity of worrying about doofy Judeo Christian ethics, without which any putz can prosper in mother US. But since then all have, some how or other, found civil obedience. Some. Good-o.

Cub was an original member of Howling X, Now one of Howling X works as a drummer in a cruise ship band. Otis was a bass player, big dude, real easy, likable, in and out of rehab. Currently hoary and bloated. Left a half-way house. Stayed with Dean, earning his keep like a geisha. For a big, physically wasted man, he is graceful moving. Looks nice serving tea.

Well did I forget to say that that ding-dang party had something cheery-special in store for everyone, in a clean, warm hotel room off Peach Street, down the row from squatter's heaven? Love that place. Free digs. Chilly surfers with grunge gear for cold nights in a frame with no windows, just entry ports. Hard years. Hard times. Spiritous cliches of specters on equine transport galloping at us till the end of time. Hallaluja. Had to wing that in. Sorry. Forgot to say I'm a dime store minister. Damn near deserve to preach on radio.

Took Otis some lively cavorting to find someone on a university campus who was not too attatched to the material. His fine presentations in the coffee shop nearest campus mirrored the current trend in metaphysical philosophy. Shit. There's beauty in that. It doesn't change much in 30 years. Assholes are still selling revised books they force kids to buy each year, new, since the old edition is unrevised rat shit. Cute book racket. He had his Dodge in less than two days of stalking the campus. "I'm needed at a peace convention," Otis convinced the maiden he palavered with after crashing a frat party. "Be back with your car real soon." For a man to accomplish that, at his age, takes pinache. He dresses college. Like it. Good choice of glasses on Otis. Slide down his scnoz like he teaches something that fucking matters. Deep. Arcane. Matter is incorporeal. Can't own it. Only fuck with it.

Pikers Ale. Dean. Dean. Did I forget Dean. Dean promised to supply mega-cases of Pikers Ale. It was a favorite in the days when Howling X ratted out their curt punk anthems. In a roadhouse just outside the legal limitations of a teensy rural college town that deserves a lite chin chuck from someone fucking smart. A fucking hell hole for higher learniing. Guests at the Christmas party should start banging in after six pm tomorro! Have to snooze. See ya' soon....



...Awake. Took a shower. Or didn't. You can't care. It's the day of Green Christmas. With enough snow outside the hotel room to make Greenland go, "Hey! We sure could use some of your snow up here, assholes." I fucking near forgot to discuss Matilda.

Matilda turned out swell. A career woman. Communications. In the dwindling field of tele-communications, now so barbed with punky no-call lists. Fuckers. They shouldn't do that to someone as comely and generous as she. She was the tall thin Earth Mother to most of that gang. A procuress. She was loved at that nameless college. Damn good earner on the phone. She's assertive on cue. Dean was already at the hotel cause he rented the fucking room. Matilda got there early because she has responsibilities. Just like at work. She's keen like that. The cases and cases of upper-crust cabin-by-the- babbling-brook type ale were stacked by the wall that served as the bar. The simplicity makes me go loosy goosy. Fuck it all, it's Christmas.

Now everbody who mattered worth a shit back at that slum state college in Nowheresville has finally arrived. Hooray. Let's party. I mean them. I heard about this shit. Maybe I was there. I'm not at liberty to be horribly specific. Was I remiss in saying that Matillda saved her shekels for some time to be ready for this extravaganza. Generous, inherritted greenbacks, Dean chipped in for the goodies. Too. Green Christmas! Blasting a punk favorite from back when they all were rad....here we go.......on a silver platter someone stole from a Tupperware party back in Kansas,......... an ounce of blow. A whole fucking ounce! Can you believe that much could be had? Cost a shit load. Everyone gathered for the viewing in the center of that clean, lovely-warm hotel room. Matilda had the baggie covered with an embroidery, beaded like royalty, that some one stole from some other social venue somewhere in Texas. There were tales to be told of everyone's travels. More gifts from residential/commercial places they stole shit from. Later on. When it kicks in. It will. Oh boy. Tick, Tick, Tick...



...Green Christmas. Matilda had laced the blow with a harmless green coloring agent. It was forest green cocaine. Can't bring myself to list specifically, by name, how Christmas-happy everyone was! The gifts they stole from all over the place, the green lines of blow on the Micky Mouse hat mirror Dean's mother bought him for his confirmation, so splendid. It was once viewed as an honor to receive such a mirror. Helped good Mouseketeers keep their hats on straight. You didn't get to see that blow-mirror any too often, I can tell you. Special occaission. More special to come. Holy fuck, dear sweet Matilda looks out the motel window and shits a post and lintel. There's a shit-storm of ugly green slime falling from the sky. Going greasy hideous kersplat, with force, on the four feet of snow on Peach Street. LIke in that Dr. Sues book. Except his green slime from outer space was gooey and comical. The grean shit that just started falling, like nearly now, like a plague, was really, really putrid. Worse than the green shit in the kid's book by Dr. Suess, who everyone still loves the way everyone was loving Matilda. Till she went frozen. Everyone rushed to the window to look at the horrible green shit coming down. Powerful green shit-storm. It stopped. They resumed enjoying the blow.  Except for Matilda, who was now a pillar of frozen green slime.  People serving as den mother to a pack of evil cub scouts deserve it for enablling a band of antisocials to feel so fucking good about their miserable selves.  On the other had, you don't kick a starlet out of bed for eating lime jello, and that hill of tainted, tinted  blow was too wonderful to waste on sentiment.

Past, Present, Future. It's against house policy to lock into time frames. Eastern. Hall of mirrors. Like some fake-ass mystic peering in his smudged, finger printy, blueberry muffin crumb specked crystal ball. That was the Apacalypse. The whole fucking Apacalypse. The four horsemen are economical, budget-constricted big fat pricks! They just picked their spot, and did it. Blew green slime on Erie, Pennsylvania. No reason for it. Threw a dart at the map and pulled a prank. That's all the Apocalypse is. A prank. Not that it ain't for good it happened. It's a message. There's a moral. And it's a really, really cool gag. Fucking Merry Christmas! Green Christmas. Write some songs about the event. Go over like Silent Night or White Christmas. But we're green.

Podcast: The Not-Too-Social Hour

'Yer old pal Bruce is making podcasts:

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Itsy Bitsy Fiction

I'm emotionally fragile and could crack at any moment. Be gentle. Please. I'm wearing a brand-new tie, what I think is tasteful solid color gray silk, and what I think is a crisp white shirt. Looking for opinions. Gentle, gentle please. Other people dress up like this. I think. But it's like there is a curse that hangs overhead. It's dangerously close to Holloween. All right. I'm masquerading as a white-collar professional.

This is part of a plan. I came in here dressed to the nines (funky odd number) in an attempt to interact with a better class of people. That's not a value judgment. If you happen to be an out of work so and so, dressed in the clothing your mother bought you for Christmas, please disregard this appeal for help. And don't take it personally that I'm no longer open to friendship with persons in positions as low as mine. This is a mission.

The bartender is taking forever to wait on me and there is hardly anyone here. The few people at the bar are twice my size, have sway with the police, and the gift for conspiracy. I know most of them are wealthy, and they're all effecting the grunge look. And they seem to all know each other.  They have signals.  It's a fern bar. Well, it's an upscale sports memorabilia bar. But it's not full of sweating jocks. It's an upscale bar in an embattled Pittsburgh neighborhood. Dangerously close to nice.

The bartender is approaching, finally, with a mean sarcastic smirk on his face. Perhaps people already know me here. I can't help looking Middle Eastern. Succeeded in buying a bottle of Rolling Rock. A cold one, as the hoi polloi calls a beer. Lifting it up to drink, condensation drips on my lap. On my shirt. On the conservative solid color necktie. A book of matches in my pocket spontaneously combusts. Smoke is coming off the pocket of my black polyester slacks. People are looking at me.

Seven Piss Tests

 

My brood sack is fully extended with the wiggling offspring of joy. And not for nothing. My most favorite dollar store is rocketing into medical curative science. The magic number alone drowns all lassitude, while breathing life into a paper bag of exuberance. Seven. Seven things you can find out about yourself by peeing in a cup and dunking, like a doughnut, a paper strip. For one dollar a whiz, you can test your water for drugs, alcohol, pregnancy, menopause, ovulation, glucose, and urinary tract infection. These are the seven dwarfs of need-to-know. Should you test positive for something you wish not to be, you can always ask the clerk at the checkout counter for a second opinion.

Buttholium and Diddlium

Bastards at the New York Academy of Science won't even look at anything I mail them in a wooden box, ensconced in wire and paper penny wrappers, like my last invention I sent to them, much less read my tracts on natural science. It's a damn shame for humankind. It's their loss. Them pointy-headed fart-biters wouldn't know genius if it walked up their ass in snow shoes. I been on the cusp of discovery, and those nerds is just letting the eye tooth split my ass. And speaking of assholes, one of my discoveries could turn Charles Manson into Albert Schweitzer.

Buttholium ain't on the periodic chart yet because some jack-off in New York been sending my discoveries to the FBI. People who are assholes have a higher concentration than normal of buttholium inside them. Collects in the ass. Causes people to have a personality disorder. I come to this discovery fair and square. I run tests. Diddlium, on the other hand, shows up in people who can't hold a job. If the scientists in New York could find a way to drain the diddlium out of these poor folk they all could find themselves a marketable skill and prosper. That can't possibly happen though till my work gets recognized.

 

The scientific method ain't but a mite different than panning for gold. That's a metaphor. One day I was pouring down some moonshine with kin, and realized that the whiskey affected some people different than others. Why is that? It can't be the whiskey, because we was all drinking the same rot gut. You can't put it down to ethnicity, because we're all related by blood, out here in the boondocks, where it gets so cold at night you can't help but snuggle up with close kin. In any case, being a patriotic and unselfish cuss, I'm giving this information away for free. It's the only right thing I can do.

Flash fiction flatulence

Oh, I don't know how I got on this tangent, or maybe I do know, and I'm not ready to say. I read one book by Melvin Mason and simply went bananas over an economic theory. This could possibly explain the changes that have taken place inside of me. It is as if it was possible to swallow business and industry in pill form. Or to speed read the Bible, and thus create a parallel universe using the blueprint. Maybe it was the day I read in the news that an American diplomat had been sodomized before being murdered, as if it was a trick-or-treat prank, on an anniversary of 9/11, that Melvin's masterpiece meandered up a neuro-pathway. And maybe this should be narrowed down.

People are always talking. Half the time when you tell someone to shut up, they will invoke their constitutional right to free speech. I have been beaten up, and have beaten people up, for saying things either they or I didn't care to hear. Melvin Mason's theory is, in part, that the Constitution is there to protect your right to earn money, and neither truth nor beauty is allowed to reach its greasy fingers into your personal money stash. Of course people are allowed to say anything they want to express. And it's illegal to beat or torture people for expressing themselves. Yet I don't recall anyone so much as paying a fine for an act of violence. The drive to silence people enjoys silent legitimacy with police and judges, so long as the victims are poor enough, or the perp rich enough. When all things are equal more or less, it is often concluded that the victim should have eaten his Wheaties. The trend of the past decade has been less and less wealthy people, and more poor folk, dirt poor, while constitutional freedoms for the masses get more and more like abracadabra, with the outcomes compatible with Open Sesame. Rabbits don't come out of the top hat. Doors stay closed.

The important thing is that I feel both energized and empowered for having read Melvin's book.

Mirror Chat

I am always cheerful, always pleasant. Informal and elegant is the way I like my friends to dress. People who can do both crude and advanced at the same time should be chiseled in between big guys on Mount Rushmore. I am like the Washington Monument when I'm chubby. I'm a glutton for contradictions.

I have my living room closet packed with the least costly office supplies available on both the Internet and the network of dollar stores that I frequent. I have a system in place for purchasing the least costly staple foods available, with an emphasis on maximizing physical prowess. "But why do you have office supplies in the living room?" Someone in the audience is asking. Because I work in the living room. It's not the living room any longer. It's where I go to work each day. I wake up each morning, roll out of bed like a Vietnam prisoner of war and go directly to the keyboard. Would you believe ordinary clerical work is the new pole vault?

The new urban Batman comic in the flesh substitutes fiscal conservatism in extremis for the camp muscle mass popular in the 1960s. They were just beginning to understand latent homosexuality at the time. This just now is damn near 17 years past the expiration date on postmodernism. Modern man should be a Giacometti sculpture with a Porfirio Rubirosa dick. As in bisexual, and I'm not referring to a 10 speed. But for now it is best to limit the little man to insertion in normal grown women. Weenie whacking, solo, is venerated.

So it's been thinking about a young Hispanic woman and her memories. "It" being the smart-alecky homunculus in the jockey shorts. All right I remember her as a young woman. She remembers me as a young man. Of course the media was as active in the 1970s as a lizard on amphetamines, but it hadn't yet turned its attention to the frailties of men. It is been so cruel since the Inquisition, beginning with the Ronald Reagan presidency. Oh, you name your conspiracy, I will bruit the one that is nagging my psyche. Manhood has been under siege like by Gertrude Stein with a pair of poisoned pinking shears. But that does not mean that some where a 55-year-old Spanish woman doesn't smile when remembering a quickie that took place no place special. Back when our skin was olive. The blood was still cherry ice cream.

Trouble Masses For His Wardrobe

The clogs I've been wearing for the past 18 months are made of techno-pop synthetic material. I've been noting that I'm the only person in Pittsburgh who wears them in public. Maybe people wear their synthetic black Dutch boy shoes in private. Or the shoes are just too carnal for the average person in Pittsburgh. Or they are a fashion blunder.

　

The shoes look a bit like a foot dipped in tar, yet offer thickish foam toe indulgence. Many times I have been accused of being a frivolous little lamb. The seamless primative shoe. Ga'head, call me a right modern finger-in-the-dike person. I'm in rubber tulips.

I've worn these clogs this long, and today the meaning of the shoes has been revealed. Let me try to help you.

Moments happen when they want to. I stepped into a bar. Ordered a beer. Drank a wee bit. Wee bit more.

Maybe halfway into the beer a man of about maybe 40 sat down next to me. He said "I just have to tell you, you're the first person I have ever seen who looks really good in clogs."

I said, "thank you." Flattery blows. Well that's not really what I mean. It can be gratifying. It can be enabling to some degree. A little bit of well-placed emotional support can even cause people to do things they never imagined possible for them to do. But there is another aspect to draw your four ounce ball-pene hammer back and beat on. That same guiding force can lead you into the grips of becoming a schmuck. They were a hit with the boys.

I did not know that the bar I picked at random to test my fashion statement in was a gay bar. It looked common and blue collar on the outside. I was deceived. There is no hard feelings. But men took great interest in me. Many men took interest in me. It could have been really anything at all but looked like the shoes outed me as somebody they should target as a hopeful homosexual partner. I wish every single man in that bar well every single day in their life. Long life to all of them. But I wanted some snatch. Not the first time this happened.

Recrimination

A man must share his tragedies. I had a plan to accessorize. It was a vision to match cheap- A plastic wristwatches, copped off ebay, like the cartoon coyote, so to jazz up the wardrode. Get mod. More with the times. It was a grand design at the bottom of the wading pool.

The collection of watches, on the desk about a foot from me, comes in bright yellow, orange, blue, coffee brown (a very subtle shade!) and black. So to match any outfit worn, with docile, socially advanced authority, such as some techno-pop music conveys. There's a not-too-nutty credo in aesthetics.

This type of self improvement has been criticized. Compared to waxing the carrot, in the film Fight Club. Some gritty, sweaty truth in that flick. Life also flings some titillating options at ya'. Fashion is macho, mi amigo. Dangerous, too. So inexpensive, bling. And no, not entirely a self indulgent, narcissistic circle jerk.


The shock occured when I was in a hurry to catch a bus this morning. Out of the house like a bat, I grabbed the blue watch on the way to the door. A seeming minor errand, returning books to the library, though anything can turn baleful. Hours later I was in a coffee shop, when I noticed that the blue watch clashed in the worst type of way with the earth tone outfit this victim was sporting. The coffee colored watch would have slayed. But I looked like a jerk. The net effect of the watch and the duds was muy malo, as styling Spaniards may attest.

Guess I could try to strengthen my case for tragedy. When one goes many places in a hideous outfit, he is ugly every mile walked, every place the ass sat in. See this for what it is. A possible infinity in which all frames are fashion victim. This state of affairs was on my person, my wrist, acting like a germ, sickening some otherwise fly rags. It was the awareness of this. The awareness and the agony which tags along, complaining, malicious, in a dysfunctional bonding between selves.

This victim is grieving the mishap. Tomorro, no dressing like a moron. A plan has to  stretch, like rubber. Like the candy color bands on the watches.

Alternative transportation whinny

I'm talking into a microphone like an executive. Minutes from now, I will use voice commands to take my browser to eBay for a shopping trip. Acquisitions. Disbursements. I am business lightning.

Well, for Jesus, there is, to climb, a dirt embankment loaded with broken glass, from beer bottles, whiskey bottles, soda bottles, soda cans, even broken commodes and 7 inch ceramic pipe. There's a huge lapidary of broken and jagged shards from those pipes. I have to push my bicycle up the same embankment to get to the back of my house.

So, one of my hopes for the future is that someone will produce an affordable, lightweight gas powered moped .

Tell me the rodents aren't so

Listening to the online instant radio, I was pleased to hear a panel of zanies discussing a range of subjects that reminded me of a swarm of fruit flies. No one seemed to be getting to any type of point, and they were presenting a decent case for that being unnecessary. They were empowered to do the show by virtue of free services.  I am wearing earth tone, Earth mother print theme tunics and pantaloons to convince anyone this shit makes sense.

　
　
On more sedate afternoons, soft flesh robots talk to each other in a sort of trance. It's a shared trance. Perhaps they're all on opiates together. As if all studied together in the same
corrective facility.

Very little information escapes the 3 inch speakers plugged into a fire engine red plastic netbook out of which I am enjoying the radio show. Maybe I should call it a podcast. Disappointed.

　
　
Note: seems like you have to stick this microphone in your mouth, same as the other one. This garbage is being written using voice recognition software, no shit, I'm talking into a tiny microphone held in my fist, like bird felatio. Like rock'em sock'em robots blowing each other. too, for the consternation. Allowing for more advanced and more miniaturized technology. Annoying.

　
Well. People's vacuous, derivative prattling is as grand as the hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Have I woken up angry again? Is this merely the work of a not too social person? Have a cup of  coffee, and read a passage composed just for you, here at the not too social hour. It's what I call the house. I call my house "the not-to-social hour."  It is both the theme and an affectation.

The runtish microphone I am talking into is reminding me of a mole. Or maybe a mouse. The kind  of little vermin that leaves droppings. Not the computer apparatus.

　
　
I put out a fresh tray of rat poison in the kitchen, and felt a sort of motherly concern that perhaps some of the little rats weren't eating.

But actually, I am certain that all the rats are eating their share of the poison. And sharing it with friends and family. I've been a happier man since I started sharing poison with the rats. There's a rat problem in the city.

An old lady who lives in Polish Hill was telling me, one fine afternoon, the city came up and put out industrial-strength rat poison in the field beside her house. It came in a container that looked like a World War II grenade. Civic weapons  worked great because she could see the rats frolicking on any afternoon before they put out the poison and it was like just plain old barren weeds afterwards.


I encountered a small group of dead rats in the sports field in front of the Observatory this afternoon when I went out on the electric bicycle to throw boomerangs.  They were flattened.   Desiccated .  I didn't mind. I'm not one of those ingrates  who go crying that there's dead rats on the lawn and someone in authority should come and pick them up, as in "who's responsible for these dead rats being here."    I'm glad the city poisoned them.

Talking the software rag

Where the hell is Randall? Randall is supposed to be keeping the kitchen in order, and obviously, he's lazy. Oh well. What can you expect from an imaginary domestic servant?   I have many. Many. But I was counting on Randall to improve the food. All right, it is my fault the lunch I prepared is giving me a case of the trots.  

You would be inventing bogus playmates too,  if you lived like this.The food I  prepare is shit. 

And I accept no blame.   I just don't deserve any.  Because it's the ingredients,  and before you suggest it is my fault that the ingredients  are   putrid, it is the economy, in the extreme, at the domestic level, that has resulted in the gestalt of food I am just hating the thought of right now. Not that this diet at home is all that unhealthy, but it's mostly eggs, lentils, the cheapest chicke  ,and what ever comes lowest on the hog.

 I reiterate, there aren't really any domestic servants here. By the by, I am still working with  voice recognition software.  It is still pretty maddening.

I guess we'll just have to screw someone

 It's the property assessment that are making me itch. I had my hearing last week, and was crushed to realize that the rhetoric  I'm so skilled in was not of interest to the court.

I had not bothered to print the sale price of houses nearest my own, which would've helped a great deal. I had thought that the people conducting the hearings had computer access to  that information and could corroborate my words as I spoke to them . Stupid assumption. They wouldn't or couldn't. Even though that should be available to them at their fingertips they could take no initiative on my behalf.  Or perhaps I was selectively refused a courtesy .

If anyone had been listening at the hearing down town  at the city County building, or whatever the hell that building is off  Grant Street, I would've laid down the tracks to the effect that there is visible land subsidence.  Retaining walls buckle outward up to 45° angles from the cracked sidewalk .  It is common knowledge that this is a high crime turbulent type of neighborhood. With a history of the crack trade.  And some rioting , which is so near dear to the labor history  in our shared collective communal  fine Sylvan  urban   squalor pit.  We are famous for bloody great fracases.  Lots of beating,s lots of carnage over jobs and labor practices and wages.  Would you mind playing a couple chords on the piano, Thomas . Thomas is an imaginary  house musician . He wears a domestic servant uniform .  

The austere party apparatchik who conducted my hearing, which was just me and she in an abject little room, told me that without documentation there was nothing she could do except find in favor of the original judgment, which was about a threefold increase in the assessment value of the home . There a host of other good arguments I had hoped   to present, but it didn't matter because they weren't being heard . I now have  an appeal pandering,  and am pissed.   They probably won't allow me to present new evidence because that's how it usually works with the Pittsburgh appeal process .  They're assholes .

He did the mash, the Milton Friedman mash.

Speaking of Moby Dick, I've been spouting like a whale about Milton Friedman's free-market economics. Gosh by golly, there is bits and pieces of constitutional freedom to discuss in relation to it all. According to Friedman,  free speech meant an individual could submit a business proposal, one could speak in the interest of one's own property, one could originate a  contract, but biggest of all, Friedman believed the Constitution was instrumental in making the switch from feudalism to free-market economics. The founding fathers conceived  free-market economics so that people could earn a living.They could in turn build whatever influence that enabled. Without a monarchy or oppressive big government.   Or a very devious little one.  Just people plying their trades and using their best judgement.

Friedmanites sometimes say that independent tradesmanship affords people the place to apply the ethics of the individuals choosing, and to promote the values that best serve.  So, you might ask, why not go with socialism, to achieve a just and humane society?  Aren't all capitalists a pig?  No, no, no.  So says Milton, free market economics allows people to act as humanitarians.

The fundamental problem with socialism is that people act in their own immediate best interest, act secondly in the interest of relatives, and tertiary in the interest of trusted freinds or aparatchiks. If people collectivized as wonderfully as all great socialist thinkers may have hoped, people wouldn't be a greedy prick on the one end of the economy and the abused yet clueless failures on the other. Maybe that's a mean and over simplistic model. I haven't had my Wheaties today.

The United States is in the grips of monopoly communism There exists a theory called the convergence theory, which states that at some point, from pure necessity , communism and capitalism would merge into one complex economy. That's our status quo. I've become a big fan of Milton Friedman's because people need to be able to earn money, and enter into the economy in order to have political influence. Socialism forces dependence on government, enslaving the masses, and not liberating them, as pop folklore is known to suggest.   .Look around you.  It's twit city. 

Our Henges Are Better Than Theirs!

Historians having been chewing gristle about Stone Henge forever now, loading up on theories they can palm off as hard science.   Always has to be spiritual mumbo-jumbo.  Like the Stone Henge was where some type of vegetarian social observation took place, aping religeon and modern secular humanism, all digitally remastered to fit the needs of people's understanding in it's both dazzled and dimly illumined 2012 trance.

No.  My theory is that Stone Henge was a patio.   In it's day, dull clueless citizens of where-ever-land would sit around in nylon web patio chairs, reading newspapers and swatting flies.  No?   It might have been a giant circle jerk.  Or else they played croquet around the posts and lintels.   People make a big deal out of it.  Well fuck that.  The Northside, right here, not far from the observatory gracing Riverview park, there are Burgh Henges.  A Burgh Henge is the remnant of some poor asshole's basement, submerbed into hillside, where most the house was demolished.   Cinder block or stone corners and broken basement walls form a henge, what ever the fuck  a 'henge' is.  Even that has not been made clear at the Ivy League.   They're jerk offs.  Henges over there are bull shit.  The henges here are grand!

Baghacker's Dark Inner Self

My new name is Bruce Baghacker. This is because I received a parcel post, and along with the winch I'd sent away for, there was pillow shaped packing materials of almost clear vinyl, full of air. Or some gas. Maybe it's an industrial gas. Or Morpheus, God of form or what ever, farted into the square pillows, sealing each unit by tensing the muscles in his fine gargantuan ass.

They were posing a minor problem because of all the space the shit takes up in the trash, after I flatten and bind the big brown cardboard box, like a responsible cellulose recycling little fuck. But I was not angry when I drew a blade!

I had that Carnaby Street feeling when I took to stabbing the pillows, each time pressing the gasses out, so the noisome vinyl can better be stowed in the shit can in the kitchen. But you've not been here. What the fuck is a kitchen?

Fuck. Just join me in celebrating my new name. A trade name. I'm a working fuck.

No no no no no...........Yes.  Tics.  Spasms.  Outbursts.


You ask me, Mr. Baghacker, why did you want a winch?? Fair due! Good Question. I see you're thinking. That's good. Real good. A motorcycle. Planning to winch one up a steep dirt embankment behind my digs. If this Greek tragedy nets results, some cool transportion could follow. Like the sun. Or an angel. Or some type of animal that somehow reflects your ontology. Your shit. Your cosmos.


....I blazed a trail about a hundred feet long, adding for dog legs and serpentine log jam divertimentos. Gonna use two ropes and a dolly to move a bike, mostly assembled but not, in a 300 pound carton built like Hercules' shit house. Like Hera's bidet. It's stocky. Hope my system doesn't fuck up, like in Zorba the Greek. 

I be winching if it works!

Cranking. Pumping. More like an orgy than anything else happening in this dead puppy village. divertiminto!

Personal Sludges: self oil change

People will sometimes ask why I'm such a depressing individual.  "You can be a downer,"  I am, at times, reassured.   There is cause.  It is career grief.  Unending.   I used to work in a men's store (1978, post-disco reconstructrion era.  Scars. Fading vistas.) for precisely the minimum wage, no commission on sales, which wouldn't have mattered, except the boss had this specially ancient sales method of having me approach the customer and then he takes over the sale, in all cases as if he was showing a whelp how a professional duds salesman does his manly, dignified profession.   Hated the asshole.   But this job had the double uglies for reasons beyond.  It was the beauty contest  nobody won, staged for all the flaming assholes in Pandora's box.  I've had other shit jobs, but mark that one year as it's own ring of down under the boneyard.   Poo.   Bad carma.  So unremitting.

But I'm not sad.   No frail spirit is sad.  Only tragically cuff marked.    Also, the store I was selling, in essence selling, anyway, being used as a prop in an annoying process of obliging the customer, was far along in the process of slow failure, was sad, sad, sad.    A vestigial cow pie left over from the practice of long term economics.  A small store front business could last at least a century or more, if referenced by Meadville in 1970, not now, no how, but during my tasks measuring bulbous inseems, it was still possible for a business to lose for years.     The local economy was worsening by the season, and it had been stable and lovely for so long, such a sweet social model of community and business.  The store closed for good a few years after I got my cute ass fired.  I was being a smart-A towards the end of that rancid working relationship, doing my utmost to piss off the dickhead owner of the failing little men's store.  He was a prick. I was so puerile.  It was a depressing coctail of  outside circumstance and interpersonal small-minded meanness.  But shit, you paid your nickel to see this side show...so here's more misery on a plate.  Here's a deformity in a pickle jar.

The boss who had been making my life shitty as best he could short of being jailed had been rooked most cruelly by the original owner of the store.   That fellow was a shrewd small business bastard of better days, when a small store front suit and tie and trouser shop could make a load.  Horse choking.  Big lurid sweaty wads.   The prick I got to work with for a year had been, first, the clerk, then the manager of that same little men's shop.  The luckier of the two men sold his manager the store, at a premium, and left for Florida.   Not that it's funny because it's sad, but the US was fishtailing into now, leaving stores like the one I worked in wedged between the treads in a speeding muscle car's tire.  But it's my bag of sour grapes, right here, and among juicy red and green ones, the transition from long term, to short term, ecnomics has meant the very reincarnation of failing small business, only more in franchised  and calculated working models of clip joints.   Makes ya' proud. Not.  My career has been one of jocky on a horse that goes out of business.

Anyway, to sum up my experience as a name in labor statistics files, it's been shit.  Just shit.  But it's happens faster and faster.  Makes ya' dizzy.  I always am.

 Let the fishing line in the River Yesteryear snap, so your birch bark canoe can take it's freedom in the rapids, and in the rare calm waters, too.   Be light and agile.  Take extra time to be a prince.  Add cheesy existentialism, the new applied philosophy, to your skill set.   Ride a simple wagon down hill.



 "Yowza.  Tweet tweet."  said both Ben Bernie and Gordon Lish. 

2.Forgot to tell you the basement. You should know the basement. Upper floors, too.

But below the men's shop I worked for a year and got my ass fired from, there was a perfect rectangle of space in sanintary commercial concrete, of clothing that had never been sold, or that was no longer rented. The old prick, who could, in my opinion, really used a boot in groin, had closed out his rental business (tuxedos, evening weear, franchised formal wear geared for store front chicken shit) though not before paying a separate mortgage to the prick who first owned the shop, the lousy pricks boss for thirty years, from junior high till he found the balls to buy the dump. The prick paid a separate mortgage for the rental franchise, along a much bigger one, for the store itself.

Here was teensy, cheap vindication. Revenge. Come uppance. I loved that basement. I was in fashion history Valhalla when I was pretending to clean and rearrange the basement. I'd tell the prick that I was going down there to perform some menial work on behalf of INVENTORY SACRED HOLY ELEMENAL MATTER OF BUSINESS HENCE GOOD GOOD GOOD. I'd hide down there trying on tuxedos and white evening jackets, also there were oversize apple caps like stereotype beatnicks once wore, also syphlitic young newspaper hawkers, and there were racks of brightly colored two and three piece business suits, which, in the 1940s, 50s and 60s were sold to African American customers. They had an industry term for those suits, but it can get you kicked out of the United Nations for saying it, so I'm not.

3.


A case could be made that African Americans were harmed by the fashion industry, as were women. By changing style each season, each year, people feel compelled to buy the latest. This business strategy keeps poorly educated people spending above their means, while separating them, aesthetically, from the conservative establishment, which favors consistent styling, which makes for better resource management, and ultimatley world domination.

The fashion industry favors skinny men, while hating women like a closet sadist. It forces women to worry about their weight, size, shape and all aspects of  physical person, making her self conscious, and subjecting her to capitalist mind rape. But I'm a histrionic little fashion plate, in my polyesther sans-a-belt wrinkle free slacks. 

Nightie.

Cosmic Work-Outs

Sorry to hear of your confusion. Beta particles. Begin by gazing in the crystal ball. It's hard edged distortions of real objects will mirror your looped neuropathways. Find the control knob. Continue.



Put the ball back in it's naugahyde belt assembly. Remove all pig shit from the surface of the card table. Name the objects. What do you want? Fish an invisible gallery of things that could get you where you're going. Gather invisible wrenches. Push button knives. Fine fabric. The cutest house pet on the planet. Your favorite food.



The shadow boogie. It's time. Use your spot light with multiple fixture settings and moderate heat, allowing your madd Watusi to do you in the ways that have been lacking. Angle for stunning gesticulation. Spread your personae like a geisha fan. Contract, become smaller, lines returning to bliss. Feel grand?

Citizen's Advisory

Readers who can see the spirit world are probably aware that, for some individuals, life is an invisible rodeo. Having had no health coverage for the past eleven years, certain continuing health problems have accrued from the illusory bull riding and metaphysical goring incidents, incurred over that hystrionic and impressionistic span of time. As a life long voting democrat buckaroo, I jangled my spurs in favor of the incumbent president. A gut feeling says he needed his first term in office to learn how to be president.  I feel confident he will win the upcoming election, and see good things coming in his second term. But as a disgruntled tarot reader, I got a bone to pick with Obamacare. Pull up a cuspidor and have a listen.


Obamacare is smoke and mirrors placed in front of the practice of socialized medicine. Call it what it is, and drop the despicable, un-American penalty for not buying health insurance. If it was possible to provide the US with the service through free market methodologies, it would be a better option than mishandled socialism.   Obama seems to be paliating the medical establishment.   The President is using a punitive, austere, compartmentalized  form of socialism to deal with the cripping cost of health care. The Canadians don't do that. And they've been making American health care look barbaric since the disco era. Imposing a cash penalty fo noncompliance is a coercive business practice that could lead to an economy predicated on things you are forced to buy. It's dystopian, for chrisake.

The economy is far to complex to deal with in terms of socialism or capitalism. Or with ordinary common sense. Everything these days seems to be some sort of fuming, corrupt,innefficient, beaurocratic crazy train. Hence a divinitory process. The  card I pulled a moment ago from the Rider-Waite deck, always reliable, was the Page of Cups, which can only mean Obamare needs to be reformed, to a more humane approximation of the socialized medicine so many other countries already have. Drop the penalty for noncompliance. Just get us health care we can afford.

Jail Bait at the Boomerang Field

Yesterday I made the first effort to make video clips of the sport that  made itself  a mission.  I'm out to make and throw the Great American Boomerang, assimilating the Aboriginal aspect to suit the suit and tie set.   Proper dress required.  You get points for accessorizing.   It's a fashion sport.  But the sartorial aspect not withstanding, the attempted filming failed completely, though I got some grand snaps of the decrepit vacinty with my peach pit size spy cam.  Then a societal thing happened that itches of deep south social strife.  I was approached by two seriously attractive young women.  Highschool Age. 

I was throwing the boomerangs just fine.  The camera has no screen or eyepiece, you have to hope you lined it up the way you think you did,  and hit the button.  Then you have to hook it up to a computer to own your success or failure.  I didn't get the bad news about the videos till a good hour after the two young women approached, as I was throwing in Fowler Field.  "Hey,  can  I throw that  thing?"  one of the tall beauties asked.

I was forced to effect my cheap imitation of a high school principal's voice, "No.  I'm sorry.  I can't let you."  They were coming towards me aggressively.

She asked why not, and I continued, like a nerd health  official, "You can be injured if one of these things hits you.   Can't let you do it.  Sorry."   And I gathered up my rangs, stuffed them hastily in my 'rang bag, also known to normal folks as a back pack, and made a beeline out of hot hot humid contentious Fowler Feild.

You can get your head split, fingers broke, knees knocked excruciatingly, and people have been known to lose teeth, on the return trip, after a perfectly excecuted throw.  It's very hard to catch a boomerang.  I'm still working on it.   But that's not the real reason I high tailed it like a wood chuck.  The two broads were jail bait.  All I need is for one asshole to see what was happening, something too fucking creepy, like free boomerang lessons in a public park, and go screaming, "Hey, quit luring young women into a van, you 'rang throwing pervert."

I worry about things like that happening.  Probably everyone does, now that it's a world of raving perps and perves.   None the less, Pittsburgh's Perryhilltop is a gem.   There's a deer in the picture, above and to the right of the fire hydrant.  It's tiny, hard to see.

Microfesto: The Wee Folks

Billy, the protagonist, has a pretty darn good little system.    He has mapped out a circuit of thrift stores, dollar stores, and damn it, even a few main stream grocery stores, same kind normal folks shop for their food at.  At which Billy buys, programatically, only the least costly and most nutritious foods.  He has a rather nice wardrobe assembled from the cast offs at the Goodwill store on East Ohio Street, as well as from Walmart and Kmart, by mail order and bus transit respectively.  And Billy has a roof over his head when he's at home, because he's a smart shopper, and he bought himself a shot-up former crack house, for pennies on the dollar, just in case you still put dollar signs next to real estate.  Billy doesn't do that, because it is utility and not social status that moves this little man's actions.  He is, till hell heats up a few degrees hotter, living  within his means.

He is not completely stupid.  Near enough, though, by relativity and the force of economy and culture.  He is stupid by proximity, because the cognitive elite vacated the slums so long ago. People have only vague recollections of the high achieving families that used to fill the houses on Billy's street in Pittsburgh's North Side.  Should it occur to Billy that the doors to his perceptions flew open for a few seconds while riding the bus to the grocery store, it could only be brain shit, as if he was deciding if he needed to get a hair cut or noting in mind one of so many petty annoyances that no pedestrian can help being a part of.  All unifying principles fit through the slot in the top of a glass piggy bank the size of an avacado, and once put in, they can't be taken  out and used.  Billy has a frozen bank account full of social theories saved up from the early nineteen sixties, going forward, till around 1999, afterwhich public confidence in man's ability to rise above grunt labor, brutality and ignorance suffocated in an invisible vault.  Petend, for just long enough to feel something, that it could matter what goes on inside Billy's head.

The round headed bobo in his yellow baseball cap has been thinking.  Fuck 'em.


2.  Poison Ivy:  a door to perception


He's been out of sorts. Low energy level, poor concentration, and the hell-knowlege of knowing what needs to happen, when he is too sucked out to raise a load in his mind and bust a nut on his word processing program. He still has the reeds that grow along the marshlands in his battered head. He has a a rash.

It's more than that, it's red itching bumps scattered on his hot corpus assholeum. He itches all over, yet there is no geometry to it, at least none discernable. Until he breaks a sweat. In the hottest hours of the afternoon, walking down Cedar Avenue, he breaks a sweat, and all the itching bumps he has been scratching at, furtively, sting. The moisture makes his pre-existing discomfort seem germy and infectious, though he's just another harmless piece of shit, no danger to anyone.

The layer of sweat does something for him, like the way a good fresh coat of varnish brings out the grain in wood, giving it greater richness and a sense of depth. The perspiration makes the rash on his chest, riding up to the right collar bone and onto his chicken neck, more distinctly the shape of an uncharted continent. All the rest of the day the rash was only itch, but with enhancement, it took shape, form and meaning. And this without Billy having to look in the mirror to see it. He could feel the shape of his poison ivy as it painted it's mural on his skin. Billy noted a change within him for having percieved the itch, the sweat, the sting and the new-found association with a place unknown. He realizes that man was made to go exploring, and has no place left in which to do. He goes inside himself, unless he just marries, has kids, and sends his poor ass to an early grave working the night shift at the McDonalds on Wood Street. He's been looking at the way of dying for years and years now, and is resolute about dying alone, with his values unmolested. His tiny ships are sailing toward the country his rash took the shape of.

Ratalogue

Rats are cyclical. They are born, they get in people's houses, and get poisoned by smart shoppers like me. That isn't the end of it, because there is continuity to vermin, the way germs and parasites come out of no where, and have a place in folklore. Like the Pied Piper. Though this is a postmodern slum. In Appalachia.

There is a network of burrows running for miles through the North Hills, and it's communal, used and shared by all breeds of rats, without conflict, aside from the fact that I've been poisoning the bastards. So have most people in the region.

Rats are a recurring pest, and a good quality rat poison will keep the problem under control. But no matter how under control it is, the underground complex of rat caves insures that fresh live rats will resurface in my kitchen sooner or later. Where they munch down the D-Con I put out for them, like a cut glass tray of mints. They eay it, seem to enjoy it, then they buzz off and die. I see no evidence of rats in the house for about six weeks, and the life cycle of rats goes back to work.

I have had this love for rat poison since when I accepted the sad fact that it is the best way to combat the problem. Maybe sadness and success should meet at a big formica table and hash out the details. Then share the pleasure that comes with resolution.

Pagan Mystic News

Earth, air, fire and water. These are the elements that the cosmos is made of. The whole fucking cosmos. Obviously, if you are throwing a boomerang, your immediate concerns are earth and air. Fire, in this topographic ring of oblivion, is used only in outdoor barbeques, and water comes from the tap. It is to be recognized that the three rivers , in plain view from this vantage point high above, exert forces on the hills, but it is indirect, hence only discussed in terms of magnetic forces, which even I am still trying to get some sort of grip on. The search is unending, till you croak.

Concerning Earth, it's berry season. Wild, edible berries. I think they are wild black raspberries. Yesterday I noticed the berries in the lot along side my hovel were ripe, and in between hacking through tall weeds with a rusty old sickle, (came with the house, belonged to the old lady that used to live here, and who got hauled off to the old folks home,) a lone wolf festivity errupted. Berries by the hand full, wolfed down off the vine. I've had better berries, as has nearly everyone, but these were freebies, volunteering in an overgrown vacant lot in the hilltop jerkwater slum I dwell in. A scant two miles from the Golden Triangle, hear the banjos. See the wan toothless cross-eyed rustication. Find lean bounty in the rocks and weeds. This morning, upon conclusion of boomerang throwing, I noticed an untapped wealth of the berries growing along a back street. Thus the anorexic feast continues for another day!

But fuck the berries for now. Suffice they are a venerated gift of Earth. And water, filtering up from the water table, and, naturally, received through generous, unseasonable rain. Damn it, I can't leave the matter hanging without including, like a minority group, the sun, which is fire, and which provides energy, which travels through the air. As does a boomerang, so fuck if I'm taking the type of karma you can get for ignoring that fat-ass element. The sun's energy is through fire, so it has to be cited, like an author, if you borrow shit from the cocksucker's book. It's about propriety. And respect for the fucking cosmos.

Returning to Earth and air, this morning yeilded the best boomerang throwing this season. Air is diverse and highly communicative. Humidity, to the air, is weight, and is, in turn a kin to the flight of a boomerang. All things that barter with performance are related to one an other, as if by blood or marriage, or even random proximity, to the object, in this case, a 'rang.

The intensity and direction of the breeze has patrician sway on the flight of a well thrown 'rang. But it is the job of the mystic to describe air, a substance so diverse that I'm getting a facial tick. Here is the storm! Dream spectors circle me, pointing wooden pikes, in proscribed formation, at me and my back pack full of hand made original boomerangs. To describe the universe is to claim a heaping handful of bounty in full view of the opposing phalanx. Of course they can only report you to the police under pretext that you are a nuissance, and they at times, in a non-aggressive way, confront you with their concerns about your apprehensions. I admit those apprehensions may be caught, any time at all, in turbulent, unstable, hostile wind, and thus may break someone's window. This can happen. Shit happens.

It was a perfect day in which to throw 'rangs in Fowler Field this morning, no cars were dented, no welts were raised on victims of a sporting accident. So painful when you get hit with a boomerang. So worth the risk. It was a glorious boomerang morning in Fowler Field, the wild berries are ripe and asking to be scarfed down, deer and woodchucks have been forthcoming with divinations. Things are pretty fucking good. It's been some fucking fine mystical searching.

Poem Recitation Podcast: WATER SPORT

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Will be posting more episodes of THE NOT-TOO-SOCIAL HOUR. For now, hear a poem, just as it came off at home, here, in Busistan, headquarters Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises, me honcho. Philosphy of entertainment, mission to present an online lit mag for spoken word media.

Podcast: The Not-Too-Social Hour....featuring POSEIDON COMES UP FOR AIR

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Mountain Walks

flash transfigurations go on without license

want no enemies

I change to one thousand bats

and go away

change to an iguanna

then hang loose



not an infrit's breath ago

took the form

mantis

ate bugs

listened to the Fugs

praying mantis for one second

sixty flights of rotting wooden stairs

Suit Cases

The polyester is about one molecule thick, so it's praeternatually light, so much so it barely registers as a garment covering my cynical, charming ass. A gentle noon breeze seems to run through it, like a hologram. And I look good in the wrinkle free summer weight suit. From across the street, you would never guess how cheap the fabric is, or how mediocre the tailoring.

The suit arrived in an envelope just larger than the ones people send 1040 forms out in. The envelope was some sort of impermeable plastic, as if it was made out of space suit material. Space suit. That's how the business suit seemed, or else it's mystic protective gear for the not-of-this-world set, when I first tried it on. It fits quite well, allowing for minor sagging.

Trying To Be Nicer

The late Fred Rogers, of the famous "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood," was a beautiful person who did great things for kids. It is so unjust the way nice people like him draw meanness from embittered loners. It's just the product of being alone, after a few too many hard knocks, in so many places less kindly than MRN.

I'd got done buzzing down some trees, afterwhich I got this vision of Fred playing the lead in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 104, the sequel that comes after 103. Chainsaw massacres happen often round these parts, and everyone has a camcorder. No one makes much of a fuss about it. Snuff film, schnuff film, it's all just good healthy fun.

I have a conscience that actually pangs when I say rotten things about really nice people. This, along with some tendencies toward satire, can make for some guilt feelings. It's like a dairy case full of sour milk. Still, Fred donning the pig mask and charging with a Homelite is probably funny. Beyond that, he was a great person, and didn't deserve this post.

Podcasts: The Not-Too-Social Hour

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Here's an embedded link to a new podcast. It's just a reading of the blog entry below, with some additional goods.

Archly Reconoitered

Been dead for a good while now. Week. Month. It does not impose greater liens the longer you're snuffed.

It's the bird's eye view, for free. Looking through the bug specked windshield, the superlight aircraft I'm borrowing for the day skims the Pennsylvania air, like it's thinning down milk, living off cream. They still got giant skeeters in swarms, like London fog. These light aircraft let you scoot between the germs and infestations.

From here it's obvious that Larry and Clootis Larva are growing in strength. For each used car dealer that pulls up stakes, there is more dank road side to plant fresh fig trees of commerce. A car wash. Self Storage. A store that sells acrylic wigs and hair extentions. Say the code word. Some one will speak with you. You follow him/her down a corridor, to the back rooms. So many.

Clootis Larva is the enforcer, his pop, Larry Larva has the contacts, the supply ports, his private room for squat personage do what not. They have people at the police station who don't work in bright sunshine. The triangular pattern this city is slabbed into triangulates the Clootis Larva trail he takes so often, in a white Buick Regal, to land accounts, and to collect from those who bought a carpet. He is fierce in reminding of the cleaning services this cabal knows of. To 'know of' here is to be tight against intercession. Rug buyers would dip their pens in Junior's college fund ink to pay, for fear of seeing more.

One in four vassals works for the government. Even well diggers. Even the thirty foot yellow building cranes. The asphalt. Rock salt. Waffle irons with which to feed the indentured owners of a time share unit some place close to Vegas. The huge mosquitos gather into bee lines towards continuing, polymorphous, pestilential progress.

cavalier

1.


I've been boarding a delightful calico kitty I've named Hafez. She's a girl, but her fur and our new aquaintanceship reminds me of a story by Paul Bowls. Paul was a kinky sensualist, obviously the connection between that and Hafez should be clear. And then the need to talk wouldn't be a yellow thirty story building crane owned by city works if that doesn't also beg some explaining. In plain terms. All right.

The cat followed me at an outdoor rummage sale near the McKees Rocks Plaza. A long single story casbah containing trashy chain stores, this plaza is for paramilitary bargain hunters. Also just poor folk. There's a view from the asphalt of a tremendous chrome plate shop. Its acres of cinder blocks are laid so square you'd say it was a midwestern grandfather's chin. Hafez was visiting the parking lot at McKees Rocks Plaza. I was chosen. Followed. I got nervous, like a farmer with his tractor imporperly geared for spring dampness. Soon we were nuzzling beneath a cafeteria table loaded with fake designer jeans. Also there were Rolex watches, cheap. The scent of sweating garments mingled with cat. We bonded.

2.

Drat! People at work have been calling me 'Snidely.' Mostly they are embittered middle aged slackers who just took their first job. After their third divorce. They sleep four to a bunk in an SRO. More clearly than Bowls and the cat adoption, the role of numbers in people's lives can be a swarthy determining influence. We say wives and girlfriends are the foreign bankers of the crotch. Yet another type of man transacts young men and other breeds of kitties. Have I convinced you I am honest? Yet I am called a vile, dastardly cartoon from Bullwinkle. Pissed.

3.



I was gifted an adding machine at my confirmation and told to sit down. The benches had 'Property of Urban Zealots' stenciled. On Wednesdays they throw out the empty spray paint cans. I've attended this church since prepubescence.

"You will cook the books," the avuncular regicide said, with this look of hope.

Post Script:

These things might not have happenened had the government not found either dippy socialism and/or smart-A capitalism. I feel like a tiny plastic rabbit inside an series of ever smaller plastic eggs. The injection molded blue trip through casings gives up the moment of sunlight before returning a puny green carrot eating, paper shredding bunny in the middle of dark fetal containment. Sometime we will be manufacturing gum machine prizes for our foreign superiors.

Nondeath and Death: The Fun

nondeath

I dare say I hope it is the abraisive dry air that did it. My nose is menstruating, and dryness may be the cause. There are other symptoms,too, of near death,though. Aches, discharges, swellings. I love the way self and outside merge to feed hypochondria.

I'm running through cause and effect relations like a Burroughs adding machine. The cough corresponds to smoking Lucky's for a couple days, while having a common cold. it's a cold. Might be malignant dipshitoma
or a hereditary thick rope and tall tree branch. This is the trillionth time I pictured dying homeless after the hospital seizes my house.


death

The shooting spree of yesterday, at a psyche hospital of all places (try a new course of therapy?) reminds how guns take the skill out of violence. Richard Speck used a knife. The Boston Strangler wormed his way into people's heart before using his hands, like a tradesman. Now people just shoot, like a big baby. Most are too lazy to stalk victims. They just show up like a fifteen year old party crasher. I was in bed with a common cold that sunny afternoon, and the whole news hour was about the former patient who seems not to have recovered.

The nose bleed I'm reactivating each time I blow my nose must be some type of portent. Must walk through a deep cavern, sure footed against viscous ooze. I spielunk in my own sinus cavity, climb with rope and petons the wet nostrils. The parts of the psyche lost to time and technical advancement are hiding in germy caves. So sad to be sick. Death. Malaise. Feelings of failure and dissatisfaction.

Acrylic Paint on Paper

27" by 48"

More Orange

The most recent bastard I seen loitering near the Winnebago was this creep I think the ex-wife sent. It's pure spite on her part. She imagines I wasted her valuable ten years, and X-ing me is gonna make the whole loss for her into the same decade in Valhalla. We both lost our faith, and she's the one who is not adjusting to the void.

There was some Eastern shit between us, when we was still together. I think a lot of poor American bozos got roped into thinking they could iron out all kinks at once by meditating. There was this asshole used to come to the house and chant like a space guru getting juiced. Jamaica, my ex, had the place done up in huge pillows, everything had freak paisleys on 'em like an acid trip, and we was getting along half well, minding we both have a temper.

Jamaica was still in thrall because I was getting into acting. Okay, fuck, I told her I had a future in that industry so full of scorpians and prairie rats, and her end of that sorry career was all thumb tacks on the seat in her booth at McDonald's. By way of review, I got my first speaking role in an old sci-fick, "They Saved Hitler's Brain," and there was that 'things better left unsaid' matter that got me black balled out of film. "That boy might 'a been on to something," is what I said, and it sorta got around to the big cheeses at the studios. Seems they all know each other.

Well fuck it all, if it ain't a conspiracy to keep you from being a film extra, it's a plan on the part of a former significant other to bump your poor old ass off the planet. For spite.

Big Ten Four,

Orange Fitz, a.k.a. Vince Viccars, film extra

Taking It In The Content

Okay. Okay. I told you what I used to be, and said a hundred times I'm a retired film extra and ex-biker. Don't suppose you remember me telling you. Fuck it. Ex-wife is trying to have me killed, so what, we all got issues. But I believe the world at large has an obligation to know. To know me. Else it knows only the other side of this fat shit box called Earth. It's me against all of it. That's why I'm writing my autobiography.


So far, I got the title worked out, and I know what I want the cover to look like. Picture of me pretending to drive the broke down Winnebago I'm living in. I'll have this madd-man look on my face. Old Larry up the street is pretty good with a digital camera. Up top it's gonna say TAKING IT UP THE BACK (that's the title), and down near the bottom it'll say "by Orange Fitz." That's my name. Ma was a ceramist. It's gonna be a book.

There's this outfit that'll let you pump out your opus like pro, online, without you even having to fuck with agents and editors, and fuck 'em all, is what says. I'm glad about that shit cause soon as you try working with them creeps they want you to write some freaks and geeks into the story, like the same freaks and geeks as them. For some reason, you have to make 'em all seem likable. Can't do it.

And I wish fucked up people was my only problem. Something else, just now, is burning a hole in the seat of my Bermudas.

I'm not small man, nor a weakling. You seen some of the fight scenes I was doing back when I was an extra in some of the best biker films ever made. I was in 'C.C. and Company,' motherfuckers. Breathed the same desert air as Broadway Joe. Got to sit on his bike. So who the fuck would guess that a man like me would get stymied over the fucking table of contents.


All the cherry syup and whipped cream at Baskin Robins won't fix the trouble I'm having. Only one of my six old, rotting computers has a word program that will number the pages. The other five pooters won't even do that much for you. But, damn it, my book requires a table of contents, so y'all can mark your spot while reading my work of genius. That's what a table of contents is. It's like a dog pissing on a tree so other dogs know Rover was there first. Or else it's there so you can look shit up. Don't matter. I just don't want my life flowing down the shit pipe, same as everyone else. I'm different. I'm Orange.

So here's the deal. Soon as you upload your manuscript, the book making gizmo changes your format, and the page numbers ain't no differrent, they just is on another page other than the page it used to be on. Page 2 gets fucked onto page 4, and page 9 is where page 14 is supposed to be. The numbers is all going the right direction, from 1 to what the fuck ever, but the table of contents has the wrong page numbers on it, and your poor dumb reader will have a shit time finding his/her favorite passages. It's like felching Winston Fucking Churchill or making Edith Wharton blow a circus mule. It's no fucking good.



Now maybe it don't really matter what number is on which page, since it's your life on that paper. It's memories, and they don't come to me, each day, in any kind of logical order. They just pass through the gauze, willy nilly. Wife dumped me ten years ago, she been trying to hire a hit man to take me out for the last decade, and I haven't been called to work as an extra on biker films in more than a dozen years. Then there's the little things I need to tell, things most people do or did, but they need to hear that other people shit the same way as them, aside from me being more dynamic and fun than most people. I been in films.

Crash Courses

I see this ad on televsion for Larry Larva's House of Carpets, out on Route 51. So it seems, a father and son team run the business, which I wouldn't know about because I don't go there, but my experience for the long haul has been you never get to see the clowns in the commercials. One of the two carpet sellers looks like he flew there on a rug. The other seems to have fished himself out of Loche Ness.

The commercial makes me dwell on that stone-in-the-shoe question to the effect of was Route 51 made of antimatter from the laying of it's first brick, or did the asphalt die, and it's soul went vamonose? Why does traffic itself seem like a neat line,in two directions, of witches flying on brooms? Used car lots grow along 51 like forsythia. Virtually nothing communicates a sense of love or caring.

Last year we got an influx of super large mosquitos that reminded of Larry Larva and his unsettling family enterprise. It's the comercials on television that put the hex on me, but I've been forced to drive Route 51 for reasons too ass to trouble telling, like some crown and bridge work, also this field study I did of some of the drinking places. There are no atractive people. No ethics. No good. It's as if everything has been installed like an Edison base light bulb to make a few shekels before the Apocolypse rolls up everyone's awnings. The skeeters were these slow moving, graceless flying twigs with a hypodermic stinger and disgusting wings, cracking into your windshield till you pray for a vagrant with bucket and squee-gee.

Holy mackeral, no sooner had I managed to wipe some of the squashed mosquitos from the wind shield, using just a white snot rag for chrisake, I'm pulled over in a parking lot outside the LaNauga Lounge, there's this big flashing sign you can pull anywhere with a trailer hitch, and there's Larry Larva, looking just like he does on television, except he has an Elmer Fudd hat. So did I, which is a rat fuck coincindence since I got mine at this outlet store in some other shitted up part of town. I swear it's the same hat.

I've never been in worse trouble, dear friends. Larry Larva has been calling me on the phone morning noon and night. He put a magnetized GPS device on my Kia Sedona so he could get a handle on my moves. Dear, I never dreamed that one eighth of a rug salesman's genes are for stalking. I wonder if he had, in the first place, been I guiding force, from a distance,in my decision to buy the red plaid hunting cap. Only now am I certain that certain hats summon the devil.

So I wake up inside a burgundy cargo van, barrelling down Route 51,with the two Larva men looking down at me. Critically. I'd been slipped a rohypnol in the LaNauga Lounge. Some acrylic bimbo,over-friendly, sure sign she works for the Larva clan. It's not just Larry and his son, Clootis, it's a whole network of blood kin to the Larva clan, and a whole ant farm of dumb yokels all answerable to the Larvas. It's crude, dynastic, but it keeps large families secure in tiny cramped row houses. Soon as I started coming to, Clootis put me out again with fat, hammy right fist. My ass was hurting.


Shit, they took turns throwing shovels of dirt in the hole I'm burried in. Behind a hot dog stand along hideous Route 51. I back sassed the Larva people, and they took the trouble to know their enemy. They did their home work. You must be meticulous to sell rugs. Now I'm gone.