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.