Reducing Violence Incrementally

People are not grand at weighing options.  Or at even identifying options to drop on the balance, oposite brass counterweights.  They just want to live in a world of clean aired, cotton candy peace and prosperity.  How fucking simple and childish.  Like the hog swill I keep hearing from people who churlishly hope to reduce gun violence.  Hope is churlish. 

How's this for overly simplistic:  Apply restrictions to the ownership of guns.   People will supposedly not shoot people if you allow guns here and forbid them elsewhere.  They will stop using violence if you limit them to ten round clips and forbid assault rifles.    Is everyone wearing their glasses and hearing aids?   Do you need another shot of tequila?  People are assholes.  There is a lot of violence part and parcel to it.  People, one way or other, strive not to be a victim of it, hence guns.  There are myriad normal healthy reasons for the use of violence, and a need to reduce gun violence.

Here's my proposal:  more use of fists, knives, and blunt objects.  Countless old timers will tell you that, fifty years ago, police beat residents of Pittsburgh with billy clubs with good results.  Gang fighting, in the 1950s, proved that stabbing and chain whipping could be a fairly quiet, non-lethal method of conflict resolution and sport.  Trips to the emergency room were dick compared to our modern inflow of shooting victims.  It's just too easy, and too lethal, to squabble with guns. 

Switchblades are a veritable aesthetic triumph.  Baseball bats, like a fresh baked apple pie.  And colorful, smiling athletic pugilism.  Use liberally, to deal with all the assholes out there who need it.  But most important, it's everyones responsiblity to beat the devil out of bad people, before they resort to gun violence.   Do it for world peace.

Not Wild

 

It looked like it could be a fine day, though North Side Park was so near the rescue mission. There wasn't anything necessary to do, had been doing errands that could have been put off, like returning books to the library, half read, like wasting all your food at the prison commisssary, and getting yelled at by a guard. But that type of perception is just a product of letting one's self get morbid over the times, what with one person in a hundred in durance vile, and new ways of putting people there arriving, like gifts, for people like the ones milling about the sprawling, lovely park. Me, I've never been 'in,' but the fear keeps me thinking of things that compare to it. Maybe that state of affairs has some sort of gravitational pull that invades the mind, because there isn't really any reason to think the way I do.

My legs were hurting from middle age wear and tear, which caused me to make my worst decision for the day. I sat down under a shade tree, to rest. How assinine. Soon I was approached.

The guy had a pleasant, large, long face, with black moles the size of quarters across his forehead and cheeks. If it was melanoma, he was walking distance from Allegheny General, but then, as is the case with being jailed, being hospitalized can be low on people's list, so I'm slightly sympathetic. His physique was kinda' poor, him being on the short side, with a torso that seemed cheated here and over-arched there. His hands were gnarled, and too big for the rest of him, which, in the nicest of derelicts, can cause people to think 'strangler.'

He had a pleasant, subdued, church-warden kind of smile when he talked. When he stopped by to talk, under the shade tree, he stood just behind me, like a safety measure, before saying 'Hi.'

 I have a weak social constitution. I said, "Hi" back. Then I tried to ignore him while he was talking, but, again, I have Silly String for nerves, and can't find it in me to tell people to fuck off. When I was younger I deluded myself with the idea that I was tolerant and kind towards people less fortunate, which is like saying that it's better to flunk your exams. Then the decisions about your future are safely out of your control. The man's assuption about me was that I could use some help.


He pulled out of his pocket some neatly folded, clean typed pages, telling me he has a list of food banks and soup kitchens, with locations and times to show up hungry, and talked to me a bit about how it's good to be able to find food when you need it, which isn't too heinous a thing to launch into. I said thanks for the tip, but I was hip to where "the ragged people go," like in a Simon and Garfunkel tune. Odd how I can't, without straining, make myself hear those folk songs I used to love, like 'The Boxer.' Just certain lines come to memory, always for the wrong reason.

I guess, if you were there, you would have heard what the guy said, and not what I thought at the time. The difference, in this life, between the homeless and the merely fucked up. He got nostalgic, as I got nervous agitation. "I used to come around here a lot," he said.

During his next several sentences, he kept getting to the middle one, then stopping, leaving me to wait for him to finish it, during which time, I was unable to control the tendency to fill in the part of the sentence he stopped at. Like, "Yea, I used like come down here and get me..."
He stopped after the word 'me,' and I started to think "...a bunch of guys together, we'd get a hotel room, and blow each other till sun came up." But that wasn't how he finished his sentence, his, not mine, not mine to judge of revise. When he continued his train of thought, right where he left off, I think, can't read his mind, sitting there like a fool, him standing off to the side, in the shade, it went to, "....a nice little water mellon....," and while waiting for him to continue, for maybe fifteen seconds, I thought to myself "....then I cut a half inch hole in it and fuck it like it was Mae West." 



But he continued, saying, "....and then I get me a little bag 'a ice cubes, and drop it on the sidewalk so the cubes break up." He paused again, but his time I couldn't place him doing anything too foul with the ice cubes, so I just cursed silently. "Then I put the ice and the mellon in a big cooler I got."

His story continued, and with each pause, I found new rotten things to think. It ended with him taking the ice, the mellon and the cooler to his church, so he could share it, on a blistering hot day, with all the congregants, on Sundays that might have been like Plymouth Rock, for all I know. He seemed like a very good natured guy. Looked homeless, seemed the sort that doesn't harbor malice, the way I do. But then lots of serial killers have a social side to them. I found a reason to stand up and walk away, with the man walking behind, still talking to me. Not wild about this form of communication. Like sliding down a greased pole.

Local Election Raga, or primitive Eastern dance tune

Election day creeped up like a case of the crud. Yesterday, all day, and into the night, till morning, this fanatic was engaged in the 'squirts' from minor food mishap, gustatory, and maybe was, on my part, negligent. Sick at both ends, as a cheery old aunt might quip. With limb-flapping time slots of pain. Followed with relief. And awareness of being ill. Seems better at the moment. Will maybe commit more resource to washing the dishes once in a while. And now I feel well enough to go vote.

Elections here deserve mention for Spartan sparseness. Few voters pass in and out the basement of a dark brick public school for special needs persons, those scholars needing large supervisory human elementals. Mortals. Laboring souls in the field. But at the upstairs of the voting place, McNaugher School is a stern-looking institution, vacant and for sale, old like some sort big male thespian that stamped his role model on young television veiwers, such as this writer once was. A conveyance of authority, even if composed of vacant marble slabs, and the bogus memory grown from decades of watching television, makes my few minutes in the Perryhilltop voting place the stern punch of the time clock, the way everyone who went to school has a permant record card, which could favor or dun your poor miserable ass for a life time, or even eternity.

A local election in Perrhilltop is never dry, always wet watercolors running into shallow ponds of confusion. I've cast my vote in that dank school basement enough times over the last fifteen years to feel as though I drank wasted pictures of a place that doesn't resolve. I'm slightly proud to have voted.

　

I favor low cost socialized medicine, like civilized techno-dudes

My sermon for today has to do with two useless parts of the anatomy: The coccyx and the uvula. The former is the tiny vestige of a tail at the base of the spine, and is part of the butt. In people, it serves no purpose, and though it is part of the spine, you can break it, as in during a fall down the side of a ravine, and not need medical treatment. That's how useless your coccyx is. I broke mine, likewise, in a hiking accident, on a rock, in the process of falling, a long time ago. It hurt lots, but aside from hurting, it had no effect, unless you care that it lists slightly to the left since the accident. Then there is the uvula.

It's the comical looking thing that hangs in the back of the throat, visible if you open your mouth real wide while looking in the mirror. It resembles a red punching back, and can swing back and forth like a metronome, which is among reasons why people seem to think the uvula is funny. But at the moment, I'm am denying. In a classic example of time referenced philosophical method. Like Husserl, for crhisake. I am not agreeing the uvula is funny.

Well, I woke this morning with a sore throat, checked it in the mirror with the flashlight, and was alarmed to see what looked like an infected uvula. I'm not wasting time and money taking my inflamed uvula to the doctor, because I don't have medical coverage, and can wait a few days to find out if I'm terminally ill or mildy uncomfortable. But I just needed to share that that useless organ reminded me of having no medical coverage, and that it's clear as mud what happens when Obamacare kicks in, in about seven months. I'm in fear I'll be taxed heavily in exchange for no service. Does anyone know if the upcoming tax will cover medical expense, like insurance, or will uninsured patients simply be taxed and given no medical coverage? If only my uvula could provide the answer.