Inspired.  Inspired, and it's a Sunday. Like that automatically relates to logorhea at a time and place picked like a bingo bean.   It's a memory piece about the time I had to get a gonad seen by a medical pro.  Brand new to Pittsburgh one week in 1991, I woke in my brand new sleeping room rented for chump change in a flop house in South Oakland.  So long ago, narrow, crooked Semple Street had a diverse ethnic entomology composed of row houses, apartment dumps, flop houses, and store front business as spare and cavernous as an an ant colony.  Upon that waking from sleep in a brand new funhouse, it was to become evident that my left ball was swollen and was hurting like a motherfucker.

Not having established a primary care physician, a term that hadn't been invented yet, I was in a panic and had no idea how to begin the process of obtaining treatment for a sick friend inside a much regarded scrotum.  There are hospitals all over the place in Oakland, in easy walking distance of my latest hovel, but it cost, even back then, a kings ransom to get a pimple squeezed inside a hospital.  Man of the street, I learned long ago the cheapest way to get medical care is to snake it out.

I took to walking, down the hall, through the communal kitchen,down two flights of stairs to the street.  It's the walk.  The walk of urgency that fits like blinders on a junk dealers donkey .   Imagine in this model that relief from testicular pain, and, as well, from the terror of all grimmest possibilities, like death from cancer of the balls, is a carrot on the stick in front of the burro's long determined face.    It took several attempts to find an office with a doc's shingle that was taking new patients.  But I found Doctor Flomm's office, and was able to get the ball treated with modern antibiotics, upon receiving  great news.  It was some sort of infection, totally treatable with some pills the good doctor had in his closet in a yellowing, moldering bowery-looking office.   I jumped the gun, a little, in this discourse.

Semple Street was half a ladder wrung upscale from a bowery at the time my nut got festered.  The office was store front below a shitty aparmtent building, charming like On the Waterfront.  Upon entering I got a chill, and it was a hot day, because the eight or nine people seated in the narrow, grubby waiting room looked like either vagrants or other wise retired to a hovel, walking distance.  This is the shit commonalities are made of.

Everyone looked afflicted, pained and dirt poor.  Mother Teresa would have loved that waiting room.   It took me a moment, standing in the door way, to decide what to do.  One of the patients moaned assistance.  "You gotta write your name on that tablet over there," he informed me, pointing to the tablet on a wooden ledge along a dispensing window, where a nurse might have been sitting, on a salad day.   The booth behind the window was empty, and much in disarray, as if the billing department routes around in paper like a gerbil.  I still wasn't convinced that this was really a doctor's office, and not an opium den or bookie joint.  It was the real deal.  Cutting to the chase, the doctor called me in after seeing everyone on the list, me last, last guy to come in, sick.  Not that I really know, now,  what was going on, but I'll venture this was a charitable drop-in center run by a very good doctor.  He checked the situation down there and gave me some antibiotic pills, physicians samples, the keystone of cheap off the street medical care.  That swollen, painful, infected testicle cost a gentle thirty five dollars to treat.  Took the pills.  They worked like a charm.

Back to sermonizing.   ECT patients sometimes return to sermonizing, after about six months lag time, after having their organ of thought chicken fried.  That has not been necessary, thanks, affirmations, for what appears to be mental health sufficient to eat and shit without they come and throw a net over me.  I'm  thankful on a secular basis for not getting strapped down for my own good.    It is affirmative to be walking around in open space, at liberty to fritter time.   Dr. Flomm made a great impression.  He may have had had a stroke at some time, as he moved about like someone partially zapped, but he knew his gonads, and fixed one of mine.  It was very affirmative.  Affirmations.

Info-toon

My Battle With Euro-Trash

This was back when I had good hair, and I might have been thankful for it.  Should have been.  This was in the early 90s.  Still had good skin, like that was enough, during that baleful time of cultural tide pooling.  Filthy fucking sea life grows amok in that clammy littoral  precipitation.  I was a waiter in an asshole restaurant on Carson Street.


'Asshole?' you ask. "How can a restaurant be an asshole?" some may interrogate. I submit a response.  This joint was a dive and a failure among more popular bistros on Carson, was poorly run, and was making me look like a fool.  And I wasn't earning shit there.  Just up the street, there was a much more popular restaurant, with better food, better interior design, and all the waiters had the Euro-trash look.  It was, and may still be, haven't seen anyone doing it lately, an expensive, time consuming and brutally elitist look requiring ultra trendy hair care, which I never went in for.  Didn't matter, though, because I had thick curly hair, which is wrong, all wrong, for the type of hair style that was in at the time.  It was best to have thick straight hair, razor cut on one temple and grown into a precision mobile flap of hair on the other.  It should move with you in a sassy way, especially when you make a dramatic turn of your long, linear northern european head.  I'm weaselly looking, now and then, and my hair, then, was completely useless for the look of the day, the Euro-trash.

I suffered economically and socially for not being able to do the Euro-trash look.   I still hold animosity towards that postmodern time and place, and toward certain individuals I'm too civilized to mention here.  The ostracism for not measuring up was worse than getting cremated.

Hey now. Some flash fiction. Title is: Pesticide Story

I keep checking the fly paper.

The insects are triangulated along the amber curlicues, Raggedy Ann's death hair giving beige tints to sunbeams coming in the living room window. Reminds of motion picture film, though working different. You have to get right up to it and roll your eye balls along the sticky, pungent hoops. Somehow flies wind up on their back, in the adhesive primal honey toxin. Maybe it proves everything uses all it's strength trying to get comfortable. Or else it's misery, as happens to bugs. All kinds of flying insects are dead on the roll of film hanging from a curtain rod near the television. 

Now I'm finding these teensy people sticking to the fly paper. Often, they are still alive, and screaming their hearts out. People the size of house flies, pinioned in the sticky goo, with a pesticide. I think it takes longer for them to die than the bugs, because the poison is safe for humans. See how our humanity goes all to shit, some how. But you have to be greatly reduced in size. 


Now everything has gone too far. There is a dying unicorn sticking to the fly paper. It is also the size of a house fly. Didn't see it come in the house.

This woman keeps loitering on my front porch. Platinum blond. She comes up on the porch, stares inside the house, then goes out into the apple trees. I'm thinking about maybe going out there. 

Posing as a media personage

Thanks for asking, the cigar smoking experience went phenomenally.  The observations are just as I had them, while smoking.

Leftist, rightist, who gives a shit?   Only your fashion statement matters.   No one responds to an explanation of some obscure european text translated from who the fuck knows.  There is no such thing as a moral imperative.  All purposes are best served in the form of a dog and pony show.   Or a tune.   Just show things to people.  Sing to them.

Stylistically, most people are a complete failure.  So it is easy to gain advantage, and look better than other people by comparison.  In the picture above, I am wearing a beret, and am blowing a smoke ring.  Smoke rings are not always perfectly round.  I've blown better rings.  But this was a fair one.

As a child I wondered if I would ever wind up some where wearing a beret and smoking a cigar, and it happened the other day.   This is a coming of age thing.  It's not to be made big balls out of.   But it's notable.

Serious Health Concerns

Pimples are a leading cause of death.  On the face they are grounds for suicide, while when a skin eruption occurs on the ass, it's carbuncle-ville, a place where anyone could have convulsions.

Found one.  Might be in the process of getting larger.   Could be an ingrown hair, egged on by ass germs, of which there are many.  I'm not so morbid as to rule out that the infection on my ass could heal up like normal.   Or there are space aliens inside it, that get eight feet long and pop out, in a frenzy of blood and vicious tiny teeth.

Went through heck of frustration looking for a tube of antibiotic ooze that I know is somewhere near, but I couldn't find it.  That was almost as bad as finding the pimple on my ass.  It hurts when pressed, or when sat on.   Son of a bitch.

...........

HERE'S A TOO FUCKING IMPORTANT UPDATE:  I found the antibiotic cream I was looking for, and put some on my ass.   Now there is greater hope of recovery from the large, painful skin eruption.  I'm reminded of how I got very painful, bleeding 'rhoids a few years back, and high-tailed it to Westview, where they have 'rhoid cream for a dollar a tube at Dollar Tree, and  they also sell anti itch cream, and unguents too medicinal and personal to go into here.  They have ointments for your snatch, if you have one, and you can find out if you are either pregnant or liable for child support payments using a one dollar test for human infestation by dimwitted dysfunctional fetus.   I'm not a huge fan of people reproducing.  Good thing you can find out if you're knocked up, on the cheap.  They even sell single use drug tests, in case your baby is a dope fiend.  Wonder if I can get a job as a public health official?

Snakes are always good news...

...ran into one on the city steps, way up high, on the way home.   The root of superstition was about six flights up, wallowing amiably on a  narrow, weed choked landing, up reinforced concrete structure following the rollicking hill side.  I'm in the mystical communications business, and would be an ass to pass up the snake for some type of omen or portent, especially since it's ass was on a stair case.  Good mix of snake, and snaking long city steps up the arduous yet amusing hillside.    I'ts like Wild Kingdom and National Geographic, in the open air.  There is the principle of ascendancy, which is big balls to an astrologer.  Or sooth sayer.  Or mystic.   I'm also brucereisner.com, and can take payment for goods and services using a pay pal button.   Reasonable rates on  tarot readings, hypnosis and divination of all sorts.

It's otherworldly Friday the thirteenth, with numinous snake on steep city steps.  I'm miking it.