poem: Pleasure Food

chawing on the eight foot stoneroni
sausage costing nineteen thousand piasters
diners appeal to the law
let us eat the forbidden home-made melancholia fixer
with florid pickle 



Idle  Talk

got sinuses like the Carlsbad Caverns
coccyx crazing  like the San Andreas Fault
sweet-spot in the dome one barren old declivity
cracks suturing till the reaper comes
my voice walks through damp tissue 
up the seventeen flights of concrete steps with rusting rebar
tone bangs into a bend behind a remarkably big nose
words find their way out a mile of muslin wrappings
upon finding an ear 
no juice
they bubble up  in soda pop colors and croak
without a funeral
an oracular miasma blends with military work togs
no record

short fiction: Bindelini's New Behavior Pattern

Bindelini couldn’t help remembering how he used to feel about his life.  He found the dusty dust jacket from his Vhs copy of Sex Organs, a very hip movie from the late 1990s.  The dust cover was underneath an improvised shelf, a space Bindelini never dusted, squashed flat, with a foot print, certainly his, in the dirt and cob web filaments.   He had his VCR and deep dish twelve inch television   on the shelf above, with a load of VHS tapes stacked, out of their dust covers, on the ‘unit.’ All appliances are a ‘unit.’   Not at all typical of the old Bindelini, the new one picked up the dirty dust cover from one his old favorite movies, Sex Organs, and threw it in his flimsy plastic trash receptacle.   The receptacle was a cheap imitation of the more famous Rubbermaid type of office shit can.  Bindelini got his at a dollar store.

He had grown slightly more decisive in the last twelve months, and clear as a reading on a digital micrometer, he had grown as a person.   No more hoarding.  No more retaining posessions that aren’t helping his case.  The movie made him remember Dahlia, with whom he had hoped to have at least a tolerable working relationship at Pressley Ridge Schools, where both losers worked as ‘residential advisors. ‘   They served as role models for people with special needs.  And a fucking fine role model Dahlia provided, trading sex for drugs or over-time and other little job perks.    That relationship was a sore spot in Bindelinis memory banks, and the movie reminded him of her.   One thing they had in common was that they both loved that really hip, cool movie about lively, entertaining career criminals.

To further support throwing out the old movie, his favorite podcast hostess had talked about one of her gay men friends, who was still stuck in the 1990s.  The 20teens are  taking a purposefully innocuous state of effete suspicions and loyalist mendacity.  The friend of the hostess still wanted to be a lovable tecky in a garage band, playing some Smash Mouth covers.  No one is doing cover tunes anymore.   No one still hoards stuffed animals.  Men don’t bother with male bonding stunts, because they are either in the click or out.  To Bindelini, this was like a message directly to his heart from the podcast hostess’ lips.   Divorce from the 1990s.

There was one thing that was still viable in 2014, and that would have to be ritual.  People always had them, and always needed them.  There remained, too, the need to forget.   In the 1960s, in film, it was taught to us all that people go to bars, friendly ones, with people in suits and fedoras, and in the bar they drink to forget the things that didn’t work out too cool for them.  That approach stopped working for people around the time the post offices started laying off postal workers, in the 1970s.  It became popular to refer angry people to a shrink.  

This brings us all to the disposition of an outdated movie on VHS, which is also outdated, even though you can watch all the movies you want on your VHS unit.  It’s the penalty phase of a situation, an ordinary, unimportant situation.  And it is spiritual, for elsewise, it would be acceptable to just toss the film in the trash.  Bindelini found his Crossman pump action BB pistol, set the film Sex Organs on his mantle, placed a phone book behind the video cassette, and took to firing pellets at it.  His first shot grazed the door to the film, the thing that gets lifted inside your VCR, so the cogs and magnetizers can have at the sanctity of human perception, against an ordinary perception of ordinary daily life.  Films make people wish they were different from themselves, and more similar to members of a super hip ensemble cast. Bindelini’s second shot cracked into the clear plastic in front of the tape inside, but the cast of the film was undoubtedly still alive, the way you can’t kill a bank robber by just shooting into his/her house, through a window.  The perp must be where the bullets are, just like a commoner has to be where the action is to get anywhere in this life.   Aiming more carefully, his third pellet hit the spool of VHS tape somewhere in the mid section, and was most unlikely to have done much harm to the super-hip.  It was then that he needed to think about what he was doing.  How many pellets must he shoot before a film such as Sex Organs dies?  Is ‘hip’ able to die, same as a person?  And will it’s death result in a future worth taking out of it’s dust jacket?  Of course not.  But still, we need rituals.  We need a source of hope.  Bravo, Bindellini, for doing exactly the right thing.

my new email address is: brusistan@gmail.com

pardonez,  but my old web site, brucereisner.com, is down, and with it, the old e-mail account, br@brucereisner.com.


So be a welcome guest at the new address:

brusistan@gmail.com

World Cup of Supremacy

Watching  world cup soccer today on a very large television, I am largely intimidated.  The game was riveting, I'm not making a fuss about the game of soccer.  This not about the National Anthem that was played at the beginning, which sounded like Deutchland Uber Alles.  There were no lyrics, just military enthusiasm in instrumental form, but if there had been lyrics, they might have been, "We have completed ethnic cleansing, have never been more buff and are fucking proud."

But it wasn't the music that put me off.   It was the way both teams look like Aryan archetypes of the master race.   It looked like Hitler's status as first runner-up at WW 2 may have been posthumously advanced.   The Nazis who fled to Argentina should be especially proud of the remarkable resemblance their adopted team had to the German one.  At least two countries on the globe are practicing some lean, mean eugenics.

Maybe I'm just too old to assimilate cultures more distant  than the convenience store down the street.  There was a terrifying official on the side lines.  He was  a short old man with a gigantic bald head, the only person on the field in a blue business suit, who looked as much like a geneticist/vivisectionist/fearless leader  as possible.  I have no idea who he was or what he was doing there, but it could have been to bask in the glory of his best human experiments.  Looked like they worked out swell.

Love those 'what are you most like' games on Face Book

The last one was the best yet.  I'm a spotted eel.   That's the deep sea menace I remind the folks  of, who made the test up, the most.   They said a panel of judges determined that people with my preferences in shoes are long and slimy.   There were other criteria.

Some of my FB friends learned that they are near enough to Ghandi to sit cross legged in a loin cloth, others found that, had they been a bootlegger, they would have been Al Capone.  The games all start out with a post on your Facebook, asking which object of awe and repute you are the most similar to.  For a teaser, they tell you that one of your friends is just like Ed Gein.  Or Dag Hammershold.  Or Dr. Ruth.   Or a baby hedgehog.   You could turn out to be similar to something, but you have to answer a series of questions, or content yourself just being your own ill-defined cabbage-like self in the produce department of daily life.  You can decide for yourself who or what you look and act the most like,  while, too, some people earn a position that defines them, but it doesn't cost a red cent to let the good people on FB decide it all for you.

I'm an eel.   A spotted eel.   Wiggling at 'ya.

fiction for people in a foul mood

July 3, 2016

Food hasn’t tasted the same without the fly shit.  There isn’t one single insect, living or dead, in the institution,here, and it’s a testament to the modern pesticides the state is getting, probably from the Monsoona Corporation.   It’s roughly the same food our soldiers get.   But their food probably has fly shit in it because they have to eat outdoors much of the time.  I’m envious. Anything cooked in a commercial kitchen is required to be free of pests, and it’s easy as shit to kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out, using a perfectly safe chemical spray product.   But it just isn’t the same without bug droppings.  If they ever let me out of here, I will look into a way to market gnat shit, for cooking.

The taste test proved to me, years ago, that no one should have to fret having house flies.  I had  a whole house, full of house flies, and, oh, I guess I can come clean about some dirt, like maybe I’m a hoarder, when in a position to be one.    It’s impossible to be one, here, so here again, I think the Powers are onto something.   ‘They,’ (neighbors, the police, the council) felt I was unsanitary, and that was one of several things that ‘cost me my freedom.’  As if that was possible.  You can’t seize a fruitcake from a swain who don’t got one.

Which is another reason, on a sad note, to put people in jail, since they can’t pay a huge fine, or their taxes.  Some of the the perps in my block didn’t sign up of mandatory health care.  It a weird point of philosophy, something like “your tonsilectomy is part of my fair standard of living.”   People who went through harrowing cancer treatments are correct in feeling that other people should go through similar discomforts.  Most importantly, the collectivised economic balance would go all to fuck if enough people tried to opt out of all the generous options the Fed wants everyone to have.   

I’m here for being a pig and a  public health menace.  Most of my new friends here did worse things, things they actually planned to do.  Any jerk could tell that’s what makes people really, really dangerous.  The meditations of the heart are one fat fucking son of a bitch.

July 4, 2016

The generousity of this prison warms my heart, uniformly, each day.  Everyone on my cell block has a view of fireworks, through small windows, which when looked through closely, yield as much of the sky as any free person can take in.  There is only so much sky to look at, the piece holding  the picture of fire fountains  and rockets is as visible to me as it is to people who took the trouble to organize their belongings and mop their floors with greater regularity than did inmate number 7111577842.  Just call me ‘7’ for short.   I would have been popped sooner or later for poor hygiene, but you can wind up here sooner, yet, if you have a habit of running at the mouth.

July 5,2016

Woke with this nameless dread, nothing so serious as to call in the shrink, but I was feeling scared, nervous.  For no reason at all.  What could possibly go wrong inside a jail?  Maybe there is such a thing as a portent.   One of guards, Fidelia, a woman I lust after in my heart, came to my cell door, just a few hours ago, and ordered me out and into a meeting in the conference room.  What a goddam rip!  I was adjusting beautifully to prison life, and they’re kicking me out.   They need room for worse people, and besides, the administration got a report.  I was making some of the inmates uncomfortable.  Seems I’m a bad conversationalist, along with being an awful housekeeper.  But there I was, self-conscious, being stared at by a panel of men and women, all in agreement that I don’t belong in jail.  I just don’t fit it.

Now I can’t decide which is more upsetting.  Being ejected like a dull razor blade, or that my newest friends were harboring some irrational animosity towards me.  I had the same problem when I was in college, and dozens of times again in the work force.  And I’m usually so goddamed positive and adaptive.   Maybe that’s the problem.   Envy is a confusing and diabolical emotion.  It was envy that caused the fatal rift between Stalin and Trotsky.   I grant that is old news, but in principle, it’s one of many reasons the New Commradship isn’t working as well as the Intelligensia had hoped.  I was born with a measure of social grace, and loud, inarticulate boors resent me for it.

Shocked at the news I got earlier today, I lost control for a few seconds and started begging them to let me stay where I am.   The fireworks display last night had been splendid, and the food is palatable, even without fly shit.  But against my protestations, they don’t want me here any longer, and are already at work,  finding me an apartment in a supervised complex.  I’m being assigned a legal guardian.  Someone with a violent hatred for disorder.

embedded video of a reading: Me and Noodles, a cat journal

Thanks for joining me for my cigar smoking period.   Been puffing stogies during virtually all projects, written, visual, and now spoken.   It's a phase.  I'll get over it.  The way I got over my business casual wardrobe, which didn't net the really cool outcome I'd hoped for.