An Unsavory Christmas Long Enough Ago To Make It Into Total BS

There is no such thing as ghosts.  Unless people completely failed their quantum frigging physics.  If they got a C- or better, they should be right here with me about ghost-hood.  Apparitions. Christmas spirits.  Like the Christmas bastards in Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carole.'  

Last Christmas whispered past with a whole Yugo trunk full of Christmas ghost passengers.    And every item and individual is   made of sub-atomic particles. So's everything else.  Ghosts.   Nitwits where I happened to be working, one Christmas, late at night.  Everything is caught up in some shitty misconception about the way matter operates.  My desk set of ceramic ghosts appeared to me one Christmas night at an adult bookstore. 1992, while the dot com universe rolled like the Blue Streak on the other side of the continent, I spent that Christmas fielding demands for cigarettes and beer money.

Most nights there were vagrants and perverts flowing in and out of my then place of work.  The part of my body most engaged  was my right index finger, pecking up small ticket sales on the cash register, behind a discolored counter, surrounded with large dildos, video tapes, and glossy reprobate magazines.  Christmas night was special because most of the perverts had family gatherings to attend, while the vagrants were consistent with their omnipresent norm.

One bum after another came in the store, begging for money or cigarettes.   How sad life has become since smoking was banned everywhere.  I always smoked a pack per shift, and the cash register was never off. And sadder, for just one sub-atomic particle of time, people would beg for cigs, like golden retrievers at Thanksgiving.  The experience compares to getting beamed up on the Star Ship Enterprise, and the thing fucks up your atomic structure.   That's how maddening it is to deal with. And then there comes the very anti-matter of the sleaze that was giving me a totally demoralizing pain in the ass.

He was a homeless fella'.  Probably schizophrenia.  Far as I know, he didn't smoke, and didn't beg for beer money.   One could say, in that district, that a non-drinker foregoes forty ounce bottles of Midnight Dragon Malt Liquor.  And a non-smoker, on Christmas night, at the smut shop, is a type of ghost.  This one was at least as hip a Jacob Fucking Marley.  His thing was the art of conversation.  And he was just terrible at it.

As is often true of schizophrenics, his thinking was disorganized.  He wanted in the worst way to have a conversation, with someone, anyone, me, about the arts and sciences, philosophy and the way the stars act upon the fates.   He would have liked to comprehend quantum physics, and he truly gave it his best brain storm, that evening, as he pontificated to me, damn near nose to nose, gesticulating, imploring comprehension of all the things he needed to understand.  In yet more pressing urgency, the man needed to communicate with the outside world, badly enough to drift into my smut emporium one snowy night. Christmas and all, I felt obliged to do my best imitation of someone who really wanted to talk to this scrambled seeker.  And now his memory is one of my ceramic ghosts.

If it matters where that prim little smut shop was, it was located, in 1992, right across from where PNC Park is now.  The shop is a ghost store front with some other type of business in it, something cleaner, and no one is allowed to smoke inside anywhere anymore.  The city did a plum job of moving the vagrants to other environs.  Most of them probably croaked since those halcyon, primitive, squalid evenings.  My memory is long, and is filled with ghosts.   Those people on Federal Street proved quantum physics to my satisfaction.  For all the meanings people paste onto Christmas, the pricks were a prima fascia case.

couple more poems

Minor Disappointments


moving forward on the ignited magnesium Moebius towards diddly
pins working like windmills escaping
the pitchfork service neath an indigo moon

jogging ahead of the fuse and it's a lot of bother
all hard labor seeping out
the barriers sussed  the best run by a not too shabby jock
with woodchuck ambition
and a disappointed runner slinks back to the shanties

dragging a Bobcat
no joy in light construction
those jaunty  backhoes cost a fortune
pastoral Alf and Loretta ain't on the list
the Singing Tabasco family was ingraciusly excluded from membership
I tried to spirit in and got the heave

 I had double parked the tractor
traded in the box wrench
donned me now my  festive apparel
it doesn't work here


Song of the Slumdweller  #1


there's a store front ministry near where I shop
when I run the bike past
the drums and organ send me into Oz
they sing intoxicating spirituals
it's medicine

my bicycle zaps into a broom
I'm the Wacky Warlock of the North
the bicycle disappears
I'm flying

there's this joint where celestial justice swung out
I buy eggs there
there are incantations
ribs of cow cook on a primitive charcoal grill
vast orbs of ham get affordable
the indiginous folk clip coupons
we have twenty five cent cigars
the looming loa smokes one

Kurt Vonnegut's novel 'Cat's Cradle' was a fucking work of genius

Some people have a shitty mind, and need to be taught remedial math and reading.  Other folks have a brilliant, creative mind, and need to learn common ethics.  And then, some invisible Grand Inquisitor might have to redefine 'shitty' and 'brilliant,' for the bounding rare few who understand that smart people do stupid things, especially for reasons of personal gain.  Or that ordinary people aren't completely out to lunch.  Case in point:

The gnarled, homely nerd who invents a doomsday weapon.  He can't tell the difference between a rousing game of solitaire and a wing attack against foreign nationals.   These creeps are equally elated to see themselves doing something 'special,' like forming a cat's cradle out of string, or when they are making a product like 'Ice 9.'  In Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle, the author illustrates this fact of life.   There are a lot of people out there who have the mind of a Ph.d scientist, and the morals of a two year old.  Differing and still related, there's the politician who sees fracking as a good thing because he/she is being bribed.  It's a low level of moral development, playing hide and seek with the rest of the mind's itinerary.  But, since it ain't costing me a quarter to talk, I'll have to just sit on the possibility that virtually every life on the planet could go down by way of  a special needs genius with Asperger syndrome.

New poem: Talking Balls

Talking Balls

the land of stolen honors
 and the city of lost balls
has it all in the margins
basketballs, softballs, superballs
with super zacron energy
spent on wastrel ambition
hand balls
 for palms with self inflicted stigmata
beach balls
 that washed up among inedible green osage oranges
with skin like a gangster
and a core of organic poison
the fruit's born rotten
and plays playground leader to golf balls that sliced out of bounds
soon nesting with smashed beer bottles
late house pets
chucked weapons
a dude's stash
there are trophies forfieted to the rocks and mud
people find them and reject them with regularity
grow familiar with defaulted gear
gym bags with a history
golf tees
 used for some form of cruelty
cleats
 used to cheat at the races
 balls
 anointed with prohibited grease
I have ceased to take lost balls home
I have enough

Best Things Here Are Free

autumn the crows form murders
a 'murder' is the word for a gathering of crows
and not the meat in a television show
the oaks fill with murders of crows

randy bucks  gallop on pavement 
 salmon spawn
a browsing doe on my front lawn
munches out and returns to her faun

the woodchucks do not predict weather
they deck out in knee length leather
and figure out how to make their lives better

below the hills owned by fauna
the paved Triangle in its trauma
lays in its pricey haze

I'm using a pen name sometimes, no secret. My pen name is Bat Robbins, and I might use it for the podcast I'm developing.

Cat Heaven

the kitty went off to the the Kingdom of Osirus
rising above the domed hills
domes spread with houses like sprinkled garbonzos
the radio tower blinking
blimp trailing a banner
billboards selling you this service that has been growing like spinach
cats were treated well in Egypt
they have treated me well here
I'm a person of diverse venerations

Cat Lore

My best freind's patched gray and white cat resembles Earnest Hemmingway.  Pussum's personality might also be compared to the actor Burt Reynolds,  emulated by men and desired by women.  Pussums is a broad beamed, independent cat who very rarely snuggles.    This cat has presence.   Also, large boned elegance, which is rare in people. 

Cat-people interact with Pussums in a manly way.  Even when interacting with women.  People are so confused about the nature of diversity.  No sexism is tolerated.  Nor indicated.   Being both masculine and egalitarian, the kitty should be recognized for outshining most people.   People have been, for throbbing decades,  behind the social/emotional curve, failing in series to adjust to  a manic society.  Cats define an elegant living space.  There's no contest.   They're better than people, which is why the ancient Egyptians were so keen on them.   


 My late kitty, Noodles, was a model of feminity, and was at the same time more like Thomas Jefferson in the way she chose her equals.   She was very discriminating.  And she liked to snuggle a whole lot.   Pussums goes in for more subtle affirmations.   There's a correct way to pat Pussums on the head, which requires thought.  To each his/her own.   Noodles had a good run of about nineteen years, and last year, moved upward to the kingdom of Osirus, as the Ancient Egyptians might have put it.   

The laws of the ancient Egyptians, regarding kitties, was right on, and one or two borrowed thoughts are  house policy here.  They are entitled to top drawer social status.   All cats enter the Kingdom of Osirus upon passing.  Cat owners are organically subject to a period of mourning the loss.  Thus it's moronic not to have a belief system for this sort of hassle.  'Cat Heaven' is a nice way of looking at it.  People from all cultures have 'mouning procedures,' as once explained in an anthropology class. 

 Scientists have claimed cats evolved in the Middle East.  Cats became venerated by the Egytians.  I am certain that Noodles is alive and well in the netherworld.   Osirus knows how to treat a cat.  Per alternative afterlife panarama, the feline cups run over in Cat Heaven.  

youtube poem reading: Dark Side

Rats Are Humanizing

Good things and bad things alike may be prone to escalation. When the weather turns wet and cold, chronic conditions such as tendinitis may act up. In fact, like some cowering child in a dunce cap in the corner, tendinitis is an example of a bad thing escalating. Another bad thing that was escalating, in my private life, some years back, were rats.

The vermin are common to my part of town, as they are most places. There is a network of caves and caverns under the vacant lots between our rowhouses and freestanding section 8 dwelling places that convey the rats from home to home. Rats have a talent for both digging long cavernous networks of tunnels, and also have sly inbred radar with which to identify existing networks of caves and tunnels. Like people, rats come in a variety of breeds, each with its unique talents, and among them there are some technological innovators whose gift is to improve and expand pre-existing rat holes. I met real estate developers when I lived in the South side who remind me most of this type of rat.

So I had a pre-existing rat problem when I bought my home in Perry South. But I didn't notice it right away. In 1998 my gloriously lovely calico cat was in her prime. As often as twice a month I would find a large dead rat in the living room.    My beloved Noodles would stand aside from it like Rembrandt indicating his freshly painted Nightwatch. I'm not a great fan of Rembrandt's paintings, but I sure loved Noodles the cat, and the love and admiration I felt was genuine and heartfelt. She had a lovely way of expressing generosity and pride in her work. She always looked so proud when she killed a big rat, and I felt both proud and grateful for the service. I wouldn't learn for several years how great a  service Noodles provided me. In her prime she was a gifted rat killer.

She and I passed a decade in bliss. If I was counting, I found perhaps a couple hundred rats on the living room floor, freshly killed, my beautiful cat watching me, my every move, my every action, like a spouse presenting a boxed anniversary gift. And so much like the aches and pains I'm feeling now from my own advancing age, I deduced  over a period of about one year that Noodles had lost her sense of smell. 

The loss coincided directly with an escalation in the number of rats coming into the house. Better stated, Noodles had been robbed of her ability to catch rats, thus I was seeing the rats, in the house, alive, that in years past Noodles would've left me as an ativistic gift in rigor mortis. The gift of posthumous vermin. And now I was experiencing virile and abundant living vermin. My beautiful cat retained beauty for all of her nineteen years, and I loved her as much as ever for the decade that followed, but the matter of killing  rats had passed from Noodles to me. It gets like that in marriages. As partners trade their services.

Thus I learned to love rat poison.  And I've been warned by some wise practitioners of Zen that sentiment can be toxic, so I will be spare in these harp string recollections.  There once sold rat poisons a plumbing supply store that looked so banal, from the outside, people would turn their nose up at it, as if it wasn't more fun than Kennywood.   Along with it's rows of pipes and plungers and sink fittings, there was a premanent ninety nine cent sale that kept me coming back for more cheap junk.  But most of all, they sold an array of pesticides that could wipe out most things that creep into our shabby North Side slum dwellings.  My very favorite one was  this rat poison that came in hexagonal bars, about an inch by six inches, in a pleasant, waxy adhesive, nice freindly pale yellow color.  The things never failed.   One week I had fourteen inch long rats with muscular thighs, next week no rats.  Pest-free, thou source of light immortal.   And it all coincided with the vanishing hexagonal bars of rat poison.  Jolly-o.

It was at that erstwhile plumbing store, used to be Keystone Plumbing, that I encountered humanity at its finest.  So often, when I went there to buy more poison, a person nearby would notice, and be reminded that he or she, too, have an ongoing problem with rats.  It was one thing, sure as state reps and bed bugs, we had all, at one time or other, had difficulties with.  We could all take action in the matter, unlike those things politicians plague upon us all.  If only there was a pesticide for Congress and the Supreme Court.  Too bad.  I'm willing accept my limitations, and take pleasure in small victories.  The poison killed my rats, and I had spirited social interatctions with fellow North Siders about rats, rat poison, ants, roaches, cheating spouses, toxic waste related ailments, and all subjects relevant to people who didn't know one rat-infested thing  about one another, till they started a chat while buying rat poison.  In that regard, some very good things escalated.  Something bad, rats, declined.  So good here, North Side.
.

Musical Waste

It was the screaching, gnawing low price that played concert master to this pitiful personal inner symphony.  

A violin piqued my interest, and after some viscerally twining ruminations, in time, I hit the 'buy it now' button on the browser that is shining internet  glories at me this moment.  Leading to the purchase, there was  titillating, teasing inner dialog...

Is it smart or stupid to get what any moron should guess is a shitty music widget?  How bad is it to waste time?   Is it possible to waste time, considering how nothing has happened in years to validate it as better or worse for the human condition.   If all time is loaded like a clear vinyl backpack full of stupidity, ugliness and failed hopes, there is no conflict between time and a shitty violin.

I can afford to waste the price of the violin, much as I can blow the same thirty five bucks on dinner for four at McDonald's.  And then I am obliged to trundle the old wheel barrow in which I wheel humanistic explanations for unproductive activities.   I learned a shitload of insignificant things in the course of acquiring and playing an awful violin.   The value of this is easily proven by running it past a consensus of cloistered people all selected for being easily amused.  At large, there are whole colleges and business enterprises that place people in a leisured fool's paradise, and in some of them, they find pleasure in what a nut case learned off his shitty, pressed plywood violin.

It came to the front door in a week, in a trapazoidal FedEx carton I'd be comfortable being interred in after my most sadly inevitable cremation.   The fiddle comes in an injection molded plastic hard shell case that I'd be even better elated to be interred it.  Mortality was among the inner interogatives that lead me to close acquisitions on a $35, post paid, violin.   And laid out in its plastic vault, like the late Chairman Mao after a royal taxidermy, the dreadful imported, mass produced  musical instrument took it's first gander at American residential light.

It has no musical value to speak of.  To learn violin on it is a waste of time.  Sounds like shit.  I am planning to shoot it with my crossbow, next summer.  It will be hanged from the dead oak tree in the vacant lot behind the house.   It deserves it.  And I  will derive pleasure. So will you, when you see the  youtube project I'm going to make.. Unless you are a stick in the mud.

This human interest story is total BS, and has nothing to do with me. Total fiction.

My Unsuccessful Sex Surgery 

For years, I suffered lower back pain from the weight of it. I was embarrassed, from the freakish lower body disfigurement my problem was causing me. And I was ostracized for it. My doctor, at first, tried to convince me it was normal to have an eighteen inch penis. But he was from Japan. How the fuck would he know? 

Imagine the fear of a wardrobe malfunction. Running shorts were a distant dream. I had to do my jogging in deep purple pantaloons, to hide my deformity. I begged and begged. I was desperate. Why couldn't I be like all the other men in my bridge group, hung like a Marlboro. They were all happily married, to frigid, workaholic spouses, and had wonderful, dim witted children. There was a crass comment made one evening, something about 'overbidding.' They were friends, for true, but they should know better than to rib a man suffering from 'the long dong.' 

The doctor finally consented, and he was willing to do it in his 42nd street walk up. It was supposed to be a simple hack saw and button hole thread job. There were complications. He had to resection it with his cork screw. There was a lot of bleeding. 

I should thank my stars the dang thing still sits up and begs, but the scarring and plain cylinder stump of it is a whole new story to tell to the hundreds of stewardesses and nurses I socialize with. Some understand, and accept that I have to use an adjustable wrench to achieve penetration. The others complain, and tell me that their last boy friend was a Virginia Slim. That's all I know to tell you. A malpractice suit is pending. Might lose. Hard to prove your life could get worse after having the long dong. I've turned to religion. 

Rant Along With Mitch....................or, it's just me, beefing out loud

Sharing, sharing, helping like Suzy Homemaker, I had a brainstorm that could save our fair city from future financial ruin.  Letting it out, like a primal scream:  Live sex shows on the bicycle powered tourist vehicles.  The vehicles on which about a dozen tourists provide leg power, not unlike on the Flintstones, to propel the happy consumers, seated at opposite sides of a steel wagon.  It serves refreshments, has sing alongs, and performs various inventive cheering  behaviors as they pedal around the cultural district. Salubrious so it wishes, the things get on my nerves.

But how lucrative could this business model be?   Not my business,  some would say.  Ontologically, everything is everyone's business.  I am forced to see the wagons when I'm waiting for the bus.   Call me a lemon sucker, but cheering antics have a negative impact on my inner wirings.

 I care about Pittsburgh, and I think there is going to be major municipal money problems if it doesn't find itself a nice fat cash cow.  And I saw one mooing this afternoon.  It was one of those pedal power tour vehicles for a dozen tourists, And at once, I realized what was missing.

There needs to be rampant sex partners, going at it, hot X rated.  And they have to pay a ton of money for the privilege, because there are suckers born every minute, and some have the cash to buy delirious  exhibitionist sex on the service deck.  There's  room on the vehicles for it, and there are a lot of people desperate for attention.  Some of them will pay tens of grands for the experience, and the public will flock downtown to watch for the tourist tantras.  People will be willing to pay hundreds of times the usual fee for pedaling the stainless steel ox carts.  It promotes more buisness opportunites.   It will help boost local sex trades, which is always good for the economy.

There could be alternate straight and gay sex wagons.   Newly weds might want to make their first go at it on a pedal powered tourist vehicle.   People who just hit the jack pot at the casino might just want to blow the whole kitty on one momentous fuck.  Makes sense.  Consider all you've read and seen.  This shit is lucrative.

Well, thanks for reading.  I'm trying to be a helpful ass motherfucker.  Thanks some more.

Lilting, Lyrical Little Numbers

the booth is oak like the Great Wall Of China
sunlight comes out through the glory hole
trumpets ride rubber buggy bumpers into a barreling bassoonist
common slip and and fall injury
call this chap in Mount Lebonon
gets you loot
it all streams in through the hole

Witch Hunting

People's cows were not producing milk and it seemed to be my fault
I did not put  a whammy on their bovines
I bought a corn broom at the Dollar General
tied it to the Schwinn
and rode through their pastures
on the bike path
thus peckerheads postulate that I am a witch
easy mistake

Remembrance of Nitwits Past

Please imagine the author Herman Wouk's famous novel, Remembrance of Things Past. Picture Herman dressed in a clown suit while so doing. Or a bulky gorilla costume. That's exactly how grotesque my experience with a local poet/personality was.

Names are withheld. I met this poet in the early 1990s after he had performed a reading at the Southside Beehive coffee shop. He and I were introduced by an acquaintance, and avid writer that I am, I asked the poet would he  like to meet some afternoon to discuss poetry writing. The fellow was at first skittish, citing the fact that he was a professional writer, and that he generally required a fee for discussion similar to the one I was recommending. With my usual candor and weasel-talk, I  convinced the poet that it was worthwhile to have a conversation, gratis. We agreed to meet the next day, at the Beehive.

What a beguiling next day it was. The poet showed up with a large leather sample case, such as salesman carry. They put insurance policies and carpet samples in  that type of case. Before the poet and I got  around to the subject of poetry readings and writings, he opened his case and pulled out a handful of brochures.

There wasn't a word about poetry uttered by either one of us that afternoon.   The poet launched directly into a sales presentation. He was deeply wrapped in a multilevel marketing business. He was a distributor of charcoal water filters. The brochures tell you all about them. Rather than discuss poems, the poet wanted me to assist him in completing a sale. He also wanted me to purchase my own dealership, because selling water filters was half of the game, the other half was selling distributorships. Had I purchased a distributorship, the poet would've received payment on every water filter I sold inside of my distributorship. Also some of the money I would've earned would have  filtered upward to succeeding levels of the multilevel marketing business. The water filters being sold probably cost about three dollars to manufacture because they were vinyl tubing and activated charcoal that fits under your sink, and the things  were selling for upwards of $300 each. It was explained to me that this is necessary because so many people have to be paid per unit sale. Hundreds and hundreds of poets, artists, intellectuals and clean water advocates were all entitled to a share of money raised by selling water filters.

He made a request, as if to test my artistic integrity.  He wanted me to close a sale that he was having trouble with.  I had nothing to lose at the time, aside from self respect, so I took him up on it.  I called a woman,by phone, and attempted to sell her a filter.  My sales call was going well, she was interested in getting a filter, and was concerned with contaminants in tap water.  The filter picks them out like Lucille Ball inspecting candy on a conveyor belt.  But I hit a snag.  She became suspicious, and asked who I was calling on behalf of.  Her tone was quite, quite serious.  This wasn't ordinary common interest in me or the filters or the call itself.  I was concerned, so I spilled the beans.  I told her that the poet had asked me to make the sales call.  She became quite, quite angry.  It appears the poet had been harassing her for some time,by phone, visits, other unwanted communication, because he was obsessed with two things, the filter business, and her.  It's called stalking.  And I got to be complicit in the poet's stalking behavior.

I did not go further with the multi-level marketing initiative.  I did continue writing poems, after that.  The meeting, and the sales call,  wasn't too horridly damaging.  But I left behind the shed snake skin of mendacity, greed, falsehood and poor conduct.  Poets can be a real jerk.

I'm a politically active fool, and fucking proud of it.

Organizations and Strangers

Lean parking twixt tumble weeds
you should see the bulk on that valet
it's the talking toys on his belt that ramp up acquisitions
clearly space is precious
awfully, time sucks into this dreadfully articulated sponge
costs money to sustain an ethic
costs wads on precious gambling junkets
for every creep who saves his saw bucks
read that book of numbers

it's riveting how more things mean more pleasure
and here's this creep
this petty ante creep
breathing rich air

Credo Barfing

Go on ahead.  Dare me to get pompous.  Thank you.  I'm there.

I am pompous about the subject of free speech.  Sounds simple?  Wrong-o, dearies.  There are more ways to deprive individuals of it than you can pull out of a hoarder's slum lodgings.

  Monsanto curtails the speech of farmers by suing them.   Newspaper magnates can limit publishing,all over creation,to whatever they care to report, blotting from notice person's not favored by, at this ugly juncture, fucking near every news outlet on the planet.

 They are all conglomerated.   You are you.  They will win in the area of mass communications, and those gazillion victories might all be called deprivation of free speech.    Money has a fat shitload to do with all this crap.  More money is more influence, same shit as free speech.  So there are other ways of stopping people from communicating negotiating, applying influence upon, fucking near anything.   People can be demonized.  Careers have been destroyed by way of affirmative action complaints.   That's a way of shutting people up.  Otherwise influential, talented people, who stand to lose it all should they be alleged a racist, sexist or flagrant sub-humanist.  People have never been less able to open their traps,type on the internet, or yodel into a smart phone without fear of being spied on.  Acted upon.  Sent to an Orwellian, Vincent Price-looking FranzKafkaLand.  I'm trying to help.

Sins of the Assholes

This is so painful to have to dredge up, but in the thirteenth century, one of my fore-cousins invented Dutch elm rot.  He did it on purpose, because his tulips had been snubbed by the aristocracy.  I don't condone what Lucius Vanderjerker did, but wood is thicker than bark.  I have to defend cousin Lucius.

There was a system in place that forbade non-Dutch residents from sending tulip bulbs to the Royal Hotshitfucking  Flowers Symposium.   The symposium operated in secret, while it relied upon a network of clueless useful idiots to do the work of a jail house rat.  Informants were rewarded with praise for reporting all posey insurgents.

Lucius Vanderjerker came to Holland in steerage.  He was ambitious.  Hungry.  And mad as a magic mushroom muncher.  Some of that madness was expended upon his mission to breed the most wonderful fucking tulips any Dutch asshole ever fucking saw.  Like too many migrating hopefuls, he was reported to the Royal Hotshitfucking Flowers Symposium.  He was promptly black balled. The tulip bulbs he had been Fed-Exing to them, year after year, were either discarded or stolen.  How is a prick like Lucius going to prove he was being plagiarized?  He wasn't being recognized as a breeder of Tulips.  Only a winky little circle of creeps were allowed that honor.  The aristocrats. Those preening human Christmas bulbs on an aluminum tree screwed together from privilege.  No tulips are pretty enough to dazzle away the injustice.

And so Lucius Vanderjerker threw his flower bulbs in a chamber pot, and invented elm rot.  It's shameful to know he was a relative.  No one since Lucius has done anything that shitty.  Holy shit, I hope people will understand that this shit happens in the best of families.

Memories, Like A Vortex Down The Crapper

Vitriolic old cuss that this fellow can be, some old grudges are less reviled than others, and there are even unpleasant experiences that should be carefully preserved, stored in a red velvet lined cedar chest, to keep the moths from eating them.  I was, one year in the early 1990s, relegated to underdog status at a poetry reading workshop.  Like it was football, this grudge is best explained in play by play form.

Firstly, this very marginally known poet read his scribbles, per procedure, at the workshop.  The circle of participants responded just swell to my first reading, and to my second reading, the next week, and the main honcho, a fine and defensive soul, expressed most positive regard for my stuff.  Twas the third reading, a week forward, that some gentle souls were pulling out the hardware.  Someone in the group objected to my work, and, I think he also objected to my entirety.  Seems I didn't measure up to this person's dearest of calibrations.

He made a speech, in response to my third reading.  First establishing that he was a working practitioner of some type of hot, happening therapy, he advanced his agenda by stating that all art is therapy.  He didn't go so far as spell it out, but I got the hot encircled logo at the end of the branding iron.  He and his favorites were therapeutic.  Their poems were therapeutic.  And  a freshly smoking mark on my flanks was indicating that I was not therapeutic.  My poems contributed nothing to the war on dysfunction.  Not one suffering victim of social injustice could possibly achieve liberation by way of the shit I had been typing on paper.  My accuser was a therapist, and I was a lousy little prick.

The therapy movement was prominent at the time.  It was and stilll is a business. And an agenda.  A sometimes overly aggressive, sometimes intrusive, often emotionally manipulative agenda. In the example above, a person was polarizing both poetry and the writers, and at the same time, relegating the medium to a singular, perhaps unwanted, purpose.  I don't refute that art has therapeutic value, but that does not mean a therapist's poems are automatically better than mine.   The dude was trying to lock in his position in the cultural community, and  to lock other artists out.  And I got the scarlet letter for being of no use to people who all need therapy.

I am fishing this old memory out of  the illusory tar pits that best describe humanity at it's snottiest. My experience  is exemplary of an annoying, lingering problem:  The use of social agendas for personal gain.  The therapy movement was a witch hunt.  And a cash machine.  And a fountain of leveraged social status.  He was doing important meaningful work, and I'm a jack off.  But I'm not.  He was being a jack off.  I'm not really all that pissed about it,  but one of my agendas is to resist the misuse of social agendas.  It's a globalized big pain in the ass.

For Bigger, For Smaller

In the 1980s it became fashionable to produce, show or purchase the largest paintings possible.  The scale of the art object indicates the scale of the individual.   Americans are great, and are entitled to the outward appearance of it.  At the time, the government was busy proving that one penniless fool is worth a fortune in justice and well being, while the gurus of the day were adamant that an artist has greater significance than people not owning comparable talents.  It was the origin of Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Classes.   The human condition advanced in technology enough to let stray thoughts materialize as valuable goods and services.  Size communicates something or other, independent of the image on the canvass.  This letter is all about the significance of being small.

Since the 1980s, there has been a shit storm in corporate downsizing.  Also, declining standards of living.  A formerly plush middle class devolved into a debt ridden, anti-depressant popping one.  Private support for the arts went swirly down the the shit pipe, while the rise of non-profit culture has mechanized and burocratized the humanities.  Sparing more polemics, little people like myself have been reduced to making small art objects, sparing expense commensurate with being a dirt poor peon. And I'm fine with this long-passing turn of culture.  Yet I swear a lot.  They say the 'Burgh is the most livable city.   It isn't the most enlivening one.  But it's a good place to be small.

Great Balls of Kitch

He wheels his wheel barrow on streets kinked and narrow.   It's a barrow of kitch purchased at the Westview Dollar Tree Store.  Among the items, an injection molded zebra,  shoulder high to a guinea pig, is volunteering to explain it's role in some fellow's mixed media project.   Quotes the plastic zebra, she is being incorporated into a symbol system borrowed from a spectrum of systems known to a boat load of civilizations.

The symbol system the zebra is helping out with is a personal one, and is at the same time derivative from art history classes someone or other took a long time a ago. Her meaning, within the project, is as plastic as she is, but it is being specified that objects purchased at a dollar store are more emblematic of the times than a Ming vase, because silly folks who ride the bus to Westview can't afford one, and don't know any one who  has one.  No one is currently manufacturing Ming vases, Stadaravi fiddles or renaissance paintings.   Anyone at all can paint his/her heart out, but this ain't the Italian Rennaissance.  The vitality of easel painting has been under criticism for decades as being an unnecessary art form.  There was a gent name of Carl Andre who pops up in this bag of spectrums.

Andre made his name as sculptor for his piles of common red bricks, such as streets and houses are made of.   The piles took no form except the shape of  randomly placed  bricks.  No attempt was made on Carl's part to make the bricks do anything out of the ordinary.  Critics praised the work for it's attack against commonly held perceptions and for it's contribution to an expanding definition of art.  There was an element of excitement in defining a pile of bricks as a sculpture, requiring no skill to construct, and holding high monetary value.  There's two reason's alone to grant the work status as art:  excitement, thus sensuality, and an exorbitant price for road bricks.   There are other tests of validity, but a shoe box of cash is  a fair indicator, too.   Carl Andre asserted his humanity by defining art and by capitalizing on so doing.  An instructor at the old state college said that Carl Andre was the father of a movement that state's "It's art because I said so."

Jolly wide thanks to Carl Andre.  The zebra and her companions are being called art.  The symbol system, at it's cheesiest, is allegorical, with toy animals observing an event or expressing human thoughts.  The system includes six inch tall action figures, and some eleven inch plastic dolls all named 'Fashion Doll.'  There's a theme or two worth ralfing up, such a Humankind's relationship to nature or to society.  Also, the theme of ritual.  Folks have been performing them for ages, suggesting an organic human tendency.  They do it, why can't everyone, and why can't people hatch their own ones?  And for one last point, someone out there has been harping to the effect that everything can be placed in a supply/demand model, here the demand for mysticism.  It is an artist's job to supply the demand for myticism.  The plastic animals and dolls are play acting at the supernatural, here symbolized by the use of fire.  

 Twas professed in a few of those classes some opinions still crouched in the afore mentioned barrow. An individual can assert artistic judgement in the manner of his/her choosing.  Advancing technology means less of this and a faster way of producing that.  An artist doesn't have to sculpt a plastic zebra when it is so much easier to buy one at the Westview Dollar Tree store.  And it is the ability to think and to communicate that matters most.  As well as to teach and entertain.  We can go water skiing in the ocean of kitch.  It's a great time to be just about anyone.

The Curse of the Levine

I did, indeedy, destroy an acoustic guitar.  On purpose.   I hung it from a dead oak tree and flung hatchets at it till it said 'uncle.'   In no way an obligation, to a small degree a pleasure, listing towards a puny imperative, I must explain why I did it behind the house,here in Poison Ivy Meadows.

  That guitar, with it's failing abilities to remain in tune, had come into my life by way of a weakened, canted, rotting  basement entrance.  It saw in me a weak point, and took advantage.  It came to me as if it was a volunteering friend, a kitten that was at once in both need and love, which is, in emotional terms, the very basement entrance  through which assholes and bad music arrive.

A musical marriage was bonded one capricious day.  It was $19.99, marked the whole way down, like a public hanging.  It was the last Adam Levine guitar sold in the Westview, Pennsylvania Kmart.   Musical instruments had been completely discontinued, though Adam's line of fashion merchandise is still graciously sold at that dreamland Kmart.  I bought an Adam Levine bomber jacket, at one of so many big box rummage sales,  a sassy off-shoot of the too famous Members Only bomber jacket of the post-disco era.  I lived through it.  Many didn't.

 I bought the guitar on a whim, without evening looking at it.  It was in a plain brown box, just over waist tall, like a casket for a kid.  Lugging it home by bus was humbling.   Comments were made, ranging from, "Them's good guitars," to "White people are capitalizing on everything."   But it seemed impossible, at that price, for anything really, really bad to happen as a result of it.    I can afford to lose $20.  And after a few days of monkeying with the ax, it was in tune, resting in the corner, sounding rather good when plucked.   Like a harp in Hell.

The thing showed promise, but is a cheap guitar.  It doesn't rate, and it recorded atrociously.  But for several years, I was content to wang out folk songs, like I always do, though at one point resolving to never record with the awful guitar.     And then I saw Adam Levine on television.   It was as if a mile long Electrolux vucuum cleaner hose was sucking the marrow out of the Earth.  I felt fatter, yet lighter, from watching Adam coach a young woman in the art of pop singing.  It was icky, horribly, horribly icky.   Icky to such a degree, that I felt worse than I already did about the guitar.  I know what good sound is, and good musicianship, and I have to live with being somewhere under par.   Damn it.  I don't need to be reminded, further, by a guitar filled with globalized domination, or the subjugation of the the human spirit.   There are more reasons why the guitar was fastened to a dead oak tree, like a Scottish King from the olden days, when people weren't so consumately chicken shit.

I came upon slab of history worth repeating, like a good cuss word.  Centuries ago, in Scottland, there was a custom.  Once their king got too feeble to run things, he got tied to a tree and stabbed to death, in a gruesome, ceremonious manner.  Part of the beauty of it is that to be a king, a fellow had to appreciate that this would happen to him eventually.   I believe this was a practical deterrent to so many character defects of the type that make modern US a wee bit of a shit hole.   The Scotts were on to something, as relates to the Adam Levine acoustic guitar that bought the farm a few weeks ago, here in Poison Ivy Meadows.

It's a lesson in adversity.  If everyone and everything faced stiff consequences for fucking up, there would be less fucking up.   The Adam Levine Guitar won't fuck up another one of my recordings.  And I got some pent up anger out of my system.  Happier, I am of better service to human kind.  And a curse has been lifted. I think.

Another Frigging Credo

Don't mean to be a Dogmatic Dick, and I have broached this matter before, but the house philosophy bumps loudly on the nature of entertainment.  It is highly influential.  More so, sadly, than a really good critical study in a low circulation lit mag.  People are more responsive to sitcoms than to sermons.

The new emphasis is because of the relatively new police state.  And because of the less than limber condition of American free speech.  The scarcity of mass media sources is goofy compared to the billions of people with almost no where with all to be heard.  Or aided.   The masses have never been more prime for mass enslavement.   But the drama aside, it is hard for ordinary people to effect change in government.    The best hope is in producing entertainment, such as The Not-Too-Social Hour.

New Episode of Captain Fire-Groin

Being a Happy Horace...

The great thing about a lobotomy is that once you've had one, it's impossible to regret it.  The same, pretty much can be said about a lot of the psyche meds people take.  No matter how horrid your life, there's a pill that either makes you happy or oblivious to being sad.  A third thought is the meds could make people unable to complain about what is happening to them.   There are other ways to defeat cognition.

People have been trained, since birth, to cooperate with the government, which is only people.  Fucked up, fallible people.  People with more money, tools, weapons and co-conspirators than you could possibly scare up, mail order.  Some big, powerful fucks.   Some say, sociopathic.  It's what I think.  Unless they are just oblivious to morals and the best interest of a fat shitload of people.

Secular humanism rewarded people for being dim.   Seems everyone with even a passing relationship with the CIA has had a hand in the process of infantilization, that cooing, babbling cajoling process of turning responsible, moral adults into mindless baby conformists, kept too fucking innocent to abhor being homogenized, like a cosmos of chocolate milk and Oreo cookies.  Infantiliazation robs people of their identity, common sense,  and free will.  And all seems okay.

Well don't worry.  Not a bit.  It's hard to regret having a lobotomy, and totally impossible to regret having croaked.   Sooner or later, all hard feelings will rot in the ground or toast in a crematory.  Cheers!

A New Evolution Proposal, or...I don't like Mondays, either.

Not that I won't try anything once, but I'm assuming it is impossible for a person to impregnate a baboon, except by way of some tubing, a lord and lady baboon,  and an ape Viagra.  A person can't have kids by way of apes, dogs or ferrets.  People are defined as people for the their ability to have kids together, no matter what race the two partners are.  A Brit can knock up an Asian.   Asians can knock up all the Scandanavians they can coax into their conversion vans.   An African person can impregnate an Eskimo.   It is through reproduction that the evolutionary process plays Double Yahtzee with Fate, and a species, such as us, can be identified for it's ability to take the Wild Thing to full term, with babies to prove conception took place, and not a mere act of illegal sex.  This is great because it proves that all races are equally human!  We have only differing cultures to blame for the heat and commotion.

Then, of all goddam things, there's the origin of the species debates, all infinity of them, always going on, though not too prominently in mainstream media.  Seems the birds and bees have never been more hush hush, more a matter  of propaganda and mind control.    That's why I want to share my latest thoughts on evolution.   I thought of this shit all by myself, discussed it with a few pals, and even did marginal research on the internet.  My theory, which, it seems, other people also hatched, is that the human races evolved separately, and that conditions on Earth are prime for evolution of precisely the people, animals, plants and germs that are or have been here among us.  White people evolved in Central Europe.  Asians evolved in Asia.  Africans evolved in Africa.   Once a race becomes advanced enough to impregnate a person of a differing race, it's fair game to say someone evolved to the point of being a potential Ward or June, Barack or Michelle, John or Yoko.   It is evolution that coughed up the human condition that everyone has to wheeze through together.  Mankind must resolve it's many hassles.  If only everyone, all at once, could just get drunk and screw.  I think it can all work itself out.

Learning to twing

I was wandering around a nameless small town in Northwestern Pennsylvania, when I happened to come upon a corner bar beside a tiny branch bank office and a used car lot, with it's block long run of cyclone fence enclosure,  and the bar looked mighty cute, so I went on in.  I just happened to be carrying my new violin, and I had hardly just found a bar stool and a beer when a man turned to me and said, "You gotta' twing that type of fiddle.  You bow that fiddle, it sounds like shit."

The place was packed with gnarled, burly, and even some lascivious Appalachians, and it appeared that most of them had purchased the exact same violin I had with me.   They all immediately recognized the injection molded plastic case, with synthetic fabric cover.  "We all got our fiddles off ebay.   On the computer."  a buxom red head told me. Go figure, that is how I came upon mine.


It seemed that some continued to play their pressed plywood veneer fiddles, while others took their fiddle outside and smashed it to kindling with an ax, leaving the splinters to blend with the acres of volunteering compost.   But they all agreed that if they were to play the violin with the bow that came with the violin, there was no hope of sounding anything but hideous.  These are dreadful, cheap-ass violins.  Thirty five dollars, post paid.  Generic fiddles.  It is possible to make pleasing music pitsicato, as the snob-ass motherfuckers at the Symphony say.  But in the ghettos, so diverse, so colorful and bohemian and rusticated, there appears to be a culture that found it's own way in musical development.  Twinging is lovely, while using the bow to play it is like drinking Drano.  I've been twinging mine, they are, to some degree or other, twinging theirs.  It's like finger picking, but more whispering.  With a light ring to the sound.  Obviously, it's why they found the term 'twing.'

 They twing their violins, plucking the strings like a harp.  The bow that comes with the violin is garbage, and the low grade fiddle can't produce sound as well as a good fiddle.  There is no chance of bowing these fiddles to good results.   But it is possible to pluck it graciously.   The Appalachian folk that meets in that corner bar call it 'twinging.'  As do I.  Now that I twing my violin every day, I am closer to the people who most stridently drawled and boasted truth about twinging.   They named it. I assimilated it.  I learned from those musical ridge runners a hundred miles north of here.  I will resume my  twinging as soon this shit is all uploaded to the blog.

Poison Ivy Meadows

I changed the name of the vacant lot behind the house, here, to Poison Ivy Meadows.  The dirt and rocks the poison weeds grow on belongs to the City, and I'll be fucked if I'm about to buy land off the sleazy, tax hiking bastards downtown, but damn if I'm not pleased to be using Poison Ivy Meadows for my private knife throwing haven.    It's all the shit is good for.  There is a huge dead oak tree, died of natural causes (I think) and is leaving it's lumbering earthly remains to great causes, like the Guit Smash and the Fiddle Smash, which is upcoming.  I did the Guit Smash earlier this  year, and the year previous to that I conducted the Mirror Smasher.  Poison Ivy Meadows is way more productive than any number of local nonprofit cultural agencies that I'm too fucking nice to mention by name.

The new name is in honor of the acres and acres of poison ivy growing there.  I get it once a year, and don't care for it, but it never gets too  bad.  I presume it's helping to repel intruders and assholes in general, who have as much right to be there as I do, but of course my work is more important than anything some jerk needs to do.  That's nature.

Mother Nature manufactures the poison ivy, and I provide knife and ax throwing demonstrations.  Other performance work is done, regularly, in Poison Ivy Meadows.  I feel as though I have married Mother Nature, when  I'm throwing hatchets in The Meadow.   She is an asshole some of the times, case in point, the poison ivy.  Also, mosquitos, arm pit hair, under arm odor, lice, bed bugs, Stalin, Hitler and Dick Cheney.   Mother Nature and I get drunk together and screw once a week, and are pretty much at odds the rest of the time.  Marriage.   What a fucking stupid institution.

Short Comedy

Another Knife Throwing Demonstration

Seedy Locals................a brand new poem

Seedy Locals


oh twang
the money maker
had this hair coiff with lewd tawny flip a full eleven inches up front and backwards with palm-like waves
this was fresh with the discovery of hair mousse
people cut their alliances with past pictures of persons
the width of lapels took minds like thorazine
there had been numinous bow ties worn
stars and supine printed flora
the boy knew how to plant orchids on his haberdashery!
this swine and his brother had the underground business franchise
the one wrapped in burger bags
with their contraband unguents
dispensed in cubicles
where creeps  work

News Update On The Not-Too-Social Hour

Look at all that shit on the official Not-Too-Social Hour marquee!  Some of it actually exists right now, Captain Fire-groin is in production, and I will be adding new characters to the show.  The Singing Diddlies are fiction at this point, but could be filled in, like a cherry pie, with guests who are able to play the musical instruments graciously provided by the Music Laboratory.    Buttwhack Morgan exists as a comic series that I did on paper a long time ago, but now he will re-appear as recurring feature, using a plastic action figure to play Buttwhack   Buttwhack Morgan is modeled after a person I used to drink with.   A jerk with both a serious drinking problem, and he had a nauseating sexual obsession that he talked about, too much, too loud.  I was obliged to dissassociate with the person upon whom Buttwhack is modelled.  Vince Victim will be a very easy comedy skit to put into operation.   Guests will be encouraged to hate and victimize Vince Victim, accusing him of anything fun to hear about, and the guest will then crush Vince Victim, on a thick wooden block, using a bright red ball pene hammer.   

The Not-Too-Social Hour is sponsored, in small part, by the Alice and Steve Fire-groin family, also by Annette and Zachary Fire-groin, all dear close relatives of our own, Captain Fire-groin.  Some of Zack's dysfuntional kids will be working here as key grips, whatever a 'key grip is.'   Doesn't matter.  It's family

.

The Squatras

I discovered the Squatras while performing a mirror ritual in the vacant lot behind the house. A mirror is the shiny back entrance to nasty yet gratifying realizations.  The cast of puppets and dolls used in the ritual were positioned around the broken mirror frame, and I had ignited the sacrificial white male action doll, after  dousing it with a measured half ounce of high test, poured from the holy gasoline container, made of safe, reliable neoprene, into a dropper bottle I think of as 'the grail.'  I use a very special funnel to pour the gas.  No fuck ups.

A 'squatra' is a spiritual plexus that opens up, like a zit, pouring forth groove juice, when you are squatting.  I was squatted down near my outdoor shrine when a few of my inner squatras opened.  Damn, it was profound.  Felt great.  Like twelve tabs of X, all cutting loose at once.  It was a reminder that spirituality is sensuality, and things like the condition of your squatras may be imperative to it.   You'll get off better once you grasp your squatras.

Further Notes On Music Creep (this is semi-fictinal,based as close as shaving with a Norelco, to some creep I once had dealings with)

There's been the same cultural carnage back near New Hope, Pa., as there has been most places, with houses rotting to the ground, arson waves, and Levitt Town construction projects.   There was the exodus of attractive, talented people, and the inflo of half way facilities, for people playing with half  the preferred card count.  You can measure time in clever bistros that opened in closed inside of a blinking city block of similarly transient store fronts.   The morphology on the artificial finger nail salons, alone, explain a thousands times more of ethnic drift than you could stuff your mind with at an Ivy League school.  Small restaurants are the mayflies urban renewal.

All places become an attractive nuisance sooner or later.  People move in and become a pain in the ass.  They colonize, with the benefit of professional help, like medically altered ants.  More assholes move in.  You get urban unpleasantness.  This tends to erupt from the surface, like an insect bite, on the the surface of a gentrification initiative, in all cases initiated by a sector of the middle class that is best able get public money for it all.   These creeps always profit, because the money comes from the taxpayers.  There is no such thing as being culpable.

 I met this scum bag guitarist in the aforementioned town, and this prick helped to distinguish the place from all the other locations that went down over the  embittered past thirty two years.  When I moved into the rooming house I was calling home for about a year, The music assole was living in the room directly across the hall.   At first it seemed almost normal that he was overly friendly, always knocking on my door to ask a small favor, or express fraternal interest, which is one of a jillion deviant social skills free for the picking, in the garden of earthly creeps and perverts.  I was much younger than, and rather oblivious to the whole business of stalkers.

In the day, Mr. Scuzzbuckets was a featured regular attraction at what was then The Cable Car Theater.  It was a fuzzily venerated small theater, formerly all stage productions, currently a movie theater with featured side shows like Mr. Scuzz.  He would do several short sets a night, before, at intermission, and at closing of the arthouse films the joint specialized in.  Here again, sic transit gloria bullshit, the sector of the middle class that had enabled this type of venue fizzled away before the dot com economy shitstormed in to preplace the old middle class establishment with the New World Order, in oblong cans containing a hard drive and screen, like canned fish, only sorely more influential.  To shorten history, the old hippies who still had jobs in the early 80s are mostly dead.  And the guitar wizard is still alive.   So I've decided to share his memory, or my memories of him, with the dysfunctional family form, in series form.  If want more of this prick, it's coming up here.

Scuzz Googling

I'm not out to hurt the poor asshole.  I met the bossa nova scumbag in a New England capital city, in a rooming house.  He was a food thief, eventually caught raiding the communal kitchen.    He was also a young pervert, at the time, and I have a feeling he still is, after thirty two years.

The stretch in the twilight zone was during the first half of the 1980s.  The attempt on my part to assimilate a new culture had its moments and pretty much failed, considering I  went back to the jerkwater town I came from, mentally worse for wear.  Recalling a disturbing twelve months as a neighbor of the musical scum, a google search finds W.B. alive, possibly in good health, possibly well regarded by a few people on the fringe of society, unless the exceptionally tall, gangly freak changed to a huge degree for the better, which I doubt.

His picture show him aged, arguably distinguished looking, and he had capitalized on a long, drawn oily face as twenty-nine year old wonder boy..   Scumbags are usually true to their scam, so he must still be a gnarled, pock marked guitar genius, a permanent babe in the woods, always looking for a victim.   He liked to play sick head games against his victims, standing outside their doors, as he would do mine, eaves dropping.   His room was right across the front hall in a huge Victorian mansion that had been cut down to a jillion single rooms.   It was diverse and charmingly monastic, the jazz creep being one of a few notorious criminals that lived their.

I learned from his 'Linded In' page, and this is public, so I wasn't intruding, or at least not wrongfully, that he is trying to form a bossa nova band, hoping like Helen Keller's speech instructor meet up with professional musicians, like the ones Antonio Carlos Jobim tripped the lights with.   He was a total parasite, when I know him, always seeking out people he can borrow from, or take sexual advantage of, or who he could perpetrate sick pranks against.   He told once, with avuncular frankness, that he was a voyeur, liked to window peek, and to spy on people by any means possible.


Anyway, great to see he's still going.

New Character

Haven't invented anyone new lately, and then there is newness.   Something came to mind, and it's a person.  A fella'.  His name is Captain Fire-Groin.  He micturates gasoline, and is able to ignite it, using a spark wheel well placed near his glass dick.    There is a rubber squeeze bulb hidden behind his ass.    It's a crude gag, but it's always fun to start a small fire someplace sweet.  

Captain Fire-Groin will turn up in my serial micro fiction sagas.   There is one, in progress, about two men who live in an old conversion van, living on Little Debbie Nutty Bars and generic fruit soda.  Other characters include Buttwhack Morgan, an S and M maven, and the Von Findrich sisters, three Romanian triplets, formerly a trapeeze act, currently disabled from three cases of identical bursitis.  

The New Guru

The new guru
is not a kangaroo
no weapons in the pouch
pleasuring  the cat on the couch
no hopping here
the silk polymer from out the worm's third eye
streams up and over
synthetic silk in blue


Gushing from my soul, like striped toothpaste out  a tube of Pepsident being stomped on, the status of gurus everywhere is walking up my ass.  Are there any real ones?  Were there ever?   Are all of them desperate horn dogs who must wrap their taboo deeds of choice in cloaks of ritual and fakery?  From my searches, the facts say, "Well, folks, most often, if the dude or dude-ette don't hold to sound reason, his/her status with the occult may not be all that stellar."  Your guru might be full of shit.   Some of the creeps are con personages.  Some are incompetent assholes who can't hack it among more critical personage, such as corporate conservatives or rigorous academics.

Guess the possibility for honest exchange of goods and services should come skipping in with rose petals raining from my shabby drop ceiling.  People are able to teach one another almost anything.  Any teacher can name his/her price.  Sometimes it's free of charge, because even sick yahoos like myself will admit it can be rewarding to share information.  Business and professional networking doesn't have to be all secular.  Why, some peckerheads take pride in assisting a positive outcome.  There's nothing wrong with accepting payment for useful services.  Lots of people could use a helping hand, through the process of  divination.  How many busy corporate execs have time these days to search the numinous nooks and crannies, these overworked, money grubbing days?

Last growl form deep within the keeshkas, people have been imposing their political agendas onto everything.   One can't seem to bake bread without having to prove that the flour was powdered by party-approved, socially engineered millstone rotators.  Everyone has been forced to act as a cheering section for unwanted victories.  A guru can teach, believe it or not, without  being a card carrying liberal, socialist, humanist, and  heaven forbid he or she should discuss free market economics.  Gee it would suck if he or she didn't agree with the local partisanship, Years ago, liberals foisted their spoor onto everything.  We're not all liberals.

mini-preamble rant

If you like Bob Hope, and Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller, or Buster Crabbe, who ever, ape man, it will help like a sharpie pen to contextualize this jungle of cognition to place the facts in order.  The 'urban jungle' is a nauseating cliche.  Pittsburgh resembles one, in spots, but is for the most part new and modern.  It's going somewhere.  Not thrilled with all of it.  Anticipate melt downs up the pike for puerile zest in new construction and pro sports, UPMC as well is a pugnacious razorback hog of a medicine conglomerate. Big deal.  So was Standard Oil, and I'd guzzle martinis with their Holsteins and Herefords  any time, any where.  It's all a box of done deals.  I'm Ghandi all the way now.

It's just those dowdy, fluff-maned recollections   When I moved to the 'Burgh in the early 1990s, it was a non-Hispanic banana republic.  Few Hispanics were here, at the time, and the comparison has nothing to do with people of Spanish or indigenous ancestry.  It's the effect of a state of social dependency, nepotism, Father Knows Best socialism, protectionist family owned private enterprise, and a network of activist organizations tangled together like Karl Marx' 'rhoids, minding how he was a hairy son of a gun.  The 'Burgh, if you look past the gentrification, is still a banana republic.  A metaphor can be a prick.  This one is.

Don't Bother Cleaning Up

Someone has to say something contrary to cleanliness.  Like rivers are polluted with soap products.  Less washing is less contamination.  The expense at which urban folk keep their dream  dachas clean can be burdensome.  Think of the money that could be saved by not buying the latest toxins everyone stores under their sink.   After eight or nine years, people could have enough in their passbook account to bribe a senator.

Maybe one out of fifty weird beard scientists will support me to the tune of:   people may be losing their immunity to illness for being too clean.  Antibodies are like Sylvester Stallone, and have to have a rigorous schedule of exercise.  They need a diet of protein rich germs.  Sylvester might pump iron, your antibodies might be playing medicine ball with some E-coli now as you watch Rocky 2 on premium access television.  It's good for people.  Even if this means the ever inconvenient case of the trots.  You're still better off in the long run.  It's an investment in the future.

Since the heart is a Luddite, and the mind is still typing on a PC, it is needed a bucolic folk tale to better sell the flick.   I grew up in the Pennsylvania farming belt, and knew many a rusticated agriculturist.  This was the 1960s and 70s, days of acid rock and rustication.

A farming hamlet, most people were aware of where food comes from.   Far from being 'dirty people,' they, most, worked close to it, planting, harvesting, handing pumpkins to Appalachian workers in trucks, and most had no fear of illness.  Religions are practical, and people considered  disease to be  a gift from the All Mighty.  Their extreme proximity to cows, horses, chickens and pigs requires they be less critical than Harvard alums about what they eat for lunch.  There's this old saying, "You have to eat a bushel of dirt before you die."

Numbers are deceiving, so are memories, and conjectures are usually a buzzard.   Rubbery statistics could show people were healthier then than now.  People were at least healthier in mind in those days.  In body, there's the argument that the medical establishment has everything under control now.  In mind, again,  there are all kinds of recent medications.  I throw this in, like a pack rat, since mental hygiene, lately, seems grubbier than the fertilizers my old friends back home so often got on their coveralls.  And it is breezily conjectured that people are more prone to illness for the American obsession with cleanliness.   I'm a dirty fellow.  You can be dirtier, too.    Like Rocky, in the film, your antibodies will beat the snot out of Dolf Lundgren.

Far Flung Philosophies

The ancient Romans were not totally off base in their practice of crucifixion. People are reasonably prejudiced against the practice, since popular perceptions place it in the 'misdeeds' category, but that stems from a complex case of crucifixion.  In it's essence, it was a practical deterant to vandalism.

The self evident relationship between misconduct and consequences is one thing lacking in modern American capital punishment.  Our adversarial justice system, grown by greed and misguided hope, allows a enough time from murder conviction to execution to raise a family and buy a brand new trailer.  If we're to go that long, we might as well try forgiving the son of a bitch.  Half the time, these creeps drop dead from substance abuse faster than they could reach the electric chair at Sing Sing.  Why not skip incarceration altogether, and hope the old fella' will decide on his own to be nice?  Or, we could could speed up the process of execution.

Am I really this much of grim reaper?  Hecks no.   The point is that capital punishment should either do its job, or face corporate down-sizing.  The whole criminal justice system needs a good corporate down sizing.  If capital punishment was the best way to eliminate the most dangerous people, this writer might quietly continue discussing the matter among responsible, law abiding mini-philosophers.  Not unlike the practice of crucifixion, a quickie death by firing squad works wonders.  Ask Norway.   They killed the traitorous Vidkun Quisling by firing squad, quicker than snot in February, and you don't hear too much any more about quislings in Norway.

Always Open For Business

Okay.  I'm more or less at liberty, and you need a Rasputin.   Didn't think I'd pull this kind of stunt, did ya'?  Ayn Rand might have liked this rant.

There are these assholes, in the corporate world, private and public, in twitty NGOs, and even in the few remaining tech companies that still have cash to waste on their retarded friends.  They are called 'consultants,' and they all do something putatively miraculous for your organization.   Most are unemployed executives who founded a consulting firm.  Some of them teach you how to run your premises.  Some are completely useless jack offs.  But a guru is a lone wolf with the gift for instruction.   I'm one of these lone horse conversants.

For a set fee, I can get the gunk out of your ontology.   Not a bad slogan.

Agenda time

Hurt?  You want to know if I'm hurt?  It's as if a punk band from central Pennsylvania was doing a version of Marvin Hamlisch's lovely song, 'Memories.'  I'm dying, here.

Most of the time I spent at a nameless state university is 'too painful to remember,' such as the hours of boredom, but the soggy, colorless water paints that still run together in memory are still warm, even if Marvin went cold on us.  It was the most racist hellhole I've ever spent a few years dealing with on a daily basis.  At the end of the worst unpleasantness, I filed an affirmative action complaint, in house, and it was mishandled.  Our affirmative action officer was negligent, and all the faculty who know full well that I had faced an extreme hostile and discriminatory environment clammed up, fearful of retaliation, in spite them having both tenure and a union to protect their supposed free speech.

One of the mini-agendas, and this one is small, like a mouse's midget cousin, is to invalidate the statutes of limitation that protect colleges and other institution from action against their institutionalized bigotry.  Though there may have been a time frame in which I could have taken further action, the situation was exceptional for sheer ability to prevail against the victim.  Penniless undergrads cant' pay lawyers to fight their cases, so it is reasonable that statutes of limitation be lifted, so to allow people to recover damages long after the fact.  A college can be a real slimy bastard.   This one was.  Hint, it's in the Western corner of Pennsylvania, where racism has been alive a well forever.

Theology

There are a lot of religious fundamentalists in Pennsylvania.  In some communities, you can be stoned to death for saying "Osmond Brothers."

There are snake handling cults.  Rattle snakes.  Water mocassins.  Venomous rubber snakes they sell in tourist traps near Miami.  These zealots go into a frenzy and dance around, reciting bullshit real loud.  Sometimes they get bit.  Usually they just swell up and scream to the music.

Polygamy.  There are whole towns made up of inbred polygamists.   This adds up. Towns get bigger.   These are horny ridge runners.  When not posing in front of the tractor with their pitch forks, they are engaged in an orgy.

Religious freedom.   All for it.

Bad Teeth, Bad Luck

What can it mean when someone has an un-ingratiating smile?  It means he/she isn't perceived as swimmingly as folks who smile picture perfect enamel coated resin choppers, all equally white as sunshine.  There is inequality.  Aesthetic variety.  A motherfucker.

Lovely looking people with perfect teeth are worth a whole lot more to the US than buck toothed ragamuffins from West Virginia.  People with great hair earn a pentillion times more money than doddering chrome domes.  A scum bag with great skin will sell more Cadillacs than will some crater faced, zit factory with halo, white wings and long scepter with a star at the end.  Twinkling, for fuck sake.   People value beauty, and no one I know of forgives ugly for very long.

This can mean 'no smiling,' one of those oppressive rules that turn up in armies, orphanages and grade schools.  Or at the office, or when walking, at any age at all, one to a low three digits, down the street you live on.  It's a cruel inversion to look uglier smiling than when keeping a straight face.   Might say the problem is emotionally crippling, but that would indicate greater sensitivity than is wise to pony forth in this slummy district.   Bad teeth are ugly.  People are hostile and discriminatory towards the condition, in the same way as toward women, minorities, and people with weird medical conditions too ugly to go further warbling about.

Nostalgia, as it applies to people's sense of entitlement

A way long time ago, in the 1970s, there lived a television series called Marcus Welby, M.D.

Played by actor Robert Young, the character was wondrously successful, having planted within it the word "well," which suggests that this guy is more healing than just any scumbag general practitioner. This guy is no quack. He cared a great deal about his patients. And this is where the problem cropped up in the real world.

There was an article in Time magazine explaining how people coast-to-coast were complaining about their general practitioners. People felt that they were entitled to the sort of relationship Dr. Welby's patients had with their general practitioner, and with the nurse, who on the show was played by Helena Verdugo.     The nurses most people got  were played by anyone at all, in a real doctor's office, by a real nurse, with whom patients are not entitled to a personal relationship anymore they are entitled to play golf with  Marcus Welby, Robert Young, or their real general practitioner.

People go see the doctor when they are sick (sick sick.) There is no such thing as being entitled to a personal relationship prescribed by the television.  People generate their senses of entitlement from what they see and hear.  And get riled when bereft of what they now feel they should have had all along.

 Not for nothing, the point in diddling the past is to recognize that  any time at all, such as in the present, the same, similar, or hybrid stupidity may be at work. It is a person's duty in life see the stupid before it creeps up on him or her.  Kill your inner sense of entitlement, and you and everyone else will suffer less interpersonal grief.   Less road rage.  Fewer spouses rushed to the emergency room.  People aren't stock characters you can depend on to tickle your stick.  Most important, for now, don't let the media  make a schmuck out of you.

Rich Overhearing At The Pizza Joint Downtown

Best line of the day:  Why do you care what happens in Turkey?  This is Pittsburgh.

Yours truly at a crappy Formica table crunching pizza, sweating like Ma Rainey, hearing what's said, the cashier/server asked the universal of someone or other, don't care who, but I heard something to suggest family 'over there' and I would have loved to find out the whole package of people and places.   I got a few specks and shards.  I think the guy who cared about Turkey needed to get back to work on pizza, and I lost radio contact with the gent.  

And then the trombones and trumpets that only whisperers hear  presented their impromptu clarions and sound boffs.   The cashier who raised the most important question of the century, the one people pay gurus and institutions for, turned chatter to her work mate, and two young working women talked about a recent birth.  Not only did the broad toss out enlightenment for free, she had dropped the kid she had been carrying for my past nine months of eating pizza a few times a week there.  Good pizza.  Good to hear of a successful birth, though yours truly has  a scant gustatory relationship of getting pizza, choking it down, and fucking off. A nicer fucker might say it speaks to the family of man/woman/universe.   Even a total ass fuck might agree.   Costs nothing to live in the present, and all Bhudists should give a whistling locomotive on that.  The  Pizza Broad deserves greater honors than Bhuda, because she's here, and he might as well be in Turkey.  Case, of enlightenment, closed.

The Pizza Broad delivered

the most important message in human history, to live in the present and to work with what is here. I overheard some particulars about the zip to the hospital, leaving against medical advice, getting bitched at by a nurse, and sounds like the kid's just fine. Medical services can be brusque in the land of soda cups and cig wrappers in the weeds. The elements that raise respect in guys, for women, were gushing out of the bev dispenser. I fizzed like a soft drink for the human spirit. The pizza was grand as always. 

As intimated, and...

.....it was none of my fucking business from moment one, I'd noticed the progress of the Pizza Broad's pregnancy when folding my slice with pepperoni. Passing curiosity can be a little bastard, in a goofy man's mind, and some of it got answered, along with the need for presence. I overheard that it was her boy friend's kid as well as hers. This brought me greater schmuckoid benedictions from the hot pre-summer sun. Marriage is the leading cause of devitalization. And a bastard has greater vitality than some snotty middle class prick born into the married middle class. I went to high school. I still hate it. Out of wedlock is out of the institution of marriage, which jibes lovely with my dislike for institutions. This was a great day on which to get a slice of pizza, with pepperoni.   I can't help adoring women who spite institutions.