Sensitivity Training

Maybe you need it, maybe you don't, but help is out there for violent, verbally abusive blowhards.  I used to be a blowhard.  A non-violent one, but still obnoxious.   I've conducted behavior modifications on myself with resounding success.  You can too.  People can reform themselves into anything.  Like wet Play-Doe.

In either  case, whether to  impose an agenda or be an invertebrate slacker,  I'm conducting a sensitivity training exercise, right here, and you can at least be patient and decide later if this is horse shit.   I'm a closeted fan of the pioneering late serial killer, Ailene Wuornos.

 Nick Broomfield's documentaries about her life are an enccyclopedia, from her birth to the prosaic lethal injection.  Her whole life was a tragedy, which feeds my sub-thesis that horrible crimes have a natural tendency to surface as modern folklore, and, subsequently, main stream entertainment.    It's stupid not to enjoy a television broadcast that you are in the process of seeing and hearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhXssXJLsf8

It's a truly brilliant, real-tear jerking documentary.  L-chaim.   The point of all this is to share my sensitive horse whisperings.   Ailene Wuornos was the Virginia Woolf of road side homicide.  She was the world's first stream of consciousness murderess, and this is very important.    Seven Sisters  post-graduates should be lining around the block to reward me for this observation.     I'm an asthmatic wonderboy!

I was meaning to raise another sub-theme, the old issue of mixing agendas.   An example is to teach people to be humane and sensitive.  Another bane is the way in which affirmative action may protect a rabid rhinosaurus' from a healthy peacock.    People invented the joke that artists are sensitive, or, more responsive than you are to other people's pain and suffering.   I've met a lot of artists, and the premise is horse shit.  There is no relationship between artistic talent and compassion for fucked up losers.    For true, I support most feminist objectives, graciously.  The beef is the abuse of faith, based on fallacy that  poor faith is acceptable when it is for the cause.  Given time and critical mass, is morphs into sleaze.

Fun with Middle East

Nigh on six thousand years ago, in Judea, there lived a highly advanced culture of Hebrew Americans.   The origins of Diet Coke trace back to this frenetic civilization.  Though not the first people to have a written language, they were the first to introduce a graduated pricing plan.   Not only was Jesus born in the region, Neil Diamond's and Shecky Green's chromosomes were there, gathering critical mass.  At present, Christians, Muslims and Jews all feel entitled to this  putative point of origin, which makes peace over there seem as likely as pleasure at the dentist's office.  This is no better or worse than daily life in the US or anywhere else, short of Colorado.  Look at all the crap we have to worry about.  Take note of shootings, bigotry, and mass incarceration.  And no one institutes  mind control better than our own Federal spooks.
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It's Bibi, over there, that has me feeling like Perry the Imp, secretly visiting, so to synchronize all the clocks on nuclear weapons.  If he's going to kick off WW3, it would be an awful shame for the fireworks to go off at the wrong time.  No one deserves to be disappointed on the 4th of July, and I'm not sure if I could live with a clumsy Armageddon.

Short Fiction: Caught Up

Two close friends were walking down Liberty Avenue, deep in conversation. It doesn't matter what they were talking about, because it's all bullshit, but the two were engaged in talk, they had bonded with an environmentally safe, easily dissolved adhesive and they both loved clever bistros. Both men were married, to women, and they didn't care if people thought they were a gay couple. It isn't a pejorative  Their views on life would be perfectly acceptable if this was happening now, but it was back when a certain someone was living there. Round '91. The dark side.

It was theater. The two men had seen a show together at the Benedum Theater.  It was splendid;  they both laughed, cried and thought about what they saw and heard on stage. It had been a gala afternoon for them.

They were deep in a conversation about A Street Car Named Desire, which is why they didn't see the procession a few blocks ahead, in front of Planned Parenthood. There were people standing in front. As the men filed through them, they were taken by surprise.

The pro-lifers were carrying baby coffins around, pacing in a figure eight pattern, lenghtwise up and down the sidewalk. There should have been an ordinance against this, because it was obstructive. When the men cleared the on lookers, they were caught, separately, in the two enclosures formed by the figure eight composed of pro-lifers, carrying baby coffins. Separated from each other, and trapped inside twin orbs of resistance to abortion, they could only stand captive as the dotted line of fanatics carried their little caskets.

Both men were thinking the same thing, that if that sideways symbol of infinity would go away and let them finish talking about Street Car, it would be grand. The curtain fell on their like-minded thinking. They died. The pro-lifers had planned a show-stopping demonstration, something they hadn't tried before. One of them gave the signal, and the figure eight stopped walking, raised their coffins over their heads, and began slamming them on the protester in front of them, beating each other and the caskets to splinters. It worked out perfectly, with the caskets all busting up at the same time, and it looked spectacular. Nobody's casket was a dud, but the two theater buffs panicked, started hitting people, and had to be shot by police. 

New Poem:

Turning My Watch Forward

springing forward to appease traffic

day circumcision indicates less one hour...

scissor job on time shanks perception

there's this fresh goal of clearing away the dead

wine bottle weather strikes Ultra-Target in the temple

tidy defenestration follows

for which we later feel arthritis

we get bunions of conscience while zipping in a power chair

the clusters of luck that enrich those most deserving Spring Time

can not be conserved

just replaced fast and cheap

I never worry

people don't have nukes

no one's crazy

Short Fiction and a Poem

Work Issues

At least two ferrets get squished most years. Stanley performs the stunt each year with his dozen ferrets. It's a fantastic spectacle when he releases them. He does other stunts besides the ferrets, animal acts and what have you. But it's my favorite part of his parties, those chocolate brown and pure white cousins of the weasel running in all directions. He waits until people are pretty wasted, then the ferrets come charging into the room. It's well understood and tolerated that people might have to step on one from time to time, purely by accident, and it isn't pretty. And it isn't without consequence.

His father bought him a yacht. Sometimes he rents big cats for his parties, and is able to bring in every type of Pygmy goat bred for amusement. I've been a member of his entourage for a couple of months now. We have to cramp inside the cabin and let Stanley do his animal act. As always, I blame myself for acting as a sort of  enabler, and it's a really cruel self judgment. Not entirely fair. It may be revolting that an entourage supports the behavior of certain maniacs. But there are, yet, rival opinions. Some free-market economists may agree with me that I provide a service. A social service. In this case for a person I met when I was in college.

Most of us met at the state University where most often are sent the lowest achieving of the upper-middle-class.
Stanley was anomalous, proving the value of diversity. But everyone's anomalous. Even the most xeroxed of persons filling an entourage such as Stanley's.We met in a philosophy class. Maybe there was some sort of bonding. Again maybe I was being simply rewarded with cash and drugs to allow Stanley and some of his other friends to behave as they so wished. I can be an amusing bastard when I'm in the mood. I learned about the importance of joining an entourage from the Andy Warhol contingent, not that I ever met any of them. It's popular culture. Recent history. The postmodern age. People who are marginal by nature tend to form entourages around the more charismatic and influential figures who happen to be slumming in proximity.

I feel bad again for sort of being the "goat" at the last party on Stanley's yacht. They say everyone's number comes up, and this applies to everything. Like when it's simply "your turn." Stanley and all the other people are actually being very nice about it. But I'm feeling emotionally worse for wear.

At the last party. I accidentally stepped on one of the ferrets. Everyone has been calling to comfort me and remind me that it's happened to everyone at one time or other. But there you are at the social gathering with everyone laughing and making love on a couch in a yacht cabin, lanky rodents leaping on people's backs and stomachs and legs, burrowing under people's blanky and rolling around. So I get hungry, get up to get a slice of pizza, it's this really wonderful white pizza with balsamic vinegar from some Casbah even God couldn't get to without a pass, and then there's the accident. There is fur and blood on my terribly costly sandals, and you might say there is egg my face, even though it wasn't my fault. It was just my turn to be embarrassed in front of everybody. But I'm a professional. I am a professional member of an entourage. I think I'll be able to recover my position. 

Progressing Nicely

All boney 6 feet should lank along behind our leader
in spite of the food
the air could use a zap of perfume
the whole spazzing entourage from the days of Camelot
holding Holstein spotted suitcases
drifts like a comet
deflated bodybuilders take to wearing garish lipstick
teenyboppers following in wheelchairs
crinkling through the fallen leaves