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.

Processing Mystery

Being a nonbeliever might or might not botch relations with theists.    Note how unpopular the topic can be, in the media.   Mysticism is veiwed by some as sinful.   Which a nonbeliever should feel at liberty to refute.  Or not, since there is mala en se, things inherently  rotten, God or no, in which case atheists and Christians should like each other, at least a little.    Being an atheist might mean rejecting superstition and the supernatural, along with the dogmatic refusal to worship a 'god figure.'   Talismans and amulets are reduced to 'witchy' looking things, having no power other than interest value and aesthetic value.  I've loved mysterious objects, antiques, suits of armor, paintings, sculpture  since a tot, had the beginnings atheism by the age of four, am currently interested in the humanities, and like this was bedtime for a famous chimpanzee, it is time to discuss a theory about the arts.

Art objects have been said to convey a mystique.  Albert Einstein once said that mysterious things are beautiful  With the supernatural safely out of the way, individuals might simply enjoy the aesthetics of mysticism.  There is a demand for it, since people  seek out tarot readers, fortune tellers, and gurus to help them, in some way, with their relationship with the occult. Or with the ordinary, by way of the occult.  It can work all ways, except for supernatural.   Mysticism is entertainment. And is a service industry.  A scintilla of my theory is that art is best reduced to goods and services, in response of the failure of secular humanism.  Art doesn't exist for it's own sake. Both art and mysticism are best bargained with in terms of entertainment value and as personal/social service.  

An artist is a mystique provider.   He/she fabricates talismans.   There is always demand for  imported exotic voodoo trappings.  This demand is supplied by both painters such as Picasso or Warhol, and by retail companies like Pier One Imports.  The less humanism people apply, the more heart.  Economics is emotion.  People evolved on the planet, and arrived at their polymorphous cultures.  The new view of the occult is that it's an  acrylic nail parlor.    All nail parlors have an inherent mystique.

poem: The Benefits of Drinking With Your Neighbors

It's a good idea to listen to old Irishmen
this alcoholic who managed a rooming house
was liquid mnemonic tales
talking in a chair
had the net effect of a powder blue Cadillac
owned two conservative suits
one pair of Bostonians
one ash tray
nothing out of place
he had pecuniary skill in drinking with rich old ladies
 
a pastoral stint in the hoosegow
a practical stint in Korea
hearing memory always gets heard in stints
etherised
 into a guy talking
etherised
into listening
it took that year in a rooming house
to benefit permanently
all the temperance in the world can't fix a crack in the Milky Way

fiction: Horst Kunkel

So there's me racing down I-90 on the bike, in my expensive as heck Nudie jacket. Some scuzz stole it off Sheb Wooly, then sold it to me. I'm a schmuck. Don't matter. Sheb ain't in no condition to get his old country singing duds back. To the buggers go the spoils. Got a recording contract with these people I met at what used to be my trailer park. Formed a record company, whatever that means. Maybe they got a tape recorder. Doesn't matter. Soon as I get to the West Coast, first thing I'll do is pawn this Superbowl Ring I got off a junkie (I got the better of that deal, I can tell you) and get me a guitar, all in one visit to the pawn shop. Done this a lot of times over the past fifty years, starting and stopping the wheels of Western music. It's always something grizzly crops up. Dead spouse. Trailer conflagrations. Some shit heel allegation. 

I'm a song writer, pretty half-famous, working on the legend. Don't tell no one, it's a big secret, but anyone can be a legend, if they are truly a weasel. People think with their eyes, and one look at my outfit, they like my songs, usually about desperados stealing stuff and making love. I think my tune 'Brokeback Studs' is gonna be a hit. It's about two cowboys who take a shine to each other. It's novel, but my public is ready. So am I. I noticed guys like my outfit better than do the gals, which proves I'm a man, and they are music fans. Say, that rhymed. It's in my next tune.

When I was a young son to a traditional biker mom and pop, it seemed all anyone needed was a guitar and Harley to be free and clear of life’s injection molded polystyrene limitations. There used to be honor in taking blows, giving some back, maybe doing a short stretch in durance vile, but a person could be true to themselves and their people, without joining some pussy country club and dumping wads into campaign funds. Every time I resumed my stalled country singing career, another Lincoln Log would fall loose from the oak toy box that contains our lives. Times have been changing faster than even a scrap yard poet can keep up with. But I will be the Poet on the Crotch Rocket till the Second Coming. 

Wait. That’s the hooch talking. I’m fucked. Would believe I can bench press four hundred pounds, and some pussy social worker has me by the nuts? The boys and me have been practicing at this warehouse some yuppie assholes converted into ‘lofts,’ we got a few of my songs down, tape recorder running, Little Angelo running this mixing board he got off a parked touring bus, me wearing my trade mark Nudie regalia. My new love interest, Colevia, a big woman, some say ‘the wrong persuassion,’ not so, it’s the right one, ask little Horst, came into my planetary orbit just a few weeks ago. We’re an item. A complex one. She has a rack of young’ns and is under professional supervision. 

Only times we can get it on is when she has a rack of her elder kin watching her hacienda, so she’s allowed to come over to my trailer. When I come calling at her place, Meyer has to be there, every minute, watching and writing in his black floppy log book. All the kids have to be spaced no closer than two couch cushions apart, and in the darkest of embrolios past, a few of her people have to be clear on the other side of the room, in a single chair. There’s been some shenanigans in that vast domestic moiety. 

The wee tad of communications between myself and my newest lady friend aside, all there is to me and her is little skinny Horst (on great big me) and deep, cavernous and much prevailed upon Colevia, where the rubbers meet the road. I ain't the type of man that takes interest in young'ns, and hers are no exception. Bad seeds. There ain't no doctorate in humanistic psychology on my trailer wall. And I ain't been convicted of nothing by a thready list of assaults against other big, hairy men, most notably, rival scooter scum. Note I ain't putting myself above my class. I'm in it, same as the rest of the cycle community, and I ain't doing nothing creepy. So here's something, just for good measure: 

I have this cultivated animosity towards perverts. A perve is someone with a sick obsession, and the will to be a piece of slime in a world of people not buying it. That's one of the things, people that is, who earned Colevia a court ordered intruder name of Meyer. Seems a number of men in her life had an interest in young'ns, so even a nice guy like me has to get interviewed, alone, with Colevia, and with her and her kids together, in order for us to see each other outside an integrated jail system. That's meant having to placate Meyer. You should see me go with the platitudes. "Any man does wrong to her or hers, I'll pull up on the Harley and make sour mash out'a people's head," I told the young social worker just the other day. He just kept quiet and made a note in his floppy black log book. Then, this morning, I get a phone call. Meyer wants to see me in his office.

My daddy, Secretariat C. Kunkel, would say to me, when he was swinging my ass over and across the sissy bar on his Harley, "Horst, croaking is one of the few things in life that's is impossible to regret."

And like there was some type of instant replay device in nature, the same stupid vision comes to mind when death crops on the menu of concerns. It's as if you could determine, while dead, that you got a raw deal. Colevia is born again, and won't hear of this shit, since she's going straight up to the abalone shells and blinking neon, and it's a rift between us, but Secretariat was right, as family dictates. This is not to suggest anyone in the Kunkel family is any type of puss. There's no easy pickins against the secular spirit. All three hundred pounds of Horst Kundel has regrets, but they don't take carry-ons at the bone yard. And here's as close as this fella'a gets ta' Ghandi.

I regret being the type of biker who has emotional entanglements. Never mind Colevia and her side show of progeny, cause all that's Romper Room compared to what's cropped up between me and Meyer, the pimple faced, strand-haired social worker. Fucking prick and me made a break through. 

         SOON THIS TALE WILL CONTINUE...