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.