Mikey Mumbawumba the the Tale of His Haitian Guitar

I will get to the bad news, it's bullshit, Mikey is a lying asshole, has been since his late mother chose not to abort him, bad decision.    The prick was able to perpetrate deception in utero.  It was his fault she felt so horribly blue during her laborious pregnancy to a charming and brutal gambler.   Human personality traits are that deeply knitted in the primordial dust kitties of  DNA.  Think of the double helix as a loosely woven scarf.  In garish fruit colors.  And purple broad brimmed hats.  Even as a zygote he was gas lighting his own mother.

Mikey was doing an acoustic set, and had to make some hairy deal out of it beyond his singing and playing.   Everyone was doing it, one way or other.   Local torch songstress Lavoris Crackman, with the pink healed over bullet hole in her massive cloven chin, would go into long winded monologues about growing up next to a hair dresser.   People would find a seat in the beauty parlor, lift a magazine from the end tables, and die of a heroin overdose.  It's still exactly that depressing around the corner of Herron and Webster Avenue.  But these days, people don't dress up as much.

It was hard to explain why Mikey Mumbawumba was compelled to perform a set of popular broadway show tunes on an acoustic guitar.   Cognitive dissonance is part of an explanation.  There were people at large, on television, doing something similar, for reasons unknown.  It's enough to know that some sort of shit was well received by someone somewhere.  That gives people febrile hope that the same thing will work out for them.  That's a start, but it's not quite enough.

Mikey's guitar was,he told the audience, a Haitian relic from a machete massacre, during which thatch huts were burned, necks were severed like sugar cane, itty bitty babies were used as field hockey balls.   There was a wizard in the village who would play the very Haitian guitar Mikey had with him that evening.  The wizard gave Mikey the guitar, but on a nice afternoon.  Less mayhem.  Nice day to get a free guitar.  Everyone should visit the island of Haiti once in a while.  Mikey began his set with 'Everything's Coming Up Roses.'

What we all need right now is more ugly buildings on the Northside....

I can see the counterpoints.   Aren't there ugly buildings all over creation, like Allegheny Center, and countless inert looking high rise apartment buildings?   Hasn't the inherent natural beauty been soiled by real estate disposition, all over Pittsburgh?  Why is some dolt saying new high rise apartment complexes are the thing to do right now?


Let's talk about the minimum wage, and the service economy that employs stupid, warty, pimply people.  The cost of housing is excessive, all around, but to the low earning scuzz muffins of our land, the burdensome cost of housing permanently destabilizes them.   They have to go on welfare to survive, and have scads of retarded kiddies, just so they can get disability benefits, so they can all collectively pay the rent or mortgage.  Also, people like that have to move in and out of cities, looking for work.     We all need low cost housing, in order to civilize the inevitable low wage worker.

Cheap housing is the only hope for quality of life.   It s also the only hope for a growing economy at the working class level.  I'm proposing the next wave municipal construction be geared expressly to enable the poor folk to earn, spend, and enter into small business.  It is necessary to reduce the cost of living to make this beneficial.   Small business will function better, will be able to sustain better human resources, if said resources has cheap ass housing.  Cheap housing means more spendable income among the wee folk.  And don't forget, there has been a beef trail of high end real estate development all over town just waiting to fail in business and cost the tax payers a fortune.  Why not beat the band for once, and open a trend that makes sense?

'Clean' is completely assinine

Of course people are sick.  No natural immunity.  Soon as a new kind of illness comes to town and  unloads it's smart leather valise over top mankind, everyone is sneezing and rushing to the emergency room, reporting to the doctors what's wrong.  They get sick, because they are too fucking clean.

 "Some filthy germ is invading my pristine, gorgeous body," the modern hygienic soul wails.  "And it's so wrong,"  twits will continue.   "When I keep my house and everything within a thousand yards of me completely sterile, using hot water, soap, and commercial disinfectants.  I shower eighteen times a day, using body wash that is 98% bio-engineered, recombinant DNA that kills microorganisms, all of them, like Obama toying with his drones, and let's God sort them out.   And now I have the flu."

  It's so wrong.  That's why I quit bathing as often as I used to, and I very rarely wash the dishes here.  I don't sweep the floor.  Trash piles up.  Aging neglected unrefrigerated foods transform themselves from solid to ooze.  The place is revolting, but I almost never get sick, because for the last hermetic, grimy twenty five years, I've been building up immunities by living in my own filth.  People are stupid for washing dishes.  

Don't clean.  You won't get sick as much.  You'll get used to it.

Polar Mission

Certain poor miserable neurotics think in polar opposites.  Everything with these people comes in a bookend arrangement of extremes.  Without many books in between.  Just the instant contention between two opposing forces.  It a bellicose form of Zen. An irritable yin and yang.  It's a budget form.  This is a dollar store.  I am a dollar store, and this is now.

Liberals versus conservatives.   The alt-right staring like a rabid Doberman at members of alt-left.  If one singular nitwit is alone in a room, considering all the yelling between opposing political fringe groups, and, to be nice, pretend this prick cites sources, uses his reference materials, he even has hard bound authoritative sources from when door to door salespersons crept the Earth during the Eisenhower admin, the son of a bitch is still unable to think or speak outside the form of a dialogue between two schools of thought, and each side wears a snotty looking ivy league uniform.
Even the invisible chorus in our own dreams has to wear a forest green felt beanie.  Even the fucking chorus has to compete against a louder, ruder one singing across the street.

This is why I'm working so fucking hard today to overcome internalized polarity.  I'm not, for now, evening blaming anyone for it, even if the New World Order wants the masses fucked in the head, and in tandem, powerless.  Though I think otherwise, evil cabals may not by waging war against low earning humankind.  But one thing is certain:  People have been divided.  One way of dividing them is to demonize ethnic/interest groups, so to mill up hatred and internal strife.  Women are sometimes taught to hate and harbor animosity towards men.  Radicals have been taught to fight against capitalism.  Other suburban milk-heads were exhorted to fight commies.  But bringing it near to now as it gets, the last election polarized Hillary and Donald.  All this stupid piece of work right on the blog here is doing is proposing a fresh peachy new way to live with it.

If I wasn't me, I would have been Bing Crosby.  Here goes.  All people, places and things can be polarized in one simple, affordable way.  It's reduced to two archetype personage.  All people are either a Charles Lindbergh type, or they are Bruno Richard Hauptmann.  The latter type earns less.  No one wants to see Bruno types on television, unless they are under arrest.  Charles types are all super elite, ever wanted, always loved  heros, with the new affirmative action guidelines strictly enforced.  Black people can be Lindberghs, no problem, so all African Americans, male or female, also transgender and gay, can be a positive, productive, accomplished high-living  eugenicist, just like the late Charles Lindbergh.  All bad people  act like Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and deserve to go to jail. Or get the chair.  People worry too much.  They make everything too fucking complicated.

Evolution: A Whimsical Origin of Species Suppliment

Sure people remember intelligent design, if fuzzy, round about it asserts The All
Mighty may have created Earth, Sky and us through a circuitous and divine  pre-ordained course of evolution.  Fans of this movement wanted to get intelligent design squeezed under politically correct, mystically hygienic radar and into public schools, where the more openly religious creationism was banned, for being discriminatory.   Holy rollers want their form of religion taught in schools.  People wanted to keep kids believing in the supernatural, and adults believing in what church leaders tell them to do.  If schools teach Darwin's evolution, that might undermine church authority.  Intelligent design is a compromise between faith and science, for reasons of keeping the former from giving the latter some type of cosmic coupe de gras.  People are desperate to keep religion in schools.

The stardust is under contention.   Darwinism got panned by some church groups for cutting the All Mighty out of the origin of us, while outright creationism was too conjectural for mainstream science.  If I was  a lot more superstitious than now, I'd munch a few fried pork derivatives  with intelligent design.  Not on the house menu.  Indigestible.

Nice try though.  Intelligent design keeps the church in the driver seat, no matter how people danced out of the elements and turned up last night, downtown, having a breaded chicken sandwich someplace common.   But I don't begrudge those who entertain intelligent design.  I'm sure most advocates are fun to drink with.  This isn't a diatribe.  I'm not being a pecker-head.  Just a dreamer.  Groups like the Everly Brothers used to sing about this type of personality disorder.

  My assertion is that the differing races of people evolved independent of each other, each in it's time frame.  Once whatever comes up the chain before people reaches evolutionary bingo, it is able to mate with members of it's own species.  Each species evolves until such time as it can have puppies with dogs from another country.   In the case of doggies, Great Danes evolved where they cropped up.  Chihuahuas evolved in their arid home vistas, while collies,like Lassie, volunteered for sheep watching on yet another place on the map.  All doggies can mate with one another and make puppies together ( as with people) and they didn't all originate from one single hereditary change, rather evolution takes place as the environment best allows, how ever mutating critters live and screw.   Exactly how is their business.  I'm not the type to intrude.

Evolution yields animals like us in neatly ordered species typings.  In file folders of animals that do the wild thing together, and have babies. Evolution is like a librarian.  Hence the female archetypes for God.  She's a maven for the Dewey Decimal system, but she is managing the fate of Earth and Man.  Evolution is  both random and at the same time, an obsessive compulsive old shrew.  But the system works.

If there's anything to this grab bag of cognition, Asians evolved in Asia, Africans evolved Africa, Milk-heads emerged from central Europe.  Jews and Arabs evolved in the Middle East, sharing genes with other ethnic marvels along the way.  Diversity is grand.   All races can have kids together,any way, any how, in any of six thousand variations of the sex act, and if that doesn't work, there's test tubes and incubators.  No decent recent modernist would object to anything living or breathing, what with all the hub bub round the globe.   Our window displays of diversely evolved humankind dictate that any way in which people live and breath is hunky dorry, unless we are talking about the worst of assholes.  Evolution grows bad eggs, same as good ones.  It's a hereditary bitch. So's the popular opinion that all people have a common source of origin.  I don't think that's the case.  People grew up all over.  In their time.  In their diversely differing global 'hoods.  If you believe in Creationism, that's fine.  You're cool.

I Hate Food

Having to eat is one handicap everyone has.  After thousands of years, science hasn't figured  a way out of this expensive nuisance. It's costly to eat, and  yields unreliable results.   Some foods make you ill right out of the box, such as with food poisoning.  Others cause slow declining health, like Twinkies, or fast food.  Purported healthy foods may or may not do what they claim.   I still have niggling confidence in fruits and vegetables, but, if you saw the flick One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, the same is said of patients at the state hospital.   They might get out and do well in life, but don't bet the farm on it.

This brings discussion to specifics of flavor.  If your food budget is as sickeningly tight as mine is, there are few specifics.   Very little of it distinguishes edible A from comestible B.  Nothing on the home menu is all that stellar.  Exceptional flavor, or, food sensuality, costs a fortune.  Cheap foods are there to keep you alive, and it is not responsible for your happiness.  This is what free market economists say about the government.   You have the right to live, you don't have the right to enjoy it.  Food is, in this way, much like the US Constitution.

For a solution, best I can figure is to either marry well or get a decent job.  Having failed to do either, food will remain lousy here in Casa Reisner.   There are worse problems than taciturn victuals.  Other inconveniences.  We eat.  We crap.  I wish neither fact was so damn intransigent.  I'd rather not do either.

Dialectic Materialism and National Fuck Up

Using a lovely and popular unnamed banking institution for an example, one could make a case that over the last sixty years the banking biz morphed from capitalism to communism.  The local bank gives it's customers no interest on their pass book account, while it donates generously to the Burgh's sinister cabal of nonprofit agencies.  It also has a professional sport field  named for it, which connects the bank and the sport to city planning, which is also a cabal of city government, nonprofit agencies, and a banking industry in pink shorts.   To some political minds, communism exists in the form of affiliated government and non-government agencies.  In the twilight of the pre-cold war, banks lent money to private business models and paid depositors interest on their accounts.  The new model still lends dough, but the working model is disturbingly borsht and vodka.  Note alarming trends in socialized caviar.

Some cow pokes are intimating there is a mass conspiracy, oozing and sweating a master plan in the Federal Reserve and anywhere else the power elites meet and greet.   Your modern freaky deaky rightist may be suggesting that the real estate melt down of 2008 was the result of a government agenda to wipe out the free market middle class, that home mortgage lending practices were the missiles, and defaulted loans were the kaboom.  That's an awful load of marginalized pop dogma just for a lead in to dialectic materialism.  You're a champ for hanging in this long.

I don't think you'll break your beak on too many intellectual rightists.  Among these rare pussy cat swallowtail types, there is lisping discourse on the practice of dialectic materialism.  In short, the method is to teach the ways of business and industry to the poor and oppressed, who then infiltrate business and industry, bringing their portfolio of social justice agendas into the shop along with their lunch box and Maoist military cap.  Yoko Ono used to enjoy wearing one, back in the hippie days.  The new business model is socialized under government guidelines and is re-purposed.  We no longer need nifty luxury items and a high standard of living.  Business and industry is there to support the advancement of interest groups.   And, as rightists bore everyone with at parties, social models are horribly inefficient.  It's evident here.  Milton Friedman's economics don't go over for shit these days, are are not in anyway a quick fix for fucked macro econ.   I don't really believe much of anything.  With the Donald yammering about re-inventing free market economics, least a cowboy can do is jaw on it across the campfire.  Non-aligned misfits should join in.  Winos warmly invited.  I love it when migrant workers play their accordions, all camped out between the river and the railroad tracks.   Free speech is groovy.   Too bad it don't pay shit.

Don't mind. Alzheimer's. My mind is wandering a little, and I seem to be belching up Platitudinous Bullshit!

Equality is a pink fuzzy rabbit trap.  


To deny that group A got better results than group B may be stupid.  The Rolling Stones were superior to Paul Revere and the Raiders.  You can prove this by selling used vinyl out the back of an old conversion van.

If you sell coffee, and you hire stupid baristas, it may reduce cash flow.

To be subordinate to a shit head is to feel like your lucid angelic mind is an affront to policy.   Stupid people reject good ideas.  They also enforce bad ones.

Over fifty years ago I heard the folk maxim "foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."  Not words to live by.  Words to remember to avoid stupid bastards where possible.

People who produce valuable goods and services are usually too busy to worry about who's President.  Or, at least too busy to spend the whole day being a prick about everything.

More platitudes on request.  Or when I think more up.   Love, love, love.  And over.

Stop insisting you know it all, and listen to people who are really playing with a full deck...

Today's quazi-German sermon is about deferring to greater expertise.   I'm not of German heritage.  It's illusory non-nonsense, for rhetorical purposes.  I'm histrionic.  Anything said with terse authority seems Germanic to me, and this is, for certain, pure media influenced prejudice.  I watched Hogan's Heros from it's genesis.  The neuro-window-dressing could be put out with the weekly paper refuse.   And yet it augments sound reason.  Like leather seats improves your driving experience.

At large  a  daunting national crisis in validity and competence  makes people speak with florid equivocation.   People are assholes for assuming their own cache of knowledge is just fine the way it is, or, worse, is superior to that of people more soundly in the know.  Dim wits have been taught to believe they are entitled to status as smart fuckers.  College teaches people they are bright, exceptional, and deserving of wealth in excess of ditch diggers.  I'm neutral on wage scales, for the nonce, because this is another one of my asshole free market econ puff pieces, and I don't really believe much of this shit will materialize in four to eight years.  There's some theoretical shit I feel should be translated into popular memes.

Social business models operate under an assumption that interest groups are entitled to advance in society by process of dialectic materialism.  They learn the ways of lucrative big business and then assume executive, mid-management, and labor positions with-in business and industry. They assume political power.   The same process is repeated in reforming government.   In an oiled working model, women and minorities replace industry and government through dialectic materialism.  There's a catch.  It only works when people's brains are sympatico with the job description.  The national crisis would make a dandy country western song hook, like 'there are shit heads put in high places, and fucking with everyone's mind.'

These affirmative action hires are fucking up business and industry, both public and private.  The Fed isn't running on all eight cylinders.  This frivolous quazi-German sermon focuses on incompetent people in high places, and people taught to think they are better than the best of egg heads.  Fuck them.  They aren't.

Cranking out election time theories like the Christmas fairy tales social science thrives on

My misanthropic theory, for this December asphalt arteriole arcing toward Christmas, is the Stinking Hypocrite Theory.   It states that social progress is a doomed proposition because liberals, progressives and socialists are as greedy, bigoted and criminal as anyone else.  If they have an agenda to advance status of minority groups, they at the same time despise and fear the minority.  And are aware that the minority poses danger to them.  For added complexity, people are diversely hypocrites.  Some are acting out of fear that the minority will whoop their ass worse if they don't advocate for them.  Other socialists have the foresight to see that their high salary can best be attained by forming a charitable institution, and bilking it.

In the film Wallstreet, capitalist pig archetype Gordon Gecco says,"Greed is good."  It isn't good, but socialists are as greedy as capitalists.  With social methods so often publicly funded, the leftist model of greed means paying social execs  a premium while withholding cash from the poor.  Too sad that equality is such a bore.  Even socialists know that if you give enough money to poor people, they morph into the middle class and upward.  Then they develop the same political influence as the majority's.   On a time line, eventually peoples' lawn and garden parties get combative.  Lawn jockeys are over-turned.  Swimming pools get peed in.   Membership in country clubs gets unruly.  People's kids get knocked up.

Then comes the bad news.   The newly minted middle class, from out of Motel Six and into the gated communities, is as flawed as the old middle class that invented the new one.  A vortex action flushes everyone downward.  Happy Holidays.  The old guard of conservative thinkers believe that free market methods better enable the advancement of women and minorities than do social methods, for reasons I'm trying to explain.  The Stinking Hypocrite Theory is my own special little crock.  Thanks for reading.

Hope you enjoy this and benefit, in some way, from, it......

...But I'm posting my old theory here, so there's a record of it, with a date when first yelped out from the airborne dust specks of Whoville.  I want credit for a butt-kicking cool 'origin of the behavior' theory.  I want the Prize, damn it, the fucking Prize.  It always goes to some jerk.  Okay, Bob Dylan deserved one.  Obama didn't.  Paul Krugman didn't.  Never mind.  ADHD.  I jump topics.  My theory i-i-i-i-is:

Some people, not all, a relative few, have a hereditary tendency to pontificate.  I'm like that my self.  Once I get on a subject, I have to talk about it.   I want to expand on the subject, and relate the subject to other subjects, for comparative analysis.   It could be any subject at all, once I'm on the SOB, I am compelled to talk about, and to convince people of it's validity.  For now, let's talk about how an organic tendency effects the practice of religion.

The biggest chunk of my theory is that the practice of religion has been formed by individuals born with the gene for pontification.  An individual with said genetic tendency might find an outlet for the tendency by preaching religion.  I believe it is a hereditary trait that makes Southern Baptists boogie to gospel rock and roll, and makes Jews sit painfully bored listening to their Rabbi.  Rabbis, some of them, have the gene.  I'm not saying religion itself originates from the gene, it is the way it is practiced.  Religion is directed by people holding the gene delivering long, passionate sermons.  If it wasn't  about religion, it would be science that someone won't shut up about, and who demands everyone capitulate.  I'm suggesting that academic science is directed by people most inclined to argue the subject.  The way shit is taught in college may be a product of a gene to pontificate about the subject.

There.  Now fuck me pink.  When you are not working for a college or a church, people have to dump their goofy cognition here, on a blog.  The slums of the human intellect.  I thought of this shit all by my fucking self.  And don't give shit about the 'God gene,'  I didn't think of it, and it isn't relevant here.  The God gene renders people amenable to the existence of the supernatural.   Big fucking deal.  It's the fuckers who convince people of its validity.  They have the gene I'm cherry picking here.  I have the gene, too.  I'ts why I get to be such a fucking bore.

Wahoo, My Search For Inner Peace Landed Carp

No where to fish but  the aquarium.    Whirly with fly reel across the rugs.  A dainty plunk.  Bubbles.   The burbling of the electric water airation assembly.   Your catch is small and not well regarded by commercial fisherman.  You, sir, are not a champ.  You are a small fry.  I have been told this so often I came to believe it.  I keep it to myself.  I hide my emotions under a size four and half Stetson.

Perplexed.   I had ordered from ebay.com a stainless steel biker ring that was supposed to look like the Hindu god Ganesh, and I received what looked like scrap metal from a terror incident.  It was miscast.  Or so it looked.  It was ugly.   No further comment.  No, I mean no detail could be seen.  It was not Ganesh, the elephant headed, person bodied, lotus poised Hindu honcho.  But there occurred to me a precept:  What if I had gone short term vision impaired, the day the ring came in the mail?  That idea came just now.  Until that doubt cropped up:

Suppose there was a mass of soot from having cast a highly detailed image of Ganesh still clinging to the stainless steel likeness?   And over a three day period a non-Hindu man wears the ugly formless-looking ring?  And over that time, the soot wears off of the ring?  It was like an episode of the Twilight Zone.  First, I wrote back to ebay, complaining that I received a shitty ring.

I set the lousy, formless, ugly ring by the computer, found the 'return policy,'  went through it, took and sent pictures of the ugly ring, with part of my mug behind it cause I used a web cam, and two days later I got my money back, easy, breezy, cheesy.   The seller said I didn't have to return the ring, and was gracious about the refund.  I had been gracious in my return procedure communications.  I feel almost honorable for being so post-free-trade-agreement hip. ' Look at me negotiate on the Internet.'  So there's that asshole ego, that stupid media saturated mentality that I would honestly like to overcome, fucking with my pale, over-stimulated little mind.  Boo hiss, you soon will agree is in order.  Here is why:

As soon as I determined, in the My Ebay section of the web site, that I got my money back and still owned the ring, and I wasn't going out any place nice, I had no reason not to wear the ugly, shitty ring.  There is no one here to dislike the appearance, or to like a pretty one, for that matter.  I'm a free agent, on the dim side of the moon.  Folks don't all beam from the same power grid.  So as I wore the ring, and figited about as I normally do, neurotic, OCD, I'm always fishing in my pockets, like a dork, the soot on the Elephant deity came off, atom by atom, so it took most of week for the detail in the ring to emerge.  But as it emerged, I took notice, in short snips, like an ADHD case.  On the final day of transformation, I had placed my right mitt on a door frame and leaned forward to look at something that had fallen on the floor.  Doesn't matter what.  An old gas bill.  Could mean something.  From the spirit world.  Just before picking up the bill, I noticed the ring in front of my puss.  All the detail in the ring had emerged, the rest of the dirt had fallen off, and Ganesh was looking right at me, giving me the message of inner peace.  "Took you long enough," Ganesh told me.  "You're not wrapped too tight, are you, junior?" he said.

Perplexed again, I asked, "But Ganesh, you are all about peace, it seems that you are P.O.ed at me."

Ganesh smiled, bowed his great head from the lotus position and said, "Back home we eat shit like you for lunch."

There's a moral to the story, if you don't mind wiping off the soot.  A belated message of inner peace doesn't sound as good as when you land one more promptly.   One should be quick about shit.

A Word Crawled Up My Butt, And It Really Wants Out

The word is 'narrative.'   It came into popular use in the media a few years ago.  Can't recall what term was used before that for the crap that comes out of the snoot.   The term is used for the public statements politicians make.   Other professionals, academics among them, are using the term for a person's bag of words spilled in print and television media.  I have a few ideas on why the new use of an old word.

Politicians have always been known to lie.  So do a lot of other people.  Business people lie.  Information gets bolixed.  I think the term 'narrative' is used because people have become so pervasively dishonest that what is said can no longer regarded as statements of fact.  It's about the difference between what dishonest people say, and what they or their people do.  Their narrative may have little, or nothing, to do with what is really on the slate.  Our government is known to perpetrate deception.  Businesses perpetrate deception.   It is  no longer sensible to believe what is said.  People listen or read, and wait to see if what was said jibes with what happens as a result.  When a public figures speak, we are not hearing the truth, we are hearing their story.

An example:  In Hillary Clinton's narratives, the Clinton Foundation raises money on behalf of social agendas.  In most working models, the money is distributed to nonprofit agencies, which pay themselves to act as a surrogate God.  They will provide for the poor and rescue the oppressed.  If that doesn't work out, and it rarely does, a sector of the middle class gets a nice salary while pretending to help the poor and oppressed.  In all narratives, the organizations claim to be great humanitarians and philanthropists, intellectuals, scientists and freedom fighters.  In my crabbed, miserable experience with nonprofit agencies people were jerk offs, professional or otherwise.  Most were there for the money, few had much regard for the poor and oppressed.  Embitterment can be degrading.  I'm down there.

Another example is very recent, just came up, fresh as a turkey egg, on Facebook.  People have been talking about Ben Carson's narrative.  I don't recall him saying he grew up in public housing, but it seems from the banter that at some point he did, and now the word is that he didn't grow up in public housing.  If he lied in the course of a statement of fact, this would illustrate my point that what he says is more fiction than fact. Hence the term 'narrative.'

For alternative theories, the word might sound more sophisticated, more literary, than what the previous term for bullshit was.  Lots of people like to sound more sophisticated than they are, and words like 'narrative' sound more intellectual than 'speech' or 'the hash that prick was slinging.'  It all means the same thing.  Another thought is that the word makes politics sound more humane and advanced, though people are still a load of vicious barbarians, with credentials.   The US has become a silk purse made from a sow's ears.  Only possible now with advanced technology.  We are too far removed  from the body politic to observe what is being done.  We rely upon narratives to understand what is being done, and the information is unreliable.

 We are told stories, on the news, before we go to sleep. Sleep well.  Dream in a beautiful, warmly illustrated narrative.  Your dream is probably nearer to fact than the bullshit we hear in the news.  The nearest substitute for the word 'narrative' is 'bullshit.'

Jeez, people are thinking like losers.

The Donald wins the election, and people are convulsing inward like a punctured jellyfish.  The win is an opportunity.  A basket of opportunity to flump your personal agendas inside out, shake out the bugs, and revitalize like a motherfucker.   Re-contextualize, fuck it.  Re-frame shit.   Ask what it will take to get heavies like Steve Bannon to support your agenda.  Hint:  Don't talk like a pussy.  Same agenda, no lisp.  Tell fucking old Steve to let gay men kiss in public all the fuck they want.

Which brings us all, you, me, and visitors from outer space, the supernatural, leprechauns, to my agenda.  Not that I'm one myself, but I'm putting a plug for the betterment of exhibitionism.  Lot's of people, all genders, all creeds, like to flash their private parts on subways and in alleys. People beat the living shit out of exhibitionists sometimes.  It's a rough and risky sexual orientation.  I think exhibitionists should be included in the LBGT umbrella grouping. Everyone should be getting equal protection from harsh treatment.  Especially geriatric age subway flashers.  They're a dying breed.  Like the Wahoe Indian.

Mr. Trump purports to care about American ideals, and I'm not about to prevent the incoming Prez from bowling all strikes in this ninth and tenth frame, in a bowling tournament with a long history of gutterballs.  I support everyone's right to jerk off in theaters.   A woman's right to flash twat will be respected.  Bring back streaking.   Nude protest rallies.   Bra burning.  I'm getting a chubby from just thinking about all the social progress.

Most important though, don't let the last election get you down.   Look at me.  I'm up. 

Sometimes, maybe often, when it is impossible to reason with people...

...who are sorely fucked in the head, people stop bothering to make sense, or to tell the truth as they see it, or to support social causes kept in the hands of irrational, angry alt left/alt right bigots, an individual on the fringe may resort to pure silliness.  No need for substance, no one is responding to it.  I'm just fine with this national social disaster.  Please enjoy the nonsense I composed the other day and pasted below.  Cheers.


Bongo Dooma, Dear Friends

A new sound has come into my days. The sound of something like a drum, you might envision bongos, and that's just fine, for now. Up the pike you will amend vision. It is not a bongo drum. It bongs, it is struck with the hand. If you didn't bring one, there are extra here, in the chapel.

Bongo Dooma is chanted while drinking orange juice sweetened with ripe figs. From a ceramic mug. From Dollar Tree. It is our shrine to the things we must buy, one item at a time, a dollar a pop. We get bread from the Goodwill Store, where it is left out front for the vagrants. I, my dear cousins, am a vagrant.

The Bongo Dooma only now can be revealed, for true. It is this noise, the noise of bubbling amniotic jizz, heard while in utero, and remembered, in spite of conventional forgetting. You always remember, but you fuzz the fuck out of it, for you have other shit to do. The Bongo Dooma returns, grateful to be accepted in your head dress. You are at peace. The fluids you pickled in during gestation evaporated long ago. But they are are still here. They are here. Condensing on a burned out light bulb. Dripping behind a loose sheet of wall board. Dampening the futon you sleep on. No fluids, no joy. You are happy, you see. I am certain. Thank you. You are standard. 

Straight Men Dig Good Interior Design, Too, You Crass, Insensitive Sissies!

Imagine a dystopian community, albeit a puny one, here, where reasonably healthy heterosexual men waste nights pining  to carry on just the wee-est business in the humanities.  Straight men write poems, too, bastards.  I'm really getting J.O.ed with the local gay no fraternizing policy Pittsburgh has, and has had, quietly, since Stonewall.  Sure, bastards, all artists, writers and musicians are LBGT.  Breeders claiming different are dim witted second class citizens.   From an ancient Meditaranian folk maxim, " for children a woman, for pleasure a six foot eight basketball hunk."   I know how you bastards are.   Imagine one lousy fucking little thing:  Straight men do good interior design, too, bastards.


I can mail order life size cardboard stand up figures of Liza Minelli and Jerry Lewis.   I'll let you borrow my Judy Garland records.   I Like New York In June, too, queers  Stop persecuting heterosexual men.

Flash Fiction: This is a silly, frivolous piece of very short fiction.

Oogie Raga, Dear Comrades!

Oogie Raga! Oogie Raga is the greeting and the affirmation. It is the sound. Not a word. Sound. First made whole by disco music, later refined to fucking near perfection through hip hop. Oogie Raga is the unifying sound, the only one. Oogie Raga!

Oogie Raga, last week I was in a meeting with a department head, a Dr. Ralf Barfing Vomitus, Ph.d, not a physician, an academic, but a better person than some stupid asshole commoner. Let's face it, people come in degrees. I can allow up to 270 degrees of total circumference to a person who has attained a Ph.d. Unless it's in public ed, phys ed, or other non-subject. I always go full circle for the true elite, but that's one percent of the population, and even I don't often get a whiff of their expensive perfume and caviar more often than four times per century. Dr. Vomitus has middling intelligence, for a person in the poly-sci department. I had to talk to Vomitas about one of the guys. About this asshole in my graduate studies program. The guy is a total POS.

Fucking Steve Kowalski. His thesis is coming along just awful, but that's not why I had to bring the matter to Ralf's attention. I think he and I are on a first name basis. He's one of those bastards who tells you to use his first name, like he didn't have to sell his sister to a cartel to pay for his Ph.D. Steve Kowalski's work is pure cancer. Total soup bowl of ricin. It's bochulism. My group has been making some real progress in anti-method theory, and Steve's garbage has an annoying effect on most of it. On everyone. We all hate fucking Steve. So, oogie raga, I went to Ralf's dank little office on my little two feet and filled him in on what a fucking creep Steve is. Oogie raga. It's all good.

A Brand New Song ...under my pen name....Bat Robbins

I'm a bitter pill. Swallow me. It will help. Like they said about the Kool Aid.

Moments ago, I was sitting back in my giant furry brown Barcalounger, patting myself on the ass over my good work in the area of acquisitions.   For a person who earns diddly, and is, by cruel tarring of demographics, one fucking small operator, I have a very nice collection of imported guitars, bought off the internet, good quality at the lowest price anywhere.  The stainless steel jewelry I have been stocking up on is probably worth more than I've been paying for, and if so, a dainty free market economic model could be cited, like a cub scout doing some old bat 'a solid' like helping her cross the street.   Electronic periferals such as digital cameras and computer accessories, all dirt cheap from venerable ebay.com made my facebook posts a luke warm roaring success.

It is possible to create a small business by collecting goods, and selling them to people.  To people who dig what you are up to.   People who like the cut of your jib.  And who share a wholesome interest in the same things you do.  Baring perverts who are into dildos and other filthy sex appliances.  I don't talk to those kinds of people.

Galloping like Randolf Scott to point, now that Donald is in, it's opportune to discuss free market methods.  All sorts.  In the free thinking mode.  I'm not protesting anything. I'm encouraging productivity.  Our best hopes are all material in nature.

Driveling Thoughts on the Election

This post, or most of it, is probably a load of ill-informed puckey, but Trump's electoral victory might be a case of super high level payback for the Democrats abuse of super-delegates favoring Hillary during the primary election.   If her 'big pals' can corrupt the primary vote her favor, opposing big wigs may as well corrupt the election proper in favor of The Donald.

This is not a case of cheating for a good cause.  It's all cash flow, or the hope of it, based on which candidate pulls which strings on behalf of whom.  By outward appearances, Hillary may have been seen as the cash flow candidate for publicly funded business, while Trump is the free market candidate.  If there is any substance to this perception, and I can't feel certain that there is, a flow of cash to private business may be for the best.  Not that I expect it to happen, but it's past time for corporate downsizing of greedy and abusive nonprofit agencies such as UPMC.  The private sector faced years of downsizing throughout the 80s and 90s.  Time to take the pubic sector to task.  It's a cesspool of incompetence and public corruption, at public expense.

Free market methods are a mouthful.  Relatively few of them can be put into practice,even where they are wanted.  The cost of doing business is too high for the small entrepreneur to make a profit.  Start up capital is doled out on a partisan 'among friends basis,' with the age old back room deal.  Too, public money is doled out per interest group, with men in my circumstances pushed far out of the game.  I plan to continue pushing an agenda to change the way public money is distributed.  Low earning non-minority men may be one of the reason's for Trump's dubious popularity.  Please consider supporting this agenda to include non-minority men in initiatives currently favoring women and minorities.  My experience with progressive politics is this:  it's as discriminatory as anything else, the only matter is 'who is being discriminated against.'  Namely, people deprived of advocacy, people who can't afford a lawyer,  people demonized for being a heterosexual male, people not recognized by liberals and progressives and being worthy of their support.    I am seeking fair and equal access to business capital.  Maybe this election is the clarion call.

Latest installment of my youtube show, The Not-Too-Social Hour

At Peace With Who-The-Fuck-Knows

Dear Donald Trump has been saying he's going to bring the steel industry back to the US, presumably to Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, maybe Flint Michigan or the jolly old land of Oz.  It seems to some people like a generic great white hope for Uncle Sam.  Minus the steel biz, the 'Burgh has become a ward of the Greater US, it has become a banana republic, and a travesty of social economics.  It's a developing third world, with new construction and an old looming downfall.  The new Pittsburgh has a few more years to bask in its newness before a succession of money melt downs turns it back into forty square miles of ghetto.  In the mean time, there are lots of lovely little things and liberties to enjoy.  Best:  staying home and shopping online.

Shopping has never been all that great in the 'Burgh.  That's why I so dearly love Ebay.com.  The stainless steel coming from China has been improving steadily.  The aesthetics of it all can be wonderful.  I've been collecting stainless steel jewelry.  Costume jewelry has never been better, thanks to the US giving over its industries to China.  Other fashion items, synthetics especially, have never been cheaper, and by mail order one doesn't have to talk to a dork in a shopping mall to obtain said garment.  As of the last passing second, everything has been coming up roses.

All that, politics, economics, socialization can take a long, heartfelt flying fuck.  It's frivolous.  While the world gets more and more hinky.  Here's a poem I wrote, recited, arranged and recorded.  It's called 'Dark Side.'




  

Another Blithering Essay...but you will like it!

Love me, hate me, I'm an opinionated middle aged cuss, with what I believe is healthy hereditary countervieling ambivalence, as if God was determined not to let me be a total crashing bore.  Note the not completely inelastic  relationship between certainty and closed mindedness.  One can still leave all thoughts open to consideration.

 No flagging, though, on abortion, I favor it, for any reason, be it to erase misplaced passion, save a fortune in upbringing costs, or just to keep an embarrassment out of the tabloids.  A woman's right to choose is respected in this single family dwelling in a Pittsburgh slum district.  A man's desperate need to stay out of paternity is, to me, like an uncontested maidenhead in Catholic Bosnia.    My thin brown sandwich bag of thoughts contains, beside a PB&J sandwich,  opinions on eugenics and it's relationship to abortion.

One of such is the fed should be identifying, through  a blood test at everyone's primary care gulag, people who are too stupid or crazy to bother having children.  In our humane best of all worlds, these assholes could then be offered a healthy one time cash payment for choosing sterilization,  Or an abortion, if it isn't too much bother.  Sure, the fetus might grow up to be Robert Young/Loretta Young/Neil Young, reincarnated to save us all from hell, starvation and a terminal case of sniffles.  This hasn't been my nearest of observations in the ghetto I call home.  It might be better to reduce population growth across the board, gentle as Snow White.  While waiting for that ideal,  there is an abortion clinic downtown, and I'll bet, if you ask nicely, they can arrange a vasectomy or tubal ligation.  I get my ideas from walking around downtown.

Last time I walked past the abortion protesters that stand in front of Planned Parenthood they had something special lined up.  Just for me.  Sorry.  I'm autistic.  It was for everyone.  Not just me.  I'm working on my problem.  There have been thousands of ever changing new abortion protesters out there for as long as I lived in Pittsburgh!    They used to have parades, but they were abolished after 9/11 for obvious reasons.   Last week they did my cynical senses good by sitting on the sidewalk in columns, each one with a bible, all praying audibly from the same page of the same authoritative source.   As I approached, en route to Mr./Ms Bus Stop they all stood up, books in hand, and prayed more intensely as I traipsed through the  corridor made of abortion protesters.   I'm giving them all a big blue star on their behavior management chart for just how nicely they made their point.  It was nonviolent.  The jerks are pro-life, which sounds nice when taken out of context, such in a slum, roused in me a sensation of something.  Specifically, I incurred a sensation from the absurdity of the situation.  There was an element of newness in their otherwise old school protest.  I am in no way worse for wear.  In fact, I'm still chuckling about the freak show.  Nice abortion protest.  But I still favor both it and the practice of eugenics, in general.

Along with the Phil Spector style Wall Of Sound stunt they did, one protester was standing still, holding a real live baby and anti-abortion literature.  Nice visual aid.  "See, this is what is being aborted."

Weak argument.   Low batting average on positive outcomes.  Their card table display was sub-standard, this time with a row of poorly rendered clay fetuses pinched out in a size range of conception to birth.  The protesters were very nicely dressed, real clean cut, and they could have shelled out for a more professional looking fetus display.  Some groups really go out on that.  The way some people, generous people, do an elaborate Christmas display in front of the house each year.  Killowatts of power lighting Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Santa Clause and all the Reign Deer.  Then there are cheap, crumby people who just put up a shitty aluminum tree, and string a few dim lousy multi-colored bulbs. My views on abortion, and eugenics, are just like they were last year, and neither Christmas nor an abortion protest is likely change a less than sun-shiny frame of mind re: over-population.  A gene pool once too often pissed in.  Declining ways of life.   A lower birth rate means less jerks.    

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The Music Terrors of Mikey Mumbawumba (a fiction saga, in short doses)

Stage names.  Required.   As was the case for most of the band members,  his real name was ninety four syllables, and if it could be pronounced, it would sound incompatible with a larger motif.  It would have been nearly impossible for the emcee to introduce them.   Steve Plank took his last name from a fad in which people lay flat and still on top of people's desk, where the targets  and they work, and force them to deal with the absurdity of what the histrionic stiffs  are doing.  The stunt was called 'planking,' and at the time everyone understood why the nick name.  No longer so rapidly appreciated, Steve is a regular feature at a local club or two.  So grows legend.  It gets juicier over time when ever younger people hear the tale of how Steve Plank got his name.  He could drum quite well, no matter how blitzed, and Steve is reasonably known and well liked in the Boggs Avenue/Rt. 5//Arlington  Corridor community.  There are still a few clubs open, most wrapped like presents in layers of barbed wire and cyclone fence.   Once you get past the security detail it gets convivial.

Mikey Mumbawumba thought up his nick name all by himself.  He is six foot six with an evil black pompadour.  It might be a wig.  He's old, at this point.  His brainstorm for self promotion came about when people were being exhorted to 'deny their fathers' and take new names that suggest savagery.
He wore savage printed sport shirts with extra tall collars.  Nehru jackets.  Thick boas. Stack heel cha cha boots.  He was performing with a storied rock and roll band.  They were so close to marketability you could smell it.  Stay tuned for my next installment.

The Sinus Politic and the Occult

Since before, and now again right after the Presidential Debate, candidate Donald Trump raised notice of a mannerism.   An unsettling one.   An ugly duckling in sound.   He has a labored, eerie and badly audible  way of drawing air up his nose.

 I don't really know how he achieves this effect, it's his snoot, his speech impediment, and I'm not Superman.  I can't peer into his sinus-obstructed head with X-ray eyes.  For as little as I have in common with the voting public, though, it seems nearly everyone in the US wants to know what's wrong with Donald, not allowing for the fact that he could be the best Prez in world history, in spite of sounding too fucking weird for most when he talks.

Most people commenting on Facebook think he's a cocaine addict, and his schozola is caving in, like a frugal coal mine in pastoral West Virginia.  A rare few intellectuals have suggested he is having a cosmetic surgery malfunction.   An unlucky nose job could cause breathing problems.  I am compelled as an amateur social scientist to seek an explanation, and to share it, free of charge, for dick, nothing, on the outside chance it in any small way benefits the greater human condition.  World affairs.  The ways balls bounce.  We all want to know why Donald Trump talked like that during the Presidential Debate.  It may have been the occult.

Hillary Clinton may have put a curse on his septum, or sinus area in general.  If she doesn't know the secret words and have the requisite mojo, other people may.  An associate of Hillary's could have an offshore  Ph.d. in voodoo.   Those possibilities aside, any witch can put a curse on a candidate's proboscis, and cause the poor bastard to sound dreadful at the microphone while debating Hillary Clinton.   You can buy a kit off ebay for less than five bucks.

If that latter thought seems preposterous, fuck it all, just look at the smart phone.  It's amazing.  So is voodoo, when it works.   Both the smart phone and magic are equally beguiling.  The low cost of imported talismans and decoder rings makes it possible for almost anyone to screw politicians over.

 It's never been better to be dirt poor during an exhausting, scary election season.  We have a voice, in the spirit world.  There is hope for human kind in the occult.  Be a witch.

Wednesday Sermon: I forgot about the Grand Design shit. It's rich, too.

I've almost recovered from a spiritual crisis.  Part of it resulted from a tendonitis attack, which hurt like a motherfucker, in the material world.   Physical pain can shit up your sense of spirituality.  Of course there are closet masochists and victims of superstition who believe that pain absolves sins, builds character, prevents you from engaging in more vigorous evil.

  Laid up with a loudly aching shoulder, I was not able to engage in second story breaking and entering.   That's another dark explanation for morality.  I'm suggesting it deserves consideration.  Not without feeling defensive.  It's weak.  People have claimed it's God's will when poor circulation and overuse causes swelling and excruciating pain in a part of the body subject of ordinary wear and tear.  If you take a trot on that pony, you may as well squeeze justice into it all.   Maybe I will be better in some way or other for having a chronic inflamatory condition.  If this was Reader's Digest incarnate, I might win the lottery, then found an organization that funds research on behalf of disgruntled hermits with tendonitis.  That aside, I'm in a weak position from which to help other pained sufferers. Maybe a sore shoulder results in more reading of decent books.  I'm seeing a wan crack of light on that account.  Then too, there is time, when aching, to think about stuff.  Stuff like this:

I neglected to mention in my previous blog entry the concept of a Grand Design.  I don't believe a scintilla of this shit, but a lot of people do.  Many who do are bikers.  Some are very wealthy.  A lot of these fart-biters are into supremacy, and aren't egalitarian about it.  The view that God ordained certain middle European Americans to have supremacy over Earth is one of many not unheard of thing-arooskis.    I mention this just to drop a few more slugs in the busted pay phone we call philosophy.  And religion.  I've been chatting about my spiritual crisis.

There is the idea of a Grand Design that plants little you, like a watermelon seed, somewhere in the great big universe.  It's all pre-ordained.  At some point on your time line you will get a painful and highly limiting chronic condition.  Or maybe something much less serious.  You might get a  hang nail while engaged in ideal and perfect love, in the super plush time share units of Heaven.  Maybe you are pre-ordained to have it made in the shade.  I'm more inclined to think shit happens when it does, and people have a limited ability to manage material difficulties.   There are spiritual concepts worth giving a shot.   I'm still open to growth.   Still believe in secular methods, and a reasonable way of managing spiritual needs. Nothing freaky.  Nothing mean.  Peace!

Patron Saint of Slackers

Say, this is rich.    I, arch-cynic and loudly dressed atheist, had a bout of spiritual conflict the past week.  Not my first.  I considered the use of prayer, and this was for the first time since Jesus freaks wondered Haight Ashbury.  

People have spiritual needs.  Fears.  Social/Emotional urban rehab zones in the head area.  Panic attacks.  There are arcane possibilities that can scare the shit out of you.   If there exists a benevolent All Mighty, it's logical to strike up some sort of extra-natural diplomacy.   I'm guessing people might assume a position subordinate to God.  Not something I normally admit, I got my knees dirty praying just the other day.  It didn't come close to eradicating philosophical doubt, though.  There remains a diverse portfolio of doubts to plumb through.

   Almost no one believes God has to take orders from people.  Some believe He/She honors requests based on some sort of merit system, while another rare few see it all as a lottery in which your number comes up and you go off to one type of glory or other.  People are admitted to heaven when the aggregate of virtues on their card spells 'bingo.'   Some people worship scratch-off cards.   I'm giving honest, pained meditations a fair run at the dog track.  

So many of us are in divine receivership after going belly up in the career department.  That's my worst source of anxiety.  Sometimes a career can seem 'God-forsaken,' even to a secularist.  Mine is.  This time around, I'm stumping for inner peace.  It's one of the many policies and contracts in a fat portfolio of spiritual concepts. 



        

New Poem!

Land Of Giants

when you're this far deep in silvered acetate
you can really catch syphillis from door knobs
cooties pole vault
tornadic wind  heaves crabs through a yard  of hard rubber

pour out your Chlorox liberally
declining confidence in marigolds inverts  skeeter air wing
tricky radar on Zika

scratching at his insect bites till he bleeds
King Squatsaputzo courts his wheezing Empress comrade
spring operated gravity needle pen with unguent
stabbed into lioness muscle
improves her breathing
feathers adjusted
the King returns to his stogie long as Georgia pines
mating is now possible
they smoke together
there is feasting

Why, I'd still love to become a wealthy knife ad ax throwing magnate

I feel dreadful about a sick joke that came to mind.  I thought of it myself, only with help from entertainment news on television, and it has to do with disgraced comedian Bill Cosby.  The joke is:  If he is prosecuted for rape, his lawyer will use the Fat Albert Defence.  Hey, hey, hey, love to play tackle.  There you go, another tasteless, insensitive joke.   And I helped.

It would help more if one of my small business concepts worked out.    On another light note, I'm still interested in teaching demonstrating and selling products relevant to knife and ax throwing.  It's a real and fun sport.  The Northside is a perfect place to do it, with it's golconda of vacant lots.  It's like a forty square mile golf course, damn near free of charge for the use of the land.  I've been chucking  blades and axes in the lot behind the house here for the last eighteen years, always happy as a clam at high tide.

So here's my pitch:  Feel free to contact me by e-mail at brusistan@gmail.com if you would like start collecting throwing knives.  Think of me as your go-to guy, sales and service with a smile.  My collection rules.  

fiction: Music Horrors

Some ape shit stalker has been fucking with me since the Reagan era, he's a didactic gas-lighting SOB, and his BS crops up, not regularly, but with his trade mark each time. This is where I remember, and get agitated, over the precept of 'signifiers,' which came up in this shit heel phenomenology class I took. It was where I first met the stalker. Stalkers often identify a signal, like a red ant might, and are drawn to it. That was a long time ago. Here's some recent shit. 

I had switched from electric to acoustic guitars, and it brought out the stalker. Some asshole had to have told the guy about it, because I didn't see the Ape at the clubs I been squatting at. Which means the Ape has 'friends,' or at least, contacts, since 'friends' has become such a hideous word. Some of the worst pigs I dealt with in the last century all would sit together in the living room and watch the tv show 'Friends.' Something about that show always made me think a process of deliberate contamination was nearing scientific maturity. 

My first mistake was mail ordering an Egbert Schliazis all wood classical guitar. It's all real natural wood. None of that mostly filler plywood some axes are made out of. Stuff makes me earl. Don't like people who play those pieces of shit. There's a lot of 'em. Egbert Schliazis a very good low end acoustic guitar, and there is no need to labor all the goddam traditions and values and every fucking spiritualized horse shit point in history that may by signified, or symbolized, or brought up like like a bowl of bad clams and too much wine. Or so I thought. 

I was very tuneful one evening, thank you, on my oak stool in the back of Chief's Bar. I was playing some Simon and Garfunkel shit, some shit everyone at the time more or less remembered, and there were some people who were into it. I was being gracious as shit, and making a special point not to have an attitude, because that's fine if you're doing Sex Pistols. But it's asshole if you're playing "Like a Goddam  Bridge Over Fucking Troubled Water." So I wasn't doing attitude that night. 

I wasn't, but some ugly bitches were, I can tell you that. Soon as I put down my brand new Egbert Schliazis, one of the bitches gets in my face. "You can shove that guitar you're playing up your ass, you fucking pig," she says to me, her sour swarthy puss contorting with rage and mockery. "Yea, asshole, big end first," a member in her entourage added, for additional caution and indelible staining. 

"Egbert Shliazis' great grandfather designed Joseph Mengele's ukele. Joseph Fucking Mengele would strum his ukele while torturing holocaust victims, you lousy fuck," she continued. "Now Schliazis'   great grandson, Egbert, is helping to kill off women in the Yucatan peninula." 

Fuck me. I was helping Egbert Schliazis lll kill women in the Yucatan pininsula. Fuck me again. I feel really, really bad about all this.   Not even music can help.

America's changing physique

No one talks about anorexia nervosa anymore, and though lots of people walking around downtown are very thin, it is mostly men, and is not the result of a morbid aversion to eating.  More likely it's a relatively new physique resulting from one hundred years of veganism.    Not that I miss hearing of it, but I suspect a change has taken place on the global level.  Perhaps the social rewards people used to obtain by merely being thinner than average were unearned, and are no longer granted.  After all, no one remembers the myth of the starving artist.

This is not to say artists, or anyone, aren't/isn't  starving in the U.S. or anywhere else.  So the media reports, world hunger is still out there, nearly everywhere.  I'm not so callous.  In the US people valued a fashionable appearance over and above the importance of health, longevity or even human equality.  The fashion industry, and the entertainment biz, convinced everyone  large built people are less valued than those of  the Rolling Stones Skinny.  One is as thin as a fashion model, or else is common and ugly,  Times have changed.   Everyone is beautiful, as long as they have money.

And how have things changed?  Fucking near silently, the middle class took over a complex of non-profit social and cultural organizations, and over time, phased out the poor.  Years ago, the story was that those same organizations were for the benefit of the poor, but now they simply pay the middle class to pose as humanitarians, because they are entitled to elevated social status.  Most upsetting to me, the money, either tax exempt contributions or infusions of tax dough through the government, now subsidizes a fat, privileged sector of the upper middle class.  There are no starving artists.  Only fat, subsidized ones.  No one gets brownie points for  being exceptionally thin, and why should they?  Fat people are  just as creative, and they aren't starving, they are staying fat on the public nickel.  They are entitled to this arrangement, so to prevent them from becoming gaunt, starving artists.  They are well fed and entitled to be well regarded, no matter what the assholes do.

Now, who would have thought that the cure for anorexia nervosa would have been as simple as subsidizing the rich and already fat?  It's a sad case of unintended behaviorism.  Reward people for starving themselves, and you'll fill the graves with creative and troubled souls.  Feed the already fat and rich, compliment them on their art work (no matter how shitty and vacant)  and you get a culture of happy bovines with a normal life expectancy.  It's a bourgoise world out there.  The poor are dying to climb on board.

fiction: gravitational hernia

"There is a point at which space itself ruptures, and, when it does, it hurts like a motherfucker." 

The Howling Universe hadn't changed in several weeks. The quote, from Clacker's thesis, wanders like a kitten back to the fur and warmth of it's copyright. There were and are cosmic pains, comparable to human experience, but traumatic to celestial horseshit. Planets arcing around the sun get bruised, like an over-ripe peach. Space in which the planets roam is subject to ordinary wear and tear. As when the ball sack ruptures, and someone has to get surgery and wear a truss. The Earth itself, invisible to it's residents, has it's terrestrial ass in a sling. 

At the same time that a person may be overwhelmed with the power and beauty, he/she may be getting bored to suicide fielding resistance to a harmless train of thought, or to fair enough hope of landing a paycheck. It isn't enough to notice that certain honey bees would look nice in a tiny gaberdine business suit, one has to submit a cartoon that adequately proves people enjoy looking at silly pictures of a conjecture. A man has to look philanthropic by installing a library in his apartment. 

Irwin Clacker would be retiring in the same apartment he had been living in since Cedar Avenue changed from charming to hellishly obnoxious. The shift from worker to retiree will probably weigh in among other happenings much the way yellow jackets look cute when drawn in caricature. Clacker was still a person of hard science, and was worse for wear. Years of friction wore thin the patent leather bag that holds our secrets. His secrets, your secrets, too, assuming his work isn't completely a load of shit. Unless Clacker turns out to be a complete asshole, his work will help people to better love themselves, and in turn, everyone else. 

It is no longer stylish to carry a hard shell brief case. Clacker stopped wearing a neck tie to work in 1981, and it seemed like science itself had changed. It has. 

Irwin Clacker is facing a forced retirement from the state college, and he thinks he still has it in him to make hay out of his work, The Howling Universe. His pension should carry him to his expiration date. He'd fallen out with youth in the 1990s. By 9/11, he had become a tolerated relic in his department at school. Soon he would be the exact same person, by another name. For now, people should be content in accepting that his bullshit has some type of merit, and gears and wires inside it work exactly the same, in or out of school.

If, per chance, you have a suspicious type of mind set....

...that's excellent, I think everyone should, considering (Kennedy intrigues, sun spots, gamma rays, the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance) a blanket human condition that could be described as 'hopelessly hinky.'   World news has been teasing the limits of credibility.

A good conspiracy theory mitigates itself for entertainment value alone.  If anyone got a big toe in the doorways to greater perception (not seeing this as too likely) that could end with  one very, very special little  blog entry or scientific paper, filed under 'not too fucking important, but the author is a clever piece of shit.'  People concerned about possible globalist domination deserve a few seconds of attention between shock treatments and hair care appointments.

For today's complaint to God, Man and Nutritious Green Snacking Items, I despise the popular meme, "learning curve."  People started using the term over a decade ago, and right away the phrase began consorting with words like 'cool' and 'awesome,' the way juvenile delinquents flick switchblades together.    The phrase has the cult following that 'degrees of separation' had in 1990s.

To put the process of leaning on a curve, such as on a graph, rather than on a straight line, challenges the way in which people think and act.  It suggests that nobody takes a direct course of action.  One never hikes directly to the convenience store for a pack of smokes.   He/she, for reasons beyond the ordinary, probably has to do something other than buy cigs.  Any social interaction, positive (like saying 'hi' to a cute babe,) negative (e.g. some asshole screams 'get the fuck out of street, shithead,) has to be analyzed and factored into the simpler hope of smoking one's next Marlboro.  Returning to the folly of basic human needs,  the only thing the phrase 'learning curve' does add spice and mystery to anything bland and common.

Hopping for a moment on the word 'learning,'  the phrase 'learning curve' may be political sabotage at it's most syphlitic. The 'curve' could mean that no matter what an individual learns, he/she will ultimately crash and burn.   If, on the other hand, little Bob or Mary was learning in a plain linear model, he/she might live and work in a continuum of forward motion and ongoing purpose.  The path to discovery and to invention is not curved.  It's straight.  Like John Fucking Wayne, in a fucking stupid cowboy flick.  "Learning Curve" is a psycho-linguistic monkey wrench flung into big, greasy indexing cogs and cables.  Bastards from the Illuminati are fucking with everyone's head.

There is no such thing as a learning curve.   A groovy complex of straight lines far better graphs human achievement and status.   As usual, it isn't good enough to demand people stop saying 'learning curve.'  People may stop saying it, but the worse problem remains: people who liked saying it, back when it was still seemingly cool.  There is a human element in society that gives me a royal pain in the ass.  Nothing can be done about them.  There will always be annoying people who latch onto stupid fucking memes.  I'll settle down.

Well, I guess this isn't getting your dick sucked....

Sour grapes.  The puckering.   The way the bitter fruits taste.  The thinking that runs foul with hindsight.

I'm embittered because my career bites the big one.   Any wide banded existentialist should agree I have an inalienable right to blame it on other people.  The fact that I met people proves grounds for animosity.  Imagine what a fat prick Jean Paul Sartre would have been if he couldn't land a book deal.  I want one, and no one is helping me find an agent.  I need one, bad.

To know (know, know) certain people is to muster animosity (animosity, animosity, like in Phil Spector's tune "To Know Her Is To Love Her."  But it doesn't rhyme.)  The social process is bullshit.  People are pernicious toxic waste.  

Remember that garbage about business and professional networking?   Forget it.  Everything here is done by political quid pro quo.  You can be as charming as a dancing gazelle, but the dope addled narcissistic rhinoceros gets the brass ring.   The plumb work.   As a favor to his/her coke addicted magisterial royalty father/mother/gay legal guardian.    Tis true.  If you give a deviant piece of shit a high paying job, he/she/it will take on greater influence in society.   And he/she/it is in a social class above you.  And you just aren't one of he/she/it's kind of people.

It takes other people to keep others down.   We are a balsa wood airplane with rubber band propeller.  Always aimed at the shit can.  

Is Futility Really This Bad?

How awful could boredom be, assuming everyone gets a few unappetizing meals a day, too much sleep, and a flashing, pestering awareness of mortality?   The professionals may speak of clinical depression, poets might enjoy saying 'melancholia,' but 'boredom' is the least judgmental term for being alive and not too fucking lively.   When bored, one wishes to have fun, and isn't having it.

 There is no law, yet, against  saying aloud that you are bored, depressed or melancholic, though for the last thirty years there were consequences.   "You should get some professional help," people might say, as if everything will be just fine between you and them if you do, and will remain hopeless if you don't.   But once people peg you as a bore, they don't start liking you better anytime soon.  Again, this suggests people are what they are, and attempts to change don't help.  Silence, in a state of robotic compliance, is often one's best modus operandi.

But what of happiness and being sociable?  Doesn't boredom negate all that?   Fuckin' A.

Just because I feel like shit right now, there's  no reason for you to be bored, angry or sad.  Have yourself a ball.  I've been at least this down in the dumps before, and bounced back.   Next week, I'm going to blog like a regular Norman Vincent Peale, every syllable reeking of positive thinking and love for daily life.  Two weeks hence, I'm going to blog of mania.   Now that's fun.

While you are still having fun (and I'm not) please take time to enjoy my video cartoon, "Captain Firegroin."

Semi-Fiction Saga with unrelated cartoon!

I'm not a public health official, nor am I concerned too spasmodically,  but this district near mine is more transparent than  Glad Wrap once around a twelve inch hoagie.   Damn, you can almost see the preservatives in the stacked lunch meat.   The pimentos  represent certain specially medically grouped individuals.  With unique problems.

As in other districts, men don't live especially long. In my district, and so many others, the leading cause of death is getting shot, and everyone here is adjusting nicely.  We're all very proud.  Everyone drinks him/her-self to death in the Spring Garden area.   Rich kids are dropping dead from scag.   But in Westview the mortality rate is a whole other kettle of fish.   More wholesome.  Middle American.  It's a grieving chowder of untimely passing, and the root cause is physique.

It's why  Westview, Pennsylvania is a great place to study something.  Like the drive to succeed.  It, like being squat-built, may be hereditary, but we who emphasize nurture over nature might enjoy finding events in people's lives that alter fates however occurances may, with an emphasis on success stories, so people don't get too doggone morose.

I often ride the bus through brevity's home base, and notice that most people are shorter than average, muscular, portly, especially short in the trunk, and are, most dratted, barrel chested.  If I must add that there is a common physiognomy, like from an injection molding firm, it would be cranking out men who tend to croak some where's between age 32 and 48.  

The leading cause of death in  Westview  is hereditary stunted longevity.  An acquaintance of recent yore lost his father all too soon, and I am conjecturing a wide load of thought that  for seeing quick mortality while in highschool, a person may feel compelled to take an early start in the career area of their lives.   Such people may have no time to suffer fools, though lots of people do.  In all cases, time is short.

These people may eschew vices, though some don't. I've noticed people who hang around bars in Westview drop dead soonest of the manifestly squat.  One's best chance of living to be 52 is to work as a manager in one of two branch banking offices.  Tom's programatic was selling 'financial packages,' and it's my contention that he might have sold either less of or no packages had he not seen, early on, that life is short, and  options for the short lived blue collar are mincingly specified. 

My acquaintance left town alive, to move someplace more interesting, and that is laudable.  He left Westview well to do.  The more common exit plan was by Greyhound or hearse, so I recall Tom to be a small town maverick.   

The picture of Tom is clearing nicely after a giant cup of convenience store joe.  It was July of 1995, Wooly Bully Big Bill Clinton was our BBF-like Big President.  Little Me still thought weensy entrepreneurs with bright ideas deserve to prosper.  How sad and funny.   Gasoline was cheap.   The tech industries were booming.  To help other econ hamlets, the Federal Reserve took the saddles off certain banking restrictions.  Out of this new liberalism galloped some fast horses in the money lending biz.  

Tom would stand in the middle of the Middling Diminutive Bank and button hole people, me included, and try to sell everyone an investment product.    I didn't buy anything from Tom, but I couldn't miss running into him at the coffee counter across the street.  He was one of those people who drag the Good Neighbor Sam feeling out of people.  I didn't always value optimism, and a decent old coffee talk with a firecracker in a crisp blue suit adds weight to certain social precepts.   Like  there's no sense bumming people out.   I told him that I couldn't invest just now because I was saving up to build an addition to my house.   Perfectly normal bullshit!  Garbage like that helps me feel taller and more attractive.

There wasn't any sense bumming Tom out with all the little plans I'd been flushing, one after another, down the mortal sump.  Elsewhere,  there was truly a renaissance happening at the time in computers, the Internet, and in money management.  It was the first time ordinary people, of any height or physique, could trade stock at home in their living rooms.   Tom's line of work was not unlike selling rugs, in that he sold groups of investments, many of which offered praeternatural returns, caprice  auspices of being not insured by the FDIC.   His people were on this matter.  It was so wrong to suppress free enterprise by forcing iron solid banks to insure deposits.  But, it would continue to insure normal pass book savings, stupid though that was.  Tom's products were at liberty to appreciate in value and to chunk out fab dividends.  

Again, I had to thank Tom for bringing to mind something that came up a decade earlier, when I was still a philosophy major.

The few chats with Tom were grand, and he and I otherwise did what ever.  Nothing out of the ordinary was happening by day,but I had been having nightmares in which a serpent bites chunks out of the Webster globe.   Each time it would strike, some backwash in Kentucky or upstate New York got scratched off.    In some ways, the dream made me even more optimistic because the cobra never hit Southwestern Pennsylvania.  It can mean that one lives in a utopia.  But it is utopia by default.  Nothing too awful happened here.  And, like narcotized reciprocity, dreadful things happened recently elsewhere, sparing fine folks like me and Tom.   Westview is the stablest ring of hell I've ever made a habit of grocery shopping and banking in.  

Tom proved to me the cobra was correct up to a point.  People, so he told me, were making much money in financial products.   He sustained the appearance of increasing wealth for the entire time he and I were conversant at the coffee shop, nearest the barbershop and stationery store that no one goes into.   I neglected to mention earlier that people were teaching this new way of thinking, just everywhere, which professed that the best we can do for one another is make one another feel good.  One way of doing so is to project an aura of positive energy, and to steer one's space wagon clear of obstructions, like negativity.  Some of the philosophy professors where I went to school were teaching that imagination was a reality that needed some chin chucks, and didn't need some dirty bastard putting up obstructions.    Tom said he never heard of phenomenology, and I quipped that he didn't need to have.  He was already a practitioner!

And now, for a cartoon...

...Still working on a youtube show....

There is too frigging much gender discrimination out there. I am not sitting still for it. Here is one of my acts of protest....

it's another cartoon. 

 No one here is this crass and tasteless.  I'm charming.  But there are people out there as horrible as the man in the cartoon above.  It is okay to feel alarmed.  I do.  You should.  There are a lot of bad people.

More comics flumphing into the blogosphere, here. Yodels...the anorexic rhinoseros. You will like this SOB.

Somehow I know there are people who will like this picture of a dead snake

Maybe it's the tale of St. Patrick whacking all the snakes out of Ireland that made finding this expired snake on the last few steps of tall concrete city steps, ambling down on a Friday 13, seem like a nice way to communicate from the Great Beyond.  I like snakes,  wish them no harm, and would be a happier SOB if they turned out on the streets downtown by the barrel full, live and eager.   The point of order is that snakes are a registered symbol of evil in the collectivized sump of human mind, not their fault, but I run a pragmatic berry farm.

   I'm half (I hope) into a fiercely painful case of tendonitis, my right knee is being a complete SOB, and finding the dead snake had a corresponding seriousness.  I've always believed that superstitions are fun, so the snake improved my day, in that manilla folder.   If he/she/it happened to be a sign that death will come to evil SOBs, and I'm getting a pass on the hecatomb, I have cause to celebrate.  Paganism is so frigging pragmatic and normal, when you choose to take it light and secular.  That way, the natural tendency towards superstition  is able to make nice and mind it's Ps and Qs  while cavorting hither and tither.

But that's only a few serpentine roads into meaning.  My fave was the first one that hit me when I saw the dead snake.  It was a lyric from a song I had been listening to, by Frank Black, on the album Frank Black And The Catholics.   Sublime.  "looked like something ended here."  I had been snake charmed by the lyrics to that album.  The line resonates because all over town it 'looks like something ended here.'   It's zeitgeist meteors.    And I've been having some reservations about ending here.  It may be wise to relocate, before things get worse.  I was reminded today to croak in better environs than did the snake.  Thanks for reading