Tuesday, May 31, 2016

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.


Free Hit CounterAs 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!

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Friday, May 20, 2016

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.


Friday, May 13, 2016

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

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Guzzle a case of Deviant Lager

New sponsor..........         Deviant Lager.      It's the beer that comes in it's own radioactive chalice.   It has steroids and meth in it.  It makes you bigger and better at whatever you do.  Law enforcement professionals drink Deviant Lager.   Executives, too.

Return to Ghurka Knife Throwing, Behind the House

Exotic, multicultural activities take place all the time here, among the rocks, broken glass and arboreal poison ivy!  You know how I feel about pageants.  People can't find their butts in the dark without them.   This blog post is a pageant.   A quazi-spiritual one, allowing for a whole pepper mill full of unique celebration of all kinds of stuff.   Praise the Elements, Earth, air, fire and water, Praise the accessories those four graces wear with their gowns and Armani suits.  Take a deep breath and read off, aloud, my list of fresh, wiggling praises.

Praise busted concrete from where some guy's house was demolished.  Praise the free red bricks from where an old lady's chimney fell over.  And I adore the two fishing boats that have been rotting in a tangle of  morning glory bushes, on a vacant lot, where a cottage had been crunched to kindling and hauled to a land fill.  As far as I know, before someone's property was foreclosed on, or condemned, those two boats might have trolled the three rivers to some sort of unspecified greater good.  They might have reeled in  some really impressive carps and walleyes.  Maybe they were used for something sublime, like importing dope.  I hope so!

As soon as the weather gets more resolutely gorgeous, the outdoor knife and ax throwing range will be running in shifts.

Friday, May 6, 2016

I love to visit store front ministries

These darn things turn up and scurry off all the time in my neighborhood.  A church group originates, heavens knows where or how, but, like bee husbandry, the group makes a hive  in a store front down the street near where I live.   Glory be.  Can 't say I'm a joiner, but visiting any church at all is better than staying home  and watching reruns of Route 66.   

Few of these ministries conduct services  more than a few months  before flying off to either a free standing rental church or holy gentrified warehouse subdivision.  The innovation with which people worship blows upward  in the distance like Moby Dick's head bilge.  Affirmations.  Thank you.  I attended many services provided by a snake handling sect, and would like to take the opportunity to report the effect that religious practice had on my future.   I'm presuming it was improved, allowing that I don't handle poisonous snakes.   Watching extended families dance to loud rock and roll, scream, chant, roll their eyes back, all the  while each jack and jill holding their choice of rattlers, cotton mouths, black mambos, cobras and even some rare snakes from far away hell holes, I'm glad I hung out there.  Free doughnuts!    Don't know who does their hair care, but it was always phenomenal.  Ever notice how there are a lot of hair care experts in correctional facilities?  

Propriety is paramount in a snake handling church.   I was dressed for it, in a leather trench coat, Irwin Rommel hat, and neoprene fireman's boots.  The church band was blasting Chuck Berry's raucous tune 'Maybelline.'  I couldn't help dancing.   A room full of maniacs in a collectivized frenzy is doggone fun.  Nothing to worry about.  People get bit all the time, and they just flop on the floor and scream till they get better.  They believe in healing from on high, and so far, there's been no fatalities.  It's another doggone lovely church group right near my domicile.   Affirmations.  

Thursday, May 5, 2016

I Love To Say 'The Horror'



Since the film Apocalypse Now, I still quote the line uttered by Marlon Brando.  He grunted that line derived from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness more soulfully than any other four word grunt by any other hipster.  To boot, so many things in real daily life are horrifying, so there is ample opportunity to say, with meaning, with heart, "the horror, the horror."

This morning, it was a ham bone that elicited, like from the Raven in Poe's eponymous poem, evermore, "The horror."

It was an accident, and I could have lived without it. A feral cat dug an ankle sized ham bone out of the trash, and left it on the sidewalk in front of the house.  I went outside to see if all the trash had been taken away, per normal, on a gray trash day morning, and all the bags had been hauled to the hallowed land fill.  But there was a gigundo ham bone one the sidewalk, and I ate the twenty pound picnic ham, over a six week festival, down to the scary looking bone.  It looked like a body part.  I was, in a word, horrified, both before and after figuring out what the fucking piece of garbage was.   I thought a person had been mutilated.  Around here, it could happen.   There are so many more reasons to quote the Raven/Brando.   "The horror."

In national politics, the 'fix is in.'  Super-delegates are great big hookers for plutocrats.  The social causes, world peace among them, turned into a carnival of greed and deception.  The social justice that progressives and humanists used to seek has been weaponized and commodified into non existence.  And the human emotional make up has changed.  People are not what they used to be.

So there you go.  "The horror, the horror."   No fooling.