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.    

web counter

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.