Inside Flush

 

Sometimes I feel like a tiny gnome in a hostile enchanted forest. Feel? Am. I am teensy, weightless, here to be tossed in the pre-dawn murmuring hollows. One wakes from illusory gulches, starts one's day, and notices that between passing dust specks parallel universes tolerate one another like Fred and Ethel Mertz. The sense one is clinging helplessly to a floating air molecule is, in some ways, an emotional handicap.

This in not completely congenital. External forces over time steep in the hot water that is our environment. I'm leaving Mike and Doris out of this, for now, since they are blood kin to the Spuke Dynasty, and me and Rosy are on just dandy social terms with both individuals. It's not their fault they are related to a zillion pieces of shit. I'm still a registered democrat, and Rosy won't hear of any kind of intolerance towards people on the basis of them being one type or other of low life asshole. Rosy, and some other people down this way, have helped me appreciate how drug dealing takes a lot of harsh judgments out of helping hands.

With the exception of our dear friends Mike and Doris, members of the Spuke family are deviant slime, and are extra-ordinarily fertile. They pop out as twin slip and fall attorneys. There are sets of triplets that repo tall buildings. Quintuplets that all collect bad debts. They've produced octuplet bail bondsmen. There are many reasons why the Bible has a whole chapter on Numbers, among them, the proliferation of Spukes. Hundreds of Spukes work for the city or for a partnership of tax exempt organizations which, in aggregate, guarantees no one gets anywhere in life delinquent of Spuke tyranny.

essay: Economic Mystique

Let's try acting like mystics. I am now Sri Rama Bingo . I have taken the name Sri Rama Bingo because everything where I live operates like a bingo concession. Also, like a clip joint.

Before the town fully corporatized, it planned to save us all from poverty by installing the Rivers Casino. Pittsburgh city government runs like a bingo concession, and, ironically, it placed a modern gambling facility on the put-upon, rumbling north shore. To many it was welcome because they love to gamble. No one seems to be sore about folks lying like motherfuckers about everything, like it was supposed to eliminate property tax, so fucking generous the lying assholes claimed to be.

There was a case, not long after the casino was running , in which a city administrator embezzled over a hundred thousand dollars from the city. She was caught, and got an insane lite sentence, no jail time (first off) because she had grown, like potted plants, an addiction to gambling at Rivers Casino. Must be low recidivism. The flesh is weak. Jesus forgives assholes for pulling shit. The the gambling consession must go on.

Our city government, former mayor Tom Murphy in the chair, initiated all the lights, the noise, the pageantry. Murphy, while the process was still rumbling towards completion, made an much maligned faux paux, publicly, to the affect, "The fix is in." At the time three businesses were competing for the concession, one of them got in, and Tom may have felt the decision making process was not unbiased. Or else he knew outright. If memory ain't too senile, a fourth contender for the concession came in under the wire, so the placement process has a lot of issues no one cares about now.

This is all happy horse shit in the past. I am neither hopeful nor sentimental. Yet memory is an asshole, and it, too, pulls shit. Like raising concerns about what people did, and what the status of said horse shit is now. This in no way asperses what assholes everywhere are doing now, or will do in the future. Parables, dear friends, reveal what may happen in the future. Mystics are fat pricks about their goddam parables, I am Sri Rama Bingo, you are gracious to read my crap.

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The New Humanism

It's spring, and daisies have not thrown in the sponge as plant life. It's winsome of them grow free range, without supervision, chemicals or mass media manipulation. They don't know what's on the news, most people do, and the daisies manage their lilting noons more elegantly than most people. Flowers are hard to live up to. As they go, daisies are equitable.

Anything can be discussed using the daisy method. Rules are easy, each petal stands for a narrative point of view. One that has been expressed by people, a shitload of times, same shit each time, on the internet of television. The gold center of a daisy is like Switzerland, it may write a nasty letter to the World Health Organization, that aside, they stay out of shit. Each petal is a different opinion on the same subject. Most flowers want you to stay on topic while recognizing a variety of challenging concepts.

Yes, it's brutal. You have to pluck the petal you just finished considering soon as you get the point, so you don't lose your place and louse up the daisy method. It's a way of broadening the mind and matching concepts to courses of action. It could be one petal, or a combination of several. Differing ideas are not all mutually exclusive. The circular configuration with joined spokes radiating from center works tirelessly to bat home the point that free societies take all things under consideration. People are overly singular in mind.

prose reading: Me and Rosy (fragment) by Bruce Reisner 5 4 2021