Bruce Reisner

audio: the gong/reading serieds

2012-01-16T15:05:00.001-08:00

Podcasts are the latest thing at Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises

2012-01-09T14:58:00.001-08:00

Credo Collection

2012-01-04T19:28:00.000-08:00

I've argued over it being stupid or not to hold more that one view about a single topic. It's been said that if you don't have one singular point of view, you don't know anything,. Your the chicken that gets pecked to death in the barn yard.

Multiplicity. Shuffle a deck of ideas. Shake dry bones in soup can and throw 'em down on the kitchen table, the one with the floral gray formica top.

There's no one thing that does it all. It's a river. Also a buzz saw. People go blind from pleasuring themselves. Naaawwww. Hun-unhhh. Nope.

Get multifarious. You'll like it.

poetry podcast for silly listeners

2011-12-31T07:59:00.001-08:00

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Alienation Network

2011-12-17T07:05:00.001-08:00

I think I got a digitized 'you was eye-balling alert' on facebook. Actually, it was, "Boy, you been sending freind requests to people you don't know." So much for the Will Rogers/Dale Carnegie thing. I'm regressing. Invertebrate.

While I'm cooling off under the half ton of granite, there will be the self-appaisal and self-bashing, the kind of both that are exhillarating on days you don't get hit with the great acre-wide fly swatter in the sky. Electric reproach. People I never met feel I have intruded on the their climate controlled Christmas. Like I was playing jump rope in their walk-in closet.

Sending the request is like the Manson Family creepy crawling in people's delux ranch house with security system and professional support system all switched to pick up body heat and call the cops.

If it isn't some evil Freudian analyst getting the goods on you and making you a slave to your own admissions of inadequacy, it's Facebook, Google and all the tech companies you depend on to socialize, now that people are allergic to strangers. The alert I got sounded like someone ratted me out for sending them a friend request, when Facebook streams names and faces of supposed mutual friends. Granted, it's titled 'People you may know,' but it's also one in an infinity of corporate Rollodexes wired with alarms and traps. It's a Montessori school caged in razor wire.

This should be where crone maturity helps, and it does. A little. And then it comes back to hurt again. I was made to see the old crones who have to sell insurance or what ever till they croak, eating all the rejection and taking affirmations in having learned to take it as part of a job, and not an indication of personal scabies. All the while, the individual looks old, seedy and frozen in a tundra of lost essence. All things are essence. Such as the feeling of being a poisoned rat. I feel vitiated. Like I'm exiled to a store front office where people reject my sales pitch. While trying to be social and happy.

Being Nowhere

2011-12-10T06:08:00.001-08:00

Hole. Sphyncter. Rictus. Pick any word, dear readers, there is a town named Albion, Pennsylvania, and per act of dark sentiment, an idyl, I once drove onto that burg's main street in the hatchback. This town looks innocent, store fronts, all six of them, painted fresh and white as the Klan.

There's a branch office of the First National Bank, so puny and frail, like it had little to lose. There were scatterings of farm and cottages, last time I looked, also cows and horses a quarter mile from a park in the center of town, and there was a six story commercial building that used to be a bank and now processes billions of welfare claims.

But that can be written off as a by-product of social progress, like bologna or liverworst. There are about six streets in Albion wide enough to let three horse-drawn buggies block traffic on. That's a total of 666. Well, no. I added incorrectly. Still 666 popped up on my inner adding machine. I fudged the numbers. But it's still an indication that Satan may pop up in smoke.

It's a frightening and legendary number. I get this shit from my crystal ball. There's evil in this green United States town called Albion. Nothing to be concerned about. An ordinary mark of the beast. Like certain cows. Certain oxen, too.

Oxen have power. Drinking establishments have power, too. There are cerain rocks and heaps that exude fragrant unique charisma.

I went into a bar and got a beer.I remember all too much, but that was the last thing that made sense for the next few minutes. Then trancendental heightened resolution.

Glancing back at a small and cheery bucolic outlay of small town personage there, I couldn't claim total inner unity with this cornpone. Hush my mouth. There was an unused coin operated pool table in the back of the corner bar. Having zero entre with the Appalacians, slingshots in the back pockets of bib over-alls, I decided to play a rack of pool, kill the beer, and leave before I'm made to feel less like a resident of Albion, Pennsylvania.

I put a quarter in the stainless steel slot and pushed in the metal sliding quarter snatch, eager to ease the nerves with gentle sport. The mechanism jammed.

I heard the balls, all mocking sixteen of them, dislodge from their pool ball residence inside the table. And they stopped, neglecting, as normal, to roll and clatter into the rear portal, like the pool table's wide wooden asshole. Indulge the histrionics. I'm fast. The balls failed to reach their destination, and I was unable to play pool.

Notice a stranger in a jerkwater town. Self-consciousness. Something the romantics rant about. "What are the customs here?" I asked myself, as told to do by my great big social science prof at college. I did poorly there. No good answer was arrived at.

At last moved to action, I walked to the bar and waited for the wan, drawn bar maid. She drifted my way, and I said, as carefully as possible, "I put a quarter in the pool table, and the balls are stuck inside the machine....."

I use the elipsis because, in soft nasal twang, she stopped me from explaining further. "You gotta kick it," she said, free of guile. College boy on this side of the bar, I gleaned, verbatim, I should walk back to the pool table and kick it.

This made sense. A blow to the table could dislodge the balls. If I kick the table, the pool balls will be jarred into cooperation and come rumbling home to papa. Note the point of origin at which views less explored come out to play in the rural sunshine. And in a honky tonk.

I kicked the table lightly, once, just to get a sense of how the tootsie might adjust to getting slammed into hard wood. Mr. Foot said back, "Don't get carried away, Hoss." I kicked the table three or four more times, but the balls stayed stuck. And because of nervousness, I may have seemed clumsy. I'm not.

Next try I kicked the table in a different location on it's dysfunctiional green felt form. I didn't notice just then that I was drawing attention. Just as I kicked from yet another position, this time winding up, I was paralyzed with the report of loud inquisition.

With a bass southern drawl, a tall hay seed hollered, "WHAT IS THAT ASSHOLE DOING?"

While still paralyzed, the girl-wheat-shaft behind the bar said, in her plaintive voice "The pool balls is stuck. He's kicking it." Then came, instantly, the idyl flash of comprehension. Animosity flutters off.

The rubes now knew why I was kicking the pool table. They misundertood, at first, my behavior, because they kick things all the time, and it never looks as dippy as my little performance. There people are called, "shit kickers." Now their emotions changed from fear to enlightening. "Kick it, kick it," they chanted, in a warm, spontaneous and unassuming fervor. Set free from paralysis by the outpouring, I gave the table a more socially acceptable style of kick. It was sort of like a drop kick. But with added finesse, for the on-lookers. It was like I was responsible for their fragile sense of closure. The balls cut free and rolled, sonorously, to the table's buttocks. There was cheering.

It took my usual of about nine minutes to shoot fifteen balls into holes in the sides and corners. On the way out, the fast nod to the town folk was practiced from years dealing with this type of social immediacy. I'm glad to have shared the confusion and pleasure. Any kind of realization might be a good one. I hope that room full of hicks remembers the experience with the same kind of love as do I. The family of man is a trip.

Tossing A Life Line

2011-11-03T05:46:00.000-07:00

The computer is defragmenting, with the moving picture on the screen of molecules gadding whimsically between a pair of test tubes. When it's done, like it's time to wipe it's ass, a digital drain spout appears, vortex circling into the cyber-shit I dive into first thing every morning. Habits are always degrading.

There's no such thing as cyberspace. I'm still annoyed at the culture that grew from our failed dot com craze of 1990s. Great at holding a grudge, everyone was thrilled and smug about the new language, and the new Silly String jet of fresh perception. 'Cyberspace' was believed to be something so brilliant and accessible and intangible that it had to do a better job than God or Jesus at making them better off. And better than people who don't dig computers. I was still a pink ludite in the 1980s, and my ass is still stinging from the alienation that resulted.

I won't be mistaken for Noah. Last time I got a directive from on high, I was tripping. It was, like, take the things that made you an asshole, and place them in the forge. Then do an Aldous Huxley on the way people drink you in. Sell something. Wear a decent suit. Talk like a powerhouse.

You have to take your own turd-in-the-punchbowl dysfunctionalities and build an arc from the goofy timbers. The new salvation is in jettisoning from the boat the giraffes and zebras who might steal your job or default on the rent. Like Satan, a rhesis monkey is a liar. But you needn't sail alone. You will be needing an entourage when the raft of drift wood beaches. After the deluge, it's gonna be a gas.

Dickhead's Fables

2011-11-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

#1
I was watching a rerun of The Untouchables, the black and white cop show from the wholesome 1960s, and there's a scene where a gangster pulls out a huge folding knife, pushes the blade through the back of an apolstered chair, and says, "See, with an eight inch blade you can kill a guy, like this."

Looked like a good idea. Better than trying it from the front, with an oyster shucker. Immediately, I went online to my favorite knife seller, a web site convenient as all get out, and like Jimmy Stewart stuttering, they had in stock an eighteen inch stilleto lock back knife with an eight inch blade, for ten bucks. I placed an order. It's a babe. Of all things, the quality of cheap tool steel has been improving wonderfully. The US is a debtor nation, and any four year old with a paypal account can cop a blade you can X people through a lounge chair with. You don't get blood on you jammies.

#2

Deer round these parts grew lazy and trusting. Now don't y'all call PETA or the game warden, because this is all a kid's game of pretend, the buck behind the house is real as black plague.

The stiletto is in the inside secret weapons pocket of my Gap knock off of a Levy jacket. The knife is a cheap knock off of something Guido's utilize in film. The shoes are mail order from Wallmart, special for walking on modern synthetic office building floor. I'd like you to be fair enough to see how changing times are reflected in a different-from-last year fashion statement. It's punk.

I won't really try this at home. I just have to visualize charging into a large deer, doing a job on it before it realizes how serious things are. First I'd just stand still, looking calmly at the herd, like ususal.

#3

Everywhere you looked, downtown was convivial as a barnload of white people doing the Hokey Pokey. We're a barn dance. Farmers. Farmers that drifed here thanks to the industrial revolution and failing family farms. I love it here. We have major league sports.

The dot com craze of the mid nineteen nineties made this town perfect because you can have anything cheap, and be anything cheap. That latter grace is because people are too inchoate to challenge each other's posturing. Why in Boston, people like me get picked apart. You can be anything you want here, because all folk are comparably delusional, made equal by mercury in the fish sandwich.

I'm optimistic about the whole crock of shit because. I'm armed with a brand new trademark weapon. I have my costume selected. My suit of lights. I believe I am a type of torreador. An unrecognized torreador. A bullfighter is quest of understanding. Toro. Toro.
#4

None of this is real. It's about what can happen. I'm singing loud, deep, sonorous. The power ditty spiritual number I'm gutting off fills the passenger compartment of the paddy wagon. They picked me up like a blue plastic sack of empty beer cans on trash day. Using a long, cruel twist tie, like they close trash bags with, I can't use my hands for anything but finger snapping, and it's a pitiful rythme section to such an inspired type of song. I'm making it up, trying to drown out the siren, people in the wagon are squirming and bitching. We're like a a string of charms on a bracelet, linked together in this paddy wagon, going bumpety down the pot holes.

Power Futz

2011-10-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

My premise is that too few Americans are in the strong and sane social economic models of yesteryear. The 'new you' could be more strapped and less represented in Washington. You may be a direct victim of formalized, duplicitous, aggressiove dissempowerment. But that's a little ham-throated, and I mean to make sense.

In range of most memories, there once existed organized consumerism. Middle class interest groups grew an A cup in their training brassiere on a plan to buy merchandise only from suppliers that comply with the consumer's political agendas. Ralf Nader convinced short dimply people they were entitled to product safety. Sweating over-forty types in warm-up suits and station wagons were encouraged to speak out, to drop a monkey wrench in commercial cogs, free of retaliation, because faceless powder puffs are entitled to be heard. I'm rebelling. I'm rebelling aganst the soft machine, and hard one as well, our stupid middle class and our fascist, mind controlling government/industrial complex. I don't know why I keep saying, 'our.' I feel alone with a strategem.

Bad Mamma Walmart beat that hope of consumerist empowerment to submission with her rolling pin, fresh imported flour smoking off her hygienic full body apron. There is no power left in consumerism. Not cried over above, joe smith in lower case letters can no longer make money in the stock markets, money markets, day trading pop stands, internet instant coffee mug magnate, you-have-an-order while the fat boy in a bathrobe drinks coffee type money earning ventures. You can't earn shet-tzu dung by working the resourses avalable to you. Whether by design or default, the dude in the Lazy Boy recliner is going weak. Here's my cutesy-pootsy unifying theory to go with this crap state of affairs.

I futz with things. No certainties. No captial investment. The freebies, the blog, youtube, craigslist, and a print on demand sevice that allows you to upload your compositions online, and thus offer a book for sale to the public. I futz with plans to design lines of merchandise, attempting to get a main stream manufacturing concern to run and sell said merchandise. The lost continent of free thinking is being futzed, by yours truly, on nearly all free internet publishing venues. A house philosophy based on Milton Friedman's economics is being applied here, in my ever whimsical bumbling unspectacular way. Results are obtained. More and faster than the fat cats. The way to recover economic vitality is to futz till something pays.

Much Like Bosnia

2011-10-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

Relations with the deer are getting worse. I was riding my electric bicycle on the trails along Riverview Park. Rounding a hairpin curve, I was caused to stop at the sight of a score or so of them. All but a few were fashionably prone, very Christian Dior, evenly and angularly spaced, as if Buckminster Fuller had composed the grouping. It was an arresting sight.

A tall standing doe gave me that can't-you-please look that these snobs seem to practice in the mirror. Then she turned to the fauns and said, "Call one of us if Abe Lincoln starts talking to you." A twelve point buck lowered it's rack at me, more dissappointed than hostle, and said, "We're resting."

As I buzzed away, a scrawny punk six pointer jeered, "Hack. Third string Marlon Perkins investigator!"

Deer Antics

2011-10-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

I'm half-out of this because I'm an athiest, but people are a religeous animal. And they might be right. I could fry like a snack food for being a blasphemous little crumb.

Disposed to Unitarian Universalism, though, diverse spiritualities are allowed to be their sweet selves in my camp. Again, it is the herds of deer that brought another worldveiw to mind.

I was returning from a ride on my electric scooter, coming up the steep dirt embankment behind the house. About eleven
hundred tiny bungalows once filled the acres of wooded area behind my shanty. Left for decades to rot, most were demolished, leaving all the space needed for the animals that have been walking with a source of light. Deer are enlightened. There was another chance meeting.

An eleven point buck lifted a hoof in a warning gesture, the way your home ec teacher used to indicate you need to be very quiet. The usual shunning behaviors the deer had been using on me like a social science was spared, and obviously this was not for lack of mistrust on their side our two worlds. The congregants silent, and still, a doe got up from the ground and paced easily among the group, speaking whispers to individual members of the flock as she did so. The buck turned to me, again with the please-just-contain-yourself attitude that I've grown used to. It said, "We're conducting a service."

A Portly Fess-Up

2011-10-19T03:20:00.000-07:00

Pardon me for squeezing the tube before looking where the sink was. I feel like I made a mess, and am ambivalently contrite. Some blog entries ago, I posted a claim to having had invented the acronym 'WAMF.' I was a hasty putz, and did not google the acronym. After having claimed to have invented an urban slang for 'witty ass motherfucker,' I was all Gloomy Gus to find that 'WAMF' is in use as 'Wide ass motherfucker,' and as 'White ass motherfucker.' From my heart of hearts, I had no intention of imfringing, defaming or plagiarizing. I thought up 'witty ass motherfucker' and the acronym 'WAMF' my own motherfucking self, and remain proud to have thought of it and shared it with dense, cruel humanity. Again, I am sorry, and admit to having been a jerk.

Orange Rides Again

2011-10-13T18:19:00.000-07:00

Me again, Orange Fitz, and again, ma just loved a bright orange sunset so she named me 'Orange.' Guess you already know my history, if you don't, I used to be a movie extra, now I'm just fucked, but I wanted to lay my poor grizzled old head on your gentle shoulder and fess up to what's been twisting my big, gangling balls. I'm a poet, god damn it, and I'm getting treated like an asshole. Let me tell you some of it.

I attended a poets conference down in Tulsa, and hooo-weeee, who the hell'd expect a group like that to suck eggs. I read some of my best work aloud, then sat back and took a moral drubbing at the hands and lungs of those rat-shitting snobs. Fucking near all the bastards insinuated, one way or another, that I wasn't on the same level as all them creeps. One asshole has an MFA, so naturally his poems about ferns in a pot are better than mine, usually about men kicking ass off a Harley. Then some turkey insists her work is on a high spiritual plane, and people like me are an Earth bound piece of shit. Good Christ, she had hair like a used Brillo. And then this guy actually stood up to say that he's doing terribly important work on behalf of Somalian gingevitis patients, which makes his poems better than mine no matter what words he shit out on eight by ten copy paper.

I been called a lot of things, in my time, and here I was being called a lesser mortal in room full of purported egalitarians. You guessed right if you said I have a burr up my ass.

All I got left is the words themselves. And a busted down Winnebago to live in, and a disgruntled ex-wife who knows a lot of ex-cons without much to lose, so I'm kinda on tinter hooks most of the time. All the old guard I grew up with is either elsewhere or dead,and there's nothing left to do with this sorry old life but compose the rhyming verses of me, biker, film extra, old fuck up with a dangerous woman in the wings. Of course, I'm hurt and angry with that poet conference, a man my size can hurt, same as you little pussies. I can see a fine sunset out the window of the Winnebago, I have my pen, paper, thoughts, consciousness and the right to walk around. Fuck them people in Tulsa.

Spiritual Math

2011-10-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

I'll do the math for you. If you are fifty four years old and lived for 21 years in Pittsburgh, you can subtract from your age the first 33 years, which is the age at which Jesus Christ bought it.

Sound like a good deal? Well, you have to live in Pittsburgh till your soul freezes. Till you no longer need to make sense. When you no longer expect it from others, and let yourself babble along with the illiterate rabble. Rhyming is a symptom of the process. It's known to come about following a brain injury. Mine is a sore train wreck. But I accept this black hole like the gospel.

And I never would have seen the light and the numbers had there not been a conversation in front of my shanty. I was trying to read The New Yorker on the front porch, as the conversation illustrated why this town can't pull itself out of oblivion. Five city workers were standing at the perrimeter of a grave-size oblong hole in the street. Shovels in hand and the city works truck idling near by, the men were standing stark still, talking about the many things that make them the very soul of Pittsburgh.
"If I make the next pay grade, I'm gonna upgrade my package in Vegas." One of the men said to the group. They all acknowleged the close relationship between pay scale and package deal.

"Well, I been taking my free time at the Rivers Casino, but I'm planning to see Vegas before too much longer." responded another.
Perhaps it was the foreman who boasted that he had a time share unit in Las Vegas, leaving him no chance of having a vacation that didn't serve the need. "You know, there's a hotel in Vegas costs $25,000 a night. Michael Jackson stayed there."

"If you won the lottery, would you stay there, at $25,000 a night," one of the men asked the group. All responded in turn, orderly as nuns, "Yeah, of course I'd stay at a hotel where Michael Jackson was. If it was the same room he was in."

Agreement was expressed around the oblong hole. They would all stay at the hotel if they won the lottery. It sounded as if only a fool wouldn't. Like, "Yes, I'd buy the Hope Diamond," or, "Naturally, I'd turn my heart to philanthropy," but their vacation packages were the only things that would change if they were suddenly filthy rich.

Virtually all topics of discussion crossed the same simple criteria. Pay grade. Las Vegas. The Lottery. It sounded as if the city works had geared itself to the price of vacation packages, time share units, and smorgesboards. Food splendor was another topic discussed around the oblong hole. None of the men were skinny, and they talked with extra ardor about the food, all they could choke down, at a favorite hotel in Vegas. Drink is a curse of the working class. So's Vegas. And gluts of fattening food.

Prophecies are tendered like the coins in a slot machine. A plethora of earthly heavens are there for the taking, while you enjoy your paid time off from your job digging holes in the street. if you win the lottery, you can quit your job shoveling asphalt. The next higher pay grade places you closer to the celebrities, and surely, the lottery could put you right in the Rat Pack's lap, inspite of them all being dead. If the workers won the lottery, the Rat Pack would all come back to life. Resurection in Vegas. Dead town, Pittsburgh.

More Optimistic Tweets

2011-10-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

She has a trace of a beard and a case of tardive dyskensia. This is hacked out with appropriate guilt for making sport of the infirmed. It's gauche to ask if her habit of spitting is autonomic or something she hopes to perfect, practicing like a concert musician in her assisted living unit. But to be fair, few people don't practice something ugly.

The highrise is right next to my first bus stop of the day, first of many, in both directions, and I would be less averse if she didn't pace around in loops and cross checkings, with legs of her journey coming too close to me. Within inches. I'm averse to being spat on.

Since I'm being both honest and reprehensible, like a clown spinning plates on sticks, there's some points to discuss on her side of the topic, like she was there first. She had been utilizing the bus service before I began, and like I should go eat broken glass, the extra nice benches and lucite enclosure that grace the bus stop are only there because of the sensible modern highrise facility. Everywhere else in the hood there's a nest of cracked cement and mud to stand on while waiting for public transport. No shit, the system did put all kinds of people in circulation. People who in years past would have been kept in a vault. On the other hand, I'm still a lousy prick with a phobia about people who are sick and interactive.

But this young autumn day is a regular poultice. I feel better about everything, for there is a moment of clarity worth flicking across the breakfast table. I've been making a practice of pointing a stick at things that indicate an improving quality of life. The woman who paces around, wrecklessly, expectorating in all directions while sporting a Van Dyke has been wearing brand new glasses. They look like the kind of glasses lawyers, social workers, women professional people in general wear, and it's an improvement in both her looks, and in the way that social progress looks. Nice new glasses on that social progress.

Men's Parade

2011-09-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

Honest, honest, honest, this is hacked out devoid of homophobia. It's supposed to be presented in good humor, cherios all around. I'm using the situation in a hearty, playful, gutsy sort of manor.

The event so named 'Men's Parade,' named by me, and fessed of free will, was moving and humanizing, as well as traumatic, so I'm going to let the true name for it shine, let it shine... More than a statement about the Pittsburgh gay community, in 1991, there was one night a month upon which a billion gay men would march through Oakland in a dazzling show of solidarity. Intimating that I'm a straight man, only slightly to the left of Jack Webb in Dragnet, one unique night etched the parade on my indellible yellow legal pad of life experience.

It was probably in September. I'm not that meticulous about dates, such as when I bought the leather trench coat at a Goodwill store. It cost five skinny dollars, fit immaculately, was of wonderful quality, and was identical to the coat Richard Roundtree wore in the original movie 'Shaft.' It draped properly, praise God. This was twenty years ago, at which time I had great hair. Since I'm working up to some sort of point, I'm the tall, willowy, nervous type, thus people have been calling me a fag since I was nine. I'm not. I'm straight. Willowy. Nervous. Wearing a leather trench coat that choir directors and synchronised swimmers would die for.

The power and glory of it all was that for no reason what ever, I decided to wear my new coat to Chief's bar, which was normally a semi-styling dive bar full of diverse mottled hipsters. But one day a month it filled like an aquarium with male homosexuals dressed to the nines. Honest to whom or what ever, I am just a silly straight fellow who hadn't been livng in Pittsburgh for very long.

I had no idea it was Men's Parade on that evening I wore that beguiling leather trench coat, walking more than a mile along the very route the men marched, together, joyous and overwhelming.

This all hapened at the very time at which simple new relationships had been forming. I had been making a lot of new friends in Chief's bar. Up until that catastrophic parade, there, as far as I knew, were no arch questions being asked about my character, background or groin yearnings. It was pure coincindence that I entered Chief's along with a thick stream of men all coming into Chief's Bar, all dressed fantasticly and all in rare form. I was not in rare form, though. I was almost my usual self, but a little off my graze from the mile walk in the jubillant, stunningly dressed, queer throngs.

I was not marching with the gay men. I was walking, to Chief's bar, alone, a male molecule encapsulated in the leather trench coat like the one Shaft wore in the original movie. But all the straight friend's, and gay one's as well, that I'd met thus far at Chief's all at once thought that I had dressed up special to share in the mass celebration of male gayness. In fact, they all, at once, assumed that I was gay. At the same time judgement was being passed among the bar flies I had come to see as friends, total strangers were taking a fancy to me. Guys were putting their hands on me. Making overtures. Striking up conversations, by the cock hairs of Zeus. There was no place to sit and took forever to get a beer because the dump was so crowded. I was getting groped. Then the walk home was the mirror image of the walk there, the streets and sidewalks a dense and random parade in celebration of men, men, men. All of whom thought I had dressed up special for Men's Parade. I was getting groped. Guys were making passes.

Making Up Words

2011-09-02T18:34:00.001-07:00

This post is nothing to sweat over , you might do without it,I'd say go ahead, give it a read. Processing the info plucked from the droll universe that surrounds us all, I invented an acronym.

Since it might catch on, I want credit for it, and it could win a spot in the dictionary, I must needs to stake my claim in the frontier soil that word origin is. Gentle readers, I coined the acronym 'WAMF.'

"WAMF" stands for 'witty ass motherfucker.' I am a witty ass motherfucker. I am a WAMF. I'm a funny guy. Ask someone. Go on. Try it.

I am at least as scintillating and evanescent as Winston Fucking Churchill or Ogden Fucking Nash. In fact, I'm fucking near Noel Coward, minus a couple brownie points for provenence. That can happen to anyone, especially us riveting soiree' crashers who might be playing on the dark keys.

I'm one of those fuckers who look cool in a smoking jacket. Or a fucking lap robe. With the big business out like lasagne noodles. I'm a WAMF, fuckers. So go ahead and use my addition to modern language as you will. Pretend you're all cutting edge and hip. Just don't forget where the fuck you heard it first.

Learning To Shut Up

2011-08-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

Hey, ya. Name's Orange Fitz, my real name. Ma was a ceramist, name of Allethia Fitz. They always give their kids wierd names. The wife dumped me a decade ago, let me keep the Winnebago. It don't run no more, so it's a sheet metal trailer with a grubby windshield. Mike's been letting me keep it behind his barn in exchange for doing odd jobs.

Had to use a stage name, Vince Viccars, in the last career, now I'm using my given name. Had to get back to where I began.
See, the trouble started long before that break up. I was having me a career in film. Till I done got myself blackballed.

They was big on giving jobs to bikers, when I rode west on the Harley, round 1962. Ain't had one of them bikes in a coon's age. Wife took that, along with everything else, except my digs. I was an extra in near all the flicks that needed a herd of bikers to ride through town and tear up the place. Seemed like I had it made. Long way up, same distance down. At the height of it all, I got a two second speaking role in 'They Saved Hitler's Brain.'

Since you're wondering what happened, it was something you couldn't anticipate in a thousand years, unless you was one them Hebrew/Americans that produced cowboy flicks since before the Great Depression. They also produced biker flicks. And a certain sci-fi flick. Ain't going full into details, but you never know where people got sore spots. All I said was, "They was on to something."

Romanian Chairs

2011-08-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

Bellevue is a dry town, but a drinking establishment is in walking distance, spitting distance, if you will. I was waiting for the 14 bus just a cock hair out of town, no good place to sit, in front of the road house called the Rusty Dory. What the fuck is a 'dory?' What ever, the last place I went to shop is a Red, White and Blue thrift store, located right off of route 65, where I bought nothing. There was a close call with a leather trench coat that came near enough to my size to spark a mental picture of me in sadist regalia. Makes sense, somehow, that people would have secret lives in a town that forbids the use of alcohol. But a man burdened with unrelated guilt has no right to judge others.

The remorse was for pissing. There's a Burger King an eight lane jog across 65 from the thrift store, both still in Bellevue proper. Like a thief, I snuck in and used the men's room, and didn't buy anything. I could hear the invisible voices, saying, "There, that is the man who pissed in here, and now the door is always locked, and you have to ask at the counter for the key, because bastards like that lousy thrift shopper did what he just did. Fucker." Pricks like me abuse corporate kindnesses, and it's the commoner who suffers for it. Reminds how a term paper I wrote in college, titled 'The Ethical Suicide,' landed me a C-, and I didn't bother with grad school. Now I ride the bus. Standing guilty and alone, an ugly American, soon I had company at the bus stop along the highway. And again, I was still alone, though now among others.

Two men appeared from across the street, both quite old, very pale, one in chinos and a checked sport shirt, the other in blue work pants and a checked short sleeve sport shirt. One on the two men was carrying chairs. They were speaking, smiling their words to each other, in a rush of an Asian dialect. Both ignored me when I smiled and nodded in their direction. Both though, seemed to be thrilled with their purchase at he thrift store.

If I could understand their language, all doubt would be erased. They were talking about their two Romanian chairs. Stealing glances though, I saw on one of them the word 'Romania." It was on the underside of the hardwood seat, the chairs stacked in front of them, one upright, the other inverted. They were cheap, sturdy early American style, the kind supplied to nursing homes and group homes and condominiums owned by the tasteless middle class. My legs were hurting.

I was aching for a friendly conversation, as well as for respite from the heat and the burden of my own weight. But only a true ugly American would initiate conversation in what might be someone's second language. And I'm a cute son of a bitch, when I'm not pissing in some fast food joint where I'm not wanted. Two people close by, and no one to talk to. And two chairs left unused, like they weren't there to be sat on. With the two bleach skinned old men talking to each other, and no chance at all at any sort of kinship forming on my end, I decided to make a seat out of a pile of rocks, fresh clean rocks trying and failing at decorating the front parking lot of the Rusty Dory. Like the two chairs, it was uncomfortable, and it couldn't have looked good for a man to sit like a child on the ground, while two men remained standing beside the highway in front of their second hand furniture.

I've always admired the stoicism of the Asian peoples. One would have to be, to sit for more than a few seconds in a patently uncomfortable chair. Or, for that matter, to remain standing for as long as it takes for the bus to come. When the bus finally came, I waved the two men enter ahead of me, like a good American, like to allow them their best opportunity in finding seats and some free space for their ugly Romanian chairs. These are the silly rules I live by.

Checkered Flannel

2011-08-03T13:51:00.001-07:00

Brad was in an ugly mood. He was pounding beer in a road house, the television news covering the Feenis County Fair, and the regs, mostly farmers and tool and die men, were talking about Linda LaMote.

"Hey LaRue, what year was she Miss Feenis County?"

"Don't remember. But I was driving that F100, I know that."

"What's that got to do with when she was Miss Feenis," Donnell Yokes asked.

These were all slow talking men, with whole minutes passing before replies.

"I crashed that truck two years ago, so it's a ball park figure."

On the nineteen inch black and white screen a local news personality was interviewing a husband and wife taffy pulling operation, with the Ferris wheel and concession tents in the background. The homely couple, both with white paper cunt-caps on their heads, did their laughing tug of war as they talked, both ends of the taffy gangling out of their hands like a low hanging scrotum.

"It ain't about liking to do this," the rotund, thin haired lady puller told the interviewer. "it's about just doing it. It's what we been doing since 1963."

The men seated like red flannel crows around the horseshoe bar were still talking about Linda LaMote. "She been in a lotta movies, since being crowned queen here." The comment sounded dangerously sarcastic, though LaRue's inflections were nearly flat.

"I wouldn't fuck her with my worst enemy's dick," Brad bellowed out, before he had even bothered sounding out the words in his head.

The outburst came as no surprise to the rest of the patrons. Linda had been invited to appear at the fair, and turned down the invitation. No one was ready to forgive her for doing a thing like that. Or, rather, for not doing a thing like that.

"Ain't that a crime of ommission?" A sincere and dry shot at humor by Larue

"Damn straight," Brad agreed, this time, at least, thinking before he spoke.

Book Biz (at total fabrication)

2011-07-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

I got Katie's permission to use her novel, "Opening Rings" as an example of the power of words. Katie came to me just after she left grad school in Massachusetts. "How do I get my novels out of the middle class?," she wrote to me. Hundreds of writers write to me, most after reading one of my books. My home address is always on the inside cover. Nothing to hide. I got no aversion to strangers. The six dobermans cased in razor wire around my mobile home are there like a half dozen lawn jockeys. Katie is one of the people who make me proud to be an independent publisher.

I got right back to Katie, that time. "You write what you need to write," I told her, practically ordering her into the kind of action I want. And without that dumb bourgoisie hestiation a lot of women, and certain men, authors get a problem over. I have been publishing all kinds of lady's books through Brass Plane Publishing.

Katie didn't waste any time putting out exactly the kind of work she had inside. I told her, "You get fucked up over that MFA program, you could get a bad reputation with the agents. You get that, you won't have books like "Inferiostomy," or your book. The one I told you I like."

"Shit," she said. "My daddie tried to get me to give it all up for the law firm he owns." There you are. "Fuck no," I says. Brass Plane Publications puts your books out without you having to go that route. Fuck no.

The little lady who wrote "Done Ragging" is also one of my protoges'. She's a little firebrand, married to a guy who races stock cars. Somewhere in the Ozarks. I'm gonna be heading up that way on the Harley, so we can talk about a deal I'm working out for them. Lisa Smith told me that her MFA is as good as a visit from pest control as far as getting you published, and Lisa's on her second book, made here in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.

Right here are two women who have done great for themselves by way of Brass Plane Publications. My wife's right here with me, and I wouldn't fuck any other broad with your dick. It's all business between those women authors and me.

Following Uncle

2011-07-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

We are/were close blood relatives, and there was a resemblence between us. We both have/had weak, timid chins, and we both have/had goatees that come/came and went with our chameleonic whims. He was a writer and critic, so the crap am I. Uncle passed at 55, I'm 53 and expect to reach at least 56. It would only be fair, considering that Uncle got famous while in his late 30s and I'm still treading the wet July air, as if the stuggle will lead to something. Uncle was best known for his work as a jazz critic, before bowling a strike with his book on the subject of graffiti. This is the reason I've turned to the subject of criticism. There are two movies that are for the most part long forgotten, and someone has to make the world know both were prescient.

I have in my private film collection a copy, on durable VHS format, of the low budget masterpiece, "Surf Nazis Must Die." On the surface, it's a schlock account of a cabal, eventually thwarted by honest American law enforcement. While the lead conspirator has black hair and post-Vietnam drooping mustache, how could anyone not be alarmed by the supporting cast of Nazis, most of whom were platinum blond. The flick could be clasified as mere cops and robbers, with neo-fascist theme, but the key word is 'surf.' Obviously, the West Coast has been spawning Nazis like violets in spring. And they can't all be just hanging ten and cursing minorities.

Not housed in my own collection, I had the good fortune of renting the B-classic, "They Saved Hitler's Brain." In this work, Der Fuehrer's scowling noggin is in a jar, kept alive with the same chemicals and electrodes that worked so well in, "The Brain That Wouldn't Die." Lucky for us all, those chemicals have been kept a secret, though I'll bet you a bowl of popcorn that Dick Cheney and half the CIA have it on paper, secured to their refrigerator doors with an ABCs magnet. It's just common sense. Why stay dead when you don't have to?

This movie also featured men and women with hair the color of Andy Warhol's wig. And wigging the late Hitler did. The only time he smiled was when the antagonist thugs were winning. Towards the end, as the virile fascist thugs fell into defeat, a look of abject horror came over the severed head in the inverted pickle jar. Knowing now that both great films were more than light entertainment, it's my duty to warn the public.

Of what should everyone be warned? Surf Nazis. Hitler's brain. Norway. No longer flexing oiled pecks on the beach, they have mobilized.

I'm in the middle of a sticky law suit over my publishing venture, Brass Plane Publications, but none the less I am willing to risk further persecution to squeeze off a more detailed account of what is happening. You too can see your manifestos and sagas looking more like a real book, and it won't cost you eternity in electrostatic brine. Just $5000 down and a modest editing fee, and you too can be an important author, like myself. Suffice, for now, to know that what you need to save the world is just a money order away. My new book, "They Killed Bruce's Novel" is available in hard cover, soft cover and astroprojection, $19.95, in the format that best saves you from advancing tyrany. Good day and good reading.

P.S. There is no such entity as 'Brass Plane Publishing.' It's purely fiction.

Inferiostomy

2011-07-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

The apartment was a cavern in the basement of a huge Victorian rooming house. When the manager of the building decided to let me have it, I overheard him say to old Mrs. Sullivan, "Yeah, he belongs down there." And I did. It was a thin slice of concrete blocks making half the basement my hole, my tube, my damp cool burrow. It came with a floozy wood poster double bed, like a peon's cheap replica of Henry VIII's guest lodgings. The orange fabric couch smelled like someone's sweating ass, and there was a comfortable vinyl lounge chair in the living room, near a floor lamp with Mad Magazine plastic megaphone shades. I was a young bachelor as much as one might be ink-drawn in the same puerile mag. Anyway, that was how I saw myself, like the kind of young man who would look natural smoking a shiny new apple pipe, if it was the norm at the time, which it wasn't. I smoked Camel filters during that import year. Later on, as I grew and changed, I switched to Marlboros. Lately I've been smoking the gamy generic cigs called 'Raves.' Very hard on the throat and chest, I'm wondering if the nagging cough will ever clear up. Bronchitis, I'll bet ya.'

I grew in that cinderblock cave. It was my first time away from the town I grew up in, doesn't deserve a name, but there was some Rebecca From Sunnybrook Farm going on when I moved from jerkwater to urbanized. There was a small, prim, girlish shelf of books in the bedroom, beside the king size bed and cartoon floor lamp, and I took to reading most nights, after a nice day at the little mop job. There was a copy of Frank Conroy's "The Subject Was Roses," which featured a long preface explaining how the author grew the compulsion to write the book. There was a worthless second edition of 'Portnoy's Complaint,' a few experimental fiction works from New Directions, in that tentative composition book style cover, and some shitty potboilers by famous authors who got lazy. And then there was the subsidy published novel that changed my life. The only book I took with me when I 'closed the book' on my year in Rhode Island is titled, "Inferiostomy," by D. P. Reters. After reading it, I corresponded directly with Mr. Reters, as his home address was printed right under the date and copyright warnings. "No lawyers, pal," it read, "You plagiarize me, I pull up on the Harley and crush your head."

In the preface to 'Inferiostomy,' D.P. explains that when people read an important work of fiction, they, in the metaporical sense, grow their first short curly hairs all over again. It's not a 'rebirth,' as many Christians like to bruit, but rather a second, third and forth (et infinitum) puberty. He stoically assured his readership that once they read "Inferiostomy," they would be able to, on an emotional and spiritual plane, shave their bush and start from delta one each time they began one of Mr. Reters many self-publications. He further explained that this is not feasible with books published through Random House or Harper and Row, because they only print books made to lock people into a state of near-death adulthood. "I can't read any of that garbage without seeing this dim light at the end of the bogus cave," D had shared.

The premise of Inferiostomy is that people have to cut their dirty, hopeless negative senses of self out of their own little minds if they ever hope to have the the magnificent self-esteem they are entitled to. It begins with the antagonist, a mean, homely research scientist, designing an electronic device, to be planted in the brains of people like the one I used to be, which is why, from the git-go, the book had such a profound effect on me. Reters was way ahead of his time, as when the book first appeared, they were only doing this stuff to monkeys. "Sure,' the author had written me, on his lined pink stationery, 'it was monkeys first, people next. No fucking way I'm waiting for the creeps to get to this literary giant." They won't get to me, either.

The handsome, young protagonist, Little Brucie, takes interest, at first, in the mad scientist's research. He's been going to the library every day after he gets home from his little mop job, trying to figure out how to resolve his feelings of innadequacy, which, of course, was the very thing the antagonist was trying to capitalize on. Little Brucie found a series of articles in the Providence Eagle about the research. "What if some type of brain implant is just the ticket?" he wondered, as he paged through a stack of local weeklies. I won't ruin the whole experience for you, since you can still get a copy, reprint I should say (the author passed, after a heroic battle with lung cancer), of "Inferiostomy" through my new publishing house, Brass Plane Publications. You'll find a lot of my novels, as well, and should you see fit to do your own thinking and writing, I can help you get your opus between glossy covers for a low fixed rate.

Solitaire (cool your jets, it's fiction)

2011-07-19T10:45:00.001-07:00

An eccentric person has no right to balk at some teasing, maybe some outright ridicule. They said the guy who designed the steam engine was nuts, and I hear tell his wardrobe was even more conservative than mine. Mrs. Henry next door says I look like I'm dressed for a flood. They're capri pants. Men in Italy wear capri pants, I think. I know the ladies do, at least, and this is supposed to be a genderless society. But lately Mr. Paul has been ragging about the motorcycle I bought. He calls it a 'rice rocket,' and he's at least half right, I should have bought either American, or anyplace other then my bikes birthplace. It's like the child of Rube Goldberg and Aileen Wuornos. A real piece of shit. This is another bad year for appliances and transportation. I think I'm getting arthritis.

Then, last year, it was the chain saw. Like usual, and I know I'm a bit of a schmuck, I got one out of a discount warehouse online, which made me wonder if it employed bald headed Jews with a short temper, like the places I used to shop in when I was kid. Society is changing much too fast for the average guy to get a grip on. Same as the goddam bike, there's something fishy with the idle screw, you can't adjust the thing properly, so there's problems with the chain saw. Either I burned out the engine, or else it needs a new spark plug. Doesn't matter at this point, because I lost interest in the project I had in mind.

There's a sweet old couple in the shanty in back of my hovel, and they keep rubbing it in about how reliable their chain saw is. All their appliances work like gems. And then they have to lay it on about the weeds I have growing. I asked if I could borrow their weed whacker. "Ain't sure I trust a man like you with a gas engine, Little Brucie." Imagine that, a 92 year old bag calling me 'Little Brucie.' I'm average height! And the name is Bruce, not 'Little Brucie."

"Them weeds is grown too thick to cut down with a weed whacker. I'd go at them oaks and maples with a chain saw, if you ever get one that works." Even her husband thinks he's a comedian. There aren't any trees. They are weeds with thick trunks, and I think their weed whacker would handle them just fine. Not really sure, though. It isn't my province.

People in this borough are clannish. That's why I don't seem to connect to well with people here. I moved here a long time ago, been waiting for my life to fill in and get more sympatico. It never does. I just live alone like a washed up hermit. Watching the afternoon movie, cashing my disability checks, saving a few pennies a month for a new saw. Once you go off your schedule too long, it gets hard pick up where you left off. Living in the boonies, like this, can have a bad effect on your outlook.

I was planning to perform a massacre with that chain saw, and now I'm just tired. Arthritis gets much worse, and it will all have been an idle dream.

Pet Theory

2011-07-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

This post is posted in case anyone claims credit for my pet theory:

It's called Big Bruce's Pet Theory of Organized Religion. It states that some people have a genetic predisposition for pontificating, and this trait accounts for the popularity of religion, and for the direction religeon takes.

Absent of this gene for Baptist style hard ball preaching, people might find other explanations for life on Earth and for outer space, as well as other views on after-life. Or there could be no religion at all.

More pet theories are in the works.

Little Black Hearts

2011-07-13T15:28:00.001-07:00

the real one went to vinegar
mishandled young wine disolving the blob
now it's a chicken giblet
so I read dense books
then write electric replies
they write back with little black hearts
no such thing on my keyboard
just one year out of date
the organs change that much
heartless

Scooter Tale

2011-06-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

It's a cruel economy, and this pedestrian is in a pecuniary nose dive. My last car got hauled to recycling glory a couple years ago, and ever since, each day has been visited with dreams of transportation less depressing than a city bus. So I've been exploring some options of the two wheeled kind.

Sure it all looks easy, breezy and cute. A nice looking guy or gal zipping down Penn Avenue on a mod looking Vespa or Honda motor scooter. Looks like a charming little way to get around. Well, there's a grim subset of factors that may determine just how easy, just how breezy one of those motor vehicles truly is. I'm working on the problem, right now, having bought one of the very dirt cheapest imported bikes available by mail order.

" Why doesn't he join a support group and leave hard, greasy, hairy chested work to people who are playing with a full deck?" a burly biker might interject. That is how an experienced motorcycle personage may well respond. "Why should I care what a misguided novice learns from his own poor judgement?" some heartless, illiterate gear head might add. But for people who value the process more so than the outcome, my experience buying a motorscooter off the Internet has been a newsworthy farrago of steel parts and poor communications.

I know you will like hearing that it took over two months to assemble the 50cc scooter, and I could have done it in eight hours if the instructions had been written by someone both familiar with the bike and fluent in English. To further the insult, a sane engine mechanic can put the things together in one hour. If you're planning on doing something theraputic, don't get a cheap-o ride mail order.

Like trying to find your ass in the dark. Unless the project is a total failure, there is a moment of clarity when, like in Come Back Little Sheba, a big gluteus comes bounding over the horrizon. I got the scooter to work, but arrived at it worse for wear. It was mostly the abysmal instuctions. Here are some of the things that went terribly wrong.

I hadn't planned on breaking some dainty cuticles removing it from the package it came in. The thing weighs more than I do. It's jangling, greasy parts were bolted to a steel frame inside a cardboard box as thick, tough and cheerful as a brig in the Somolian Navy. While the thing was delivered nice enough by truck to my dystopian hovel, there was no way possible to get it up the two flights of concrete steps between it and the front door. Don't mind that it had been raining all day, so there was no good option of putting it together road side. The best kind of muscular pain was in the works, but first I had to chew through the box and unbolt a metal fixture. Once that ordeal, pain of a thousand stubby bolts, was complete, I had to drag the heavy parts up the steps, to the kitchen, which is the only room in the house that's suitable. Note that no one comes here for dinner. The heavy lifing act was well in the hernia/heart attack zone. Soon false hope arrived when I managed to get the front wheel on.

What happened next caused me to think that it's clutch lever was some sort of Flying Dutchman, or else someone in the Smiling Happy Communist Motorcycle Factory #6 forgot to put one in the package. It said in the instructions that it had one. It doesn't. The wispy motorcylcle was manuactured in China, and has no brand name. It's a generic imported bike. The political prisoner who wrote the instructions seemed to wish the thing had a clutch lever, or he hates Americans, and is laughing at the thought of guys like me taking it the hard way. It took over a week to acertain that it has some sort of hybrid clutch, not quite an automatic, but made for people with miminal riding skill. This was worse than The Manchurian Candidate for the way it disolved ordinary cognition.

The battery was scary because you have to pour a sinister plastic package, like a cross between a bladder implant and a part of the space shuttle, into six or eight matching holes, all eager as puppies for a nice drink of sulfuric acid. There was no way of knowing exaclty how to do it without getting third degree burns, suffice I got through that part, but then came the next thing someone in the imported bike biz should have known. It said in the instructions that the battery had an overflow tube. It didn't, so the time spent looking for it was both frustrating and pretty as meat packing. Motorcycles are called, on the street, a 'crotch rocket,' which caused worry about an explosion.

I won't continue to cry over everything that destroyed my nerves, but by the time I got the engine running and ajusted, it was nearer to the Second Coming than hoped. I haven't learned, yet, how to ride it, that will start in a week or so, when I fully recover from stress injuries and a nervous breakdown. Shouldn't be a problem. I'm a quick study.

Poems Wrote This Morning

2011-05-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

Conscience

not guilty of rain
mayhaps
or of causing pain
or perhaps
destroying grain
maybe

having too many babies
rabies, scabies
men and ladies
guilty
maybe
guilt
in the air
like a dragonfly
and I've done nothing

Lassitude

with lips parted
I'm running fingers through four day stubble
makes an ocharina sound
can't make a tune of it
just one odd tone
the head
a piano
sinus strung for music
I am hollow
tonal
alive
but not moving

La Stradaroo

2011-05-10T08:49:00.000-07:00

On a typical day banks get robbed and buildings get surounded. One time I was down town, walking near Fifth Avenue Plaza, when first two and then, like stern rabbits, dozens of cops plowed into the perimenter, cop cars accumulating in a dense formation around busy Penn and Liberty Avenues. It looked wonderfully organized, with police storming into a branch office bank, all in all, size of a Kinko's copy store, all happening half a block or less from me.

Heading to my bus stop like normal, I just happened to be coming toward the incident, walking at my normal clip along the flank of Fifth Avenue Plaza on a gorgeous summer day.

People were at their all out best, just then, as the spectacle with police action went like a rodeo popped up all of a sudden. People who normally walk past each other with polite disregard smiled. "Someone robbed the bank," a tall stunning black woman said to a passerby, who smiled back and said , "Lotta Po-lice." Other people smiled along and shared the words "whole lotta po-lice." Whatever happened in the bank was probably in the can, in one sense or other, within a few seconds, and nobody seemed to be watching. It was something you couldn't miss if you wanted to, and a teaming narrow side street between Penn and Liberty was remarkably cheerful and personable. 'Normal' is a marvelously adaptive word, in these parts.

Squatter Heaven (short fiction)

2011-05-04T09:22:00.001-07:00

It gives one an erection long enough to knock the pot of gold out from under the rainbow, like a curling stone. Bing clack, under the prismatic arch.

She's an object of lust. We been seeing each other for about two months now. Together and seperate, we've been testing a series of herbal teas, all used for centuries, to methodically rejuvenate each and every organ and gland, brain and nerves included, like shining all shoes and pressing all seersucker. We've made it a project to fix as many organs as possible, without reserve.

.

The significant other and I have been shacked up in a miniscule one story house, barely more than an elongated shed with pitched roof, set on the mountaintop directly above Route 28. Down below us we have a rock garden composed of basements set deep the whole way down, half a mile, to 28. They picked that side of the hill clean of standing houses years ago, and no one's hot as pepper to build anything on an undermined plunging hill. Damn nice, the cement nooks and crannies cake walking at random down gentle dirt and weeds

A most unfortunately hostile neighbor hates me because one of his people had a motorcycle like mine, and got arrested. Then turned queer. And then he was killed. Killed. And he was riding a motorcycle like mine.
Not certain what to do. Embittered people have this tall trajectory. Always lands near by, damp and unwanted.

This relationship between Lorrie and me is doomed because my new number one has a kid with some tubular bingle-bungle growing out of his head, that being our sweet talk for long bony horns, and I'm affraid I am not prepared to commit to it's upbringing. He's a tiny triceratops. Call me a pig. The saddest thing for me is that my girl's family has high hopes for me and her. They are dazzled into thinking I'm responsible, and I don't mean to do it. I can't help having more personality than the general run. Appalachia. Will have to close the book on this before too much longer.

The new bike that I just got re-opened something that shut down a ways back. I used to be a lounge lizard, sunk to no where, and now that I'm mobile again, albeit on a 50cc generic motorcycle from off the internet, the seeds inside are germinating in the soil of endeavor. Can't make nervous types stay still

Motor Bike

2011-05-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

cheap knock-off
she was made
in the silverware thrown down stairwell factory
where labor is so cheap
a laughing boy can have it all
made in China

Recent Poems

2011-04-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

Battered

mom had an electric mixer
seemed like an electic insect
with pincers head down in the bowl
with rotating tusks in the batter
spine hunched in the kill
her tea cakes came out like angels
so I grew into this sort of brute
half kind
half brutal
mixed
inclined to use force
inclined to use reason
mixed
mad
common

Pissed

importance, you bastards
I could change to zillion bats
skitter in the falling leaves
make the 17 year locust
sound like harps
I could fill with nitrous oxide
make whipped cream
and torment you
this body is without water
no collogen
no oxygen
bone and titanium screws
from the wreck

Bird

living room
basement apartment
pet rooster perched like buffalo nickel
young lady says she was in jail for stealing cars
getting the keys off close relatives
and passed-out targets at parties
the bird flapped pillow feather wings screaming
converse like a disc jockey
share-crop sight of the giant television
be a family

Rock Slide

I want the pain
won't move
or wince
rain of dust and pebbles for the overture
I won't open the umbella
landslide is big tit nature
sound of scraping and cracking loose
sight of cheap frame houses unmoored
gotta look up to something
gotta give
I'll give a dime
first rock that kills me

Back Woods

grimly he assumes
he has to take control
repetition
has to hear himself belt it out
he had moments full of napalm and laughing gas
there's you like a baby rabbit
he can come at you with a goose gun
leap bow-legged over barb wire
he will repeat the story about inhalents
he savored spray paint
woofed an aggressive kitchen of solvents
mad cow

Renovated Former Dump

they took out the wooden steps
cased the beams in faux aluminum
in dark modern blue
the row of basement doors were cinder blocked
swan sun glass hue to match the siding
secure entrance assured by an autistic engineer
it has some racing goggle replacement windows
tropical insert court yard
I used to study the moon there
shoot the shit with some shit heads
on webbed chaise lounges
when it was a dirt square
been fine somewhere else

Flying Bugs

locust treadmill
rolling black belt to the check out
flying insects a ribbon in clouds
grocery stores on every corner
tire stores
feed mills
weevils dusting the brown air
grasshoppers loaded with radiation
scabies
rabid froth
vermin with lace wings
tinting the air black

The Redness

red roof on the manse
red undies pop out when they dance
red trance

red letter day ahead
red eye gravy on bread
red thread on the rubicund literary bed

red the type of skin blushes
red bush fillling four cubic inches much
my drunk red luck
chance to get fucked
chuckles

Smither

garden of little things
the voice is too soft
makes you step up to the spikey terrarium
captured mantis centaur anemone squid
thornweed timothy asparagus sticks
lettuce moss centipede
ants in a black leather trench coat
once inside
it has you
makes you smither

Turning Cold

been keeping the heart in a Mason jar
it was opined I wear in on the sleeve
that's only whining
I'm inclined to store it in glass
only take it out when desperate
only when praying to the West
for money
or praying to the East
for learning
been burned
then froze
on a shelf with peppers and tomatos

Fear Of Illness

2011-04-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

I just got a message on my answering machine, bruiting of disease. The spinach I bought at the grocery store is being recalled because it may have been tainted with salmonella. The automated massage said it was for spinach I bought over a week ago, and had already eaten. They knew I had the spinach because I used my "smart shopper" card at the check out. I trust that a public health robot is examining my medical history right about now, with clinical dispassion. They don't need to get their semiconductors in a knot. I'm fine. Though I may never feel the same about spinach.

You should see my fore arms balloon when I eat some. Haven't sung a sailor's jig all day.

So while I'm recovering from the panic attack, I get a visit from Little D, not his real name. He hasn't been coming around as much since he got hitched. I guess it's safe to tell the weasel that I'm off my graze. Just got a scare. Don't have my sea legs. Should have known all along Little D was a slow acting snake in the grass. All he has to know is that you have a soft spot.

"I know a guy you can talk to," Little D boasted, practically in my face. I used to think of 'a guy you can talk to' as a teacher or responsible small business representative. Maybe I gave the twerp too much information by declining his offer to help me initiate a frivolous law suit. A creep like Little D sees that as an opportunity to twist the purpose of moral scruples. Like it's dumb enough to have them, and a bigger waste not to use the trait, in others, for personal gain.

He moved in next door a few years after I found a two room hell hole in a barny looking wood aparment complex with spindly stair cases. Little D quickly established himself as an indispensible companion. The way an item can. I once had a vacuum black head remover that was so helpful in controlling acne that I thought of the plastic syringe aparatus as a companion.

You can kill a million scabies with a cream, and it's so legal you get the poison from the doctor. People think like this when they are stewing.

Maybe a year before my spinach trauma, Little D hitched himself to the hairy fore arm of fortune. This was about a charter school that didn't allow him and all the other litigants to serve the slum community. They were all veterans with hinky records, and had been supposedly entitled to hiring preferences.

Answering the phone is like drinking from an alien creek. Praise technology for the answering machine. It told me I could have salmonella. So when I decide to just answer the phone, myself, it's Barry Scumbag, attorney at law, wants to talk to me about my experience hearing of the tainted spinach, and more importantly, did I eat some.

"I ate some, Barry. I ate the whole bag of spinach. With some croutons and dressing. No, don't think there was anything special about the toast chunks and salad oil, how can I help you today, Barry."

Barry was trying to get a word past me the whole time I was talking. Couldn't wait to ask Barry if he was the one who told Little D about the class action law suit that he seemed to fit into like, like a hand in a silk glove.

I let Barry get to the point. I fucked up. I should have said I was puking blood.

I'm getting time frames mixed up. I could die of salmonella any minute, and I just got off the phone with Barry Scumbug. Little D tried to shake down a charter school about a year ago. For some reason, he and I are still speaking.

Little D worked like a charity martyr, calling everyone he ever met, asking if they liked spinach, and if so, did they know it could kill them. Barry, the professional, would emerge from the rear, soon as someone said they were sick. Alright, it was a month ago that I ate queer spinach and got an automated warning not to eat it on the answering machine. Getting nearer the present, Little D's new bride has been complaining something awful. Seems she is acutely ill. Symptoms something like salmonella.

Now both Little D and Barry Scumbag have been calling me ten times a day. Seems there's a legal loop hole. Might still be able to sign onto the Spinach Caper. Meantime, a local songstress is rounding up singers who lost their voice from puking real hard after getting sick off the spinach. She's been calling here. Nice voice. A little raspy. From all the puking. I hit the play button on the answering machine, and hear, "This is LaVoris Crackman, and I need you to help me sue."

It's hard to convince people I'm healthy as a horse and happy as a pig. LaVoris was calling from the dressing area at her club, The Pink Camel. It's owned by the gay Libyan cat. They say he's hung like mule.

"Come on sugar. Tell LaVoris what really happened to you. When those bad food handlers made you ralf up blood."

"Well, they scared me, LaVoris. That much is for true."

Somehow, I knew that if I went for this thing, I'd be wearing a hair shirt loaded with Noxema. There would be discomfort, salved with something made for women with bad skin. I'd be wearing the unwashed hair shirt to bed, with people. Other people. Lay down with bad people, wear a greasy hairshirt. No. I'm not waking from this greasy.

Farming

2011-04-05T19:41:00.001-07:00

swing the wire basket full of eggs
rope the sun with pendulous milk
her white bonnet and white trimmed black farm uniform
repells animal fluid
her galoshes adore soft synthetic pastures
wondrous quartz gravel trails rove artifical peet
the bog smell is piped in

Pissed

2011-04-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

importance, you bastards
I could change to a zillion bats
skitter in the falling leaves
make the 17 year locust
sound like harps
I could fill with nitrous oxide
make whipped cream
and torment you
this body is without water
no collogen
no oxygen
bone and titanium screws
from the wreck

Befuddled

2011-04-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

you have to fish it out
I've been wrenching gleet in the basement
roof job has me swimming up ladders
I tried to chase predatory carp
in a chimney
fast greasy gold fish with teeth
hard to concentrate on the school
got away
a pipe broke
Old Faithful with thick fluid umbrella
gushed away my compass
I need it
can't find my toes

April Moebius

2011-04-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

falling for the same phone prank
april fool
paging mike hunt
course figure eight like orbit
kinked in the center
tormenting me
calls me where ever
at work
at home
a fun seeker
stalker
joke

Resurecting Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises

2011-01-28T09:51:00.000-08:00

Here's some of the old school credo:

1. This house is my studio. I used to call my studio 'Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises.' Haven't been calling it that lately.

2. Inside the studio, a whole gang of projects have been, and still are,under way. There's no longer a name for the whole shebang, but it's the same hive of activity. Products made here include boomerangs, throwing knives, folding knives, jewelry and sculpture. There is always some visual art being poduced, and there is always one or more small businesss plans in progress.

3. There's a house philosophy at work at all times, based on Milton Friedman's economics. It's an encompassing school of thought which states that both the economy and macro-culture are in poor shape, and leftist Keynesian economics must be replaced with an erudite method of applying free market economics.

4. Creative intelligence is to be valued, loved, worshipped. There is to be a new heirarchy in creative thought, which places on the highest plane creative work aimed at the development of earning operations. People can't function very well without money.

5. Private support for the humanities is to be encouraged. Tax deductible cash support for nonprofits is to be discouraged. The nonprofit cultural community is an unfair business practice, and is a bane in providing, at public expense, material support to base opportunists.

6. My studio supports the position that low earning Caucaission Men are an oppressed minority in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and should be eligible for affirmative action, same was women and protected minorities.

The name changed but the goals are all the same. I am in the process of resurecting Rollicking Rowdy Enterprises. It's a little like the Esalen Institute, and a little like Spahn Ranch. The new name for my studio is "The Spesalen Institute of Deviant Ranching."

Libertarians Meaningfully Floundering

2011-01-24T13:19:00.000-08:00

Free market economics is believed by a giddy few to be the only path to personal freedom. According to my hero, economist Milton Friedman, without the right to free speech, the indivdial can't bargain in the processes of free enterprise, and usually winds up like a victim in the movie "The Conquorer Worm," featuring the late Vincent Price. One must be able to ply one's trade and enter into agreements among risible prosperous merchants, if there are any. Or do what I'm doing, which is to dry up like a pimple.

Going to New Lengths to Communicate

2011-01-23T06:41:00.000-08:00

Genteel poverty is a concept that has some status in New England states, and almost none here. It's something of a watchword of mine. If peaceful, dirt poor and scholarly people were to fill in some of the very cheap slum properties here in the Observatory Hill area, it might be a start towards intitiating a less pitiful state of affairs than our most conspicuous norm.

I suggested years back The Fair And Equal Access Campaign be formalized, to open public revenue sources to individuals in the community who face hardship and who are, and have been, unspoken for through affirmative action. Open new revenue sources to low earning Caucaission men.

Squeezing the Inhumanity Zit

2011-01-17T04:31:00.000-08:00

A zit is a wispy duct that engorged with pimple germs. Soon it's a maraschino cherry size blemish right on the puss.

Old Loughner, with a freshly shaved head and maniac smile, looked like a big zit in the newspaper. People have been spouting off like Mount Saint Helen's about the shooting rampage, characterizing it however best scratches the self-expressive itch. As a concerned citizen I feel everyone should, in his or her own way, try to squeeze the zit out of existence.

If only it was so easy. There's always something gross left on your face when you pop a pimple. Passivity. Best option.

Moped Conversion Kits (alternative transportation)

2011-01-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

One of many new projects at the house here is mopeds. I'm installing conversion kits, and can't wait to begin testing these things out this spring.

Am also considering some imported mopeds available mail order off the internet. Small gasoline engines are the best option with which to reduce dependence on gasoline. It will provide a cheap alternative to public transportation, as weather permits. Mopeds I am working on now will be under 75 pounds.

Mopeds are a nice way to reduce parking congestion, are easy to store, safe.

Off In The Chlorine Clouds

2011-01-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

pouring it into a turquoise espresso cup
with escutcheons surrounding the loop handle
the standard mix of ethanol
stained green with lime gelatin
quadruple whammy
we are overtaken
our synthetic delivery system of joy
giving up whacked in measured doses
we are not whole
till the apartment is all pure chlorinated water
we share the need to be in an aquarium
new age of pisces
and we are changing

College Bowling

2011-01-07T13:38:00.000-08:00

Of all my studies at a state college, there was one course that stayed fresher in mind than most, and which remains a wellspring of meaning and metaphor. And when learning stays alive like this, for nearly thirty years, I'm able forget, for a moment, what a rip-off and abomination higher education has become.

It wasn't math or science or philosophy, or even the English Lit that I still bang around behind me, like tin cans tied to the honeymoon Chevy Nova. It was the phys-ed requirement. Oddly, I haven't been to a bowling alley more than twice in twenty years, but the course in bowling I took has been so dear to the heart that I sometimes stare at my gym bag and blast Lulu's song "To Sir With Love" on the portable stereo. That instructor turned the college course into a 'special relationship.'
He was a man with a method, and a man who believed in bowling. It was more than a sport to him. As much as a really good score, like 150 or better, he was a sportsman who appreciated the human form in motion, and could see in his work young people flowing through space like Baryshnikov, though on the other side of the tracks. It's not all about winning, which is great, because I wasn't planning to.

He seemed to take a special liking to me. More than once, when he had a chance away from prying ears, he confided that I was among the most graceful bowlers he had ever seen. When it was my turn to roll, he would often watch from directly behind, and admire my four steps, the clockwork timing in pushing the ball forward (most important component of proper bowling method,) the pendulous backward swing of gravity as the keggler takes the ball behind the fourth rib, then that final step and the release. Speaking of release, this wasn't the first time a gym teacher seemed to enjoy watching the way I move my ass.

During his lectures on the subject, the instructor made his point that bowling was sensual. The sight of the ball curving into the pocket, leading the orgasmic crash of pins, is like creation itself as falling pins add up on your score sheet. And then all the hidden meaning.

A seven-ten split, for instance, reminds me of how hopeless the economy is. A gutter ball mirrors all incidents of human failure, with descent into dark nowhere. My last girlfriend was a gutterball. She thinks the same about me, and we only went bowling together once. That's how precise the sport of bowling is in reflecting the warts and moles in human nature. A strike is one discrete unit of victory. Twelve strikes in a row is a perfect game with a score of 300. Angelic. Angels are said to be perfect. And when you pick up a spare,it is redemptive, like picking up the pieces of your shattered social life. Just now, my love life is an open frame.

That teacher was probably married with kids, but like so many athletic coaches, it is across their own genders that they find the secrets of the soul. He took me aside once to tell me, personally, how a bowling team is the most important relationship in a man's life. You can't compare family responsibilities to the obligation to fellow man. Score too low too often, and you could be off the team all together. Or you might just bring the whole team down, if you don't force yourself to excell. He told me again that I had beautiful bowling form, and might have a future, if not as a pro, as a man among men. At the bowling alley. With men like him.

But when all was rolled and scored, at the end of the semester, I got a B and not the A I thought he was going to give me for my phys ed requirement. The dissappointing grade may have reflected some disappointment he felt, as if the love of bowling could be unrequited. Then, too, he may have been a closet queen who hoped to score with a lithe young stallion bowler, maybe the prettiest horse on the lanes. That course in bowling made me feel pretty.

Knuckle Dragger (dystopian free verse)

2010-12-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

ape cone with bristle
haunch stomach and knuckles folded in front of the groin
the rolling gorilla orbits
score sub-human terror kisses at tourists
he's in a power squat
and he's out a good three narrow inches
one radient pungent skin piccolo
it's eyes are bigger than its manhood
he's a monumental beast
with the what you looking at hiss

Viewed

2010-12-26T18:00:00.001-08:00

I've been asked to talk about something that changed my life, and since I don't travel or socialize, I have to admit that it was something I saw on television around 1978. At the time, sex therapy was a new kind of business, and according to the doctors, if people didn't improve their sex lives they were practically public enemy #1, collectively, as there must be billions of people who aren't so attractive or talented in making love. Much as you are robbing society of its due if you have an untreated phobia, at that time you were proably making your spouse, and in turn your family, employer and coummunity miserable because you are so irritable and constipated when you don't have great sex.

(continued below)

2010-12-26T17:59:00.000-08:00

It was a PBS show, one that came and went like the gourd on Jonah's square yard of beach front. They were experimenting with the media. And with us, as well. First the doctor spoke, on a couch, with a relatively unknown television journalist, which was informative. Men, she explained, who suffer from premature ejaculation are one of the reasons Americans are so uptight and unsuccessful. There is no way of reaching your full potential if you can't keep a chubby for at least forty five minutes, which is the least amount of time possible in which to bring your spouse to an orgasm. She went on to expain that there was a rogues gallery of quick squirts at large, each with his own type of malady.

2010-12-26T17:57:00.000-08:00

The next part of the show was my fave. Dr. Melissa Milgram, this time, was in a sound studio interviewing three couples, all of whom were under her care. Each of the couples was married, and may even have had children and houses and jobs and cars, and none of them, prior to being referred to the good doctor, was ready to admit that their sex life wasn't as good as it could be. There was something wrong with all of them, and in the course of conventional therapy it was determined that whatever the beef was on the surface, below the green water there was some form of sexual dysfunction that was robbing the world of their productivity and social redemption. Women bereft of satisfaction are famous for being cranky. And men turn either queer or homocidal, so it's mighty important to iron out what ever is wrong. All the couples were eventually referred to Doc Milgram.

2010-12-26T17:55:00.002-08:00

It wasn't the information that made my life, that day, so special. It was the eagerness with which they all talked about popping prior entry, of trying to correct the problem on their own by thinking about baseball while going at it, and about the roaring success that the doctor's therapy brought them. One of the men boasted that he had gone from seconds to minutes, and was very proud of his accomplishment. The wives got their say, and they all agreed that it was sometimes a good idea for their men to give them head, which helps guarantee them their best orgasm. But all six of them seemed pleased for the chance to be on television, all talking about something once taboo and now the avante guarde. People should talk about their sex lives, as well as all other elements in their lives, openly, anywhere, to anyone. Repression sucks.

2010-12-26T17:55:00.001-08:00

The doctor made a good authority figure, and it was learned from the Zimbardo experiments that ordinary people are capable of anything provided they have the approval of a convincing enough authorty figure. Somehow that television show seemed, to me, like the beginning of a new breed. They weren't mock electrocuting fake victims in an adjacent room, with the white man in the white coat giving them the go ahead, but they were telling the world that they were guilty of innadaquacy and that they had done what was necessary to correct it. It was the a new beginning for willing participants. We can't progress as a society, afterall, if we shun modern science.

Now I feel safer knowing that in the future, further experiements and procedures will be carried to fullment and ultimatley replaced with other equally urgent medicine. After all, there is something wrong with everyone, and you can self-actualize by being on television. It was the beginning of schlock therapy.

Pigeon Trick

2010-11-10T18:32:00.000-08:00

Like you could put parentheses on either side of the block, the one between Mellon Center and Macy's was set apart from the others by pigeons. They had chosen all skyscrapers, a lot of them on the stately city block, to rest upon. Wise birds. That block provides sills, ledges shoulders, roofs, alcoves, lattice work, and gargoyle installations all for the pigeons to snuggle up together on. It was like the tall buildings had fur on a sunny, perfect fall day.

The sidewalks were packed, miday aftenoon crush, lunch time. As I crossed Smithfield Street to the pigeon coated block, I happened to notice a tall thin man, holding a long white bag in one hand, smiling, beautifully, beside a fountain at the far end of the spiring city block. No sooner had I come parallel to the first of so many pigeons bobbing on the busy sidewalk, the young man reached into his long white bag, and drew from it the remains of his lunch.

Through my stuffy bifocals I could discern that it was the last third of a foot long hoagie. He broke a piece off of it, and like the maestro of a symphony waving his baton, he threw it underhanded, up, up, up and gracefully down, down, down to no place in particular on the sidewalk. The pgeons closest to it were first responders, hopping and flapping towards the breezing bits of bread. Their work was rewarded for taking initiative, munching away, but not for long. More birds on the side walk moved in for the free lunch. Then some of the birds on the sills and gargoyles flew down, and a small scale riot began, perhaps a few hundred birds fighting over food. The gent in the distance looked much too happy to be working for the cause of world peace, if this was any indication.

On his first toss I realized that my clothes were in danger of being soiled. Pigeons relieve themselves without care or shame, and I fear being under the process. I was advancing, on foot towards the epicenter of what was about to happen, feeling trepidtion. But the man with the hoagie was smiling so warmly that good cheer had to be factored in. This was looking like a funny situation. People being crapped on by thousands of pigeons is probably funny.

His second and third tossing of the hoagie did it. Thousands upon thousands of pigeons came pouring down from the minion of skyscrapers, all focused on the food and fearless to go for it. The riot that ensued had the force of a tornado, an amicable one, one that has the decency to let you step past it. It was a huge battle among pigeons, and they only beat and pecked at one another, leaving pedestians to find their way through the chaos.

My fear of being crapped on escalated, of course, but again, that young man's smile in the distance was more compelling than some petty concern for the threads I had on. It was obvious the gent knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that the power and the glory could tipped if he provided the proper impetus. A billion pigeons, some greasy pinched bread, and a symphony composer's vision. The solid crush of birds coming down from high above could have been the forces of fate. The riot in the street, his prank, was magnificent. All that movement brought my senses to life. It was a thrill to walk through birds.

Well, that's all I saw of the young man with the bag of tricks and the mischievous smile. Upon passing the spectacle, I took visual inventory of my hat, jacket, trousers and shoes, and felt gifted to have not a single dropping on my clothes. That, in spirit, is a sign that this happened for all good purposes. It is possible to make things happen.

Hog Maw and Chitlins

2010-11-10T10:54:00.000-08:00

One of the advantages of being hyperactive is that I can eat four pounds of fried chicken a day and remain thin as a rail. I can perform the same trick with bacon. If it sounds like I'm bragging, I am, but only about the good parts. Along with all the fidgeting and rapid digestion, the condition can leave a man prone to flights of free associations. It can, to some people, be annoying.
I haven't been driving for the past few years, and after giving up my last car, bird-like images have been flapping around in my head when I ride the bus across town.

The autumn dusk sky was full of crows when I got to the Herron Station platform. The kohl black birds flew neatly spaced for miles distant down the busway and over the Golden Triangle. There were a few bats flying in between the myriad crows, like flying punctuation marks inside a statement made of crows.

Pittsburgh is a place of sylvan beauty. Where the birds rested on clusters of trees the hills looked like a forsythia bush with lampblack flowers. it was an enchanting late afternoon across slummy and elegant districts.

One of the older men at the bus stop was dressed like, and vaguely resembled, one of the most popular pop singers of all time. The soon-to-be passenger is a meticulous dresser, and everything matched and fit, even the wide fedora, tilted, and ideally matched to the collar of his knee length top coat. He was way too thin and seemed to have some exotic health problems.

His space dancer outfit was an almost tasteful dazzle effect. He has a face like a pommeranian and crinkles his eyes a lot. There was years of booze and psyche meds on his face, but he was personable. I've been seeing him at bus stops between downtown and Perrysville for years now, and tonight he spoke at some length about his culinary talents.

The bus came sooner than I would have liked, which is almost never the case, but the bats and crows were turning in such a narcotising performance. Once inside and seated on the EBA (all stops) I had occaission to overhear some challenging words about food by the man in the black fedora.

The young woman sitting nearest him asked if chitlins didn't smell nasty.
"Ya put in a whole lot of onions to cover up the smell. But you make chitlins right you got some good eating. Gotta cook it with hog maw. That's how I serve it. Chitlins with greens and hog maw."

It brought to mind the song 'Back Door' man. "Some men likes to eat pork and beans....I eats more chicken than any man ever seen." It's me. I swear. I eat huge amounts of chicken.

Hold your water if it sounds racist, all some people do is observe and make note. I'm a little more convoluted than just that, but what happened happened totally absent of malice. Along with fond remembrance of the Mississippi blues song, I got a passing mental picture of a pig's face wrapped in butcher paper and carried under the arm of a short, scrawny, aging soul brother just a few feet away. Go figure this flight of imagnation was happening in Pittsburgh.

His words. He said to his listeners, "I'm an old soul brother and I love chitlins and greens. With hog maw." I wasn't sticking my hand up his back and making his lips move. "I make my own salad dressing, too," he added.

Unless the man is younger than he looks, he's done better for himself than his famous alter ego. The glammor puss with all the dance moves kicked off at 51, and I'd put my chitlin chef at at least 59. I know for a fact that, so far, I outlived the same singer by over two years, and my face isn't falling off from having a lot of cosmetic surgery. But then I was always content to be a yutz. It's an awful trade off, in life.

The southern gourmet also reminded me that rabbits are copraphagic. It's another real long stretch at amateur science, but people have natural tendencies, served on the same plate with the collards, head meat and chicken shoe strings. The tendencies are garnished with what has been learned, such as the recipe, but I have been, for some time now, leaning to the view that food is hereditary more so than aculturated.

Not certain, but I'm probably the only person on the bus who has a bachelor's degree. Okay, it's bunk. He'd probably like steak if he grew up eating alot of it. I like a good steak. Fried chicken, too. And I went to college.

Are thoughts a manifestation of bigotry? Is it wrong to share the same said thoughts as simply as possible, allowing for having become a bit of a twisted bus rider? Have I become a bad passenger, or is it in the greater interest of man to let a few stray cats out of the erudite burlap bag? I don't think so, and if I live in this neighborhood long enough, I may get a chance to get the campy looking chef's opinion on all this and more. He's at the bus stop every day. I could learn to like chitlins. I know I'll be coming back for seconds on the hog maw. In any case, I won't be buying a car any time soon, so best to be get used to the cuisine.

Deer Meanness

2010-10-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

A lot of deer live in this fine city, and I am pleased to share sidewalks and road ways with them. I like them. Yet it is unrequited liking.
Last week I was hiking through the miles of trails coursing Riverview Park, and was arrested by a herd of deer. I don't mean they pulled out badges, I mean that there were a lot of them, the nearest one about twenty feet away.
The meandering wooded trails bent archly. Upon looping around one of them, the herd was there like the G20 Summit with fur. They stood still at odd angles to one another, neatly spaced by a fathom, thin saplings poking up in between them. This was a unified gathering of deer.
It was a form of arrest, because I had to stop walking. This type of proximity is reserved for fables. No muse worth tapping into would waste the opportunity, nor will I.

A herd of deer in the woods takes more than a few seconds to take in because they blend in with wooded areas. This was a nicely camoflaged conference. Looking around slowly, the number of deer eased into awareness. The one closest to me gave me a slow once over, like it was checking the meter on the side of your house. Then it looked away, towards the second nearest antlerless deer. Might have been bucks, could have been does, might have been the season they drop their antlers.
The second deer gave me the look. I saw the same look on one of the foreign exchange students back at college. It's a cultured expression of mistrust. The closest deer gave me another glance, this time, clearly in a defensive though still dissmissive frame of mind. Some of the others in the herd were the first to speak.

"Why is that asshole standing there," I overheard a faun say to it's brethren laying peacefully under a sparse bush.
I could discern the voice of a buck by it's depth and resonance. "Just ignore the moth eaten piece of shit. We're here, and asshole is over there. Fuck 'em." the elder animal said, not loudly, but he knew I could hear.
Then the one closest to me, so near I could almost pet it, turned to me again, and said, "What are you looking at, Shithead?"
Then it turned it's head away, as if I wasn't there. But it knew I was still there. The next closest deer turned to me and said, "Why don't you bring a gun, Hiawatha?"
Don't they understand that is was they that accosted me?

African Bee

2010-10-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

Sports isn't my subject, so it wasn't too hard to take it when the Steelers lost the football game. I can't remember who they lost to. My buds thrilled to the game while it was going well, and I was able to get with the program. The defeat didn't seem to register with the goup, either, or at least not for more than a few minutes, and it was directly back to beer and some dinner soon as the bad news dropped.

It had been a decent afternoon with the gang, then it was necessary to walk to the bus stop nearest their shanty just below the Hill District. There's some steep hiking down hills and bedraggled city steps, and then, as occaision conforms, there are football related reconoiterings that go with people in the inner city.

Football was the main switch to realization that afternoon, but there was also the martial arts leaching out of the universal tea leaves in the air and into cognitive steaming water. I start remembering my martial arts moves when I'm in fear of being jumped.

The Dragon Ice Company always comes to mind when I walk past the ice factory on Herron Avenue. All it is is a warehouse with no windows and a lot of loading docks, some trucks with the company signs on it, and a billbaord advertising ice sculpture in front. It's flank is right along the road way, with just a few feet broadsided in steel fence between the pavement the bricks, so there isn't enough room to have Asians shooing ice blocks, like in the Bruce Lee flick. But it has a sober, work-a-day look, off set down the hill from the projects, so it corresponds pretty nicely to an old Korean action film,in my opinion.

Passing the ice factory, on it's corridor leading to Polish Hill, the next joy is the underpass bored out under Bigelow Boulevard. Nice as it was to get out of the rain, the underpass is a perfect place to get mugged, lending crooks a hand with the blind angles and remoteness. The stairs down and up are cleverly bent off from the tunnel, for modern mimimalist municipal styling. There were no junkies, no shining white pot heads sharing an experience in the tunnel, just me in my thin rayon rain coat and brim. Just the same, it was edgy.

It was chilly, and it was raining on my brand new hat. It's a woodsy outdoorsman's hat with thin canvas band stitched in loops to hold lures and amunition. A lot of the brothers are wearing the exact same replica. They cost ten bucks each at the Broadway Army Navy Store, which is where people in my part of town shop. The rest of their outfits come from a patchwork of store fronts that sell hoodies and jeans and bling. I get the rest of my gear from Walmart or K-mart or Haband dot com. But I think the hat is enough to convince people that I'm not all the way distant. Pooled up water was still dripping off the wide brim minutes after I got to the bus stop.

Uncomfortably close by discomfiture's cultivated standards, it was really a normal distance from me to the two young African American men. The two came along the curving blacktop above and trotted down the concete steps folded between the Herron Avenue Bridge and the busway underneath, cold rain keeping their heads down, hoods over their ball caps. Both young men appeared to have legs too short for their torsos, but this is largely an optical illusion performed by having their jeans belted below their buns. Praise Jesus, they all wear tennis shorts to cover the jewels, and most wear hoodies to flump over their shorts, so they're not immodest. I wish a few of them would spit less often.

Hardly a weather vane, I couldn't tell if they were sizing me up for a robbery, but since both got on the bus when it finally came, they probably weren't planning it, or were thinking better of trying anything with this bird. I'm the nervous type that you gotta watch.

First the more muscular of the two sat down on the bench about seven feet from me, which is, in polite circles, more than enough personal space. But not when you are worried about the veracity of your kung fu training. The tall thin one in the wide checked hoodie stood for a moment,then sat down, then got up again. Both men kept looking at me, and I kept my eyes down below the dripping brim.

I couldn't tell if the stocky one was trying to be freindly or if he was testing for my level of fear, but he looked right at me and struck up a conversation. He had been working on his Blackberry, and he turned to me and said, "They oughta' install plugs right here," indicating on the brick wall behind the steel benches. I didn't know what he was talking about, and at first, agreed that would be a good idea, while visualizing a fire hydrant installed in one of the few places where nothing was flamable.

The man had a difficult smile to read, looked like he was either part Mexican or Native American, and this can add some rough angles to comprehension among strangers. He also had what could be assessed as an angry disposition, chumming in gracious cultural nuances that may wish to dissent that nervous perception. It was either just the way the guy looked, or else he was doing the anger test to see if I could be scared into chumming over cash and valuables. I affected the most pleasant look I could work up for the occaission. The man began clarifying his position.

"If they put plugs in this bus stop right here, people could charge their phones," he said, indicating his Blackberry. Looked like there were a lot of aps on it, and I was tempted to take the relationship a step further by asking about them. I almost asked if he could do WordPad on the phone, but reconsidered it as probably too patronizing and goodie two shoes.

I started to realize what the man meant, he thought they should install electric outlets, and it's a perfectly good idea. Upon realizing that I had mispercieved his idea, I began explaining that it took a moment to realize what he was saying, and that an electic plug right there would be a good thing. Then I tried to realign attention to the sidewalk, water drops still falling off the brim.

The bus was taking forever because this was happening on a Sunday. Self conscious and worried, I tried to look pleasant and prepared for combat at the same time, tactfully checking for signs of a forthcoming attack. After a few minutes of this, the heavier man with the Blackberry jumped up off the steel bench, darted straight at the skinny man standing on the other side of him, and he started swiping open hand at his friend's black and white check hoodie. "There's a bee on you. You gotta get that thing off of you."

The bee bounced on the wet sidewalk over to the curb, landed on it's back, and worked its legs in the air, stunned, and with two soggy wings. It struggled there, all three of us looking down at it. It occured to me to go forward and step on it, but I remembered that bees are becoming an endangered species, possibly because of a billion irradiating cell phones. I also remembered that I grew up in the white middle class, where people lay guilt trips on you about social responsibility and kindness. While I was gathering wool about the differences in upbringings and socializations that were attendant at the bus stop, the man with the Blackberry stepped forward and tamped the yellowjacket to death with the tip of his Nike. "What's a bee doing coming in here?" he asked me, like white people are probably more up on entymology than he and his pal.

I dare say I probably am, but then the young man with the phone was obviously better adapted to technology. I don't have a Blackberry, just a boxy desk top at home. The black man has mobile internet. "It was probably just getting out of the rain," I said.

This was probably too much cross-over from the street to the college campus for this type of encounter. I could picture some old pedant from the university explaining that the bee probably wouldn't have stung the thin man, it may have just been seeking warmth on a cold, raining afternoon. The bus finally showed up before we all started emoting, praise God.

The bus ride from Polish Hill to downtown was uneventful, and the number eight was on it's way there when I got to Penn Ave. It was mostly packed, with a couple open seats up front. I sat alone on one of specialized seats for old folks, in between a triad of black men, all talking about the Pitt football game. These men were working class. You could tell.

"There ain't no quarterback." one of the men said, smiling, practically hooting. The guy was tall, well dressed, well proportioned, muscles neatly defined.

"That's Wanstadt's fault, He didn't put in the right quarterback."

the man on the right corner said, sitting directly opposite from me.

"They don't got no quarterback, It stunk up the game." said the tall man who had spoken first, the three men laughing and nodding at each other.

A heavy set man on a seat down added, "It don't matter that Pitt won, cause they was playing a nobody team, so it don't make 'em look major league. They was amteur."

"That's cause they ain't got no quarterback." the second in the triangle agreed.

"You can't stay a winning team with all field goals." one of them said.

"Okay, they got a place kicker. So what. A real team would crush that rookie."

Talking, laughing, smiling, taking their voices all sorts of places when they talked, I wasn't even close to saying anything about football. I can barely keep up with the talk at my friend's place where they watch Sunday football. Just the same, the spirit was there for anyone to plug into, even without having to know exactly what was said. It was feeling good to be somewhere in the middle of the black working class.

Failing My Audition

2010-10-02T04:25:00.000-07:00

I'm remorsing the mistake I made. I should have put in my upper plate before going to the audition, but it was for a yogurt commercial. All it said on the prospectus was that the 'lucky chosen' would eat a spoonful of Crackteef and affect a look of sincere pleasure and well being. I tried explaining to the exec that I wouldn't have to smile or chew, but when she asked, "Do you have the other half of your dentures with you," I had a feeling I wouldn't get a chance to sit next to Johnni Grant Custer on a couch.

It's not just childish dissappointment because I don't get to be in the commercial or get paid. I've admired everything Johnni ever did, except for a few bad movie roles, which all famous people have sometimes. She's taken on a stellar role as spokesperson for a number of important social causes. If it wasn't for her, most people would have never heard of Powder Village in Haiti, or the Bolivian Bugs Initiative. Those are the clever names really connected people think up for their movements. Every time I see her on the Crackteef commercials, it galls me that I can't sit next to her in a really special kind of relationship. It's what Crackteef is supposed to be all about.

Virginia

2010-09-04T21:38:00.001-07:00

We prefer the word 'kin' to the word 'cult." All the other cults are cults, except for the one you drink poison Kool Aid for. That's a joke we like to tell.

A bunch of us headed down to that Virginia campus where the big shooting happened so we could counsel any survivors that needed our help. They all do, really, but we can respect free choice. The thing about a free and pluralistic society is that there are people who have accepted the truth, and the people who can see it come aboard.

That's the simple part. We Kin have to help people to see the truth. All Kin know that they have to serve the Kahuna. That's the new word Kin Marshall McLune introduced to us to cover everything of a spiritual nature. This may be confusing. Think of the Kahuna as a tall sheet metal filing cabinet full of file folders containing all human spirituality. That wasn't so hard to digest. Kin Marshall gave us the word 'Kahuna' because it is a hip and happening sort of word.
So be it.

One of the funny things about enlightenment, of any kind at all, is that once it is apprehended it sits on a shelf with the toaster you got for opening a pass book account. It doesn't help you, unless you are making toast. To put it another way, you still have to use deodorant and argue with shrewish, promiscuous brother/sister Kin. I am every bit as committed to the cause as Kin Shannon, but she hates my guts and is a truly horrible person to drive with. We got to sign out the four ton Dodge Suburban (we call it the 'Burb') so it was a certainty that the trip would be fun, but we had to pour out 300 miles of ugly highway at 135 percent of the speed limit to get to the campus before the rest of new-found religious orders got a chance at it.

Kin Marshall realized that there is a limitless organizational device, best compared to a filing cabinet, that allows the cosmic counselors to track everyone's earthly thoughts and comings and goings. Of course this is merely a visual aid, the real process is a big hairy deal and it can only be understood when it is presented in outline/overview form. Too, the gospel can't be fully accepted until 501 c3 status is granted.

Our leader was seated in his high school guidance counselor's office one day of his junior year. His grades had been slipping, and there were some complaints about his hygiene, so he was sent to the guidance counselor. Mr. Stepchuck was a stern and overbearing social worker, with a frightening habit of pulling drawers of his filing cabinet out while brow beating young Marshall McLune. It would make a thunderous noise, and Marshall was bright enough to see that the filing cabinet served as a sort of slap stick. An authority figure would pronounce the complaints against Marshall, indicate that this was marked on his permanent record card, and pull the drawer much the way radio personalities would crank a siren to fill in the image of an emergency

The cabinet supposedly contained Marshall's permanent record card, which he was not allowed to see, and J. Edgar Hoover was. I told you that the Kahuna was an easy spiritual path to skip around on.

One of the things that brought Kin Shannon into the group was that she had some marks on her permanent record card.

So we argued most of the way to Virginia. It was everything that happened since she and I met a few months earlier. There was the incident in which I mixed up all the plastic beverage cups and forgot to turn the attached perma-straw to the West Wall of our temple. Then I put a whole cup of sugar in the grape Kool Aid, instead of the half cup that we were supposed to limit ourselves to. And I had no way of knowing that the office supplies needed to be chanted over before they can be put in their storage place. Marshall looked at me like I had tried stick a shiv in the Pope. But that was because Shannon ratted me out. Just like that. As if I had deliberately violated policies and procedures. That was her way of lowering me in the eyes of our leader.

Those were the conflicts that I could be impeached for. Then there are the typographical errors and falsifications that crop up in the papers of the soul. It was certainly not my fault that Shannon was in with the clique and I wasn't. She came aboard with a group of her friends from college. They eloped from their freshman year together.
They sneak drugs together, and they won't give me any. They even stopped our con-fabs to watch their collective favorite television show, reruns of "Friends." I hate that show. It never fails to remind me how unlikely spiritual growth most often is. It also reminds me that I don't belong to the clique.

I have gathered from membership in the Kahuna that as long as people share an objective, the petty differences in character among group members can be filed away for as long the goal is actively sought. Yet someone always manages to re-open the closed cases of interpersonal disharmony.

Kin Shannon was not lazy, nor was she a cynic. Her problems mostly had to do with poorly organized relationships. Too, there was a poorly organized little bag of behaviors that resulted in all those crappy kinships. That is why the Kahuna is such a keen way of leaping out of your folder of bad things, and into your next higher file drawer.

One of our policies is based on the Judeo-Christian type confession. It's mostly Christian, because Marshall used to be Catholic. We all have to fess up and make up. That's one thing everyone agrees on. Even those of us who aren't in the inner circle. I pulled the Burb over to the shoulder of I79, out of the way of prying head lights and confronted her about her patent and capricious anger. I was feeling imbued, and may have gotten to the documents in her folder.

Just the same, I have to call it a grudge match. Shannon is a drug dependant nympho, and I suspect her of being frigid but by the time she and I were both smoking a Cool, I think we had both neatened up our eternal documentation.

Poseidon Comes Up For Air

2010-08-27T17:40:00.001-07:00

Even dream jobs become stifling if you stay at them long enough. It's been twenty years of this pink heaven in an ivory tower. I'm tired of being a creative writing instructor. It's no big deal, this sort of career burnout isn't as serious as, say, postal worker syndrome, but lately minutes of inner static have grown to hours, hours, hours.

It's not as bad as it sounds. But I've propagated the humanist myth for so long that at times I wish I could sort mail. And every once in a while the joists below the aegis fall sideways. They can't fire me for what happened, but I think my stock at the state college may have gone down.

Larry had been coming to my office, not missing one single of my requisite office hours. He isn't completely devoid of talent. Larry isn't Orpheus, and he doesn't have breasts, so you can imagine how hard I had been working to support the college claptrap pertaining to Man's Unlimited Capacity.

Larry has been working on an epic poem. He has been adamant about completing it, even as I told my class more than once that epic poems are to be avoided, as are variable rate mortgages and 'time shares' in tourist traps. No one has time anymore for the longer drink of poison.

As Larry read to me the forty-third stanza of "Poseidon Comes Up for Air," my attention moved to an earthbound woman who had the finest twat in all of the limitless cosmos. But his skill as a reader had improved over this leaden term of a common pregnancy. Larry managed to break my wool gathering with "a humming bird lit on the man-god's epaulet." If someone who mattered had used that line, it would be a fairly good one. I was able to listen to the rest of Larry's stanza before the static turned to sirens.

"Let me stop you there, Larry. That stanza is perhaps the best verse and the finest reading you've done this term!
I think we can punch it up a little. After the man-god kisses the tiny scales on the humming bird's foot, I want him to rip the little fucker off his epaulet, tear it to tiny feathered scraps, and shove them, in a moment of masochistic hubris, up his left nostril. I suggest ending this stanza with these simple words: Fuck this feathered symbol of enlightenment and freedom. Fascism, fascism forever!"

It seems that during the outburst I snatched the yellow legal pad out of Larry's hand and turned it to a mass of humming bird feathers. It was Larry's only copy of Poseidon Comes Up For Air, hand written like a note from lawyer to defendant. As he walked, shaking and birdlike, out of my office, I followed his steps with a few words of encouragement. "That was an awfully nice reading, Larry."

Copraphagra

2010-08-04T15:52:00.001-07:00

Ever since the time when I used to watch Dr. Kildare and, eventually, Dr. Marcus Welby, M.D., I felt that I should be entitled to a really ripping relationship with my general practitioner. It's been a long time since that dream was instilled, and as still more line ran out from the reel, managed health care placed limits of time and possibility with which to be part of the medical world village. But that is no reason to let the medical establishment be a bully.

There is a new medication for a nervous rash that I get. The commercial for it shows how to discuss the rash with a primary care person, and I sent for the free DVD that shows all the steps to getting the pills I need.

So naturally I am disappointed about what happened. I described to my physician how I have been getting lesions like a baboons bum. "I am not allowed to prescribe for you Copraphagra. It's not for you. You have liver problems." He says to me, like he wasn't on my team.

I deserved that. That's really fair. I have the least infectious, least pernicious type of hepatitis, and my doctor won't let me take Copraphagra. I also have a problem that would respond perfectly to the new medication.

Dr. Vadawalla reminded me of a debate coach I had in high school, laying out the opposing strategy: the liver could go kerfluey, blood pressure, stones and tsunami of diarrhea could happen. "You don't have to use medication every time you become upset," he said, like the 'impact statements' that twelth grade pedant used to make us trot out in our forensic tournaments.

I had an impact statement of my own for Dr. Vadawalla. "I haven't been able to meditate for over two weeks. Two weeks. And a truly great man, from the very same part of India you come from, says that if you are unable to meditate, you need professional help. I told you weeks ago that I was having this problem, and now I am breaking out in a skin rash. You are a professional. I am asking you for help."

The Luddite Elite

2010-07-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

There are reasons to be glad about being in Pittsburgh. The history here makes eye candy anywhere you go, the attrocious lack of decent planning is still tolerable, you can always predict who will win an election, and people are better than most about minding their own business, minus the usual snoops and gossips.

This is a quiet town.

In spite of as many as twelve shooting incidents a week, virtually all neighborhoods are peaceful at all times other than when the angry cars or pedestrians pass. A few alarming seconds, and things are just like they were before, like an urban pasture. Pittsburgh has improved in a subtractive process over the past five years, having scared away most of the very people who have plagued my life for much of it: people who think they are better than me.

The breed of human that I would like to lambast today is the grouping that feels the old ways are better than then the new ones, and most of these swine have advanced college degrees.

These people come in herds, like smug elk. Few have the stones to live where I do, (IN TRENCHES I TRUST,) and I am pleased about how well some nice, loud hip hop, pounding out a basement window, will disperse a flock of soft college liberals. It's hunting season for fledglings with credit cards and laptops. Okay, there's some noise here and there, but for the most part it helps.

There's this thing called 'more rusticated than thou." I thought they all died, but there are still people out there trying to prove they are happier than you in their unheated cabin.
Few of this set are actually poor, many have old money from Mayflower dynasties, yet they live like Daniel Boone. When here, they fill their apartments with antique farm equipment.

Some of these cheese eaters make their own cheese, and they are too inversely elite to make brie or cammembert, it's always some rough hewn nameless goat curds, prepared so not to challenge the environment or appear to be anything but pure primordial munchies for pseudo-agrarian snobs.

I had the misfortune of visiting too many of these people's homes because I went to college at a time when people where still expected to be social. It was a deceptive and false premise since the Earth oozed out of the sun. There is no reason to believe, anymore, that people interact for any reason other than cool mutual interest, aside from which people cut their losses, in discomfort and and ever-useful fear, by fleaing the vacinity. Some of the back-to-nature set moved to Maine, others found midwestern forests and farms far from here. Each day I face East and thank urban blight for chasing away some jerks.

I wore polyester slacks at the height of the Natural Fiber Wars, circa 1967-89. For 'wrinkle free,' I paid with my social standing among luddite academics and hippies. Some of these people owned looms and went on torid junkets to adore one another's hand woven fabrics. The least deviation tolerated from their pink program was either Osh Kosh or L.L. Bean. If they weren't having a backroom pow wow about my petrochemical pants, they were angry that I wasn't altering Middle Eastern politics, as many did with cash contributions to the PLO. They despised American smoke-stack industry and condominiums and malls, bought folk art from people who seem, like them, to live like Pilgrims, and they objected to my love for Clint Eastwood movies. These people objected to my views on space and time, also.

I wouldn't have such a dark attitude about it if people weren't as annoying. More backward:more ethical is crud. People in foriegn lands don't hack each other to death because they are technologically advanced. And I wouldn't have let one side of the moon go dim if I hadn't been persecuted by people who object to my views on business and industry. They all think that everyone could survive as cobblers if people got hip to what used to be necessary. The past wasn't better than now, unless raw milk is better than a Big Mac.

They hated my linear, goal oriented thinking. They think in trained, enlightened clusters of sod.

To spare further insult, I seldom leave the comfort of illiterate Perryhilltop, which exited it's last uppity post-graduate in flannel and dungarees in the 1980s.

Isolationism and healthy mindless consurmerism, here, is sweet.

New Diggs

2010-06-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

worthless brass

people hoped for answers with their incense

hollow Buddhas spumimg a narrow jet of smoke

fez tassles rotating

pastie tassles indexing opposite each other

bikinis made of fake fish scale

boom boom hiss wiggle wiggle

candle sticks in deep need of a polishing

a gong and a gohonsin scowling

small Persian rug and climbing rope up to the rafters

confined to athletic barracks

the collections of old lamps and fixtures

arranged around everbody's futon

choice of bible or comics

three hots

and some stuff they let you keep

Granny's Complaint

2010-06-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

foul people forever and the mind is riddled
inch worms bowing their backs as they crawl the craters
to think I used to be elated

Timmy kissing a picture of his bastard baby
mystery money siphoning

acres of skin have been harrowed with Tim's wanderings
whole herds of him have been pasturing in row houses
an argument and round shot-put-like people bellowing at their children
in a yard six feet from the street
mongrel at their feet

Horrid Haiku Trilogy

2010-06-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

wrinkling in syrup
indigo plums don't fatten
both dead and wholesome

marbled monkey meat
served with orangutan gravy
half-shell skull dishes

wearing X-ray specs
backsides of ladies unseen
need return postage

Temp Pool Pieces #33

2010-06-01T05:31:00.000-07:00

Every time Stan has a sensory overload at work, he has to report it immediately to his supervisor. As soon as possible, and from my perveiw, it was very fast, the supervisor would arrange an ad hoc meeting to help Stan with his snit.
The sheet metal shelves that order my senses do not so easily overload, as does Stan and his occupational handicap. In fact, you could say I'm a bad man around a mail room, which is where I met Stan and the management team that worked so well on his behalf. You should see me go with a packing tape dispenser.
Now I won't go ratting about Stan's group of ad hocs. Not all togeher. One of them made a regular thing of complimenting my free choices in business casual attire, just like it reads on the mimeograph sheet they gave me. Slacks and a golf shirt. I filled the office shoes of that order real nice.
I'm not saying I had major conflict with Stan, either. In the most humanistic tradition, no fault comes into the picture, though his ad hocs have to resolve the matters he toddles over to them, on which occaissions I get, among other things, compliments on my duds. They, so far, haven't had to trot out the water board, I fess up like a trained otter right away to have been inadvertantly frightening Stan.

So Stan and I are in the basement illeum like two baking turds, underneath the proud and handsome head of a law firm. I can feel the parystaltic action against me. The marble building I'm in reminds me of a stately mastiff, and the next loaf it pinches is me. They really need someone less threatenting to Stan.

Suit Flight

2010-05-28T11:47:00.000-07:00

As a man in the botton third portion of a financial downward trajectory, steps are being taken to pull up the joy stick and point the nose cone upward. I've decided to dress better. Pinched for the operating budget, I had to obtain at least one clean, presentable business suit, in case any one is hiring kamikaze displaced middle management. Leaping from my crashing biplane to modern aviation, I decided to feret on the internet the cheapest ready made suit that escaped the sweat shops of Pakistan. Air mail, or ground shipping, it is here, fruit of some alien loom.

It arrived in the mail, in an envelope smaller than I had expected, though this polyesther business suit didn't even need the sactuary of a cardboard box. Its wrinkle free fabric is so advanced it's a space odyssey.

The color is good. And once there were no good colors in polyester gaberdine before this day.

Rose petals falling from the caked ceiling, the price, with postage, was fifty two bucks, with introductory discount. Not only was it impossible to look cool in a cheap suit of recent yore, there was no internet in the 1970s, when the disco era caused confusion and revulsion for what has emerged as the lungs of Orpheus. Synthetic fibers have risen in consciousness. This suit fits so well, you could style your way out of the Underworld. This, too, was only released from Olympus when man/woman was ready to apply themselves to the task of innovation.

Maybe it is the length of the trousers that validates the Golden Mean. There is less than a quarter inch wiggle room between the right length and a fashion blunder so paralyzing that even your earth tone silk tie will look like manure. I will not asperse the character of man whose cuff gently tap at the top of his shoes, and I will not be concilliary to a man who is dressed for a flood. A quarter inch shorter, he is a fool. But if the pant leg is from the fashion moguls of Zeus, it will take greater initiative than merely touch the shoes. Trousers of impact break about seven inches above the instep, such to give a yet more pleasing and compelling look. It is merely a subtle crease, again living to the tolerance of a indexing lathe, but if it works, you will be perceived as super-mortal. Here the coat is the proof of Golden Mean, as it's proper length is in harmonic balance with the ideal trouser. Should that be disrupted there isn't a hat or collar bar that can save your fashion statement.
My new suit breaks properly, and the coat, too is the proper length. Valhalla.

For this nest segment, subtited 'the lifting of banes,' cat hair doesn't stick to the material, and it is machine washable. The all-cotton cut rate off-brand chinos I had been wearing the past fourteen years are indellible with cat hair. The static cling is so powerful I once seemed to have fur. Be mindful the Ancient Greeks abhored body hair. The new duds abhor it as elegantly.

Now is the prima vera in a new way of dressing. I had suffered, in mind, about the right way to dress, and fretted the cost. I wondered, would it be possible to look hip, while sustaining a blood oath of cheapness. Victory. It has become clear that there are people in business suits, down town, and there are worse off individuals who are not dressed for advancement.
Polyester has achieved advancement. Victory. The mysteries of proportion, texture and responsiveness to flourescent commercial light have been in formation all that trying while, when the leisure suit caused a great fabric to be wronged. It has found itself, and has merged with the muses of Christian Dior and Oleg Cassini. The suit fits perfectly. The muses and their sartorial excellence. The ghosts are admiring this victory.

Talking Bears

2010-05-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

Deer are family in Western Pennsyvania. Virtually all residents have hunted, shot, eaten or merely crashed into one with the family SUV. And most residents have stalked and beaten a relative, so there is unity. These nether-species cousins are abundant. So much so, a lot of them are turning up in the inner city here. I see fauns behind the house. Whole hurds of them stick their snoots in your pockets. They roll people.

Racoons enter and exit merrily through the holes in a neighbor's roof. To shame the poshest love nest, I have a view of the zoo out the front picture window.

Opossums are more rhetorical in my neighborhood than in others. Chipmonks have implimented family planning, without prompting from a bureau. My cat mastered plain English. And now, bears have been talking to me.

There was a black furry ursa minor, not bigger than me, but near enough for discomfiture. It lacked the clarity my dear Noodles expends like nickels, and Calicao cats are known to excell in ellocution and wit, but the young bear was able to convince me it wasn't Smokey the Bear. It was it's own fur and hide. He was a real person in his own natural costume. Not some bozo.

Visiting Stig

2010-05-17T02:15:00.000-07:00

Some nights my beloved cat, Noodles, sits on the front porch and chats with Stig, the alley cat. Stig has no permanant address, yet his personality is superior to that of most homeless people. Last night I happen to over hear them talking about Stig's past.

"Yeah, I was living with a guy downtown"

"Where about's, Stig?"

"It was in one of those new type apartments, you know, where there used to be a store or a warehouse."

"So you were living with someone who was pretty well healed, and otherwise, a piece of shit."

"Yeah. Yeah. The guy has money."

"So what happened, Stig?"

"Problem with the guy's piano."

"Yeah..."

"Okay, it's his priceless Steinway concert grand piano."

"You fucked with it."

"Yeah. I did. I fucked with it."

"So you just decided to fuck with his Steinway?"

"No. He kept making me get off his piano. Fucking piano. That's what I say. It's his fucking fault. Anyway, when he was out of the room I'd hop in the open cover and piss and shit on the strings. Sometimes I'd take a piss right in the goddam hammer assemblies. Takes months for it to take effect."

"So he noticed sooner or later that there was piss and shit in his piano."

"That's about the size of it."

"Was he one of those assholes who think they're Carl Haas?"

"No. This asshole thought he was Liberace. Fucking closet case. But since you mention it, he was playing the Pathetique Sonata, when shit balls started flying out the front of the goddam Steinway. Some of them bounced off the canope and hit the bastard in the face."

"So it was worth getting kicked out."

"Oh, fuck yeah."

The Cats of Honor

2010-05-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

It has always bothered me when some people have to explain beyond the facts why they need my help or want my friendship. Friendship is the worse explanation of the two for there being the leverage of need.

Ramon is a creature of honor, so his few impositions are never taken badly here. We have been speaking freely for several years now, and at times his infectious smile on a black moon face, with it's long jagged scar down the cheek, eased to plain talking when he told me why my help was needed. On one such occaission he told me that a bargain is a dinner table, across which the pork and gravy is said. That was something that I already knew, and needed to hear from an other.

It was getting to the end of the month. I was eating spagetti with my fingers, taking a few strands directly from the collender in the sink, lifting them over my head and lowering them down the hatch. Noodles was finishing a can of Nine Lives beef chunks in gravy, skewering the last of the chunks with a paw hook and lifting them over her head and into her lovely mouth.

Ramon came to the door, I let him in, and we sat together in the kitchen for a few minutes trying to put one another at ease, as the smile on the giant alley cat's face was in storage till his work was done.

"Bruce. Bruce. My family has been doing well of late, as you know. We have had woodchucks with meat like a Brahma bull, and we have had birds that flew too close to the sun"

"You mean they flew too close to those powerful paws of yours, Ramon," I said, to break up the tension a little. The joke was not wasted and Ramon was able smile just a little. But there was a reason for the visit, and it showed beside the scar and a broken whisker. "Bruce, this time it is for a friend of my family. A friend who has not been well. He has colitis and is unable to digest the foods my family has so enjoyed this great harvest season."

Noodles listened as carefully and fully as did I. Her white and pumpkin fur coat covered every grace in the world. And, too, she could be a cynic among cats and people who thrive among these complexities. "What the fuck, Bruce, I got extra food," she said, in a brash tone that, ironically, salved the hurt of need. "Will two cans of Nine Lives get your friend clear for a few days?"

"Yes, Noodles, two cans will permit my friend to regain his strength."

"It's in the closet over the sink, Bruce."

"Yes, Noodles, I know where we keep the food."

The Cat Saga

2010-05-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

Noodles, Ramon and I sat at the cable spool in the house he and his had acquired through mortgage failure. We took turns pouring Cuervo and biting the lemon, while off to the side all the kittens were eating sweetly around the carcus of a fresh woodchuck. For the grown-ups the birds, tar tar, fluttered inside us all like birds drinking tequilla. Ramon can make robins into anchovies, or bacon to garnish his wonderful ground hog serviche.

"You might say that cats are, in some respects, like your fundamentalists," Ramon said as he looked at the thousand kittens. Noodles doesn't laugh out loud, or even move much once she settles in, but she registered that funny thought. "We're not very good ones," she commented.

"That's religeon, from the vantage point of sex" I said. "I think sex is better when it's used to influence politics."

"Was her name, 'Lewinski,'" Ramon dropped in. He was able to keep abreast of current events.

"Yes, Ramon. She influnenced politics a little bit by making Bill Clinton look like a jerk."

"It didn't make much difference," said Noodles, dryly.

As Ramon poured another round of tequilla, he sagely added, "No, but we should know that indiscretions are worse for people who are rich than for us."

Some people regard cats as thankless creatures, but that is because they are in the dark.

Gangle

2010-03-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

I'm dying my hair to black. It's a dollar job, buck a pop at the store, and it's soaking into my head right now like uranium. It really really helps to keep it dark on top. But there is a problem.

Earlier today I tested my new electric power assist bicycle on a long run. Mission sucked, it was as strenous as riding a road bike the same distance. Laws of physics, blow me. As soon as I got my wind back from taking the trip, I looked in the mirror, saw how under-the-bridge my hair looked, and went for my hair dye pack like a spawning salmon.

The skull cap of sludge is turning colder, but I don't put that in front of my dog sled of misery. Just a second ago, I got an excruciating spasm. I'm in screaming pain, and the shit on top of my head, last I checked the mirror, has me looking like an undesirable. I am going to have amble to the kitchen sink to hose the shit out of my hair. Will soon be hiking like the Hunchback, swearing and screaming. Can't fucking wait.

I got another ten minutes before the hose, so here's the special thing that happened on the bike trip. Most of the way home, the battery was showing near discharged. The bike weighs 75 badly placed pounds, hills here are steep, spires you might say. To discharge completely would hurt.
Like now.

A few blocks from home, working the last volts the battery liked to donate, like corporate America, I decided to rest near the high rise. There's a double lot where two crack houses used to compete like Sears and Monkey Wards. The demolition squad left some of the cinderblocks from the basents, providing a cozy cold corner, minus the rest of the room, to scrooch up in. Corners were made for cowering in. There I was, perfect.

This gangle of cut and dragged morning glory vines tied the room together, like a tall house plant.
It looked more like a hybrid tumbleweed and crown of thorne. This area has a lot of Catholics, so you get that sort of effect in shit that blows in and out of here. My cinder block corner had an open view of the first floor of the highrise, beehive of dysfunction and ease, illness and freedom from hard labor. I get a Harriet Tubman vibe. There was a bureaucratic set of tunnels and trails to arrive at the current state of liberation,but I had my own free piece of concrete basement floor to enjoy.

The words, 'hi there, hi there' started flying like crows and doves in the air. At first I tried to ignore it, since I wasn't aware I was being spoken to. I'm good about cleaning my plate when you have me over for dinner, might even fold the napkin. Whatever. You don't go looking to see who it is that's talking, unless you know them, and their doe eyes are meeting yours, absent of malice. Otherwise, you pretend people aren't there.

'Hi there' kept flapping its blowsy heather wings. The flesh is weak. I started to look around.

"Look up higher." she said. First I looked at the fifth floor of the highrise, and it was its usual row of vacant unseasoned concrete balconies. I looked at my bike like it was half guilty for what was happening. It's fucking near time to rinse the liquid plutonium gell that will soon fix my repulsive grey hair. Presto change-o, it will be black. I might look young again when this is over.

On the seventh floor. "When the moon is in the seventh house."
Soon as I looked up there she entered my life with all the familiarity that modern times lack. I'm a lucky piece of shit with a not too successful electric bike.

A huge woman in a night gown was talking to me from on high. Shit like this happened in the Bible, but things were more substantive in those days.
She seemed to like me. "And Mercury alines with Mars." A song from the rock musical 'Hair' started up in my head, like a juke box.
This isn't the age of Aquarius. This was not the sort of woman that gives me the big hard one. The batteries 'down there' have been running lower than in years past, but there is still a supply of juice. The visage above didn't help. But damn it all, she was friendly.

The little bell on my clock spring timer just went 'ding,' and I must get this shit out of hair, so I am going to leave off at how I conversed with the huge woman, she waving her arms in the air like a big bird, her too transparent nightie doing a dance to the bounding flesh. We conversed, about nothing but the weather, fine as could be asked for, and maybe how sweet it is to have such a fine resting spot right where I was. She was right, I had my own corner of a demolished basement to hang in till both legs got half back to normal. Damn like the ending in The Yearling.

Maybe it's a hamstring. Something cord-like and imperative feels like it is tearing loose from the trailer hitch nearest my ass. This bullshit has to mean something, or else something else would have happened. I know per usual that after the hair dye rinses out, the skin on my forehead and face will have on it embarrassing stains that take about a day or two to wear off.

Winter Manifesto of 2010

2010-02-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

Winter Manifesto of 2010

nigh on twenty years
the twenty four hour bug flies away
people begin to tell the truth
that trophy shelf of bum steers and slanders
happy collecting dust behind a sacred cow
won't fall off the brackets
this long here
the tin throne begins to answer
cronies quit giving you the run around
they drop the tools of graft
and shift to dull resistance
it's a chilly place to work into
hip deep in snow
the plow milles distant

Buddy Film

2010-02-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

peroxide blond has my back
up the row of gyroscopic stainless steel stools
got bullet warts in my back from standing up
patella wedges in slug frappe
got the riteous limp while rousting
blue plate specials that need their ass cooked
a row of them in watch caps and CPOs
you know I haved to jack on the wharf rats
Fake Yellow pathologically quiet and cruel
futzes in the passenger seat
the Slumlon scrap leather trench coat
a million scars to the yard
covers the hoary brute

Class of '75

2010-01-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

In a town that saw the rabbit run
those first two decades of fun
were blocks of ice in the sun

twelve years of school
jerkwater town and the fool
remorsing at home on a stool

steeped in hair and bone
thirty years alone
airs out the hemp cologne

Singing At Night

2009-11-24T13:16:00.001-08:00

I'm waiting for the 11D, it was later than usual for one of my trips downtown, hence ranker desert for a trip home, and my nerves, my nerves were not the steel thread they can be earlier in the day in a less ugly spot on the map . The police don't cruize past Heinz Hall quite as often after 11 pm. The duplication of '11' is bad for people with superstitions. It is only suprising how fast secular humanism can run from danger, and the cultural district starts to look bowery. This evening I was only one of two people waiting for the bus on Penn like two live chickens waiting for Colonel Sanders. And in the nervous fearful minutes, passing like heavy dumplings in rank stew, it seemed good, at first, that the the other guy struck up a conversation. He was working on his career in music. Country western.

The number '11' is never good, and the letter 'D' reminds me of a report card. The hopeful musician beside me asked if I knew when the bus was coming. This caused me to trip up. I have this thing I call the "Fred Rogers Reflex," which is an irrational need to sustain middle class courtesies while standing in a hell hole. I fished my bus schedule out, so to give a neighbor the exact time the bus probably won't arrive. I could see for myself the hollowness, since the bus is never on time, and the act of pulling out the paper schedule was an autonomic beourgoise ritual. People are supposed to be helpful, my ass. It was late, and the grunting of 'it's supposed to be here' would have been sufficient.

The musician warmed up immediately. The deceptive nature of common courtesy had been a regular tool in bag for people like Ted Bundy and Albert Desalvo, and less catastrophically, the pimply, sandy haired man nearest me launched into his recent past. "I just come up here from Nashville. Music industry in Nashville is all fucked up. I hear the music industry up here'll at least give a man a chance."

Going play by play, I was unaware that there was a country western music industry in Pittsburgh. A church or two got converted to recording studios a few miles out of town, and the outfits don't bring in much with the collection plate. The fact that this was happening against the humorless flanks of Heinz Hall brought optimism down a couple notches.

"Just bought this guitar at a pawn shop" He had his ax in a cheap boogie bag, like a body bag for a crumby instrument.

It's like saying 'that librarian is three inches taller than Roberto Duran.' I lost the rest of my respect for the singer because pawn shops are the outside worst place to buy a used guitar. You can score a good one anywhere, cheaper, unless you are the jerk I met at the bus stop. To strenthen his argument against Nashville, he said he's written more songs than Merl Haggard. Some people have more cavities in their teeth than others. He stepped closer to me and launched into one of his songs. He was smiling out a song he was proud of, and he was standing uncomfortably close. Had the bus come sooner, I would have heard less.

Federal Curling

2009-11-12T10:18:00.000-08:00

Played on skates and ice, the sport of curling hasn't caught on in the US as much as it could. I've seen it done on television, and don't get too excited about it, but it's a sight to behold, and I was reminded of the exotic sport just this morning after reading an article about our national economic strategy.

For overview, a burly skater hurls his curling stone, a heavy, burly round stone with convenient handle, forward on the ice, towards a target. As the stone glides to target, two 'sweepers' skate ahead of it, corn brooms in hand, preparing the surface of the ice, both knaves furiously and comically sweeping the ice. Our federal government has taken the role of sweepers in the area of world money management.

This new governmental role as 'sweepers' has emerged because there are relatively few highly profitably large scale corporations. Rather than fostering new corporate development evenly throughout society, the gov is protecting the few, the proud, the really really rich.

There are a lot of too wealthy curling stones, but not enough to help a ten percent unemployment rate and a declining standard of living off the ice.

Curling is a dull sport, and looks like paralysis compared to our glorious and brutal hockey, but it deserves respect in much the way you can't park in front of a fire hyrdrant. Need I say it is loved in places other than my own private state of confusion, and it has provided a model for purposes of greater understanding. Still more convenient, this sport has some of the characteristics of an exotic global dash for the cash. It is unsportsmanly conduct on the part of the Fed, though, to sweep.

Senile Musings: Accepting Your Movie Role

2009-10-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

There is a hard numerology at work. The number of times you have seen a movie impacts, directly, the role it will take in your future. I watched Taxi Driver seven times, and began asking imaginary foes if they are talking to me. But that was a long time ago, and at midlife, my 19 viewings of the film Frankenstein is defining me.

I'm turning into the old man who played his fiddle. The Monster turned up at his shack in the Bavarian woods, and the blind hermit musician welcomed the huge, ugly crazy quilt of human parts. The kindly old cheese introduced Frankenstein's monster to the violin. "Music good." And to the grape. "Wine. Fucking good."

The hermit was an archetype of refined and marginalized individuals everywhere.

dates and fates

2009-08-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

A few years back, I was looking for a date. So I ran a personal ad on Craigslist, stunning athletic male seeks leopard-skin pill box bomb shell, nothing freaky. I'm a plain kind of guy full of hope, and soon I got a response, then a meeting for coffee, with woman about my age of a half century.

She seemed nice, at first. Though, too, she expressed that her life at home was troubled, a husband had absconded with their life's loot, she had grown kids that didn't like her. The former boyfriend who committed suicide for no reason known to her, and they were dating at the time, made the nads shrink. There are some 'don'ts' in picking your mate. On the more normal plane, she had a job. She said she was a medical transcriptionist at a local psychiatric hospital. A well connected hospital.

We were chatting pleasantly on the phone when she told me that she had checked my psych history on her computer at work, and she was pleased to find that I have no history of mental illness in the United States for as far back as everything private went on-line. If I went nuts before then, like in the 1980s, I'm doing a great job of hiding it.

Using only my first and last name for her inquiry, she was able to find out if I had my head examined in New Zealand, and she could even find out if a general practitioner had prescribed me a psychiatric med, such a Xanax. She might have had half a romance novel in front of her if I had been involuntarily committed.

My date with an apparently unstable transcriptionist caused me concern. An amazing breach of privacy is possible by way of plain folks and an ominous network of computers. The right to privacy has been altered for the worse. On a bright spot, I'm probably playing with a full deck.

Piggish Banking

2009-08-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

I wish this didn't have to sound like a Nervous Whiner Gets Hit With A Bill type story, but this having happened right after the federal bank bail out can bring it out in people who are normally cool as cream.
Put up with me while I explain.

My auxilliary checking account with, oh I won't say which bank, had been left in a poet's state of limbo. It was opened mainly to do transactions through pay pal and ebay, and my nerdy attempt at being an internet Tarzan mostly flopped. Haven't sold anything on ebay since early post-Bill Clinton.

So I didn't look as eagle-eyed as I should have for a while. The last bank statement tells me I owe the bank $181.00 in overdrafts. They added a nine dollar monthly service charge like mice on cotton, and when the remains of a weak but wiry bank account was all eaten in those fees, they shot out of the bull pen with an $8.00 a day overdraft fee. I slap shotted myself to the phone, with the depressing statement in hand.

The game of phone processing, digitized, shake-the-little-weasel-off-our-tails tactics were as annoying as your last chat with a bank by phone. I managed to get them to close the account and stop the overdraft fees from continuing, and thus growing into a Stimulus Package for Bank Swine. Just now I'm sounding out an F. Lee Baily/Johnny Cochran/Barry Scheck speech to lay on some petulent bank manager. I'm going to ask, nice as Marsha Clark, to scratch the fees and refund the money they stole. With Cochran waiting to get in the game. It should come off at least as good as Lance Ito at a weenie roast for not-well-liked jurisprudentials.

Parting words on the brass agates of banks, they're criminals. Criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals.

Another Fatuous Policy Statement

2009-08-04T21:50:00.000-07:00

A certain local city council person is pushing a bill that would force all used car dealers in the area to place tall shrubbery in front of their wee places of business. It's a beautification effort with flies in its Noxema. How are we to buy used cars if the lots are hidden behind a forsythia?

From Fort Duquesne Tunnel to the fresh air of Brentwood, Rt. 51 has about 300 sweet looking, old school used car lots. That stretch of about four miles, all of it mighty bad road, is, smooshed pavement alone, a heap uglier than chain link fence and used cars. And don't come screaming at me that used car lots all look alike. They are diverse, each it's own oasis, each a living thing. Hillary Clinton would probably like them.

When I rattle my muffler driving the stretch, I always think about what life must be like in the trailers and bungalows with fenced in cars. The lots are limpid little tracks of dirt with ginger houses for the used car salespeople to sit in. I always imagine them as tall, firm, honest men, waiting to sell their next car so they can get the wife the Serta Perfect Sleeper she needs for her back. What kind of fiend would want to hide that in bushes?

Local History Piece

2009-06-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

The legs were fucked from about twenty miles of biking all over the west set of hills, not sure if there's a name for the whole deck of trashy mountains, but I cruised the West End, also the South Side, then did the crack pot of side walks along Route 51. There, too, were other crazy quilts of bad road, when I stumbled onto Boggs Ave.

Boggs is in no way ugly, unless you are too analytical to live there. That's likely, but it's a good place to see while walking the jangly touring bike 50 degrees up the cracks and pot holes. Even, and I say especially, if there are little kids are out in a stunted front lawn, working on their futures like Harvard freshmen.

........

The ancient Hebrews were aware that there was an advantage in stationing high on the hill side. The mob of brats was aware of it too. Not that they planned to be where they were, they just knew my legs were cooked because I was walking my bike straight up the hill, like the last poor asshole they saw doing likewise, looking too weak to out run a coyote pack of rotten kids.

It's trade offs in life, like the black eye for the team, that keeps the legs some hurting spaghetti for the true runner's high. Bike riding heightens the senses. The gangster babies were all working together on something, on someone's sloping stump of lawn between a house and Boggs with it's pot holes. They were enunciating the phrase, "Hey Asshole."

None of the brats was more than three feet tall, yet they were organized and orderly in front of the shitty ranch house, with no grown ups around to tell them to shut up or to teach them something even filthier than what they already mastered.

Just the term 'ranch style' brings out the worst in my thoughts when it has to do with shitty frame houses glued into rock and more little brick and shingle dumps. It's still no reason not to like this particular part of town. I'd be proud to march down the street any day with the locals carrying rakes and torches. The kids could help by throwing rocks at people from out of town.

They were taking turns saying, "hey asshole," all smiling like mindless adult convicts who thrived on boiled cabbage and kielbasa. Most of them would be aquiescing to exactly that, but this scene was so fucking adorable it almost took my mind off how bad my legs hurt.

...........
One of my former girl friends from when I was in college came from this part of town. She told me once that her mother taught her to take her earings off before getting into a cat fight in a bar, and her mother taught her how to call someone an asshole. Mom said to emphasize the second syllable if you really want it to hurt the other cat. The phrase 'hey asshole' is almost always used to convey authority, like saying 'attention' over a loud speaker. There ain't no fucking loud speakers, if I may sort particulars with the brats. 'Hey asshole' is used like a Crescent wrench in the tool box of pranks and intimidation. It's used a lot all around town, so I had to see the kids as being off to a good start in the whole mess. Somewhere about the tenth time one of the brats staightened shoulders and said, 'hey asshole,' a little girl who had been showing top drawer leadership in the excercise took notice of me, the bike, and two fucked up legs not liking to push the bike. I could see she hatched an idea.

This kid had the genes that made the place what it was and probably still is. She picked up this hard thin tree branch about as long as her height, and ran at me with it raised, stopping just short of me. Looking up, smiling, she said directly, "Hey asshole," and then tried to whack me with the stick. I caught the end of it with my hand and held onto it for a few seconds. While she pulled on her end, leaning back and still smiling victory and the kill, she said like Edith Wharton, "let go of my stick, you asshole." It's what Edith might have said to someone if she grew up on Boggs.

With my legs hurting again by this this time, pained patellas in red Jello, runner's high running thin, I was getting a wee bit demoralized by the vitality of a she-thug the size of Thumbellina. I let go of my end of the stick, and she fell on her ass on the pavement, but she got the better of the fight. I kept walking my bike up hill, with all the kids together reminding me how I was perceived by them.
At that point in the afters, they were yelling at me together, Hey Asshole. Been losing most of the fights I've been in, last twenty years in Pittsburgh. Not a good place to outsiders.

The Secret Ingrediant In a Dentifrice

2009-05-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

There is a method to mystery, and a road map to fascination. Both can be discussed in terms of ingredients. The harder it is to scare up all the spices, the more people prick up their ears when you describe the soup. People open their wallets without resistence when they are trying to obtain some intangible thing that important people have. Mystery is as much in the description of objects associated with power as it is in assembling the graven images that look like the supernatural.

The property of being clandestined figures neatly into the occult. The secret ingredient in Crest. Here, one of my favorite limericks from a National Lampoon bought in the 1970s:

A hygienic young woman out west
asked the cowboy who sat on her chest
will this cause tooth decay
why no mam I've heard say
it's the secret ingredient in Crest

For mystical reasons, this dumb limerick still makes me laugh.

Pig Trouble

2009-05-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

Pigs. First it was trichynosis, and now it's swine flu. That's a lot of guilt for the farm animals to have to carry around. You have to remember that they didn't mean to contract a disease and spread it to people. Yet they have to carry the social stigma, as if they were all one collective Typhoid Mary who should have had the decency to wash her hands more often.

But to get down to the cases of how bad life is, my new dilema is that Jews asperse the character of pigs and won't eat them, and Christians eat all the ham they can choke down, so love it or hate it the pigs get either eaten or looked down upon. Or blamed for the latest bio-engineered virus.

So like people, chipped or sliced.

Fiction Fragment from a Novel I'm Writing

2009-03-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

...........................
We could of all been mean and selfish about this wild fire of law enforcement that put all of us together in a syphlitic make-do world in rural West Virginia. The 1980s did us all in, and in the late 90s we wound up living all close together on the same dirt road. But we're not too down about it.

Sharing music among friends is redeeming. No matter where you sing. Some nights Rosie takes out her violin and lays down a clutch of partitas by Bach. She's no slouch about the things for which she keeps the passion, and some of her perfomances put the shadow of J.S. Bach in Rosie and my living room, listening proudly with his feet comfy in the chicken shit and straw.

Clyde Smith was pretty sharp on our spinnet piano, sort of a jazz standard machine from the cold war era, and when Bonnie sang along, it was hard to fathom that trained and lovely voice coming from a woman who might resemble Joe Stalin if she grew a mustache. You can see how any place can seem like middle America when music is part of the daily routine. It says everything about the natural goodness in people.

Appealing and Squealing

2009-03-05T19:44:00.000-08:00

In the world of fund raising, an appeal is performed after someone gives money to the organization. It is a second request, for more money, because though that which was already given was received like people being pleasured, a circumstance arose requiring that more dough is requested. This post is different. It is a appeal to people who haven't ponied up squat, and I know you didn't, because it's just me at this little round up here. You haven't bought my book, "An O.K. Corral of Poems," and you should. Just hit the button to your left and play ball.

Last week there were two local news articles, at least, in which the hurd of nonprofit cultural oganizations got their chance to bemoan the recession of 2009.
I've been making a shit storm about independent artists, we who don't get tax incentives, you can't write little me off on your income tax forms, oh, no, any financial support you waft my was is simple free enterprise, my book of poems for your greenbacks by wire. Why the lowest earning, dirt poorest men (some of us) have been cut out of public funded programs! Squeek!

A poem by one of my pen names

2009-02-27T13:15:00.000-08:00

Exiting the Sinus Cavity
by Al Mooseprocter

is it true that a man can be sneezed?
if left in a snowdrift like Amundsen
denied the proper seal skin
fed foods not indiginous to foriegners
then a moose could inhale such a victim
last such mishap was mine
I rattled inside the head of that windy moose
I bellowed for liberation
made the single phone call they give you
in captivity
culpable tracks leading to moose
demands ordered out of that predicatent
could not amble out of that hostile three foot sinus
I was suffered to find my way out
and was trampled
the moose did not even sniff

Disclaimer, a big hairy one

2009-02-18T08:29:00.000-08:00

Before anyone goes ape, I would like to assure everyone near and dear that there is no validity to my ficticious accounts of a fiefdom I call, "Brusistan." My proposed and hoped for comic opera, titled, "The Prince of Brusistan," is a work in progress, while in the mean time themes and variations of urban renewal have been bandied about with some caprice. There is no such city sanctioned renaming or rezoning of the Perryhilltop neighborhood. It's the same fine place it has been for my past decade of residence here. It is with artistic licence that I have been calling this part of town 'Brusistan.' I have been refering to myself, in works of prose, as "the Prince of Brusistan." This, too, bullcrap. But it's art.

The Boomerangs in Brusistan

2009-02-18T06:46:00.000-08:00

To bring you up to speed, the North Side neighborhood in which I own a shanty has been renamed. It was called 'Perryhilltop' but I renamed it, after me. The new name for 'Perryhilltop' is 'Brusistan,' a newly christened third world American slum. I am a proud and productive resident of Brusistan.

As far as I know, one of the few manufactured goods made here in Brusistan is boomerangs. All shapes and sizes. Made of durable industry standard materials, each hand made. Thus far I have manufactured some of the best rangs any rollicking rowdy individual could love or dream over. My boomerangs, properly thrown in good weather conditions, return. The industry standard 'rangs, made of five ply cabinet grade baltic birch plywood, perform a diverse family of arcs, runs, sweeps and encirclements. They do the tricks that boomerang experts world wide recognize as throughbred horse-like elegance in motion.

By goodness, they describe a ramping tear-drop shaped flight in the air above a good sized sports field. The first arc travels near eye level away from ground zero, then takes a short sharp run up and around, most of the way back to the thrower. But not entirely. A great boomerang will slow down on the return sweep. Just over it's tender's head it will go into small circles, like a falling maple seed in nature's helicopter configuration, gyrating gently to fertile soil. A world class fine 'rang will lower itself down to you, spinning and circling, which is how these fine sporting devices say to you, "Catch me, catch me. Take me you, fool."

A champion boomerang is like a champion horse. It looks great standing still, and it looks great in motion. It has a pleasing disposition. It has a proper sense of self and community. Unlike some people and places I could mention.

The State of My Ass Address

2009-02-16T15:42:00.000-08:00

I'm in tight-woven navy blue gaberdine, a serious rayon neck tie, and white button down collar. This post pre-empts other blog drivel. This is an important, once a year thing, like a medical exam, but with personal fancy and screamed out through a bull horn while driving around and around the downtown cultural district there about Penn Avenue and Liberty. It's where I'm at, and I'm belting it out the way US presidents do the State of the Union Address.

I'm old enough to croak of more or less natural causes, depending on how you look at it. When you are 35 years old, you are too young to die. Fifty-one is a reason to be more careful. It's a good time to be sagacious, if possible. A calm, goal oriented approach to gluing my personal history into the scrap book of now is in order.

Here, here. The project on the front burner is boomerangs. I am in the process of refining some of the boomerangs I first made om 2005 and 06. Some of the 'rangs made back then were better than others, and I am in the process of filing, sanding and re-sawing to produce a family of boomerangs to make you proud. You will be proud to own a relic from my studio here in Perryhilltop, a neighborhood I think of as my own personal third world fiefdom, named after me, Brusistan. A boomerang producing third world slum in Pittsburgh.

Making A Holiday

2009-02-14T09:42:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine invented a name for the year end holidays. Ramachriskwanzooka is Ramadon, Christmas, Kwanza and Hanuka smooshed into a pablum of holidays that both the friend and I have had trouble, in the past, digesting.

I have hated Christmas songs from the origins of my acrid consciousness. Too, and though I may be homely, I boast of being truly averse to materialism. By nature, by natural selection of good taste, and not by the years of studied left wing thought, the mixed solemnity and greed makes me gag.
Nativity scenes remind me of wards where they tube feed crack babies. And then there is all the religeous conflict among Jews, Christians, Muslims and all alliances that hate the rival grouping for color, creed, mode of operation or cut of costume. From Thanksgiving till New Year's Day there is a reason per second to attack or flee. It's the time of year that thieves come out of the woodwork. I get depressed. Without the aid of good thought, the holiday season serves as nothing but a cold sheet steel sliding board into the freezing, rotten winter.

There is hope. In creative intelligence. The holiday, Ramachriskwanzooka, may include the entire late fall and complete winter. It remains a baby food of pureed hope and happiness, but it is an honest holiday for the bleakness of the weather. People around these parts, by and large, are missing a few spokes, by world standards in achievement. So until the month of April, it is a good idea to fertilize the barren mud with contrived spiritual mumbo jumbo.

A better reason, yet, for the four month holiday is that winter is slow physical degradation. I need a lot of brisk physical activity in warm sunlight to be all that I can be, in terms of joy and achievement. All winter the dearth of what is needed leaches away the life blood. To help, there isn't a transfusion, or an exorcism, just a home remedy for the blues. Winter blues. Invent a celebration.

At The Risk Of Being A Bore....

2009-02-10T13:17:00.000-08:00

........there may be a soft warm membrane that separates what people believe from what is. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan claimed to have believed that the housing market was stable and secure all during the decades long process of real estate costing more and peons earning less. Or while peons took two full time jobs instead of one, just to eat and shit. It was either in the Chairman's immediate interest to ignore the financial erosion of the middle class, or else the communiity with whom Alan interacts kept Alan in a state of ignorance. But I'm feeling plucky and pontifical at the same time. Alan is a big victim of the pink tarp that separates what one would like to believe from what is. Or it separates immediate self interest from the victims of poor thinking, e.g. the wee folks with name tags and generic macaroni and cheese for dinner.

I'm boring you with this thrumming moral rant because just about everyone has been forced or allowed or encouraged to accept a view point that serves immediate best interest. It has become impossible for people to make a decent assessment of circumstance, and impossible to originate and complete a corrective course of action.
There. I've made myself yawn. You're boring, sometimes, too.

Bigotry and Hatmunching

2009-02-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

In the early days of television it was common for game show hosts to say, "...I'll eat my hat." The expression isn't used much now. On a related point, references are no longer made to rhubard, especially not on the news when reporting the weather, and no one at all in those days said, on television, they were, "happy as a pig in shit." On this Monday I am going to eat my hat, check the rain on the rhubarb, and I am happy as a pig in shit.

The Pittsburgh Steeler's sixth superbowl victory feels great. I feel unreservedly proud of the home football team. And its a situation in which I got proven wrong about one hundred sixty thousand things relevant to major league football and this town. Certain prejudices just got corrected by yesterday's Superbowl victory.

From lotsa years back, and putting into this that I'm a transplant to the 'burgh' and come from a family of sports dysfunctionals, I was under the impression that the team wasn't worth its salt. I thought Big Ben was a poor choice, I thought he was going to retire from injuries before managing to became a star in history, I was prejudiced against people who have had a lot of concussions, and our great quarterback did what great people do to clear up doubt. Santonio Holmes seemed to me like some sort of flash in the pan when I first heard the name on the news (I almost never watch an entire football game) and now it is impossible for that first impression to be true. The two plays, a first pass through Holmes' arms, and the completed touchdown pass that won the game, was as thrilling as it gets. All in all, it appears that the team is the "real deal" and I had thought otherwise. I'm eating my hat about the Superbowl, and there are more hats to munch on.

All the while that I was expressing my doubts about Ben, some of my die hard Steeler fan friends insisted that he is the 'real deal.' Their ability to see the talent in the sports figure deserves notice. It's a lot of hearts and minds deep in a fine city and champion team. The future looks better, my collection of hats is depleting, and the eradication of prejudice feels good, like winning the Superbowl.

Buy My Book: An O.K. Corral of Poems

2009-01-24T01:56:00.000-08:00

There, to your left, is a 'buy now' button, and underneath it is your opportunity to support the arts directly, by buying a copy of my book of poems, "An O.K. Corral of Poems."

The title is to suggest that the group of poems is meeting in the lot between two buildings to settle all hash now and forever.

Here's one poem from a very large group of lyric combattants:

Becoming Respectable

back then
the low life went where the hot shots went
the latter group gloated

My pal drove a Pontiac LeManns
faded yellow
with wide black stripes that did not augment its design
may I borrow your Wembly tie

A Dippy Moratorium

2009-01-24T00:59:00.000-08:00

A pile of wet rags. That's the kind of peace that has accumulated in the rain barrel below the hole in the ceiling. I make sport some recent quixotic political campaigns. One man political campaigns. The high brow literary/rhetorical Rambo lone hero swell guy vigilante but with no violence, just words type of lone warrior struggle. I'm calling a temporary truce. I'm gonna be nicer, as if I was making a new year's resolution, but not, just tired of busting a nut on nit wits. Peace, pricks, peace. The next series of posts on this blog will be so positive and free of animus that you will shit.

The $93,000 Act of Gender Politics Fraud

2009-01-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I've had my ears boxed too many times, but I can't remember dates. It was inside of 2008 that the local news shared a story that the city was commissioning a study of salaries with reference to gender. Similar studies have been conducted since the 1970s and the same result comes up every time.

All such studies show that men earn more than women. and at all times it has been common knowlege that wage earners are entitled to equal pay, and that the disparity favoring men explains away as men earning more in commissioned sales and executive salaries.

I would't be such a prick about the waste of public revenue, last year it was $93,000 bones paid to an interest group or individual to produce the same fraud that follows all studies of the kind, but now there is new reason to claim that women should be given preferential treatment over men in distribution of public revenue: It was recently claimed that the misleading results of the last gender study fraud prove that women are more adversely impacted by our newly christened economic recession. This new lie makes a matching candle stick to go with the new source of dim and loathesome light. Not only was public money wasted on the study, the fraud of it is being used to direct scarce resources to the wallets of an interest group that nets a continuum of poor results. Men have been done great harm in the American work force over the last few decades and have been treated like dirt, while the systematic empowerment of women made it all more unfair and counterproductive to sustained economic well being.

Fair and Equal Access To Public Money! End Gender Politics! All-inclusive Economic Revitalization!

Pulling a Quote

2008-12-14T11:16:00.000-08:00

I'm a kinda guy who likes a pointed quote. There's sensuality drawing sharp words from their sheath in history. Pulling a deep breath, here's a boarding saber from the days of wooden ships:

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Samuel Johnson

This quote holds an edge. Too, it can be built upon. Religion, nonprofit organizations and a job lot of social causes provide bad people an appearance of being good and a foundation upon which to be crooks and liars.

Seven years residence in Pittsburgh's South Side from 1991 to 1998 brought me visits by the late Samuel Johnson's ghost as rafts of hopeful entrepreneurs predicated their business plans on the environmental movement, the national mass marketing of therapy, and the on the New Age demand for spiritual instant gratification. The beautiful historic neighborhood was a refuge for scoundrels since the steel mill days, and the emerging new economy of air and fibs became a remarkable refuge for so many of the scoundrels that made the place special, insubstantive, hollow, ethically vacant, and outright friendly towards political dirt.

With a very special new president of the United States coming into office real soon it may be good to pour a table spoon of ethical cod liver oil, choke it down, and proceed with the closest thing to honor that can be cleaned out and fortified the old way. This is not a good time to provide refuge for scoundrels, and perhaps it will be a bad time to be one. Better morals may just be the cutting edge.

Milk Me, You Brute

2008-09-24T06:21:00.000-07:00

Some time past the age of fifty, men don't become more like women, but do become more like cows. People probably carry a gene for future bovine humanity. In this parable I am caused to believe that men with this gene survive by auspices of institutions, the things for which Pittsburgh is recongnised.

The town is guileless and unthinking as soon as you step off the street and into a church, school, or community council. The non-cows tend to be more like wolves or jackals, as you prefer, and they are usually good enough to confine themselves to outdoors. A lot of the creeps are homeless. Others of them live a rudderless existence in smoke filled casbahs off of East Ohio Street, and I reiterate that these people are rotten scum, but you are never more than a block away from some place full of people who can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, like a nice flat footed humanitarian aid group advocating for people they are unable to locate.

Well, that's all the meanness I can muster out. My udder is full, it's my milking time, then a nap. Moo.

Closet Executive

2008-09-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Amercan political radicalism was in a downward trajectory for a long time and more of less ended with 9/11. While the radical left spent the past three decades working itself into the main stream, Republicans have done the work of saints in easing right wing fanatics into our more hawkish family of man. We have never been more culturally diverse than now, and never did a better job of hiding it. It's the stuff that uneasy truces are made of.

Now that there is no such thing as an American radical, I have had to confront the problems that go with being an obsolete person. Not at a loss for strategy, I invented a phrase to define the political activist in a two dimensional society below Big Brother's cameras: closet executive.

A closet executive is probably unemployed or marginalized one way or other. Some consultants provide a neat working model. Yet a political activist can make executive decisions and take executive courses of action. If a new view point is wanted, projects such a letter writing campaign could net real outcomes.

Any good executive encourages the growth and development of both business and cultural communities. Even executives who live hand to mouth while supporting the unrecognised cause. The nearest thing to radical is a lone activist campaign to develop alternatives to nonprofit urban renewal. I am proposing a plan intended to create empowerment programs that would grant revenue directly to Pittsburgh homeowners who need the help and who can earn that aid in service to the community.

Eliminate the One Dollar Bill, You Dirty Leaders

2008-08-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

Money is dirty. People have touched it. With their hands. With their fingers. They woofed snow up their filthy schnozola with it, and some of what is inside the ghastly organ got on the money.

But worse than this, the paper our bucks are printed on cost a fortune. There are good reasons to eliminate the one dollar bill. If we are going to be made sick by money, it could at least be for a fin or a saw buck. Not to worry. The treasury department has made an amazing discovery: People are honest. All of them. There isn't one single cheat or liar in the United States.

Rather than carry money and exchange it for gum, sex or drugs, people will need only say, "I am thinking of the money you are asking me for. I am picturing that money in my mind right now. Can you see the sum of money I am picturing in my mind?"

In the new emerging economy, the merchant, hooker or career criminal will respond, "Yes, yes, we are sympatico, I see the money you are thinking about, and I accept this clean, valuable currency."

Our leaders are wisely starting small, allowing only one dollar bills to be thought about so fondly. But if it works as well as I know it will, soon twenties, fifties and hundred dollar bills will be transacted in our depraved American minds.

2008-08-02T20:05:00.000-07:00

You can't see it or hear it, where ever you are, friends, other individuals, people who think I'm a jerk, but I am pronouncing, "Tsk, tsk, tsk," while gesticulating. An article found on the Internet pulled the pin out of a metaphysical, imaginary and physically harmless handgrenade that I keep in the prop rooms of cognition. The article claims that vitamins A, C and E are not as good as was once believed. One or all of them could cause untimely death or illness, and I am most especially miffed with vitamin E, for such great hopes had lain on it.

If this new view of vitamins plants in your mind a cold war era loathing and uncertainty then welcome to the club. It is as if the agents of proper nutrition have revealed their dark side. But since it seems that antioxident vitamins don't work as orginally believed, and probably don't lengthen people's lives, there is a matter of civil duty to air.

It has to do with 'free radicals.' When the antioxident vitamins were still honored nutrients, it was believed that they worked their miracles by neutralizing free radicals which were said to be toxic at the cellular level. All X-billion of your body's cells will live longer and happier for the free radicals killed off by anti-oxident vitamins. But 'mais non, mon freres." The vitamins may have lead a Stalinist purge of innocent, productive and morally superior substances inside of you.

The free radicals killed off by vitamins A, C and E could have been the Abbies Hoffman, the Jerries Rubin, the Lennies Bruce of organic matter. I propose that we can not be free and healthy people in a hailing atmosphere of suppression.

Bat Freeze

2008-06-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

The late Mrs. Flimpton (not her real name) taught fourth grade and she has had a place in the shallow closet of my bungalow. An obit had her peacefully retiring for good at her home a long time ago and she is remembered for playing 45 rpm records during recess. She encouraged dancing, showed us the twist. It was nothing out of school, so to speak, honestly it was more part of charisma, some people have it, such as durable grade school teachers. The phrase 'in the closet' in this case means a realization that Mrs. Flimpton was a great person operating an economically healthy small town, Pennsylvania.

A memory is like a G.I. Joe in the wood box under the bed. Under the futon, if you will. Consider the Batusi because it is an off shoot of the twist that was being introduced on the television show "Batman," fresh as cream. Danny W started doing the Batusi as soon as Batman brought that lively Goldberg Variation of the bar boogie out of, if you will, the all inclusive big closet in the sky.

2
Kindergarten, Mrs. Dickey.

Kindergarten trustee gets to pass out construction paper. Mrs. Dickey gives instructions and demonstrates tearing a circle, seven inches in diameter, much like her. Class is ordered to stand in a circle inside the austere classroom and tear a circle from the construction paper as much like her sample as we could force from our selves.

I applied the inner forces on it, and recall noticing that I was working faster than the other five year old yardies. I was correcting a long roundish train of errors and making a pile of tiny scraps on the floor. When Mrs. Dickey pushed the button on her stainless steel stop watch everyone froze like sprayed with the Bat Freeze. We were standing in a circle with our circles held out in front of us. My assessment was that my circle was more precise than
those of the hoi-paloi, and was feeling proud of the fuzzy disk. It was among my first memories of institutionalized misperceptions.

Mrs. Dickey hated the pile of scraps at my feet, which pretty well indicted my ass, not that the normal larger type of paper scraps other kids dropped could be impeached, they were the norm. My pile was more like those of a hamster, mia culpa. Also, she detested the size of my circle. Other kid's circles were closer to her size of circle. So they would be more like her in the future. Well shit, I took it pretty good. Mrs. Dickey announced to the class that we would be doing this same circle jerk again in a few months. She invected "And I don't want to see anymore of your little circles," directly to me, then closed her lesson in shredding low grade paper.

Lotta Carnage Goes To Work

2007-11-26T13:23:00.000-08:00

November 3, 2007
I'd feel sorry for Ozzie, but he's a wife beater. So I'm glad he's the disgrutled big guy with his viagra and prozac and lipitor and a diet of Big Macs. And my conscience is even clean about invading his privacy, because he has been paying junkies to follow his wife. Mr. Lee is too cheap to pay a private detective. In a better world I would get to punch the shit out of him and tell him myself that his wife is fucking minor league basketball players. My dad used to say that the truth is a waste of money.

Besides the meaty odor that he seems to feel okay about, or not know of, I was able to enjoy my work. He was drinking I.C. lites and telling people he didn't know what an important step in his life he has taken by switching to lite beer. "Been meaning to take off a few pounds." He means well. One of the arts to my job is to act something like a hooker and something like the one non-hooker on the planet that would fuck Ozzie Lee without first running his debit card on a knuckle grater. Get this: I walked right up to him and told him that he looked like someone I met at Oxford. When I pressed the dueling banjos into his back I thought I might have accidentally cured his E.D. Even I have reservations about helping people like Ozzie.

Anyway, we have a working relationship. The man that's on the official B.I.T.C.H. shit list is the one I feel sorry for. All this quizling did is sell the formula for a designer illness to Boris Badinov. "Boris" is the name we give anyone who sells our secrets to the Russians. His name is too confidential (for now) to part with on parchment, so he will stay 'Boris' until I put the hit together.

When I'm not doing the hooker/Oxford intellectual routine, I'm doing some of my white collar work. Had to flash the credentials to the human resource fruit at the trucking company Ozzie works for. Those dutiful queens love to give up information, and they aren't allowed to unless the feds request the info, and they are completely off the hook as long as they don't tell their boy friends about their adventure with a government spy woman. The H.R. man dressed like Oleg Casini and wore a cologne that almost had me blowing him. Wonder if he would let me do him Greek with one of my many and varied strap-ons. Anyway, he was thrilled to tell me that he did in fact have to speak, more than once, with Ozzie, and that Ozzie wasn't doing all that well with his therapy. He had made verbal threats to a dispatcher, and was always boasting about his gun collection. Best of all, he feels deeply humilliated by the therapy, the meds he has to take to keep his grinding miserable job, and about having to share all facts with Oleg Casini's doppleganger.
.........
A woman has to be proud of her accomplishments, and I am. I have one of the few government clearances that allow me to hand out little glassine stamp envelopes like gift packets at the Sherry Netherlands. It's the only way to form a trusting relationship with the sort of people Ozzie uses to find out Mrs. Ozzies dirty secrets. She's been keeping busy with her secret Watusis, and poor Ozzies is fuming away and popping double helpings of Xanax to keep from getting himself thrown in jail. His therapist tells me that Ozzie is 'managing his feelings' but that he is not comfortable with Ozzie's level of hostility. The good doctor has to keep it zipped about our disussions, and he has to do what I tell him to do if doesn't want to wind up leading group therapy sessions in Leavenworth.
.........
'Boris' is an idealist and an idealogue. The numbered bank account that gets fed by the more-than-ever-our-friend Soviet Union is, he claims, to give back to the people's peons in what used to be an old-school communist country. That was what drove the Cambridge Four when Russia wasn't our friend. Now there is a new big plan for world peace, which, like the last one, is filling body bags, land fills and secret prisons. We have them, too. I am a working girl, and not a social philosopher.

I've been tracking him electronically, and he isn't hard to find because he has a job. He teaches Post Cold War Politics at Yale. He's so overconfident about his importance and his skill as an operative that he eats eggs and hash at the same diner with truck drivers and polyesther shirt and tie men who man from the trucking firm's dark brainless payables and receivables department. Stupider yet, he goes out for beer at bars that would get any real operative booted out like a photo copy of of his own termination notice.

The agency wouldn't bother with the fancy liquidation process unless he was more dangerous than he is trying to be. If all he was was a common traiter, one of the shirt and tie men from the FBI would simply arrest him. But he's an 'Academic.' People would make a fuss. And he has a lot of friends with the East Coast intelligensia. I have about a week's work to do on Ozzie and his spies and supervisors and therapist before I get to go up close and personal with 'Boris.' If I was an idealist and ideologue I'd try to do something about the new role our universities are playing. The freshmen and upperclassmen and even the graduate students are paying over 30,000 a year for tuition, and half of it goes into a slush fund for all the government spooks that have to have a cover story and access to a lot of money. Too, they have to have the social entre that makes 'Boris' such a pain. If he wasn't teaching at the Ivy League, no one outside of Wilbur's Tavern would share info with him. I'm not going to get riled. It's brilliant, using colleges as MAC machines for spies and traitors that our government needs to deploy every once and a while.
......
Ozzie's choice of social outlets is a lot like those of 'Boris.' It's almost funny. He is a regular at Wilbur's Tavern, and he's been there even more regularly since I started dropping in for a nice cold I.C. lite. Ozzie is pretty dim, but he has the sort male ego that makes my work so rewarding. Yesterday I cooed audibly while allowing him to put his hand on my thigh. That's why they call it work. For the more relaxing moments, I started meeting with some of the members of Mrs. Ozzie's favorite sports team.
Didn't mind this part a-tall. Ronald is a seven foot center, and when he isn't playing basketball or working at his software company, he likes to meet with friends at his clubhouse. I picked him up as he walked out of the lockerroom, and coaxed him to take me back to the clubhouse. The slate grey suits he prefers look better than anything of the kind on a seven foot, gaunt black man with the features of a god. And Ronald has the steel nerves and talent that makes me cum. He's not a loquacious man, but he didn't mind telling on his teammates. It seems that Mrs. Lee pulls train, which means my job will be easier than I first thought.
.......
Like father, like daughter. The management back at B.I.T.C.H. has pictures of me sitting on Dick Cheney's face. That's enough to keep us girls in our own good stead with the federal government. Otherwise we would all have to take orders directly form the White House and the Pentagon, which is like letting your pet schnauser drive your Lexus.
..........
Dr. Helperin is a piece of work. Psychologists study much of the same spook shit that spies learn at spy school, but they are too insecure and pathetic to do anything but weasel into the heads of hapless, bellicose employees who wish they had amounted to more than they did. They all know the preschool level 'ego up' and 'ego down,' as well as how to make a total douche bag believe they should have high self-esteem. And of course they all know how to make normal healthy people think there is something wrong with them, something that can only be corrected by a douche bag clinical psychologist.

Ozzie had been ripening like an oversize watermelon, and he was drinking in the same bar as Boris, thanks to my role as social director for people who are very, very expendable. His cadre of junkie rats had told him about his wife's comings and goings, and I found a perfect occaision to loop the information I had gathered into calm bar banter at Wilbur's Tavern. As he got to my first base in the parking lot behind Wilbur's, I interjected to him that he was a married man, but of course he shouldn't feel he is doing anything wrong, when his wife's pass times are taken into account. He was too full of himself to let that stop him from trying to kiss me like Cary Grant. All three hundred sixty pounds of Cary Fucking Grant.

He had another 'therapy' session with Dr. Helperin coming up, so I called the good shrink and told him to give Ozzie the ego down. "Remind him about his "perspiration problem," I suggested to Doc, like I was recommending a good riesling. That, along with me keeping Ozzie as horny as he can get, is like mixing nitro with glycerine and giving it a good shake. Having the looks of a Swiss model makes it plausible to be a major cock tease. Mrs. Lee was in a lot of danger, so I had Dr. remind him what happens to men who beat their wives. Boris was starting to follow me around like a puppy, after I seduced his narcissistic little ass in one of the music rooms at Yale. And like Ozzie, he was now a regular at Wilbur's.
........
I remember the way my father would clean up after himself after building a bird house in the garage or after fixing the throttle on his Austin Healy. That's what it felt like when I gave me report back at B.I.T.C.H. headquarters. It was my favorite ploy of all, and it had the neatness of my fathers crafts. I call it the 'modified Blanche Dubois.' With Ozzie holding in his craw the anger that any good cock tease can instill, I picked my moment and started screaming at the poor jerk. "How can you try to make love to me when the only man I want is sitting one seat down to your left?"