At The Risk Of Being A Bore....

........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

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

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

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.

Pulling a Quote

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

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

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.