Finding New Spiritual Practices

Late In Hamarama

A religious treatise can be  a tiring thing to have to compose.   With the television on, and a salacious inflow of ads on the  perifery of my netbook, a rerun of Leave It To Beaver and some pop-up ads  for condoms and lubricants are working in league to distract me, in spite of how well and thoroughly I considered a chubby wide matter of the spirit.

I've said it a bunch of times:  Some Seth or Waldo invented all religious dogma and ritual.  Unless I'm dead wrong.  Unless everything known about the supernatural came from something other than crazy, fucked up people, as of this 21st of January 2014,   dreamed up, drummed up or cooked up same as fairy tales.  Or else one black-covered book or other is telling the stone cold truth, to the exclusion of all other accounts.   If I'm packing good sausage this fucking cold Tuesday,  my thesis is that anyone can fabricate their own cotton-picking rites and ceremonies.  I dreamed up Hamarama because ham is cheap during the winter holiday seasons.  It made sense to combine the abundance of meat with an elemental tendency to celebrate, and/or give thanks.  Using Christmas as an example, this kind of shit might catch on, with  publicity.

And then it gets even more abstruse.

Heaven help me, I'm worse than Catherine Deneuve, in Roman Polanski's too creepy fim, Repulsion.  Worse because I can't take the luxury of being clinically insane.  And what I did isn't really all that heinous.  But it could seem so.  Confusion is exacerbated because people are ever so more favorably responsive to Catherine than to my much abused poor self.   Blonds have more fun, she's blond, I'm swarthy.  She's a flesh statue.   I'm one of many men you see waiting for the bus on freezing winter afternoons, blending in with the slumdwellers.  I'm  dysthymic.  Thirsting for beauty.  Applying the spirit of invention.

I got my third ham this period of Hamarama,  in the last  holiday trimester during the Feast of Cheap Ham, which starts before Christmas and goes on for as long as it lasts.  It lasts for as long as the price of picnic hams stays at the reduced rate of 99 cents a pound.   During Hamarama I cut the food bill by eating mostly ham.   This orb of pink meat, with leg bone up center, was just over seventeen pounds, which has been typical of store brand pig portions this year.

I've chosen to eat ham, thin sliced, but otherwise as it came, pre-cooked, from the grocery store. Ham sushi.  Seems more decadent then when fried.  It's under consideration.  Might or might not be included in the dogma.  It's my dogma, and I'll be darned if it's going to have a life of its own.  I need some control, in this life.

poem: Motoring

there's a world of losers waiting to rob you of joy
late model van with food supply of cello-wrap cakes in stacked boxes
screech of rear door slamming while beefcake fills pantry
Sterno wine rack
slant six motor in truck color of cirrhosis
Brylcream stash and extra for the thinning pompadour
kept alright with a mesh back trucker cap
no crumbs in the follicles
no rest stops 

New Year's Aims

Everyone has the inalienable right to play with words.   It is more inherant than the tendency to play with one's food.  But it is the former fleck of conduct that made Winston Churchill a famous wit.   While dull witted blather is associated with brain damage.   A compelling case, not so?

I invented a word, and am longing for the recognition that is supposed to come with discovery. It is the property of 'ballsoutness,' of working in a 'balls out  way,' that needed a term with which to wend it's pendulous meaning.  A dear friend passed recently, a man who had lived his fifty nine years in a very balls out way.  No name dropping just now, trying to be more sensitive, per recent New Year's resolution.  Still have the sticky eye secretions gluing the swollen canthus, from the drinking bender, that comes with flipping the calendar year.  But the much honored decedent had unique ballsoutness, and his life is being fictionalized, in an off track shot at writing a novel about blue collar life in Pittsburgh.  On an unrelated note:

Armani:     I noticed the Armani look in magazine ads and in some of my favorite indy flicks, and instantly, the world divided between people who had the look, and assholes.  This harsh judgement is temporarily suspended for the project mentioned above.  Less judgement and more description is what's cooking on the hot plate.  Dress daring.

A Sermon, but this one is kind of chintzy...

It's not like me to rub it in, but hasn't the harmonic convergence of 1987 been sort of a let down?  If it was all that great in your camp, that's fine here.  I don't recall winning a beauty contest that year.  Then the damn Mayan end of history, 2012, turned out to be smoke and mirrors.   Had my hopes up, too.  Like Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, of the Sex Pistols, I wanted to go out in a blaze of glory
.
Well, this year's Hamarama is in overtime.  It started, by shear luck, with the rolling of the osage oranges, when the inedible warty nuisances fall off their trees and rolled, bumping and banging in the pot holes,  en mass, like the running of the bulls, down  steeply inclined Federal Street.  As if a new pope was elected, the price of store brand picnic hams fell by up to seventy-five percent, to 99  cents a pound.  Hamarama runs from the first day,to the last, of Very Cheap Ham Season, which lasts each year as long as grocery stores abide the Word.   By way or revue, Hamarama begins near Christmas time, when the price of ham dips to 99 cents a pound, and ends when the price goes back up.  It's a  mono-maniacal feast.

Observant like a zealot, been downing two pounds a day, grand total, so far, eighteen pounds of ham.  Special thanks to the pigs, and to all those nice folks in the meat business.

Next Dippy Sermon at the Store Front Ministry

There's a book of Hebrew mysticism called the Zohar, and I thumbed through it like a fry cook waiting for his haircut at the barber's, but even jerks can make a decent point from time to time.  There was a passage on the subject of marriage, in which it said, give or take a point, that when a man is unmarried, the Earth and sky is misaligned, and that when said same fellow ties the knot, Earth and sky move parallel to each other, like a factory preset position.  Only when married is a person deserving of a static free sunset.

Being a life long a bachelor, you are encouraged to ask, "Why do you care, Pussy Cat?"

It is because a good metaphor makes me wiggle with glee.  For my statistician friends, married men are less likely than single dudes to be  shivved, shanked, shot, beaten, jailed,  pink-slipped, demoted, slandered  or cornholed to death by roving zombies.  They tend to have more stable careers and social lives, give or take a point for  ugly, pimply variables, and some dumb geezers are still claiming that family life is beneficial.

Next on the conveyor belt is that gender roles have been changing.  Did I say I begrudge that?  I didn't.  There isn't a politically incorrect corpuscle clogging veins in this old seed sack.  For the super-logical among us all, the same principle of completeness and harmony can be extended.  Why do mystical precepts have to be good for the goose and not the gander?   And why do I use shitty cliches? I have a diploma from someplace or other.

Well, with loose ends waving at me like a mighty fertile hydra, this rant about applied metaphor is wearing out it's welcome on this page.   Thanks for reading.

new poem: Fashion Plate

send me off somewhere in black leather
it's riding on my head equine
nearest I get to Secretariat
see comrades I'm a hat nut
compares to graduate studies
I'm a thesis
got this one fresh in the mail from the  online auction
came in a sealed bag hygienic as a Contac capsule
why do certain looks say pills?
no dookey in my socks
no wrong blood levels
it's a look that says prowling
in essence I am