Love those 'what are you most like' games on Face Book

The last one was the best yet.  I'm a spotted eel.   That's the deep sea menace I remind the folks  of, who made the test up, the most.   They said a panel of judges determined that people with my preferences in shoes are long and slimy.   There were other criteria.

Some of my FB friends learned that they are near enough to Ghandi to sit cross legged in a loin cloth, others found that, had they been a bootlegger, they would have been Al Capone.  The games all start out with a post on your Facebook, asking which object of awe and repute you are the most similar to.  For a teaser, they tell you that one of your friends is just like Ed Gein.  Or Dag Hammershold.  Or Dr. Ruth.   Or a baby hedgehog.   You could turn out to be similar to something, but you have to answer a series of questions, or content yourself just being your own ill-defined cabbage-like self in the produce department of daily life.  You can decide for yourself who or what you look and act the most like,  while, too, some people earn a position that defines them, but it doesn't cost a red cent to let the good people on FB decide it all for you.

I'm an eel.   A spotted eel.   Wiggling at 'ya.

fiction for people in a foul mood

July 3, 2016

Food hasn’t tasted the same without the fly shit.  There isn’t one single insect, living or dead, in the institution,here, and it’s a testament to the modern pesticides the state is getting, probably from the Monsoona Corporation.   It’s roughly the same food our soldiers get.   But their food probably has fly shit in it because they have to eat outdoors much of the time.  I’m envious. Anything cooked in a commercial kitchen is required to be free of pests, and it’s easy as shit to kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out, using a perfectly safe chemical spray product.   But it just isn’t the same without bug droppings.  If they ever let me out of here, I will look into a way to market gnat shit, for cooking.

The taste test proved to me, years ago, that no one should have to fret having house flies.  I had  a whole house, full of house flies, and, oh, I guess I can come clean about some dirt, like maybe I’m a hoarder, when in a position to be one.    It’s impossible to be one, here, so here again, I think the Powers are onto something.   ‘They,’ (neighbors, the police, the council) felt I was unsanitary, and that was one of several things that ‘cost me my freedom.’  As if that was possible.  You can’t seize a fruitcake from a swain who don’t got one.

Which is another reason, on a sad note, to put people in jail, since they can’t pay a huge fine, or their taxes.  Some of the the perps in my block didn’t sign up of mandatory health care.  It a weird point of philosophy, something like “your tonsilectomy is part of my fair standard of living.”   People who went through harrowing cancer treatments are correct in feeling that other people should go through similar discomforts.  Most importantly, the collectivised economic balance would go all to fuck if enough people tried to opt out of all the generous options the Fed wants everyone to have.   

I’m here for being a pig and a  public health menace.  Most of my new friends here did worse things, things they actually planned to do.  Any jerk could tell that’s what makes people really, really dangerous.  The meditations of the heart are one fat fucking son of a bitch.

July 4, 2016

The generousity of this prison warms my heart, uniformly, each day.  Everyone on my cell block has a view of fireworks, through small windows, which when looked through closely, yield as much of the sky as any free person can take in.  There is only so much sky to look at, the piece holding  the picture of fire fountains  and rockets is as visible to me as it is to people who took the trouble to organize their belongings and mop their floors with greater regularity than did inmate number 7111577842.  Just call me ‘7’ for short.   I would have been popped sooner or later for poor hygiene, but you can wind up here sooner, yet, if you have a habit of running at the mouth.

July 5,2016

Woke with this nameless dread, nothing so serious as to call in the shrink, but I was feeling scared, nervous.  For no reason at all.  What could possibly go wrong inside a jail?  Maybe there is such a thing as a portent.   One of guards, Fidelia, a woman I lust after in my heart, came to my cell door, just a few hours ago, and ordered me out and into a meeting in the conference room.  What a goddam rip!  I was adjusting beautifully to prison life, and they’re kicking me out.   They need room for worse people, and besides, the administration got a report.  I was making some of the inmates uncomfortable.  Seems I’m a bad conversationalist, along with being an awful housekeeper.  But there I was, self-conscious, being stared at by a panel of men and women, all in agreement that I don’t belong in jail.  I just don’t fit it.

Now I can’t decide which is more upsetting.  Being ejected like a dull razor blade, or that my newest friends were harboring some irrational animosity towards me.  I had the same problem when I was in college, and dozens of times again in the work force.  And I’m usually so goddamed positive and adaptive.   Maybe that’s the problem.   Envy is a confusing and diabolical emotion.  It was envy that caused the fatal rift between Stalin and Trotsky.   I grant that is old news, but in principle, it’s one of many reasons the New Commradship isn’t working as well as the Intelligensia had hoped.  I was born with a measure of social grace, and loud, inarticulate boors resent me for it.

Shocked at the news I got earlier today, I lost control for a few seconds and started begging them to let me stay where I am.   The fireworks display last night had been splendid, and the food is palatable, even without fly shit.  But against my protestations, they don’t want me here any longer, and are already at work,  finding me an apartment in a supervised complex.  I’m being assigned a legal guardian.  Someone with a violent hatred for disorder.

embedded video of a reading: Me and Noodles, a cat journal

Thanks for joining me for my cigar smoking period.   Been puffing stogies during virtually all projects, written, visual, and now spoken.   It's a phase.  I'll get over it.  The way I got over my business casual wardrobe, which didn't net the really cool outcome I'd hoped for.

Inspired.  Inspired, and it's a Sunday. Like that automatically relates to logorhea at a time and place picked like a bingo bean.   It's a memory piece about the time I had to get a gonad seen by a medical pro.  Brand new to Pittsburgh one week in 1991, I woke in my brand new sleeping room rented for chump change in a flop house in South Oakland.  So long ago, narrow, crooked Semple Street had a diverse ethnic entomology composed of row houses, apartment dumps, flop houses, and store front business as spare and cavernous as an an ant colony.  Upon that waking from sleep in a brand new funhouse, it was to become evident that my left ball was swollen and was hurting like a motherfucker.

Not having established a primary care physician, a term that hadn't been invented yet, I was in a panic and had no idea how to begin the process of obtaining treatment for a sick friend inside a much regarded scrotum.  There are hospitals all over the place in Oakland, in easy walking distance of my latest hovel, but it cost, even back then, a kings ransom to get a pimple squeezed inside a hospital.  Man of the street, I learned long ago the cheapest way to get medical care is to snake it out.

I took to walking, down the hall, through the communal kitchen,down two flights of stairs to the street.  It's the walk.  The walk of urgency that fits like blinders on a junk dealers donkey .   Imagine in this model that relief from testicular pain, and, as well, from the terror of all grimmest possibilities, like death from cancer of the balls, is a carrot on the stick in front of the burro's long determined face.    It took several attempts to find an office with a doc's shingle that was taking new patients.  But I found Doctor Flomm's office, and was able to get the ball treated with modern antibiotics, upon receiving  great news.  It was some sort of infection, totally treatable with some pills the good doctor had in his closet in a yellowing, moldering bowery-looking office.   I jumped the gun, a little, in this discourse.

Semple Street was half a ladder wrung upscale from a bowery at the time my nut got festered.  The office was store front below a shitty aparmtent building, charming like On the Waterfront.  Upon entering I got a chill, and it was a hot day, because the eight or nine people seated in the narrow, grubby waiting room looked like either vagrants or other wise retired to a hovel, walking distance.  This is the shit commonalities are made of.

Everyone looked afflicted, pained and dirt poor.  Mother Teresa would have loved that waiting room.   It took me a moment, standing in the door way, to decide what to do.  One of the patients moaned assistance.  "You gotta write your name on that tablet over there," he informed me, pointing to the tablet on a wooden ledge along a dispensing window, where a nurse might have been sitting, on a salad day.   The booth behind the window was empty, and much in disarray, as if the billing department routes around in paper like a gerbil.  I still wasn't convinced that this was really a doctor's office, and not an opium den or bookie joint.  It was the real deal.  Cutting to the chase, the doctor called me in after seeing everyone on the list, me last, last guy to come in, sick.  Not that I really know, now,  what was going on, but I'll venture this was a charitable drop-in center run by a very good doctor.  He checked the situation down there and gave me some antibiotic pills, physicians samples, the keystone of cheap off the street medical care.  That swollen, painful, infected testicle cost a gentle thirty five dollars to treat.  Took the pills.  They worked like a charm.

Back to sermonizing.   ECT patients sometimes return to sermonizing, after about six months lag time, after having their organ of thought chicken fried.  That has not been necessary, thanks, affirmations, for what appears to be mental health sufficient to eat and shit without they come and throw a net over me.  I'm  thankful on a secular basis for not getting strapped down for my own good.    It is affirmative to be walking around in open space, at liberty to fritter time.   Dr. Flomm made a great impression.  He may have had had a stroke at some time, as he moved about like someone partially zapped, but he knew his gonads, and fixed one of mine.  It was very affirmative.  Affirmations.

Info-toon

My Battle With Euro-Trash

This was back when I had good hair, and I might have been thankful for it.  Should have been.  This was in the early 90s.  Still had good skin, like that was enough, during that baleful time of cultural tide pooling.  Filthy fucking sea life grows amok in that clammy littoral  precipitation.  I was a waiter in an asshole restaurant on Carson Street.


'Asshole?' you ask. "How can a restaurant be an asshole?" some may interrogate. I submit a response.  This joint was a dive and a failure among more popular bistros on Carson, was poorly run, and was making me look like a fool.  And I wasn't earning shit there.  Just up the street, there was a much more popular restaurant, with better food, better interior design, and all the waiters had the Euro-trash look.  It was, and may still be, haven't seen anyone doing it lately, an expensive, time consuming and brutally elitist look requiring ultra trendy hair care, which I never went in for.  Didn't matter, though, because I had thick curly hair, which is wrong, all wrong, for the type of hair style that was in at the time.  It was best to have thick straight hair, razor cut on one temple and grown into a precision mobile flap of hair on the other.  It should move with you in a sassy way, especially when you make a dramatic turn of your long, linear northern european head.  I'm weaselly looking, now and then, and my hair, then, was completely useless for the look of the day, the Euro-trash.

I suffered economically and socially for not being able to do the Euro-trash look.   I still hold animosity towards that postmodern time and place, and toward certain individuals I'm too civilized to mention here.  The ostracism for not measuring up was worse than getting cremated.

Hey now. Some flash fiction. Title is: Pesticide Story

I keep checking the fly paper.

The insects are triangulated along the amber curlicues, Raggedy Ann's death hair giving beige tints to sunbeams coming in the living room window. Reminds of motion picture film, though working different. You have to get right up to it and roll your eye balls along the sticky, pungent hoops. Somehow flies wind up on their back, in the adhesive primal honey toxin. Maybe it proves everything uses all it's strength trying to get comfortable. Or else it's misery, as happens to bugs. All kinds of flying insects are dead on the roll of film hanging from a curtain rod near the television. 

Now I'm finding these teensy people sticking to the fly paper. Often, they are still alive, and screaming their hearts out. People the size of house flies, pinioned in the sticky goo, with a pesticide. I think it takes longer for them to die than the bugs, because the poison is safe for humans. See how our humanity goes all to shit, some how. But you have to be greatly reduced in size. 


Now everything has gone too far. There is a dying unicorn sticking to the fly paper. It is also the size of a house fly. Didn't see it come in the house.

This woman keeps loitering on my front porch. Platinum blond. She comes up on the porch, stares inside the house, then goes out into the apple trees. I'm thinking about maybe going out there.