Support the Arts By Patronizing Bullshitty Small Business Initiatives

I'm letting the little kittens out of the burlap sack.  There's a new itsy-bitsy small business in the works here, and the whole damn thing fits in a standard size briefcase.  Woot.  Woo hoo.  Booo-yaahhh.

What is it?  Jewelry ensembles.  Fools wear one ring or less on each hand.  The new elite will be wearing co-ordinated jewelry ensembles, or, 'groupings,' so that your whole outfit leaps right off your ass and into instant ephemeral fame.  I think Warhol would approve of this, maybe, if he was still here today, if pernicious, evil Valery Solanis hadn't shot him in the brisket, taking years off that poor, suffering genius' too short life.  Even with Andy dead, his many surviving fans and rich friends will need to improve their look.  Things have been mighty fucking slack on Carnaby Street.  People have been neglecting fly their freak flags, and everyone has to suffer.  Unless people get hip to jewelry ensembles.

I plan to buy and resell jewelry, grouped in co-ordinated ensembles, always with high fashion in mind.  The new ghetto chic is near.

A Revolting Display Is Guaranteed For All

It's been a long wait for the dentist with regard to a stalled-up pet project.   The Not-Too-Social Hour was supposed to be a weekly podcast, with guests.  It was going to start off as a youtube video production, cheap as dollar store spaghetti, informative like Biography on amphetamines, and damn it to hell, no one is charging up here on their Harleys to join me here for a show.  So I haven't been producing the shows.  I haven't been producing much news and information.  No personal histories.  No spoken word accounts of local history.  The new year is kicking off with longing and hankering for guests on what I would like to become a weekly podcast.

Am I offering cashola to appear here?  Not lately, but it could happen.  Sooner or later I will inquire about landing a mini-grant.  If, if, if, I'll use the dough to pay people to amble up here and talk into the headset.  I'll make you a cup of tea.  Or whatever you douse your innards in.  It's real fucking hospitable here in Perry South.  Even the gangsters are nice.   There is no reason to worry, they only shoot each other.   The rest of the time, you just can't get a word in edge wise.  They're always arguing about theology and metaphysics.  When they aren't playing golf or polo.  You'll like it up here.

New Years Report: A Spiritual Conference With A Great Leader

It's here, 2016, like a baby you either wanted or didn't but have to pay for anyway.  It's my belated new year's address to the outside world, from inside my hermetic, frivolous private universe.  In this room in which I sit, typing 900 words a minute, I am bantering, cooing, entertaining an eighty foot tall baby, in a sash a mile long that says "Happy New Years."  I'm getting blitzed here, with the new year baby  cartoon.  I'm talking to an eighty foot tall baby with a long mustache.

 Kids are expensive.  So are spouses.  And so is time, and 2016 is taking something from me already.  I believe I've changed since last year.  I didn't have my usual flight of memory.   New years eve brought no apparitions, and it usually does.   I had instead, a few days later,  an invocation from the human spirit.  From history.  Shaka Zulu is visiting me, right now, and you are invited to tea with me and Shaka.  Come on in.  It's Shaka Zulu Friday here at the house.

I'm observing Shaka Zulu's birthday.   And taking liberties.   No one knows exactly when he was born, so I'm being a jack off, and leaving the date in absentia.   I don't give a shit when Shaka was born.  I dig his greatness independent of the goddam details.  He was an amazing military strategist, and natural diplomat, and in so many ways a whole lot of what I ain't, which is, in part, why I am venerating Shaka.  I do my plum goddameddest  to emulate his courage and talents as near as possible, which may be any amount short of really really being Shaka, since now days it would land my skinny ass in jail.  I'm not going that far to emulate Shaka Zulu, but I feel something more profound than mere admiration.  Let me propose I am a transcendental groupie of Shaka Zulu.

In the final analysis, I know I'm not really Shaka Zulu material.  If I had been a member of his tribe, I would have worked in the hospitality department.  I would have helped them arrange their vacation junkets in Vegas. They would have had great fun.  But since I wasn't there, and might have got speared to fuck if I had, I'll just sign off with a respectful, even loving salute to Shaka Zulu.  The guy was alright.  Might help all around if everyone entered the new year with the Shaka Zulu spirit.  A guy like Shaka can improve your year.

An Unsavory Christmas Long Enough Ago To Make It Into Total BS

There is no such thing as ghosts.  Unless people completely failed their quantum frigging physics.  If they got a C- or better, they should be right here with me about ghost-hood.  Apparitions. Christmas spirits.  Like the Christmas bastards in Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carole.'  

Last Christmas whispered past with a whole Yugo trunk full of Christmas ghost passengers.    And every item and individual is   made of sub-atomic particles. So's everything else.  Ghosts.   Nitwits where I happened to be working, one Christmas, late at night.  Everything is caught up in some shitty misconception about the way matter operates.  My desk set of ceramic ghosts appeared to me one Christmas night at an adult bookstore. 1992, while the dot com universe rolled like the Blue Streak on the other side of the continent, I spent that Christmas fielding demands for cigarettes and beer money.

Most nights there were vagrants and perverts flowing in and out of my then place of work.  The part of my body most engaged  was my right index finger, pecking up small ticket sales on the cash register, behind a discolored counter, surrounded with large dildos, video tapes, and glossy reprobate magazines.  Christmas night was special because most of the perverts had family gatherings to attend, while the vagrants were consistent with their omnipresent norm.

One bum after another came in the store, begging for money or cigarettes.   How sad life has become since smoking was banned everywhere.  I always smoked a pack per shift, and the cash register was never off. And sadder, for just one sub-atomic particle of time, people would beg for cigs, like golden retrievers at Thanksgiving.  The experience compares to getting beamed up on the Star Ship Enterprise, and the thing fucks up your atomic structure.   That's how maddening it is to deal with. And then there comes the very anti-matter of the sleaze that was giving me a totally demoralizing pain in the ass.

He was a homeless fella'.  Probably schizophrenia.  Far as I know, he didn't smoke, and didn't beg for beer money.   One could say, in that district, that a non-drinker foregoes forty ounce bottles of Midnight Dragon Malt Liquor.  And a non-smoker, on Christmas night, at the smut shop, is a type of ghost.  This one was at least as hip a Jacob Fucking Marley.  His thing was the art of conversation.  And he was just terrible at it.

As is often true of schizophrenics, his thinking was disorganized.  He wanted in the worst way to have a conversation, with someone, anyone, me, about the arts and sciences, philosophy and the way the stars act upon the fates.   He would have liked to comprehend quantum physics, and he truly gave it his best brain storm, that evening, as he pontificated to me, damn near nose to nose, gesticulating, imploring comprehension of all the things he needed to understand.  In yet more pressing urgency, the man needed to communicate with the outside world, badly enough to drift into my smut emporium one snowy night. Christmas and all, I felt obliged to do my best imitation of someone who really wanted to talk to this scrambled seeker.  And now his memory is one of my ceramic ghosts.

If it matters where that prim little smut shop was, it was located, in 1992, right across from where PNC Park is now.  The shop is a ghost store front with some other type of business in it, something cleaner, and no one is allowed to smoke inside anywhere anymore.  The city did a plum job of moving the vagrants to other environs.  Most of them probably croaked since those halcyon, primitive, squalid evenings.  My memory is long, and is filled with ghosts.   Those people on Federal Street proved quantum physics to my satisfaction.  For all the meanings people paste onto Christmas, the pricks were a prima fascia case.

couple more poems

Minor Disappointments


moving forward on the ignited magnesium Moebius towards diddly
pins working like windmills escaping
the pitchfork service neath an indigo moon

jogging ahead of the fuse and it's a lot of bother
all hard labor seeping out
the barriers sussed  the best run by a not too shabby jock
with woodchuck ambition
and a disappointed runner slinks back to the shanties

dragging a Bobcat
no joy in light construction
those jaunty  backhoes cost a fortune
pastoral Alf and Loretta ain't on the list
the Singing Tabasco family was ingraciusly excluded from membership
I tried to spirit in and got the heave

 I had double parked the tractor
traded in the box wrench
donned me now my  festive apparel
it doesn't work here


Song of the Slumdweller  #1


there's a store front ministry near where I shop
when I run the bike past
the drums and organ send me into Oz
they sing intoxicating spirituals
it's medicine

my bicycle zaps into a broom
I'm the Wacky Warlock of the North
the bicycle disappears
I'm flying

there's this joint where celestial justice swung out
I buy eggs there
there are incantations
ribs of cow cook on a primitive charcoal grill
vast orbs of ham get affordable
the indiginous folk clip coupons
we have twenty five cent cigars
the looming loa smokes one

Kurt Vonnegut's novel 'Cat's Cradle' was a fucking work of genius

Some people have a shitty mind, and need to be taught remedial math and reading.  Other folks have a brilliant, creative mind, and need to learn common ethics.  And then, some invisible Grand Inquisitor might have to redefine 'shitty' and 'brilliant,' for the bounding rare few who understand that smart people do stupid things, especially for reasons of personal gain.  Or that ordinary people aren't completely out to lunch.  Case in point:

The gnarled, homely nerd who invents a doomsday weapon.  He can't tell the difference between a rousing game of solitaire and a wing attack against foreign nationals.   These creeps are equally elated to see themselves doing something 'special,' like forming a cat's cradle out of string, or when they are making a product like 'Ice 9.'  In Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle, the author illustrates this fact of life.   There are a lot of people out there who have the mind of a Ph.d scientist, and the morals of a two year old.  Differing and still related, there's the politician who sees fracking as a good thing because he/she is being bribed.  It's a low level of moral development, playing hide and seek with the rest of the mind's itinerary.  But, since it ain't costing me a quarter to talk, I'll have to just sit on the possibility that virtually every life on the planet could go down by way of  a special needs genius with Asperger syndrome.