Essay: The Sound of Coffee 

To 'errrr' is espresso, to go nutso divine. My aluminum 'Euro' espresso maker is making this soft chiding sound. "Err, err, err." I think it's telling me I'm a cheesy American. I think it's correct. I'm no John Phillip Sousa. I'm crapola compared to John Wayne or Randolf Scott. My self-esteem appears to have spontaneously combusted and died on an ugly used living room couch.

When I was using a generic Mr. Coffee knock off, banal years ago, it made this urinating sound. I felt as though it and I had something in common. We both piss. Before that, a plastic percolator from McCrory's was like a heart that had been stabbed with switchblade that had done stellar acting in West Side Story. After drinking five cups, I'd skip around the living room singing, "There's a place for my sick ass, somewhere..." That was a long time ago. Since then a pall of alienation fell on me like a gigantic tone arm on a portable vinyl record player. I no longer know what it means to be a total failure in America.

Flash Fiction: Heavy Water

  Heavy Water 

Noncompliance is a heinous crime against humanity. The city ordinance states that rain water pissing off your roof has to drain into one sewage line, and the city water from your tap and shower has to drain into the other one. Bastards spent your money determining that this prevents landslides and pestilence. But there are still bastards out there with mono-pissing drainage, which means that both types of H20 is all going into one or the other shit pipe. Landslides are like a fully comped month in Vegas compared what just happened to me.

I was using the bathroom, innocently, trustingly, when the water began rotating. Looking between my two hairy legs, I deduced the vortex was not from a spontaneous autonomic flush, which has happened. The plumbing here is older than character actors on All In The Family, so some funny things happen once in a while. It was a biochemical reaction from the two kinds of water colliding.

It's called 'smart water.' It was with only the best of intentions that the city put radioactive cobalt in the water supply, to kill germs and neutralize the cadmium that's killing residents by the dozen. It's not city leader's fault that Republicans emitted worse chemicals into the atmosphere to kill birds that are killing everyone with their goddam avian flu virus. It's why one egg costs sixty dollars at Giant Eagle. Sure, it was necessary, but short-sighted. Their scientists are intellectually challenged, while ours are all just brilliant. It's because of the GOP that I incurred horrible pain and trauma.

Please don't conflate what happened. It wasn't an alligator or a cobra, it was a water snake, a chemical reaction, that leaped from the vortex below and charged up my ass. I called my city councilperson, and there's a program they clipped like a coupon out of the infrastructure bankroll to pay for surgery. So I'll probably survive what happened, and it won't cost me a red cent of my own holdings, but smart water hardens on contact. I was told to lay off whole grain bread till they can schedule the procedure. Soon as they can free up a winch, I'll be good as new.

Flash Fiction: Great News

 Great News 

Nurse comes out of seemingly nowhere, approaches, and says, "The doctor will see you now."

Niles followed him down a carpeted hallway, noticing the tattoos of Asian letterings and runes on the back of his thick flabby neck. "Should I get undressed,' Niles asked upon entering the exam room. "No,' the nurse answered, "the doctor called you in for a conference."

"What the hell is a conference?" he thought to himself. The doctor came in, a burly, athletic old cuss. He started out with something happy and irrelevant, to put his patient at ease. "My grandson just earned his Ph.D in world cultures. We're having a celebration for him later today at the Cheesy Valley Racket Club. You ever been there?"

Of course Niles had never been here. He wasn't completely brain deficient. He knew this was something rich people do to make poor people think they are in the same picture frame. "Uh, no," Niles answered, trying to sound sociable. The doctor went on as if it was possible for Niles to join the Country Club. Niles wondered if this was a form of calculated mental abuse taught at expensive universities. "You'd like it. They have beautiful tennis and squash courts at the Racket Club."

Niles was getting annoyed, and he wondered if it was because of some secret set of rules and methods. "Mr. Groper," the doctor continued, "you have mentallary thyroid cancer, and it isn't like a flash drive that we can pull out in a hot second."

"That's great," Niles said. "Sounds like my thyroid earned it's ass a Ph.D."

Short Fiction: Inner Peace

  Inner Peace

I'm taking this new medicine called Newtlarva. It's used for terminal diseases of all sorts. Keeps you ticking longer than you might if you have anything terminal. No point worrying about the side effects. But they are nasty. It can cause a guy's cock and balls to fall off, but by the time you need Newtlarva, you don't need the equipment.

So I'm keeping to my normal routine, starting the day with budget espresso and toasted Wonder Bread, breakfasting while enjoying an old foreign slasher movie on this fantastic new free movie web site. No point reading one free article in NYT and one in WSJ. The world is perfect when you get to this end of the Monopoly Board. If China attacks Taiwan it only proves life in the United States isn't all that bad.

Twice a week I take a city bus to the grocery store to get more espresso and Wonder Bread. No one talks to anyone on the packed box of pubic transportation. Everyone plays video games on their phones, but it's like we all know each other. I see some of the passengers at the clinic, and it's never been better the way no one gossips about anyone, everyone having lost interest in other people. The French existentialists were completely moronic about he human condition back when people were still healthy and happy. Those creeps had to dig into their evil minds to find proof everyone was secretly miserable. Leave It To Beaver was still being produced when they determined Americans suffered from alienation.

How wrong those stupid pessimists were. This morning I was entering the bus when the side effect took effect. It was quite painful, I had to scream as I clicked my Connect Card on the cash box, but I felt no embarrassment at all. The driver and everyone at the front of bus saw what happened and everyone heard me scream but that aside, privates rolling down and out the wrinkle-free polyester slacks meant very little to anyone. I found a seat beside a sick old lady, and the driver kicked the stuff I just lost out the front door before getting back in the drivers seat and heading to the Westview Plaza, where everyone shops. No one even looked up from their phone.

Essay: There needs to be a New Counterculture

 

I need to wing out thoughts about Counterculture.  When I moved to Pittsburgh in 1991 people I met were talking about how it had either evaporated completely or else changed into something they no longer recognized.  I'd say it was mostly because people had been leaving town in droves, and the economy no longer supported people involved in the Counterculture.

Another reason for what the Counterculture became is the rise of tax exempt arts and humanitarian groups.   To get 501c3 status people have to claim a humanitarian or social agenda, when the individuals are seeking personal gain, e.g. salaries,  real estate, fame, sex  and tax deductible cash contributions.  The business model lead to an epidemic of fraud and gaslight.   For years people have been slandering each other in hope of proving they are doing important social justice work while competitors in this business climate are evil pigs who do terrible things.    It's not fun being on the losing end of this.  Take it from me.  Worse, wealthy elitists are faking humanitarian work to gain status among the super-wealthy donor class.

Most recently there has been the invention of the celebrity dissident.  These individuals claim to be persecuted and repressed in their homelands, and in the United States they are used as money magnets for tax exempt businesses.  People lie all the time about their backgrounds and experiences, also exaggerate or invent persecution stories.   In reality, American artists, writers and activists are ignored, and very few of them gain national attention or remuneration.  It's very difficult in the US to land a lucrative book deal, and the celebrity dissident racket provides a system with which to gain national or local attention and unearned status.  This is most disgusting in the area of poetry writing.  No one cares that the material is garbage, only that there is a martyr story of persecution and rescue by tax exempt saviors.  

For a lot of people, the Social Justice movement is a fast track into business, remuneration, special favors or social status, irrespective of validity.   The formerly rigorous intellectualism the Left used to engage devolved into a mindless, hostile  singularity.  Only one way of thinking  is tolerated, theirs, unified in their hatred for the political right, and for anyone not fitting their paradigm.   People no longer care about free speech and expression, only in sustaining any advantage they have or think they will gain.  The Left used to abhor and protest censorship, now it is  the leading proponent of it.   They have had a putrid effect on literature and on creative people who don't fit in with the Social Justice paradigm.  

I plan on writing more on the subject of Counterculture.  A new one needs be formed.  I suggest it be based in a nonpartisan Universal mode.  It shouldn't recognize party affiliation, only an agenda to resist what has become a repressive and oppressive partisan economy and culture.  It shouldn't recognize Democrats, Republicans, Capitalism, Socialism or Communism.  Partisan politics is a disaster, and best serves the rich and powerful.  The poor folks have been reduced to voiceless peons.   The new Counterculture needs to be free of greed and ulterior motives.  People need to resist corporate/nonprofit/government fascism.  I read in news recently that China's new model of Communism is Corporate Communism.  Pittsburgh's City/Corporate/Nonprofit partnership appears to be the same thing.  I am in fear of this corporate/political fascism, and hope to resist it.  A new, nonpartisan Universalist Counterculture is called for.