Piggish Banking

I wish this didn't have to sound like a Nervous Whiner Gets Hit With A Bill type story, but this having happened right after the federal bank bail out can bring it out in people who are normally cool as cream.
Put up with me while I explain.

My auxilliary checking account with, oh I won't say which bank, had been left in a poet's state of limbo. It was opened mainly to do transactions through pay pal and ebay, and my nerdy attempt at being an internet Tarzan mostly flopped. Haven't sold anything on ebay since early post-Bill Clinton.

So I didn't look as eagle-eyed as I should have for a while. The last bank statement tells me I owe the bank $181.00 in overdrafts. They added a nine dollar monthly service charge like mice on cotton, and when the remains of a weak but wiry bank account was all eaten in those fees, they shot out of the bull pen with an $8.00 a day overdraft fee. I slap shotted myself to the phone, with the depressing statement in hand.

The game of phone processing, digitized, shake-the-little-weasel-off-our-tails tactics were as annoying as your last chat with a bank by phone. I managed to get them to close the account and stop the overdraft fees from continuing, and thus growing into a Stimulus Package for Bank Swine. Just now I'm sounding out an F. Lee Baily/Johnny Cochran/Barry Scheck speech to lay on some petulent bank manager. I'm going to ask, nice as Marsha Clark, to scratch the fees and refund the money they stole. With Cochran waiting to get in the game. It should come off at least as good as Lance Ito at a weenie roast for not-well-liked jurisprudentials.

Parting words on the brass agates of banks, they're criminals. Criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals.

Another Fatuous Policy Statement

A certain local city council person is pushing a bill that would force all used car dealers in the area to place tall shrubbery in front of their wee places of business. It's a beautification effort with flies in its Noxema. How are we to buy used cars if the lots are hidden behind a forsythia?

From Fort Duquesne Tunnel to the fresh air of Brentwood, Rt. 51 has about 300 sweet looking, old school used car lots. That stretch of about four miles, all of it mighty bad road, is, smooshed pavement alone, a heap uglier than chain link fence and used cars. And don't come screaming at me that used car lots all look alike. They are diverse, each it's own oasis, each a living thing. Hillary Clinton would probably like them.

When I rattle my muffler driving the stretch, I always think about what life must be like in the trailers and bungalows with fenced in cars. The lots are limpid little tracks of dirt with ginger houses for the used car salespeople to sit in. I always imagine them as tall, firm, honest men, waiting to sell their next car so they can get the wife the Serta Perfect Sleeper she needs for her back. What kind of fiend would want to hide that in bushes?

Local History Piece

The legs were fucked from about twenty miles of biking all over the west set of hills, not sure if there's a name for the whole deck of trashy mountains, but I cruised the West End, also the South Side, then did the crack pot of side walks along Route 51. There, too, were other crazy quilts of bad road, when I stumbled onto Boggs Ave.

Boggs is in no way ugly, unless you are too analytical to live there. That's likely, but it's a good place to see while walking the jangly touring bike 50 degrees up the cracks and pot holes. Even, and I say especially, if there are little kids are out in a stunted front lawn, working on their futures like Harvard freshmen.

........

The ancient Hebrews were aware that there was an advantage in stationing high on the hill side. The mob of brats was aware of it too. Not that they planned to be where they were, they just knew my legs were cooked because I was walking my bike straight up the hill, like the last poor asshole they saw doing likewise, looking too weak to out run a coyote pack of rotten kids.

It's trade offs in life, like the black eye for the team, that keeps the legs some hurting spaghetti for the true runner's high. Bike riding heightens the senses. The gangster babies were all working together on something, on someone's sloping stump of lawn between a house and Boggs with it's pot holes. They were enunciating the phrase, "Hey Asshole."

None of the brats was more than three feet tall, yet they were organized and orderly in front of the shitty ranch house, with no grown ups around to tell them to shut up or to teach them something even filthier than what they already mastered.

Just the term 'ranch style' brings out the worst in my thoughts when it has to do with shitty frame houses glued into rock and more little brick and shingle dumps. It's still no reason not to like this particular part of town. I'd be proud to march down the street any day with the locals carrying rakes and torches. The kids could help by throwing rocks at people from out of town.

They were taking turns saying, "hey asshole," all smiling like mindless adult convicts who thrived on boiled cabbage and kielbasa. Most of them would be aquiescing to exactly that, but this scene was so fucking adorable it almost took my mind off how bad my legs hurt.

...........
One of my former girl friends from when I was in college came from this part of town. She told me once that her mother taught her to take her earings off before getting into a cat fight in a bar, and her mother taught her how to call someone an asshole. Mom said to emphasize the second syllable if you really want it to hurt the other cat. The phrase 'hey asshole' is almost always used to convey authority, like saying 'attention' over a loud speaker. There ain't no fucking loud speakers, if I may sort particulars with the brats. 'Hey asshole' is used like a Crescent wrench in the tool box of pranks and intimidation. It's used a lot all around town, so I had to see the kids as being off to a good start in the whole mess. Somewhere about the tenth time one of the brats staightened shoulders and said, 'hey asshole,' a little girl who had been showing top drawer leadership in the excercise took notice of me, the bike, and two fucked up legs not liking to push the bike. I could see she hatched an idea.

This kid had the genes that made the place what it was and probably still is. She picked up this hard thin tree branch about as long as her height, and ran at me with it raised, stopping just short of me. Looking up, smiling, she said directly, "Hey asshole," and then tried to whack me with the stick. I caught the end of it with my hand and held onto it for a few seconds. While she pulled on her end, leaning back and still smiling victory and the kill, she said like Edith Wharton, "let go of my stick, you asshole." It's what Edith might have said to someone if she grew up on Boggs.

With my legs hurting again by this this time, pained patellas in red Jello, runner's high running thin, I was getting a wee bit demoralized by the vitality of a she-thug the size of Thumbellina. I let go of my end of the stick, and she fell on her ass on the pavement, but she got the better of the fight. I kept walking my bike up hill, with all the kids together reminding me how I was perceived by them.
At that point in the afters, they were yelling at me together, Hey Asshole. Been losing most of the fights I've been in, last twenty years in Pittsburgh. Not a good place to outsiders.

The Secret Ingrediant In a Dentifrice

There is a method to mystery, and a road map to fascination. Both can be discussed in terms of ingredients. The harder it is to scare up all the spices, the more people prick up their ears when you describe the soup. People open their wallets without resistence when they are trying to obtain some intangible thing that important people have. Mystery is as much in the description of objects associated with power as it is in assembling the graven images that look like the supernatural.

The property of being clandestined figures neatly into the occult. The secret ingredient in Crest. Here, one of my favorite limericks from a National Lampoon bought in the 1970s:

A hygienic young woman out west
asked the cowboy who sat on her chest
will this cause tooth decay
why no mam I've heard say
it's the secret ingredient in Crest

For mystical reasons, this dumb limerick still makes me laugh.

Pig Trouble

Pigs. First it was trichynosis, and now it's swine flu. That's a lot of guilt for the farm animals to have to carry around. You have to remember that they didn't mean to contract a disease and spread it to people. Yet they have to carry the social stigma, as if they were all one collective Typhoid Mary who should have had the decency to wash her hands more often.

But to get down to the cases of how bad life is, my new dilema is that Jews asperse the character of pigs and won't eat them, and Christians eat all the ham they can choke down, so love it or hate it the pigs get either eaten or looked down upon. Or blamed for the latest bio-engineered virus.

So like people, chipped or sliced.

Fiction Fragment from a Novel I'm Writing

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We could of all been mean and selfish about this wild fire of law enforcement that put all of us together in a syphlitic make-do world in rural West Virginia. The 1980s did us all in, and in the late 90s we wound up living all close together on the same dirt road. But we're not too down about it.


Sharing music among friends is redeeming. No matter where you sing. Some nights Rosie takes out her violin and lays down a clutch of partitas by Bach. She's no slouch about the things for which she keeps the passion, and some of her perfomances put the shadow of J.S. Bach in Rosie and my living room, listening proudly with his feet comfy in the chicken shit and straw.

Clyde Smith was pretty sharp on our spinnet piano, sort of a jazz standard machine from the cold war era, and when Bonnie sang along, it was hard to fathom that trained and lovely voice coming from a woman who might resemble Joe Stalin if she grew a mustache. You can see how any place can seem like middle America when music is part of the daily routine. It says everything about the natural goodness in people.

Appealing and Squealing

In the world of fund raising, an appeal is performed after someone gives money to the organization. It is a second request, for more money, because though that which was already given was received like people being pleasured, a circumstance arose requiring that more dough is requested. This post is different. It is a appeal to people who haven't ponied up squat, and I know you didn't, because it's just me at this little round up here. You haven't bought my book, "An O.K. Corral of Poems," and you should. Just hit the button to your left and play ball.

Last week there were two local news articles, at least, in which the hurd of nonprofit cultural oganizations got their chance to bemoan the recession of 2009.
I've been making a shit storm about independent artists, we who don't get tax incentives, you can't write little me off on your income tax forms, oh, no, any financial support you waft my was is simple free enterprise, my book of poems for your greenbacks by wire. Why the lowest earning, dirt poorest men (some of us) have been cut out of public funded programs! Squeek!