The Luddite Elite

There are reasons to be glad about being in Pittsburgh. The history here makes eye candy anywhere you go, the attrocious lack of decent planning is still tolerable, you can always predict who will win an election, and people are better than most about minding their own business, minus the usual snoops and gossips.

This is a quiet town.

In spite of as many as twelve shooting incidents a week, virtually all neighborhoods are peaceful at all times other than when the angry cars or pedestrians pass. A few alarming seconds, and things are just like they were before, like an urban pasture. Pittsburgh has improved in a subtractive process over the past five years, having scared away most of the very people who have plagued my life for much of it: people who think they are better than me.

The breed of human that I would like to lambast today is the grouping that feels the old ways are better than then the new ones, and most of these swine have advanced college degrees.

These people come in herds, like smug elk. Few have the stones to live where I do, (IN TRENCHES I TRUST,) and I am pleased about how well some nice, loud hip hop, pounding out a basement window, will disperse a flock of soft college liberals. It's hunting season for fledglings with credit cards and laptops. Okay, there's some noise here and there, but for the most part it helps.

There's this thing called 'more rusticated than thou." I thought they all died, but there are still people out there trying to prove they are happier than you in their unheated cabin.
Few of this set are actually poor, many have old money from Mayflower dynasties, yet they live like Daniel Boone. When here, they fill their apartments with antique farm equipment.

Some of these cheese eaters make their own cheese, and they are too inversely elite to make brie or cammembert, it's always some rough hewn nameless goat curds, prepared so not to challenge the environment or appear to be anything but pure primordial munchies for pseudo-agrarian snobs.

I had the misfortune of visiting too many of these people's homes because I went to college at a time when people where still expected to be social. It was a deceptive and false premise since the Earth oozed out of the sun. There is no reason to believe, anymore, that people interact for any reason other than cool mutual interest, aside from which people cut their losses, in discomfort and and ever-useful fear, by fleaing the vacinity. Some of the back-to-nature set moved to Maine, others found midwestern forests and farms far from here. Each day I face East and thank urban blight for chasing away some jerks.

I wore polyester slacks at the height of the Natural Fiber Wars, circa 1967-89. For 'wrinkle free,' I paid with my social standing among luddite academics and hippies. Some of these people owned looms and went on torid junkets to adore one another's hand woven fabrics. The least deviation tolerated from their pink program was either Osh Kosh or L.L. Bean. If they weren't having a backroom pow wow about my petrochemical pants, they were angry that I wasn't altering Middle Eastern politics, as many did with cash contributions to the PLO. They despised American smoke-stack industry and condominiums and malls, bought folk art from people who seem, like them, to live like Pilgrims, and they objected to my love for Clint Eastwood movies. These people objected to my views on space and time, also.

I wouldn't have such a dark attitude about it if people weren't as annoying. More backward:more ethical is crud. People in foriegn lands don't hack each other to death because they are technologically advanced. And I wouldn't have let one side of the moon go dim if I hadn't been persecuted by people who object to my views on business and industry. They all think that everyone could survive as cobblers if people got hip to what used to be necessary. The past wasn't better than now, unless raw milk is better than a Big Mac.

They hated my linear, goal oriented thinking. They think in trained, enlightened clusters of sod.

To spare further insult, I seldom leave the comfort of illiterate Perryhilltop, which exited it's last uppity post-graduate in flannel and dungarees in the 1980s.

Isolationism and healthy mindless consurmerism, here, is sweet.

New Diggs

worthless brass

people hoped for answers with their incense

hollow Buddhas spumimg a narrow jet of smoke

fez tassles rotating

pastie tassles indexing opposite each other

bikinis made of fake fish scale

boom boom hiss wiggle wiggle

candle sticks in deep need of a polishing

a gong and a gohonsin scowling

small Persian rug and climbing rope up to the rafters

confined to athletic barracks

the collections of old lamps and fixtures


arranged around everbody's futon

choice of bible or comics

three hots

and some stuff they let you keep

Granny's Complaint

foul people forever and the mind is riddled
inch worms bowing their backs as they crawl the craters
to think I used to be elated

Timmy kissing a picture of his bastard baby
mystery money siphoning

acres of skin have been harrowed with Tim's wanderings
whole herds of him have been pasturing in row houses
an argument and round shot-put-like people bellowing at their children
in a yard six feet from the street
mongrel at their feet

Horrid Haiku Trilogy

wrinkling in syrup
indigo plums don't fatten
both dead and wholesome

marbled monkey meat
served with orangutan gravy
half-shell skull dishes

wearing X-ray specs
backsides of ladies unseen
need return postage

Temp Pool Pieces #33

Every time Stan has a sensory overload at work, he has to report it immediately to his supervisor. As soon as possible, and from my perveiw, it was very fast, the supervisor would arrange an ad hoc meeting to help Stan with his snit.
The sheet metal shelves that order my senses do not so easily overload, as does Stan and his occupational handicap. In fact, you could say I'm a bad man around a mail room, which is where I met Stan and the management team that worked so well on his behalf. You should see me go with a packing tape dispenser.
Now I won't go ratting about Stan's group of ad hocs. Not all togeher. One of them made a regular thing of complimenting my free choices in business casual attire, just like it reads on the mimeograph sheet they gave me. Slacks and a golf shirt. I filled the office shoes of that order real nice.
I'm not saying I had major conflict with Stan, either. In the most humanistic tradition, no fault comes into the picture, though his ad hocs have to resolve the matters he toddles over to them, on which occaissions I get, among other things, compliments on my duds. They, so far, haven't had to trot out the water board, I fess up like a trained otter right away to have been inadvertantly frightening Stan.

So Stan and I are in the basement illeum like two baking turds, underneath the proud and handsome head of a law firm. I can feel the parystaltic action against me. The marble building I'm in reminds me of a stately mastiff, and the next loaf it pinches is me. They really need someone less threatenting to Stan.

Suit Flight

As a man in the botton third portion of a financial downward trajectory, steps are being taken to pull up the joy stick and point the nose cone upward. I've decided to dress better. Pinched for the operating budget, I had to obtain at least one clean, presentable business suit, in case any one is hiring kamikaze displaced middle management. Leaping from my crashing biplane to modern aviation, I decided to feret on the internet the cheapest ready made suit that escaped the sweat shops of Pakistan. Air mail, or ground shipping, it is here, fruit of some alien loom.

It arrived in the mail, in an envelope smaller than I had expected, though this polyesther business suit didn't even need the sactuary of a cardboard box. Its wrinkle free fabric is so advanced it's a space odyssey.

The color is good. And once there were no good colors in polyester gaberdine before this day.


Rose petals falling from the caked ceiling, the price, with postage, was fifty two bucks, with introductory discount. Not only was it impossible to look cool in a cheap suit of recent yore, there was no internet in the 1970s, when the disco era caused confusion and revulsion for what has emerged as the lungs of Orpheus. Synthetic fibers have risen in consciousness. This suit fits so well, you could style your way out of the Underworld. This, too, was only released from Olympus when man/woman was ready to apply themselves to the task of innovation.

Maybe it is the length of the trousers that validates the Golden Mean. There is less than a quarter inch wiggle room between the right length and a fashion blunder so paralyzing that even your earth tone silk tie will look like manure. I will not asperse the character of man whose cuff gently tap at the top of his shoes, and I will not be concilliary to a man who is dressed for a flood. A quarter inch shorter, he is a fool. But if the pant leg is from the fashion moguls of Zeus, it will take greater initiative than merely touch the shoes. Trousers of impact break about seven inches above the instep, such to give a yet more pleasing and compelling look. It is merely a subtle crease, again living to the tolerance of a indexing lathe, but if it works, you will be perceived as super-mortal. Here the coat is the proof of Golden Mean, as it's proper length is in harmonic balance with the ideal trouser. Should that be disrupted there isn't a hat or collar bar that can save your fashion statement.
My new suit breaks properly, and the coat, too is the proper length. Valhalla.

For this nest segment, subtited 'the lifting of banes,' cat hair doesn't stick to the material, and it is machine washable. The all-cotton cut rate off-brand chinos I had been wearing the past fourteen years are indellible with cat hair. The static cling is so powerful I once seemed to have fur. Be mindful the Ancient Greeks abhored body hair. The new duds abhor it as elegantly.

Now is the prima vera in a new way of dressing. I had suffered, in mind, about the right way to dress, and fretted the cost. I wondered, would it be possible to look hip, while sustaining a blood oath of cheapness. Victory. It has become clear that there are people in business suits, down town, and there are worse off individuals who are not dressed for advancement.
Polyester has achieved advancement. Victory. The mysteries of proportion, texture and responsiveness to flourescent commercial light have been in formation all that trying while, when the leisure suit caused a great fabric to be wronged. It has found itself, and has merged with the muses of Christian Dior and Oleg Cassini. The suit fits perfectly. The muses and their sartorial excellence. The ghosts are admiring this victory.

Talking Bears

Deer are family in Western Pennsyvania. Virtually all residents have hunted, shot, eaten or merely crashed into one with the family SUV. And most residents have stalked and beaten a relative, so there is unity. These nether-species cousins are abundant. So much so, a lot of them are turning up in the inner city here. I see fauns behind the house. Whole hurds of them stick their snoots in your pockets. They roll people.

Racoons enter and exit merrily through the holes in a neighbor's roof. To shame the poshest love nest, I have a view of the zoo out the front picture window.

Opossums are more rhetorical in my neighborhood than in others. Chipmonks have implimented family planning, without prompting from a bureau. My cat mastered plain English. And now, bears have been talking to me.

There was a black furry ursa minor, not bigger than me, but near enough for discomfiture. It lacked the clarity my dear Noodles expends like nickels, and Calicao cats are known to excell in ellocution and wit, but the young bear was able to convince me it wasn't Smokey the Bear. It was it's own fur and hide. He was a real person in his own natural costume. Not some bozo.