Deer Meanness

A lot of deer live in this fine city, and I am pleased to share sidewalks and road ways with them. I like them. Yet it is unrequited liking.
Last week I was hiking through the miles of trails coursing Riverview Park, and was arrested by a herd of deer. I don't mean they pulled out badges, I mean that there were a lot of them, the nearest one about twenty feet away.
The meandering wooded trails bent archly. Upon looping around one of them, the herd was there like the G20 Summit with fur. They stood still at odd angles to one another, neatly spaced by a fathom, thin saplings poking up in between them. This was a unified gathering of deer.
It was a form of arrest, because I had to stop walking. This type of proximity is reserved for fables. No muse worth tapping into would waste the opportunity, nor will I.

A herd of deer in the woods takes more than a few seconds to take in because they blend in with wooded areas. This was a nicely camoflaged conference. Looking around slowly, the number of deer eased into awareness. The one closest to me gave me a slow once over, like it was checking the meter on the side of your house. Then it looked away, towards the second nearest antlerless deer. Might have been bucks, could have been does, might have been the season they drop their antlers.
The second deer gave me the look. I saw the same look on one of the foreign exchange students back at college. It's a cultured expression of mistrust. The closest deer gave me another glance, this time, clearly in a defensive though still dissmissive frame of mind. Some of the others in the herd were the first to speak.

"Why is that asshole standing there," I overheard a faun say to it's brethren laying peacefully under a sparse bush.
I could discern the voice of a buck by it's depth and resonance. "Just ignore the moth eaten piece of shit. We're here, and asshole is over there. Fuck 'em." the elder animal said, not loudly, but he knew I could hear.
Then the one closest to me, so near I could almost pet it, turned to me again, and said, "What are you looking at, Shithead?"
Then it turned it's head away, as if I wasn't there. But it knew I was still there. The next closest deer turned to me and said, "Why don't you bring a gun, Hiawatha?"
Don't they understand that is was they that accosted me?

Failing My Audition

I'm remorsing the mistake I made. I should have put in my upper plate before going to the audition, but it was for a yogurt commercial. All it said on the prospectus was that the 'lucky chosen' would eat a spoonful of Crackteef and affect a look of sincere pleasure and well being. I tried explaining to the exec that I wouldn't have to smile or chew, but when she asked, "Do you have the other half of your dentures with you," I had a feeling I wouldn't get a chance to sit next to Johnni Grant Custer on a couch.

It's not just childish dissappointment because I don't get to be in the commercial or get paid. I've admired everything Johnni ever did, except for a few bad movie roles, which all famous people have sometimes. She's taken on a stellar role as spokesperson for a number of important social causes. If it wasn't for her, most people would have never heard of Powder Village in Haiti, or the Bolivian Bugs Initiative. Those are the clever names really connected people think up for their movements. Every time I see her on the Crackteef commercials, it galls me that I can't sit next to her in a really special kind of relationship. It's what Crackteef is supposed to be all about.

Virginia

We prefer the word 'kin' to the word 'cult." All the other cults are cults, except for the one you drink poison Kool Aid for. That's a joke we like to tell.

A bunch of us headed down to that Virginia campus where the big shooting happened so we could counsel any survivors that needed our help. They all do, really, but we can respect free choice. The thing about a free and pluralistic society is that there are people who have accepted the truth, and the people who can see it come aboard.

That's the simple part. We Kin have to help people to see the truth. All Kin know that they have to serve the Kahuna. That's the new word Kin Marshall McLune introduced to us to cover everything of a spiritual nature. This may be confusing. Think of the Kahuna as a tall sheet metal filing cabinet full of file folders containing all human spirituality. That wasn't so hard to digest. Kin Marshall gave us the word 'Kahuna' because it is a hip and happening sort of word.
So be it.

One of the funny things about enlightenment, of any kind at all, is that once it is apprehended it sits on a shelf with the toaster you got for opening a pass book account. It doesn't help you, unless you are making toast. To put it another way, you still have to use deodorant and argue with shrewish, promiscuous brother/sister Kin. I am every bit as committed to the cause as Kin Shannon, but she hates my guts and is a truly horrible person to drive with. We got to sign out the four ton Dodge Suburban (we call it the 'Burb') so it was a certainty that the trip would be fun, but we had to pour out 300 miles of ugly highway at 135 percent of the speed limit to get to the campus before the rest of new-found religious orders got a chance at it.



Kin Marshall realized that there is a limitless organizational device, best compared to a filing cabinet, that allows the cosmic counselors to track everyone's earthly thoughts and comings and goings. Of course this is merely a visual aid, the real process is a big hairy deal and it can only be understood when it is presented in outline/overview form. Too, the gospel can't be fully accepted until 501 c3 status is granted.

Our leader was seated in his high school guidance counselor's office one day of his junior year. His grades had been slipping, and there were some complaints about his hygiene, so he was sent to the guidance counselor. Mr. Stepchuck was a stern and overbearing social worker, with a frightening habit of pulling drawers of his filing cabinet out while brow beating young Marshall McLune. It would make a thunderous noise, and Marshall was bright enough to see that the filing cabinet served as a sort of slap stick. An authority figure would pronounce the complaints against Marshall, indicate that this was marked on his permanent record card, and pull the drawer much the way radio personalities would crank a siren to fill in the image of an emergency

The cabinet supposedly contained Marshall's permanent record card, which he was not allowed to see, and J. Edgar Hoover was. I told you that the Kahuna was an easy spiritual path to skip around on.

One of the things that brought Kin Shannon into the group was that she had some marks on her permanent record card.

So we argued most of the way to Virginia. It was everything that happened since she and I met a few months earlier. There was the incident in which I mixed up all the plastic beverage cups and forgot to turn the attached perma-straw to the West Wall of our temple. Then I put a whole cup of sugar in the grape Kool Aid, instead of the half cup that we were supposed to limit ourselves to. And I had no way of knowing that the office supplies needed to be chanted over before they can be put in their storage place. Marshall looked at me like I had tried stick a shiv in the Pope. But that was because Shannon ratted me out. Just like that. As if I had deliberately violated policies and procedures. That was her way of lowering me in the eyes of our leader.

Those were the conflicts that I could be impeached for. Then there are the typographical errors and falsifications that crop up in the papers of the soul. It was certainly not my fault that Shannon was in with the clique and I wasn't. She came aboard with a group of her friends from college. They eloped from their freshman year together.
They sneak drugs together, and they won't give me any. They even stopped our con-fabs to watch their collective favorite television show, reruns of "Friends." I hate that show. It never fails to remind me how unlikely spiritual growth most often is. It also reminds me that I don't belong to the clique.

I have gathered from membership in the Kahuna that as long as people share an objective, the petty differences in character among group members can be filed away for as long the goal is actively sought. Yet someone always manages to re-open the closed cases of interpersonal disharmony.

Kin Shannon was not lazy, nor was she a cynic. Her problems mostly had to do with poorly organized relationships. Too, there was a poorly organized little bag of behaviors that resulted in all those crappy kinships. That is why the Kahuna is such a keen way of leaping out of your folder of bad things, and into your next higher file drawer.

One of our policies is based on the Judeo-Christian type confession. It's mostly Christian, because Marshall used to be Catholic. We all have to fess up and make up. That's one thing everyone agrees on. Even those of us who aren't in the inner circle. I pulled the Burb over to the shoulder of I79, out of the way of prying head lights and confronted her about her patent and capricious anger. I was feeling imbued, and may have gotten to the documents in her folder.

Just the same, I have to call it a grudge match. Shannon is a drug dependant nympho, and I suspect her of being frigid but by the time she and I were both smoking a Cool, I think we had both neatened up our eternal documentation.

Poseidon Comes Up For Air

Even dream jobs become stifling if you stay at them long enough. It's been twenty years of this pink heaven in an ivory tower. I'm tired of being a creative writing instructor. It's no big deal, this sort of career burnout isn't as serious as, say, postal worker syndrome, but lately minutes of inner static have grown to hours, hours, hours.


It's not as bad as it sounds. But I've propagated the humanist myth for so long that at times I wish I could sort mail. And every once in a while the joists below the aegis fall sideways. They can't fire me for what happened, but I think my stock at the state college may have gone down.

Larry had been coming to my office, not missing one single of my requisite office hours. He isn't completely devoid of talent. Larry isn't Orpheus, and he doesn't have breasts, so you can imagine how hard I had been working to support the college claptrap pertaining to Man's Unlimited Capacity.


Larry has been working on an epic poem. He has been adamant about completing it, even as I told my class more than once that epic poems are to be avoided, as are variable rate mortgages and 'time shares' in tourist traps. No one has time anymore for the longer drink of poison.


As Larry read to me the forty-third stanza of "Poseidon Comes Up for Air," my attention moved to an earthbound woman who had the finest twat in all of the limitless cosmos. But his skill as a reader had improved over this leaden term of a common pregnancy. Larry managed to break my wool gathering with "a humming bird lit on the man-god's epaulet." If someone who mattered had used that line, it would be a fairly good one. I was able to listen to the rest of Larry's stanza before the static turned to sirens.


"Let me stop you there, Larry. That stanza is perhaps the best verse and the finest reading you've done this term!
I think we can punch it up a little. After the man-god kisses the tiny scales on the humming bird's foot, I want him to rip the little fucker off his epaulet, tear it to tiny feathered scraps, and shove them, in a moment of masochistic hubris, up his left nostril. I suggest ending this stanza with these simple words: Fuck this feathered symbol of enlightenment and freedom. Fascism, fascism forever!"


It seems that during the outburst I snatched the yellow legal pad out of Larry's hand and turned it to a mass of humming bird feathers. It was Larry's only copy of Poseidon Comes Up For Air, hand written like a note from lawyer to defendant. As he walked, shaking and birdlike, out of my office, I followed his steps with a few words of encouragement. "That was an awfully nice reading, Larry."

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