Alternative World Cultures

This wily old galoot went to college a passel of relative time arcs ago, and every cuss that snagged sheepskin had to take a course in world cultures.   Fucking liberal arts requirement, no matter what us dunces and anomies hoped to make of our rusticated, inbred  selves.  

There was this eight hundred pound world cultures guy, Ph.d, and he drummed diversity and exotic modes of thinking into our hides real good.  I'm still to this day picking cognitive shrapnel out of my lower back, from all the heated debates.   And eons forthwith from those piney college discoveries, the very source, the grail, the golden honey dripper held heaven high, dripping honey on people, turns up downtown everyday.  Would you fucking believe it's the 83 bus?

Many a time it hauled, in relative discomfort, my calloused bones through the Hill District.  It's always packed like expensive salmon in a plastic vacuum container, and passengers get hurled around as the bus navigates the narrow winding side streets. It's like conducting a family reunion  inside a cement mixer.    But it provides a better course in world culture than the one I got at college.  Yesterday it had to do with the subject of human relations in a distressed community.  

In the course of a conversation, a young woman explained that she and her sisters all live together, and, her words precisely, "We can't stand each other."  Before that, she was talking about her best female friend, not related to her, who was the one person she could always be nice to.   She and her sisters yell at each other all the time, and it's the way it is.  Some high brow college cretin might start in here with people 'compartmentalizing' their emotional lives, defining boundaries, applying ordinary common sense to a situation  less than ideal, but necessary.  The young woman was both revealing and confirming the clearest representation of a whole course of study.  As usual most people on the 83 bus are more edifying than that dusty college course I had to take.

She had a great deal more to say about both the human condition and her own relationships within it.  Off the cuff she added, "If I don't know someone, they ain't my friend."   I'd heard this credo expressed before, in the Hill, and the irony is that I had to learn exactly that, the hard way, a million times over, in a lot of different places.  All I was doing, at the time was overhearing a conversation on the miserably crowded bus.  And it provided me an affirmation.  I got the news, weather and sports, figuratively speaking. I got the 411. On the 83 bus.  Even numerology comes crashing into the picture.  Collectively, it was and always is a bountiful trip through the Hill.

Alternative Ways Of Reducing Gun Violence

Yep, er', I'm old.  Date back to normal folks keeping a locked upstairs dungeon full of military rifles they got on the cheap, mail order, out of the back of an American Rifleman magazine.   There were guns all over the place.  Everybody had lots of them.  Little kids had them.  People put Springfield rifles in nine month old babies' cribs so they wouldn't get so fucking skittish every time a fist fight broke out.   People were remarkably abusive.   But there were no shooting incidents.

Today's lecture has to do the new status of gun violence.   When I was a teensy punk, kids were taught gun safety starting at around age one.  We weren't allowed to play with bullets till we were eighteen months, and only severe dysfunctionals were excused from hunting.   "I got no use for a toddler who won't gut a deer," my grandmother would often say.    There was all sorts of violence, but people didn't get shot, because the rusticated rural townfolk knew how to handle guns, and were taught rather strictly.  The reason for the misty water color memory sequence is because maybe gun safety should be taught in school.  Maybe kids need to learn how to be safe in a world loaded for bear.   In Israel they teach tiny tots the Hebrew National martial art, krav maga, and it really helps in country with those types of woes.

American kids might be engaging in gun violence because their role models are criminals.  Perhaps the good guys should make it a point to make a good impression, instill some value in human life, while teaching safe practice.  People need to be pragmatic about our nutty, deranged, loaded for bear populace of fucked up malefactors.  Rather than continue fiddling over gun control, I propose better education.  It needs to get more John Wayne.

New Poem: Capitulating

Capitulating

The NSA can rig the sky to play show tunes

the horizon owns a harness racing franchise

diode constellations and fireworks dazzle, converge and draw old phrases from the bottom of a steel coin box

the wide flat galaxies direct spontaneous generation

cats prosper

under the spreading television glow through bay windows

and onto the swimming pool

beeping blinking nanny cams insure no voodoo

sport utility vehicles parked outside
there lurks the jackal

radio wave silverfish wriggle into your privacy

snake out some baubles

get the goods on you

the doll that resembles you takes on an eerie cheerful leer

so there

I don’t have to explain the convergence theory

Urban Renewal Plan: The Inner City Trailer Park

By jizz, there comes a time when a middle aged fella' should make some sorta' statement about the social economics of real estate.  People are getting priced out of the new high rent developments, such as in East Liberty, while the greater North Side builds next to nothing on it's abundance of vacant lots.  Go figure, by way of mucho demolition, where huge and elegant mansions stood, there are acres of useless weeds.  No one has come up with a plan, in the mean time, to provide affordable housing for so many many low wage workers.  They live around my part of town, elsewhere too.  I have an idea, but first a little story.

One day back in the nineteenth century a young man got out of bed, in his sharecropper shack, and pined for a better way of life.  He was not ungrateful for his job, frying potato curlies in a coal french frier.  It afforded him a way of life, and he was proud of his work,  fryer baskets in hands, that grease sizzling, potato curls turning that fragrant brown.  And then there were all those burly settlers who so loved his curly fries.  But the job didn't pay well, and he really needed better housing.  He wished and wished, and because of his intense wishing and longing, some fine, glowing bastard invented the trailer park.

I am familiar with a shitload of trailer parks because I grew up in an Appalachian backwash a hundred miles north of Pittsburgh, where  the Mason Dixon line jumps position and appears like the Flying Dutchman.  It's a nasty backwash, in places. Mean spirited, some would say.  But there came this mass salvation, in the form of trailer parks.  I am proposing that the next wave of low wage housing be in the form of placing trailers on vacant lots, utilizing the existing shit pipes and rain drainage conveniences, and re-forming the trailer park, so honest fry cooks can afford a cool place to have a few beers and play country western ballads on their banjos.  Nothing unreasonable is being suggested here.  People need cheap digs.

Fishing Up Some Networking

Where, goodness gracious, did networking go?  It was such a popular concept in the 1990s, when, like digitized nymphs and nimrods, people all over the place were glowing with the spirit of invention, and the practice of forming working partnerships, all in pursuit of comrade free enterprise and free social interaction.  People were wunking out software products.  They were milling and drilling hardware.  They were selling shit, like streaming videos of a hotcake, all kinds of fucking clever shit.  And then the dot com economy of the 1990s bit the dust.  It was a giddy, often lucrative chaos, and it has found order in mass consolidation.  The small time entrepreneur has been more or less screwed ever since.

The concept of networking has taken a breather.  It's outside, smoking a Marlboro.  It's cold out.  I'm trying to invite its productive and socially redeeming ass in the house here.  People can get back to the business of free and open communication on the internet, and where sanitary, in person, such as at a Starbucks.

I used to trundle an idea that it is possible to develop profitable private business and industry by way of a communications model.  If the entrepreneur scares up the product, other professionals facilitate development and marketing, and everyone makes greenbacks, holy jeepers its as All American as pro football.  During Superbowl season, for fuck sake.  Go networking process.

Old Books. Burn Them.

Back in the day, like so many puny dreamers, I loved old books. Seemed sinful to go out and buy new editions. Seemed, when a gal or fella' opens a tomb, there ought to be a nice fragrant cloud of mold spores and dust mites, the honest allergens that made great scholars sneeze and wheeze while they poured over a 'quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.' But that was before everyone got herpes, back in the late 1980s. Now people want everything sanitary. Hell, I won't touch a book, anymore, without rubber gloves and a bucket of Chlorox.

Burn old books. Buy new ones. Pay. Pay a shitload to read. People need the dough.

Ritual Itinerary, or the new voodoo for 2016

What do Karl Marx, the Unibomber, and Valerie Solanas all have in common?  While you mull the question, I will lean back in my chair and blow smoke rings off a big apple pipe, like real men in blue suits smoked back in the old days.   Don’t know?   They all wrote a rip-snorting special manifesto.  

Of the three, only Karl’s is still getting studied, pawed, drooled on and in other ways soiled  at the public library.   Ted Kozinsky hasn’t been heard from since his incarceration, and Valerie, Valerie passed away for the most part forgotten.  And why do I care?   Because, as everyone in the ‘Burgh either knows or should know, she shot Andy Warhol in the brisket.  Valerie hated men.  

Her manifesto, titled SCUM, was all about how women should take over the government, eliminate money, and, more urgently, men.  She truly hated guy’s guts.  I checked Wikipedia, and it doesn’t say how she proposed people reproduce, post apocalypse, but that aside, I think her work was very nicely thought out.  But she perforated Andy Warhol’s gizzard, and she meant to kill the man.  Which is why I’m proposing a new ritual.

Soon as weather permits, a cheap ass dollar store doll, looks just like Barbie, will be nailed to the dead oak tree behind my house, and I’m going to throw hatchets at it.   That’s the whole thing, unless I decide to ad lib some bullshit, maybe for fun. The doll will represent Val, and the stunt will symbolize my need to avenge the meanness of it all.  The violence.  The rabid, hostile, discriminatory man-hating that shortened poor Andy’s stint.  I’m not all that pissed at Valerie.    She’s gone.  No hard feelings.  But it’s getting around time for a new pagan ritual, so Valerie’s next.  Will record it on video, and post it on youtube, like I always do, when originating a ritual.