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Holidays and long weekends have long since ceased to mean anything to me, I haven’t worked a regular nine to five gig since the 80’s.

Today we were compelled or at least expected, to remember the fallen.  The warriors.  The men and women most certainly courageous, who ultimately gave their lives for our way of life.  The freedom we enjoy.  The liberty we covet.    No euphoric sentimentalism here.  I’m grateful.  It’s huge.  I think about all those brave souls who answered the call.  Americans who willingly walked face first, head up, into a shitstorm far worse than they had the capacity to imagine.  I think about those that gave their lives as well as those that were horribly wounded, disfigured, limbs lost and/or often as not, the ability to think clearly or ever have a moments peace, gone forever until they are perhaps gratefully allowed to shuffle from beneath their own mortal coil.

I have an uncle, a big sweet friendly man, who served in Viet Nam.  He has never said a word.  He is, without a doubt, troubled.  Damaged.  All I or any of us know, is that he lost his best friend within days of setting foot.  He’s a good man.  He wrestles with it in private.  He drinks too much.  Often from morning to night.  Not one of his ten siblings has ever really interfered, they understand that they can’t understand.

War is easily the most egregious and too often unnecessary sin humankind seems determined to commit with an insane and senseless prolificacy.  An absolutely maddening consistency.   We kill and we die over and over and over and more often than not for no goddamn reason, good or otherwise.  It’s sick.  It is disgusting.

But, I digress.

I’m so very tempted to pontificate here until the sun rises on the day after this holiday.  I could.  I would.  Look at the shit Israel pulled today.  But it really is beside the point.

The point I want to make is this:  America has not participated in a justifiable war since World War II.  Yet as a country, we spend nearly half what the entire world does on the mechanisms and utility to make war, to bring death.  Over half of every dollar you pay in taxes, particularly if your a member of the vanishing middle class or ever burgeoning working poor, is directed toward America’s ability to kill entire populations, to destroy whole societies.  We spend more than ten times our nearest competitor (China) for just that vulgar and ignoble privilege.

We are badass.  Don’t fuck with us.  We’ll visit carnage and destruction on you like the rest of the world will never, ever, even be allowed to see.

We are the richest country in the history of humankind and to this profound ugliness, we commit ourselves daily, hourly, whether we like it or not.  We don’t provide health care for our people.  The only civilized nation that seems unable but is ultimately unwilling to do so.  Our children have not had the benefit of a competitive education for decades and the population of homeless on our streets grows ever more prodigious.  We give more financial and military aid to those irresponsible assholes in Israel than we do every other country on the planet combined.  We incarcerate more people per capita than any other state or nation on earth.

Whenever any individual claims the temerity, the audacity to challenge and point out the absurdity of such, that person is shouted down with vehement, nonsensical jingoism and ignorant bigotry.  Labeled socialist in a shameless plutocracy.  Only in America could we have a viable movement, an actual albeit self described party, for which just such a thing is their pride and purpose.  Willful, fucktardian ignorance.  Teabaggers and their complicit Republican sycophants.  The tail is beginning to wag that dog.

The stinging irony being, it’s only our largess that allows for it at all.  This level of ridiculous fuckery could never exist in the vacuum of abject poverty……….so what happens when it lands our entire population right there?

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” –MLK

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower

I sincerely hope you had a happy and peaceful Memorial Holiday.  I really do mean that.

Drinks for my friends.

She reserves the “F” word almost exclusively for this downright context. I don’t believe I ever heard her utter it until I was about sixteen.  My mother.  She uttered it then.  She uses the the word very sparingly and only in sagacious anger to this day.  I confess it elicits a certain glee in me.  I like it when she does it.  It makes me smile like The Grinch.  When she says it these days she says it.  She confided that it’s one of her favorite words.  It was the following course of events that compelled her to disgorge the words this time.

Chapter Two

We find me exasperated, frustrated and pissed off at the concerted Republican effort to retard, malign and obfuscate with insidious bullshit, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  Congruent with all gay, bi, lesbian and transgender aspirations for equality under law, I can’t help but view it as an authentic civil rights issue.  I’ve always maintained that sexual preference or identification is inherent and therefore exclusively subject to such specific purview.

NEXT.

For the purpose of due disclosure, it may be what I sincerely believe, but I don’t give a mad fuck either way.  If it is indeed a choice, it’s an exceptionally personal one and thus none of your goddamn business.  A spectacularly dumb and pointless concept for anyone to bother with at all.  When it comes to serving in our military, if a soldier is a good soldier, and by that I mean a willingness to risk and perhaps sacrifice one’s own life, who cares?

Over thirteen thousand men and women willing to literally take a bullet have been expelled from our armed forces for merely being fags or dykes or any iteration thereof since this crap began.  Some fluent in Arabic and Farsi.  Respected, beloved commanding officers.  Fierce fighters and patriots.  According to rep. Patrick Murphy, such egregious bigotry has cost taxpayers $1.3 billion.   Hello, national security.  Hello, war on terror.  Hello fiscally conservative assholes.

We, the citizenry, and the military personnel agree overwhelmingly.  Polling is consistently in favor by some seventy five to seventy eight percent for at least a couple of years now.  Americans never agree that conclusively on anything.  You’d be hard pressed to compel three quarters of the electorate to consign themselves to the notion that men possess phalluses and women vaginas.  The whole, pun sincerely intended, innie and outie thing.  The old, in and out, as it were.  Picture me penetrating the OK gesture of one hand with my index finger from the other………..

Yet the body politic does not reflect as much at all.  Every day is opposite day for just less than half the elected and at least 25% of the naturally occurring, incurably stupid.  Don’t forget “The 1/4 Paradigm”.

Who’s stupider? The just under half or the hardcore and perhaps lacking chromosomes 1/4?

I’m going with the just under half.  They actually got elected.  They understand the universe doesn’t care if they’re obtuse while they begin to reap what they sow.

Republicans have stated that they are so vehemently opposed to repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell that they are willing to vote against funding the Pentagon.  Their precious Pentagon.  Their adored military industrial complex.  Their senseless $1 trillion dollars a year.

Man I hate these guys.

Fuckhead House Republican Mike Pence said, “The American people don’t want the American military to be used to advance a liberal political agenda.  And House Republicans will stand on that principle,” -Firedoglake

Mike Pence is a douchebag.  See Mike, this is just fairness for the people who will most likely fight and maybe die regardless.  “liberal political agenda”, Mike?    Good luck with that Mike.

Mike might could be a little Brokeback.

Thus far, only five house Republicans have broken ranks and voted for repeal.  They were immediately accused of having joined a “Radical Gay Lobby”.

REP LOUIE GOHMERT (R-TX): “If someone has to be overt about their sexuality, whether it’s in a bunker where they’re confined under fire, then it’s a problem. And that’s what repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell does. It says, ‘I have to be overt, I don’t care. I want this to be a social experiment.” -Think Progress

I have to say that I just love this fucktard’s last name.  “Gomer” was one of the most disparaging labels we could muster in Jr High.  Have you seen this guy?  Google him, seriously, I mean this dude is one round headed Gollum wannabe.  A can of beer to anyone who guesses which state he allegedly represents.

Louie occurs to me to be a little too concerned about being hit on in a bunker during a firefight.  Louie likes it rough.

C’mon now.

Similarly, John, can I look anymore like a deep fried poultry carcass, Boehner, had this to say:

“Rushing ahead with a political decision without understanding how it will impact the men and women of our Armed Forces who are fighting two wars is deeply irresponsible. I hope Members of Congress who care about our national security on both sides of the political aisle will stand together to stop it.”  – The shitneck’s very own website

Methinks he with the pallor of a roasted cornish game hen, said “ fighting two wars is deeply irresponsible.” See how I did that?

Nevermind the foolishness of said wars.

This next one is my favorite:

In the Senate, Armed Services Republicans threatened to filibuster the defense authorization bill “if it comes to the floor with Democrat-backed language repealing DADT.” “I’ll do everything in my power,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said. “I’m going to do everything I can to support the men and women of the military and to fight what is clearly a political agenda.” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) agreed, promising to support a filibuster “if the repeal language makes it into the version of the bill that goes to the floor, most likely after the Memorial Day recess.” –Rachel Maddow

Poor Pasty McSquinty.  Senators over the age of seventy five should be subject to compulsory competency examination just like they should for driving privileges.  He ain’t no maverick no more you know.

Archaic and absurd.

Still, there’s a thread here.

It’s all leading up to something.

Fire, I mean……Fear.

I know, typical and predictable but, with ever increasing obstructionism, partisan fuckery and shrill proclamations, those who would sell you fear are beginning to buy into it.  Republicans are genuinely afraid of fags.  It’s just that simple.  Don’t act all shocked, Republicans have been afraid of Negros for fifty years.  Now they fear Mexicans more than the Negros but less than the Gays.  They prioritize.

A step further.  Stay with me.  Rush Limbaugh, the Human Shitsmear, is a shameless hypocrite so he’s in my test tube.  He’s earned it.  Now, Shitsmear railed against drug users and abusers.  He fired snot rockets at Kurt Cobain post mortem.  Turns out he was one.  Exploited the help and broke all kinds of laws and nearly lost his hearing because he was a junkie.  Even got hassled by the TSA.

Rush Limbaugh, the Human Shitsmear, is a fag.  He is too you boys.

Get it?

Fucking Republicans.

Drinks for my friends.

I have a confession. I have a rather old cat, I can’t know her exact age but she must be at least thirteen. I’m sorry I can’t be sure of her age but that’s not my confession.

She’s been my daughter since the mildly jacked up former and still sometimes speeder warehouse guy brought her to us.  Back in the 60’s when everything was great.

She’s a Calico born in California so somehow he named her Cali but I think of her as, and call her Swirly Girl, The Gurry and variations thereof.  Once in awhile she licks my head or my hands and I’m not sure what to make of it.

She frowns a lot.

She frowns all the time.

Swirly bites and claws the shit out of me when I fuck with her but she likes it and we stay friends.

Heh.  Anyway, she’s getting to be a grizzled old meatwhistle.

I like the smell of her breath.  Meatwhistle breath.  This is my confession.

Her exhale is sweet and stinky.  She’s an old sod.  I love her.  My confession.

She snores and it warms the cockles of my cardiopulmonary.

The Fish and I contemplated the smell of cats.  We discussed it and agreed.  What we agreed was there was such a thing as kitty perfume.  A natural essence.  Rest In Peace my beloved Bean.  Tondaleo Bean The Negress.  Thinking of you still makes my chest constrict and my eyes water.  I loved you.  I would go back there, to that time, if I could, I surely would.  A simple and perfect life for us all.  I would, I really would.  Right now.

I would bring you two with me though.

“Wish I may
Wish I might
Get the wishes I’m wishing tonight”

Swirly frowns a lot but she always smells flowery and musky.

I don’t know how she does it.

I enjoy the stink of her yawn or hiss.  Sometimes I make her spit because it cracks me up.  All I have to do is pick her up gently, hold her gingerly and kiss the side of her head and face while her ears fold back, she rumbles and growls and pretty soon she’s a hissing fracture in the earth’s crust even though I’m loving on her.

This amuses me to no end I believe that’s what makes me do it.

I giggle and put her down.

She always walks away flapping her head in that feline way, frowning and shaking the experience of human dad love off like I’d blown mosquitoes into her ears.  Oh, the culicidae!

She’s over it seconds later.

I am also father to the complete opposite.

A muppet of a string bean of a furry post adolescent sorority hopeful.  Very feminine but with garish lipstick, zinfandel stained teeth and little social grace.  Beddy.  Yep, Beddy.   Short in truth for Bedhead, dubbed thus by The Fish.  Rescued from behind our warehouse and a community of feral cats when she was days old.  She’s a mutt.  Her coat is a mess.  She can’t help it and probably wouldn’t if she cared or could.  She does not.  I adore her.  She has no temper, no anger.  Sweet, curious and willful.

Petite black kitty.  Hair always a mess.  Barely beyond kitten size and not ever getting any bigger.

I can’t teach Beddy to comb herself, but she opens doors.  Literally.  She’s kind of opposed to my mother.  She counters her.  It appears deliberate.  When I think about it I must admit that one of the biggest conflicts on the books is between Beddy and my mother.

The sequestering makes them both indignant.

Beddy figures out how to open the bedroom door and mother devises the simplest of devices, literally a stick and rubber bands to defeat Beddy.  It impressed me.  It was so simple.  I’d imagined a wide wedge I could pull from outside the closed door with ropes.

See, Beddy likes to open the door and pee on my mother’s walls.  This is too much for all of us.  No one keeps house like my mother.  No one.  The amber stain of drizzle is an anathema to my mother.  I don’t blame her, my mother.  She has a nose like a toucan, my mother.

My poor girls.  Whenever they escape they end up within a few feet of me in not much more than a few minutes.  By my side.   They just want to hang with me.

It is necessary and it reminds that Beddy needs the surgery.  I’ve been reluctant for reasons not the least of which I’ve been a broke ass motherfucker.  Well, that’s pretty much it, but I really hope her personality doesn’t change much.  She talks a lot and what she has to say is pretty funny.  She bitches at me.  She wants the surgery.  I’m a bad dad.

Mom raps awesome tuna melts in foil.  Proof right there.  Sheezus. My queen cat has orange fur that never fails.  She leaves white and black all over.  Never orange.  My youngest leaves her black at the door.  All over in front or behind it depending on your polarity with respect to the door.  Get it?

Hey Otis, don’t gotta worry about no polarity on no cow.

“Wish I may
Wish I might
Get the wishes I’m wishing tonight”

Drinks for my friends.

ALL ABOUT HARRY (Reid)

My mother worked for him when they were both young and ambitious. They are still friends. He does not forget people.  She had occasion to call his office in DC a few years back for a favor.  He returned her call in half an hour.

When she asked for an autographed copy of his book for my birthday, he delivered it personally, inscribed, and kissed her on the cheek on live television.  His was the first ever campaign I worked in at all of eight years old.

To be fair, I’m a little prepossessed.

The thing about Harry is this: He’ll never end up in a sex or money or ethics scandal. What you see, really is what you get. He’s honest and does the best he can in a demanding and complex job. He spends his days threading needles.  He’s a good and decent man whom I don’t doubt consistently pursues what he believes to be right.  The courage of conviction.  Those like Hannity and Limbaugh would have you believe he’s a turd in the punchbowl.  Consider the source; what they are pointing at is a perfectly delicious Baby Ruth floating there in the garish red and tragically tainted froth.

The man comes from humble.  He paid for his mother’s teeth with his winnings from the ring.

I see these signs around town. Pretty random, often crude or homemade, saying anyone but him. What’s that all about? They know just enough to figure they’re pissed off at him? Too lazy to get a lungful of the alternative (s)?

Chickenshit.

What amazes me is that Nevadans would even flirt with abandoning his kind of juice. In this economy, our state economy,  highest foreclosure rate and second highest highest unemployment rate in the country (and no, it’s not his or Obama’s fault) and they wanna surrender the Senate Majority Leader? There’s everything from very sensitive and contentious water rights to Yucca Mountain, mining, gaming and our share of federal funds.

The guy’s card carrying and endorsed by the NRA. As the head of gaming during organized crime, he carried heat in his briefcase.  There was an attempted assassination. He was a boxer. He was mentored by Mike O’Callahan.  If that last name is not familiar to you, you might not have any business voting in this state.

He has the ear of and quite possibly favors in queue from the emperor.

The pinheads on the right spend as much time kicking at their best interests as they do drinking dogma with their hands protectively on their crotches. They’ll believe any goddamn thing.  No exception here.

I don’t agree with the man on everything. He’s pissed me off. I have my own mind. But I both estimate and understand him to be a good and decent man. He’s a Mormon and I think religion is silly but Mormonism tilts at hysterical.  C’mon, magic underwear? And see, you’d have to look that up; otherwise you’d be none the wiser. Wait until the right finds out or remembers Harry is a Latter Day Saint. He and Guy Smiley (Mitt Romney) might end up dancing cheek to cheek. Who names their son Willard Mitt? Ill advised.

Romney is a good looking but vacuous bastard, yet Harry could do worse. I suspect Harry’s a bit of a closeted Machiavelli. I’m not all that worried about it. Willard will either tie Harry’s shoes or be just slithering, hissing serpentine. I’m hoping for the latter. For the theatre of hypocrisy, of course.

I don’t know what will happen to Harry, but he’ll be fine either way. I hope. He’s a very bright and accomplished man, never making a show of his honesty and convictions.  Soft spoken, even tempered with a punch that most never see coming. It’s the state of the State of Nevada that should be on every mind.

Think of the State of Nevada and think about Sue Lowden in the same breath. The same sentence. She of the poltroons.  The chicken lady. My brother in law once described Dumbya as an empty suit. I kinda think of him in terms of like, less than immaculate conception.  Think gore festooned conception.  Chitty Shitty Bang Bang. Peanutbutter and pretzels and other choking hazards and their threat to infants and the infirm.  Anyway, Lowden’s clearly a pant suit of a whistling breeze. Bimbo flotation device. Not for saying it, but for flogging it without apology over and over. She’s way cheese short of a pizza but you never know. She could be your next spectacularly dumb and least powerful member of the senate.  The line between clever and stupid has rarely been so vast.

Were this to happen, her ascendence, good luck fucktards.

My mother knows her and she confirmed as much. She might have used the word ‘ding-a-ling”.  Without understanding as much, my mother really means “fucktard”.

Maybe she and Michele Bachmann could wrestle in actual toxic crude with Palin as the referee. I digress. It’s what can happen to you on cheap pot and gin you bitches.

Sharron Angle is barely worth mentioning, so that’s all I’ll do.  Eh, Teaparty…..

Danny Tarkanian has his father, a former UNLV basketball coach and his own prowess as an athlete to thank for name recognition.  I kinda like his position on foreign policy, specifically regarding the military and our flagrant use and abuse thereof.

Couldn’t find any evidence of political experience, yet he aspires to fill the shoes of the most powerful and experienced man from Nevada ever?

His positions on health care are typical Republican boilerplate and therefore suck.  Allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines isn’t a bad idea, but hardly a panacea.  The entire notion of tort reform is obtuse and betrays a frustratingly homogeneous and alarmingly plutocratic stance.  Malpractice litigation accounts for significantly less than than a single percent of health care costs.  It’s a two dimensional effort to afford big insurance ever more autonomy.

Needless to say he waves both flags with the gusto of a lockstep Republican.

Stupid.

On the economy, he supports the repeal of the inheritance tax (realistically only effecting and protecting the hoarders of the filthy lucre), extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy including the tax on Capital gains.  You know, the ones that have cost us two trillion dollars and allowed for the top five percent to own and control ninety five percent of American’s wealth?  The most egregious, precipitous and momentous concentration of wealth in the history of humankind.

If that weren’t enough, he opposes a woman’s right to choose.

Don’t know about you, but that’s all I need to know.  He’s a douchebag.

It cracks me up when they have the pompous audacity to label us socialist when they are so overtly fascist.

Less juice than even playboy Ensign. The only aspect of what he did that interests me at all is the money. The payoffs and all that attendant drama. The monkeys of C Street and the inevitable blurry stills of visits by the Devil and Little Red Riding Hood. Pixilated and enhanced.

Nevada will be shat upon without Harry and with either two of these three roundheads.

I’m not crapping you negative. There’s plenty more shit for the fan and now is not the time to surrender to anti-incumbent myopia. I’m saying the challengers might be retarded. Work with me. Ketchup little tomato.

Go with the Trader Joe’s Puttanesca. Honestly, a little good olive oil and the requisite white cheeses and Bob is your uncle.  Remember to cook the pasta “al dente”, drain and refry with a little quality oil stirring rapidly, plate and add the cheese before and underneath the “gravy”.  It never hurts to add fresh tomatoes to the the sauce while it simmers and a little of the wine you’ll be imbibing, especially if it’s the cheap shit.

Ever flashed on how the contemporary cell phone resembles the “communicator” on Star Trek? Of course you have you bitches. If art imitates life, I cant wait for the “tricorder”.

Drinks for my friends.

Ever clock that riff in that song “Firestarter” by The Prodigy? It’s the coolest fucking sound. It’s so fluid and menacing. The song is genius because of it. Man, that’s an awesome Crimea. Live to toast, with beans, tomato and bacon. Or points of with Creme fraiche and caviar.

Sometimes I get up and check my computer. I won’t remember why I checked the spelling of fraiche in the morning.

That black death is filling the Gulf. Latest efforts in the lobby of the pizza joint at that old claw game have failed to tame the beast or inspire confidence.  What kills me is they’ve no fucking idea what to do.

They want us to believe they can drill five times deeper but they couldn’t prevent this or so far even mitigate it.  What’re we?  A month in?

This will end up a nuclear meltdown. Worst man made disaster ever.  I’m not here to downplay Chernobyl but we have no idea the total at the register there, so it only kinda counts.

How do you stack the animals and the environment against human disease and suffering? Let’s just say fifty fifty for the sake of argument. I believe animals to be better than human beings because they are innocent of greed or prejudice and they are capable of unconditional love. So let’s say sixty forty in favor of the animals because I can’t imagine my two kitties waddling and shaking trying to lose the oil, that no bird, fish or reptile would ever be able to deal with on it’s own.

This has me spooked.

We’re looking at weeks before anything. This thing volcanoing at thousands of pounds psi, the most toxic shit there is short of radioactive. 200,000 gallons a day? Bad news boys and girls. The entire gulf coast is gonna look like the surface of the moon. Wait til it bakes in the sun for a few years and the mosquitos mutate. Cockroaches the size of shuttlecocks.

It will come to shore thicker than hog snot and erase any reason to visit any gulf coast for a long time. We will all witness it and some will even understand what they see is but a quarter of what was wrought. Every American will feel this one. It’s gonna suck and they will lie to you about it over and over.

Louisiana is gonna choke on it.  I mean turn blue and flop around.  The entire state is gonna need the Heimlich.  Chemo and radiation.  Leeches.  A mustard poultice.  Mississippi probably.  How much of Florida, Texas……….we know they’ll need surgery.

The puppets are out, pretending to fail on their swords by appearing to be idiots in front of congress.  Understand that by wagging fingers right and left, they accomplished just as much as having embraced each other minus any social gratuity.  They all got to look resolute and confident at least.

Ain’t nobody gonna get caught accountable.

Pricks.

So how soon until even them that might be paying attention, succumb to the relentless serial lies, perpetuated beyond the pompous blowhards, by a simple wondering they might be confused?

Hard to say because it’s an ongoing conflagration.

You know, NASA has reached far further and has enjoyed a far lesser payload of consequences.  Total lives can’t be more than ten or so.  Anybody?

Here’s a government agency that screws the pooch now and then but generally gets really complex shit done.  The fact that the space hog of a shuttle is still flying, and yes despite the catastrophes, says this is pretty vast and special program.  Thy did a bang up job on Mars except that one time.

Someone neglected the differences between the metric system and ours.

It could happen.

They don’t have an answer,  BP or Haliburton or whoever the other clowns are, but the second they do you’ll know about it and you’ll begin to forget.  Hammered out of you passively but insidiously as soon as.

You know, by the liberal media.

We have not yet the capacity for this age of technocratic information saturation, yet and so, it accelerates despite us.  We have lost control of it.  We have lost control of too many things.  Sometimes I wonder where the line is between our lack of mere accountability, and our inevitable demise.

I’m doing the roadshow at the Reno location and a cranky looking, bald bird of man with gray teeth and a shit eating grin walks up to me and says, “Where’d ya get that wig?”.  I sized him up and said, “Can’t tell you that.  Can tell you it was expensive”.  He said it was a nice wig as he walked away.

Drinks for my friends.

Julie Brown

Is Rubio becoming the Latino Clarence Thomas? There is a reason why more blacks and Hispanics don’t join the Republican Party and the "conservative movement." It’s not just their ideas, which often seem hostile to people of color, and which have had very real, negative consequences, not just for minorities, but for America. It’s that in order to … See Morebe in the club, you have to sell a little too much of your soul, by becoming an ethnic parody or by openly repudiating your own ethnic group in the strongest, harshest terms, in order to prove that you have more fealty to their notion of America, which often translates to a particular white historic and corporate elite, than to people who look like you. In an ideal world, there should of course be no ethnic tribalism in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society. But America has not reached that ideal, and empathy for others, whether in your own ethnic group or not, is at minimum, a sign of civilization. To the right, however, empathy is seen as a threat, particularly when those being empathized with are not, to be blunt, white.

……from over three and a half years ago……..

 

 

A Tempest Without Flaw

October 31, 2007 – 11:59 pm

Nine ways to Sunday and from hell to breakfast if we’re not careful………… In the last quarter century, arctic ice has atrophied over twenty percent. We’re now staring at over nine percent melting each decade and the pace accelerates. The effects of that decline are exponential. While the disappearing ice reflects less heat and energy from the sun back into space, as it melts, it reverses ocean currents, weather patterns and ultimately submerges an ass pocket full of inhabited coastal real estate. In less than that time, world population is up by thirty four percent. Still no condoms in Africa, despite leading the world as a continent infected with HIV and far more people than can be fed. Central and South America are hot on the heels of Africa, thanks in no small way to Catholicism and a long line of morally bankrupt, idiot Popes drooling dogma and fomenting archaic and absurd doctrine in every impoverished region on the globe. These people are evil fucking idiots. The EPA submitted a fourteen page report last week that the White House “redacted” by removing nearly eight pages and then saw fit to insert propaganda from a report that was partially funded by the petroleum industry. These people too, are evil fucking idiots. Nothing new there. Dick-in-Bush have been censoring NASA scientists and government environmental reports since about the same time the GOP hung it’s own toilet paper in the Residence. Indeed. Show me a report that denies global warming and it’s effects and I’ll show you a body of work with a rather obvious oil slick on top. Atlanta is due to run out of drinking water within ninety days. California still burns. The bees are taking a holiday to who knows where and they’re not coming back. This, a very big deal. Weather in general is off the charts. In the last handful of years we’ve had tornados and snow in Los Angeles. What’s occurred climatically in every other corner of the globe made that look Fisher Price. In that same handful of years the only thing propping up the American economy was an unrealistically robust housing market. That’s over. Very 2005. That sector now bubbles and hisses in collapse like some agent of Satan firehosed with holy water. Where the American economy goes, so does that of the world. The US has more than one piston firing in the global economic engine. Our pistons however, disrupt the clock and rhythm of the engine. Ominous black viscera vomits from the twin exhaust. Grab a gear and put your foot in her and she hesitates, sputters and acts like she’s gonna stall. Sorry, but sometimes you gotta laugh while doing the metaphor thing. We owe China more than we make. We buy more from them than we can afford. We continue to fight an embarrassingly unjustified war in Iraq, costing over $700 million a day that we have no way to pay for and no way to win. Yet, we command the world stage with hands on hips and chest thrust out, clearing our voices and stomping our feet, picking a fight with every other country in the region that could be of incalculable help in mitigating this clusterfuck we have ignited and foolishly perpetuated. America has become a cartoon. Most nukes don’t cost nothin’ cause we paid for em’ a ways back. Nukes do what lotsa soldiers do but way faster and way cheaper. We got a shitload of nukes. All different kinds. Don’t forget that the Navy and the Air Force haven’t had much to do with things so far. Don’t forget that. Wait ’til that kinda shit goes boom. It will guarantee a degree of fucked so profound, humankind won’t be able to decide whether to shit or go blind. The genie in that bottle will do more than flirt with our demise. Don’t forget that Russia and China are standing by. Putin and Ahmadinejad have been seen holding hands in public lately. Who knows what they’re up to in private, I doubt it’s in our best interest. And hey, crude topped out at over $93 a barrel the other day. Up from around $30 just seven years ago. Good news for fucking EXXON, the richest corporation in the history of man. This is a reality that permeates every aspect of just about every human life. The only exception is a stroll to the bathroom to evacuate the colon. Actually, in light of toilet paper, only a sprint to empty your piss bag. Let me put it in terms the Great Unwashed will understand. Soon, cable and Tivo will become expensive luxuries, the cost of adult diapers will skyrocket and you’ll be forced to synchronize crapping and pissing to the advertising schedule of network television. Yes, just like the 70’s. Oh and, it will be really hot, lots more disease and your ass will be broke as a motherfucker. You won’t have to piss much because there just won’t be much water. The temperature of the sun is eleven thousand degrees farenheit on it’s surface. The speed of light in a vacuum is one hundred eighty six thousand miles a second. The last thing we need, is to be slugging it out in a world war, with an economy constructed of flimsy cards, while Mother Earth has long been sick and fucking tired of our shit and is in the throes of hocking us like a greasy loogie onto the curb of extinction. I riddle you this; how do you intend to answer the question of where you were and what were you doing when it became so obvious that that our entire species was facing the father of all perfect shitstorms? I noticed at the grocery check out that Oprah is blowing up again! Were you perhaps overly distraught about a dazed and confused Britney losing custody of her children to a loser like K Fed? Maybe OJ’s latest stroll through pigeon shit occupied your attention a little too much. Or perhaps you endeavored to man up to real political, social and enviromental issues, but ended up succumbing to the insipid corporate media agenda of which presidential candidate had the most faith, which candidate might be most likely to let fags and dykes marry or which might be the most likely to let a woman make up her own mind. Wouldn’t you at least like to be able to say that you were paying attention to the candidates and the salient issues? Wouldn’t you like to say “I was fucking paying attention and I voted for the right ones.” ? Wouldn’t you like to know that you voted for the right ones and that was the catalyst for change so crucial that humans may have become extinct without it? Ladies and gentlemen, the perfect storm is coming. Just pay attention. Think about it. brainspank.org coming soon. Drinks for my friends.

 

I don’t know.

I mean I do but I don’t.

Let’s be honest, the immigrants in question are pretty unlikely to have blue eyes.

Having said that, the weakest among us are those that have chosen to hate Mexicans. Hate is something you choose.

I was raised not to judge. Nevermind the color of skin; I was taught not to for any reason save for character, integrity, honesty, reliability and a consistency thereof in total. I cannot fault any individual for coming to this country under any circumstances with the honest hope and purpose of feeding family or loved ones. My father would do the same in a heartbeat and I sincerely doubt he is alone with that ethic.

This particular issue hits closer to home than any I can remember as an adult. It’s understatement to say my parents are weary of rampant unchecked migration of illegal immigrants from the south. It is fair to say that I sympathize with them on a number of fronts. My hometown of Carson City, Nevada is plagued by all manner of sheep’s clothing socioeconomic issues manifesting as ugly circumstance. They winter in Yuma, AZ and on the ground conditions there are worse. Crime and violence have exploded not merely due to a clash of cultures.

It’s bizarre. I’ve lived in LA for the last 25 years. I figured the onus to adjust was mine.

I took it upon myself.

This is less simple.

What began as an issue so convenient, has begun to bite asses hard. To ignore it is to pretend that while business is reaped, in a fashion not unlike the engine of the agrarian age, slave labor in Dixie, only profit is sowed. Not so. Then there are the ordinary folks for whom there is no dog in this hunt. Folks who are frightened. Folks who are inclined to resent and even hate as the bombs they did not plan or place, explode around them constantly. On both sides.

Phoenix is the kidnapping capitol of the entire country. Violence spills across our southern border in frightening ways. More people dying everyday than Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is real. It is visceral. It’s next door and coming through the mail slot. Again, avarice has morphed into carnage and fear. It’s exasperating that we cannot seem to learn this singular lesson. It ultimately is, America’s fault. It’s tragic indeed that them who created the problem suffer the consequences so much less than them that didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with it. Ain’t that America?

Yes, it is.

Giant swaths of our infrastructure are reliant on immigrant labor. Honest hardworking human beings trying to feed families. No different from any family in America for their willingness to do anything to survive. I cannot in good conscience begrudge them a damn thing. They are human. They love and need and wake up hungry. They do what they have to do. Happy to work hard for pride and the necessity of providing for their loved ones. Human beings.

We must not lose sight of the fact that they are people. They are we. We are them.

Something’s gotta give. It’s unsustainable.

Is the new Arizona law wrong? Absolutely. Not only is the slope it invites slippery as hell, in that it throws wide the giant doors for abuse and racism, it’s un-enforcible and enjoys little potential for an efficacious conclusion. "Papers please". Note the omission of a question mark you bitches. It’s unconscionable and naive to place the ignoble affliction of judge and jury on the workaday law enforcement officer. As a notion on it’s own, it’s crazy absurd and dangerous. How can the officer know anything about a random man or woman beyond the commission of a crime observed? No officer has time or occasion to walk in the shoes of everyone encountered. A purview beyond any one peace officer.

Peace officer. Think about it.

It makes no sense. How will this be enforced or prosecuted? Were it to prevail, it’ll be backward ass country fuck, Porky’s style justice. And it will because it would. That scares me. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It will in no time at all, assume the most vulgar iteration of whatever the original intent may have been. It will get ugly fast.

The subsequent blowback is likely to be just as unseemly.

Or maybe we’ll get a civil rights movement v2.0.

Talk about passing the buck. The powers that be have no problem with the rest of us being consumed by the maelstrom. They rather want it. They anticipate with delight the worker ants scrambling toward threats once not considerable but now so pervasive. They adore it.

I can almost guarantee that upon reaching it’s obvious conclusion, and despite the Supreme Court’s rather dubious decisions of late, such law will be struck down. I see it as inevitable. It could happen.

What should I do?

Ever seen someone eat a burger while operating a five speed manual transmission? Answer yes even if you can only picture it. What about texting with both opposable thumbs while pissing in a urinal? The answer is yes. Work with me. Something needs to be done.

What really gets my blood up is this ignorance of the obvious. An attempt that does less than nothing to address the cause of the disease, and that makes it dumb. Wrongheaded. There has been a law on the books in Arizona since 2008, it mandates any and all employers to verify the legal eligibility of every employee. Approximately six percent of businesses have complied. Whew. Six percent.

Um, what happened there?

An earnest legislative endeavor to pragmatically confront the root of the problem completely overlooked and ignored. A law. On the books. See what I’m saying? Doesn’t that at least sound like a better start?

Therein lies the rub. It’s American contractors, factory owners, large and small agribusiness owners that are the most egregiously culpable. What they do is exploit slave labor. When the great unwashed screech and stomp about the dearth of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, they have only cousin white devil to blame.

The highest most robust fences won’t solve it and neither will draconian laws or battalions more border agents. Treating people like shit inevitably leads to more and more shit. It must be exclusively and specifically egalitarian in intent and implementation. Pejorative rhetoric eschewed post haste. Human beings being debated here and like it or not, part of your economy. If they disappeared tomorrow, you’d be in a very bad place.

You would. Don’t shit yourselves. You would.

This is not a racial issue and it cannot be allowed to become one any more than it already, regrettably has. Trust me, it has.

This, another aspect not unlike a cheese grater applied with vigor to my ass. I don’t doubt that what I see here is a concerted effort to foment hatred, suspicion and fear of the brown man. George Carlin said that what we do is bomb brown people. If you’re brown, sooner or later, we’ll get to you. It’s no coincidence that during an eight year run amok by the GOP, nothing, fuck all, was done about immigration. All the sudden their all about it because it will inevitably distract from financial reform for example.

They hope.

Not a single senator with an (R) by his name has thus far even expressed a modicum of willingness to participate in any bipartisan effort to craft or endorse meaningful immigration reform. Instead, as with so many important issues, they choose to "wallow in a mosh pit of demagoguery" -Anthony Weiner. Cowards. Fucktards.

Man I hate these guys.

I will tell you that my loving, compassionate and very liberal parents spend a good amount of their time living along the Arizona/Mexico border as "snowbirds" and they tell me I can’t understand the depth and breadth of the circumstances. I own that I can’t. That they are frustrated speaks volumes to me. It tells me the problem is huge. Still, that they lean in favor of this legislation, if only as a catalyst for the federal government to finally act, breaks my heart a little. My little political heart.

It is not the right thing and it will do more damage than good for all involved.

This issue has been allowed to become overly complex. It is simple. We understand the malaise. Treating a symptom is myopic. It doesn’t and won’t get short term gratification. The disease lies in the avarice of our own. The brown people are pawns whether they pick fruit or sell drugs. Fisher Price boys and girls. If you really want them gone, you’ll pay for it in tomatoes instead of taxes. Grapes and dope. Six of one or a half dozen of the other.

You would miss them, I promise. The deliberate architects of this clusterfuck could give a mad fuck.

Drinks for my friends.
 

My first blog wearing glasses.

I am here to tell you that the entire Tea Party movement is a house of cards.  Furthermore, I want to inform you, that the majority of members thereof, are douchebags.  I do lament the absence of, and pine for a third party, but as far as this one, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Dickheads.  Asshats.

Loose lipped cashiers all of them.  When Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin and Dick Armey are blowing your skirt up, you’re not in Kansas anymore.  You’re in a place none of them would ever admit to but are invested in.  That they don’t understand where they are leading you speaks volumes about their intelligence and yours if you ascribe.  The Tea Party is a fool’s paradise.

I’m not sure how many of them realize as much, but the term “teabag”, is a verb and has long been reference, a colloquial advent of the contemporary American vernacular,  for the act of a man placing his ball sack on the chin or face of another man.  It really is most of what needs to be said here.  It honestly is.  All you need to know.

Still with me?

These proud adherents, are both best and generously explained as confused.  I prefer the word ‘fools’.  They imagine somehow that their reason has to do with the admirable notion that taxation sans representation is egregiously unjust.  Indeed, it’s the only thing they are right about despite it having nothing at all to do with what they are up to or claim to oppose.  They have no idea.

It can and does say all manner of preposterous things about the American Electorate.  It insults my intelligence.  It’s fucking absurd.  It baffles and confounds me.

The blind attempting to lead the naked.  Dumbshits whistling and gesturing at the willfully ignorant and tragically confused.

See, the middle class, what’s left of it, now enjoys one of the biggest tax cuts in history.  Tax returns are up by 10%.  95% of American tax payers are enjoying the lowest rates since 1955 -sourced from The Rachel Maddow show.  The cuddly whip smart lesbian.  I’m hetero so I want her to change her hair.  88% of said Teaparty disciples  don’t know as much.  They all watch FOX.  How tragic is that?

It’s a simple as the roads they drive, the police and fire departments, medicaid, medicare and social security they depend upon, to say nothing of the world’s most powerful military, ever and by far, in a long history of very powerful war engines and military industrial commerce.  Big business.  Huge business.   Literally,the biggest business on the planet.

Hello?

They are a simple folk.  What the mad fuck are they so afraid of?  What are they so angry about?

They know not at all what they would object to.

They inhabit a vacuum.  Fools.

They couldn’t be bothered when Dumbya was at the wheel.  They cannot tell you with any coherence what they object to.  They plainly, don’t know.  They are quite simply, pissed off.  And that, is all they are.  All they are.  Life sucks so they need to be mad.  They want to be mad.  And they just happen to be ignorant racists.  They see Mexicans busting ass for six or eight bucks an hour and refuse to own that it could be them.  That it might be them.  Fear of a diverse planet.  Fear of of a black man that has already helped most of them in far more substantial ways than any President in their adult lives.

Jackin’ shit up right and left.

Fear of God.

Assholes and idiots.  You stupid fucks.

It chaps my ass, these dipshits have at best, vague reasons for being so fired up, and they can’t explain it.  They know not what they do, they don’t even know why.  Willful ignorance.  Taking pride in causing some shit.  Packing heat to some non violent, peaceful, political event.  Intellectual laziness and dishonesty.  Flammable.  They consistently subject themselves to and prostrate themselves for, something so profoundly ridiculous that it can’t be explained and makes even less sense in any historical context whether it be recent or ancient.

“The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans now have a larger share of total income than they ever have in records going back nearly a century — an even larger amount than during the Roaring Twenties, the last time the US saw such similar disparities in wealth……….According to Saez’s study, which Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman drew attention to at his New York Times blog, the top 10 percent of earners in America now receive nearly 50 percent of all the income earned in the United States, a higher percentage than they did during the 1920s.” -RAW STORY

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” -Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

” The concept of wealth is of significance in all areas of economics, especially development economics, yet the meaning of wealth is context-dependent and there is no universally agreed upon definition. Various definitions and concepts of wealth have been asserted by various individuals and in different contexts.^[2] Defining wealth can be a normative process with various ethical implications, since often wealth maximization is seen as a goal or is thought to be a normative principle of its own.” -Wikifuckinpedia

A Plutocracy.  Not an oligarchy.

Wake up.

Ahem.  What’s crazy is they kinda want to hang the rich.  It’s mad because everything they participate in is a thinly veiled concerted effort to further the flow of filthy lucre to those that would eventually enslave their dumb asses.  All these, who as a class, as in used to be “middle class”, have ceased to matter, yet they rail and snarl in favor of what causes their unrest to begin with.  I’ll put my toe in the water and call them all men who don’t realize they are costumed in dresses.  Elaborate rhinestone purses.  Silly stupid shoes.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Great Unwashed, the 1/4 paradigm, doth march with open weaponry.  Forgive them for they know not what they do.  Or not.  Stupid fucks.  No one wants to take your goddamn guns away if for no other reason than we can’t.  We can’t.  It will never happen.  It’s done.  Leave it alone.  I know a good many of you have them that shouldn’t.  At the end of the day, it’s all they seem to care about.  They are unable to define themselves in any other way or by any other cause save abortion, taxes and the most twisted hypocritical Christianity that I’m tired of being made to pay attention to.  It’s you I have a problem with, not your God.

Jesus is just allright with me but his fans are losers.  They eat paste.  They throw tantrums.  They act like assholes.

It is ultimately a sad thing, a uniquely one dimensional thing.  Foregone sacred by city blocks.  Bereft of humor and decency by leagues under the sea.

“Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives–and probably cost Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection–Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.”  -firedoglake

Every icon they foist and worship is a tiger constructed of the thinnest paper.  I’m sick of it.  You lie to us and yourselves.  You suck.  Teaparty and/or Teabaggers are far beyond reprehensible.

Not only did Reagan raise taxes over and over, but he sucked off the rich and we suddenly won the cold war.  A simple strategy.  We out spent them with your children’s money.  Walk in the park.  Ronnie was no sharper than a marble, but he didn’t bend us over the stove nearly as bad as Junior Dumbya.

Tax cuts to the rich under Dumbya cost us two Trillion, with a “T”, dollars.  Honestly and seriously.  No shit.

I am weary of them.  The media affords them far too much light.  On their very best day, twenty five percent of all living and breathing Americans.  Thus far, their biggest achievement has been to allow the stupid to feel a little better about themselves for not being so shamelessly manipulated and therefore stupid.  It’s just that they have been so shamelessly manipulated and are therefore acutely and chronically stupid.  Congratulations to one and all.

I hate stupid and there’s no chance of fixing it.  They just aren’t willing.  They honestly don’t care.

At the same time, I am curious to see the effect on the vote.  The GOP.  I’m wondering whether the season may not be so bad for the Democrats because ham fisted idealogues cannot hold they smoke.  What we have here is a bifurcated tail.  Bacon and chocolate.  Not for everybody but I’m on board.  Let’s see what happens next.

Bacon and chocolate.

What crawls up my snatch is the deliberate obfuscation and subsequent fomenting of fear and lies.

It’s true that the great unwashed  have been diabolically misled, but it’s still their fault.  Ignorance of the law is no more an excuse than lack of intellectual curiosity.

Really.  The Tea Party is stupid.  So goddamn dumb as to not realize that the tax rate they’ll be paying has been rolled back to the middle of the last century.  For the first time in a long time they are getting unhammered.  95% are seeing a reduction in federal income tax.  5% aren’t.  That last tax cut to the 5% cost us two trillion dollars.

Did I mention with a ‘T’?

That was dumb.

No Shit.

Look at my thumb.  Gee you’re dumb.

Now we are in Afghanistan again.  And broke.  Broken.  Our debt is less than most European countries.  America is too big to fail.  Really.  It is.  Therein lies the rub.

Bacon and chocolate.

I am rubber and you are glue.

Drinks for my friends.

Is it a coincidence that any food that is bad for you comes in loud packaging?

Think about it here in class.  The best snacks being passed around are the crinkliest.  I am bothered by this on more than one level.  A sonic manifestation for the guilt of indulgence.

I’m waiting to fail up one more time.

I have a kiosk at Costco.  I sell you on the idea that a design consultant will come to your home and measure your windows, dazzle you with samples and hold your hand while you and your family envision your new window treatments in all their glory and how much they will cost at no obligation.

It’s kind of intense.  Whoever you are, I’ve been watching you for somewhere between 15 and 75 feet depending on how busy it is.  By the time you get to me, I’ve sized you up and have an impression as well as an idea of what’s going on in your cart and what it’s contents may say about you.  I look at your shoes and how you’re dressed.  Your watch and jewelry.  Many fall short of the ideal of sartorial splendor.  It begins with eye contact and then it becomes guess and instinct.  Intuition.  If I make eye contact with you I may already have figured out what to say.  As often as not, I do that and just nod my head.  I monitor your passing from my periphery to see if you see what I’m selling.  You never know.  If I’m feeling it, I ask you about your windows or congratulate you on your new 72 inch LCD TV from VIZIO.  I might make fun of you for walking out with one item or ask what time the party starts if you egress with nothing but booze……..

I smile a lot.  I’m good at this.  I’m a salesman and I know what I’m doing.  I’ve sold everything from pipes to dildos to credit card merchant services.  I’ve done hundreds of trade shows.  Name tags are a decade of ubiquity for me.

I can sell ice cubes to Eskimos but have never been about the hard sell.

I’m a monkey on a stick.  At least I’m pretty anonymous.  Having grown up in this town, I recognize a fair number of faces but enjoy the luxury of not being recognized.

I love to watch people.

I used to have a Costco membership.  I had a  beautiful house and a hot fiancee.  Three felines and a big back yard.  Nice new cars in the garage.

There is no longer any reason for me to be a Costco member.

I’m firmly of the belief that some members take the idea of membership a little too seriously.  My display is across from the food court.  The smart ones grab a cart and enter at the exit to grab a snack before shopping.  Never shop for anything on an empty stomach.  Some people come just to eat.  A buck fifty for a big ass hot dog or polish and a carbonated cocktail of sugar but no booze is pretty serious business.  The pizza isn’t bad.  I just remembered I’ve never seen them maintain that onion dispenser in any way; just turn the crank and perfectly diced onions spill onto your dog effortlessly.  I work four hour shifts.  I can’t believe I haven’t clocked anyone so much as inserting a single onion.

The average body type trends toward endomorphic and is predominantly middle aged to senior citizen.  Either young people don’t often frequent Costco or the demographic paradigm has shifted dramatically in Carson City since my upbringing.  I see a few of you, my classmates in there.  I believe I’ve seen Bob Priest three times and had the good fortune to meet his wife.

There are regulars.  Costco has regulars.  The number of faces familiar to me continues to increase un abated.  Many of them don’t buy anything.  My guess is they show up out of boredom and for the free samples.  On weekends it’s a virtual buffet, a moveable feast.

There’s the guy with the gray scoop of hair all bristlecone pine or creosote bush shaped like a brain complete with frontal lobes and cerebral cortex piled high on his head in the most ridiculous of pompadours.  I figured out just today that his significant other is one of the sweet older ladies who passes out samples.

The thin woman in her mid sixties that still has serious sex appeal.  Petite and glamorous, she always chats with me a little, sunglasses on her head holding back her beautiful gray mane, tight pants and stilettos.  She is sweet and has intelligent eyes.  I think I’d like to share drinks and conversation with her.  I picture her driving a late model red Mercedes convertible.  She rarely buys anything but flowers or chocolates, yet she shops for hours.

The warm and pungent waft of three different pizza varieties.  Combo, Pepperoni or Cheese.  Tomato sauce, bubbling cheese, bell pepper and sausage.  I typically try to close a few deals before I take a stroll to the southeast corner for the buffet.  Brie and garlic raviolis, shrimp scampi, marinated tri tip, yogurt, juice, aged Irish cheddar, chili or lentil soup.  It irritates me that the yogurt, chili and lentil soup are served with a spork.  My father and I have discussed this.  How do you get at the last of it?

I am a DSR.  A Demonstration Sales Representative.  At the end of every shift I fax my DARs, Design Appointment Requests, into the home office in Portland Oregon.  I have run a $10 million dollar a year company.  I was hands on instrumental in guiding that company from shipping $20k a week to $50k a day.  I produced and engineered a record that sold nearly four million copies.

Then there is the brutal repetition of dreams.  Realized and impossible.

I keep moving.  The universe pays no mind.

Drinks for my friends.

A Note to White Bear

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 Tue at 9:49pm

Seems our lives, as if not already limited enough, are about to be, or already are depending on the bar you hang out in in cyberspace, ensnared in a ‘144 characters or less’ world of no goodness, as I was unable to post to your wall much of anything other than the usual “whatup dog?” which though mildly amusing like a morning rub and tug are not nearly enough to sustain or feed us to the point of providing real heel kicking call a good friend and scream into the phone “Goddamn I’m happy! Aren’t you?!” joy, the kind that some of us still claim as one of our rights for the mere fact that we’ve made it this far. So I figured I’d throw you a note while my able bodied team continues to work out the kinks to our big move to “dedicated servers.” Meaning yours truly cannot post freely on his own empire turf due to CPU overages they claim are due to traffic violations on the information super highway. So here’s that ten-year note. Or is it twenty? Either way, it’s been a long time my friend. Too long.

For those in the know (readers of the Transcendence Diaries), this is where Fishy reconnects with White Bear, the beer belching bourbon loving bearded bard of infinite alliteration who mentored young Fishy in his college years while he called Atlanta GA home for a few years. And so, after many, many, many years, the reply to the unexpected electronic letter that appeared from nowhere went something like this.

Dear White Bear,
As older brothers go… I’ve been missing you too; for years my friend. In response to your question, yeeaap (not too long but slightly drawn out) I was wondering the same thing… I feel our spheres are close enough to share a drink or a two-hour chat now and then. (and they don’t call me the ambassador for nothing. I find it awfully difficult to not get along with just about anyone truth be told. Not always to my benefit. But certainly to theirs.) I wholeheartedly agree with you on the Kennedys. Thought Bobby was the White Knight we’d been waiting for for decades. Idolize the man. Love but hate the behavior of the dark forces that took him from us, those same forces that now seem to control everything except my left nut, though even that I wouldn’t bet on.

In terms of money and fame, I’ve haphazardly and ironically made a fortune over the years while chasing that ever-elusive dream of stardom seemingly forever intent on ignoring my imagined greatness. Unlike you, I’m not interested in money. Just give me the influence so I can help right the Becks and O’Reillys of the world. I’m glad we’re still playing at the same table on that front, but I do lean more toward the “you don’t really believe they’re working for different people still do ya?” view. David Icke et al. (Oh how i would love to see you laugh that one out in person) But truly I bailed on all those left versus right legends long ago and tend to operate somewhere outside of but in between it all. Some people refer to it as conspiracy theory (which I find fallacious because that would imply something “secret” and there is no longer anything secret about the self-serving cabal of blood thirsty murdering fuckhead bastards that rules all governments of the world at this point.) Others call it libertarianism I’ve heard, but I haven’t had time to check. I just call it being human. Fluid. Bamboo. Never stop researching.

One thing I’ll tell ya is that your influence was a great and mighty one on the young Fishy, once known as Ed Hale, then Eddie Darling, then Guess Darling, and eventually the pretentious as all hell Ambassador. Wrote like a mother f*&ker for 20 straight years based on your many deep-voiced mid-of-night suggestions and ended up with a ridiculously over-weighted 5000 page novel series called The Adventures of Fishy, spent eight years blogging from it (based on a suggestion from another brother from a different mother who you might equally enjoy we call G2) to something called the Transcendence Diaries. See it here: www.transcendencediaries.com. Some damn good passages in there. A few I’m actually proud of. And not a year went by that I didn’t wonder what you’d think as I pounded those keys. Thank you for that.

By the way. Got married recently. You may remember my hopeless romantic ideals that true love really does exist somewhere out there if we just wait for it that I would occasionally espouse during those obligatory drunken late night talkies (did we actually get college credit for those as you once told me?) Well it turns out that for once I was right. It does. Sometimes it may be right under our noses… PLT, better known to readers as Princess Little Tree, had and has been my best friend for over seven years when I finally proposed to her on a row boat in the middle of a lake in Central Park on the sunniest day the Good Lord ever created. But indeed you really do just have to wait for it. I had plenty of just about everything else; so I knew what I was looking for. And you know what it was? (still is…) A “Yes.” Something we hear inside that we ourselves cannot muster up no matter how hard we try. One day I hope she gets the opportunity to meet you… I am sure she will consider it every bit the honor that I did way back when.

Very very good to hear from you my brother. Your presence was missed.
E (or F as the case may be)
;>

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Michael Douglass

Fuck me you little shit. David Icke, I’d sneer at ya.
I must say this. I am honored and flattered.

Understand, I was growing up too.

My memories of you are so fond. You fascinated me. A pompous sixteen or seventeen year old punk with a big ass thirsty brain who wore frilly blouses.

We met when you battled pimples and I was able to grow my first beard.

Honesty though. Painfully honest. Recklessly honest.

I’ve missed you too my friend. That I influenced you in any way is huge to me because honestly I meant to.

I have no idea why but I did.

I was pretty sure you were smarter than me but you needed course correction.

I’m about a third of the way through a rewrite of a novel and writing a book about the biz. I got this blog which I adore. I just get on it and spew or post a chapter from one of the books I hack away at.

Sheezus you flatter me. Thank you. From long ago and far away you have touched me today.

I’ll follow the link.

My old friend, how cool it is to hear from you. Let me count the ways.

I look back on my life and realize I’ve always had a collaborator, a partner, an intellectual counter strength for ballast and balance, I’ve long owned that you set the bar. Remember we called it “knowing”?

Exactly how simple is that?

Yesterday at 12:00am ·

 

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Ed Hale

Wow. My heart just grounded one step deeper into earthly comfort as you mentioned “Knowing.” For i carried the term quite far and wide over the years, long past the end-zone and off the field entirely into the world and beyond, sharing everyone what this cool guy from college and I used to talk about and how few actually even seem to get it… that… See More “to KNOW is to know you don’t know. If you flat out know you don’t know shit, then at least you KNOW. But if you think you know, then you don’t KNOW. I found a few other people who understood the concept… Harry Palmer (created the Avatar Materials – deep as all hell; talk about KNOWING. His first book blew me out of the bathtub i was reading it in at the time). Reconnected with an old Junior High crush known as Juliet who turned out to KNOW, G2 got it, and of course PLT… She so gracefully “doesn’t know” that she may just KNOW more than any of the rest of us. It honors me that you remember that. I had assumed you had abandoned the ideas of our youth.

And no i had no idea that you intentionally were attempting to have an influence, but rather thought that I was just leeching due to feeling you had so much to offer. I will never forget this subtle but impactful father to son talk we had sunning by the pool where you taught me that just because I may be generous at times does not imply that I can just assume others are the same way and that perhaps I should ask others before I eat their food or use their ______(fill in the blank). I LEARNED that. I took it with me. It changed me. I HEARD you. It helped. Tremendously. I always wanted to tell you that.

There were many such instances.

Yesterday at 12:22pm ·

 

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Ed Hale

PS — in direct line with this same thread, I took up a similar mantle with a young man who lived in the same building as I here in New York known as Little T. Found him when he was a mere 11. Had him reading Howard Zinn by age 13 and writing better than Van or Bruce by age 15. Recognized his genius long before he or his parents or teachers did. … See MoreFor a brief spell it felt as though I was his only lifeline… SO despite how difficult it was at times (I remembered your occasional frustration when I would fall) I stuck by his side. I often reflected back on you and your subtle don juan like life lessons even when I pained your ass just by my very presence. But without you there would be no Richard Bach, no Carlos Casteneda, no Kurt Vonnegut, no Steely Dan or Mozart… Little T couldn’t pass a urine test when I found him let alone a final or entrance exam. I knew all he needed was someone that understood he KNEW, that he was special. Happy to report that my work is now finished with him, that he not only gets straight A’s, attends Bard College two years earlier than the rest of his lot, but that i openly acknowledge that he is leagues more intelligent and more well read than I am already (he is 17 now) so I now use his lyrics for my songs rather than my own just due to the sheer humbling fact that they are so much better than mine half the time. Talk about a humbling experience… but i figure better to sing great lyrics penned by a 17 year old poet than to sing mediocre lyrics penned by myself just for the sake of doing so. My ego doesn’t need the tickle. I just want to sing great songs. He offers me that. He also strangely has turned into one of my best friends, which, well, talk about weird… but if we do KNOW anything, then it is that “age” may just have nothing to do with “it” at all.

Yesterday at 12:43pm ·

 

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Michael Douglass

Man. You haven’t changed but to hone yourself either. I’m sincerely so goddamned impressed I can’t stand it. Gorgeous honing my old friend. Your voice is so clear and honest, literally like bells.

I like who you are, who you’ve become. Because I know. Certain things after this long, we know for sure. I see you’ve become a human who’s easy on the eyes for them who see enough to understand there’s far less known than not.

“I find it awfully difficult to not get along with just about anyone truth be told” -that’s what I’m talking about. You were a bit of a cunt back then but I understood that much. … See More

We need face time.

I hesitate to say it it because it smacks of patronage, but I’m overwhelmingly proud of you. The tone of your typewritten voice is all I need. I tell you this as an equal.

Understand, I never considered you anything else. You were the smartest person I’d met at that point in my life. I worried a little that you might be smarter until I understood it just didn’t matter. I learned that from you my friend.

I understood I didn’t have to worry about every good brain I came across but rather aspire to appreciate it. It helps me as of today.

Later, I met a lot of people way smarter than me and ended up grateful for that lesson.

You taught me plenty my friend, much of it by example. I have been grateful to know you since we met and have thought about you too over time.

The idea of “knowing” meaning we can’t begin to be so enlightened as to even understand understand what we don’t know, I doubt to be an exclusive concept, but I believe you and I put it into those specific terms together. It never was my idea, it was ours. I could never abandon such a thing. Profound truth. We know it now for sure don’t we?

That you’ve mentored someone into a muse must fit into some rare and delicate self actualization. I trained a few engineers but …………yes, age has nothing to do with “it”.

Allow me to update you: “……….don’t doubt that the randomness of life is in some way synchronized with all the things that we don’t understand about the universe. It’s what we do know that confounds us. All the while, what we don’t know blows us along. ” -I wrote that.

I’m traveling through an exasperating period in life. Frustrating. I haven’t stopped learning and understanding new things however.
It never stops as I’m sure you know.

It would be huge to drink dirty cheap whiskey with you.

Someday soon I hope.

10 minutes ago ·

 

Drinks for my friends.

He is my uncle Larry.  One of eleven brothers and sisters on my mother’s side.

A jockey.  A laborer.  A father, son, brother, cousin and uncle.  No doubt a grandfather.  I really don’t know him as well as I would like.

He’s a mild misanthrope.

Broken collar bones, shoulders, arms, knees and fearlessness.  A slight man atop a charging behemoth; both human and beast taught most all of speed and finish line.  Grace thereof a fortunate and beautiful artifact of an archaic contest.  Forty seven miles an hour on a twelve hundred pound engine wearing a vest that would merely call sexuality into question at any other venue.

A man who most certainly loves in his very own way.  You’ll see what I mean.

He and uncle Skid were just here last week.

I call him uncle Skid.  I didn’t make it up.

He hugged me goodbye and said in my ear that he was glad I was here.  I thought he meant to tell me I was doing some good here with my parents.  My father having suffered numerous injuries and illnesses, both taking an enormous toll on he as well as my mother.  I thanked him for saying it and he reassured me I was.  I told both he and Uncle Skid that I loved them and they told me that too.

Before I was five I learned to fear him.  When the phone rang at two a.m. there was no one else it could be but my mother’s little brother.  Uncle Larry.  On his way to some track in California to race.  Maybe some desert town for a quick purse.  Uncle Larry confused me.  I loved him and he was good to me……..not nearly as good to me as uncle Danny was.

All these people are chapters.

I was but a toddler the first time he electrocuted me with the glorified cattle prod he carried at all times.  He reached into his pocket as he asked did I want to see his frog?  He had it on him at all times to shock the shit out of whatever human he may come across I guess.  I remember the hollering of uncles and cousins subjected to it.  He once laid in wait in a San Francisco motel room until his younger brother entered the shower, he dumped ice water on him and shocked him when he fled.  We heard the screams.  We were four or five doors down.  The sun wasn’t even close to ready for the morning.

Yeah, he’s a funny little bastard.

The whole family is just a little off.

He was fond of using a tissue and putting it back in the box.  One day shortly after Christmas my family returned home to discover the tree in the front yard festooned with every bra, pantie and undergarment my mother owned.  My mother’s middle name is Lenore.  He’s called her “Manure” ever since I can remember.

Until I was ten, my feet would churn before they ever hit the ground if he reached for his pocket.  By the time I was twelve or thirteen I was probably big enough to kick his ass.  I woke one morning in Scottsdale Arizona with his dirty socks in my mouth.  He would hide crab or lobster shells or a soiled diaper in your car in August.

Uncle Larry is a bit of a sociopath.  I sense he honestly can’t help it.  It has a lot to do with why I like him.

A few years back he and my uncle Skid showed up and spent time visiting my sister and her family.  As per normal, any member of my mother’s family is always willing to help in any way they can.  All the brothers and brothers-in-law are handy and capable of anything from plumbing, construction, heating & air conditioning to electrical to concrete.  Together they could build a nice house.  They covet a challenge and to the man, all believe they can fix anything.  They are a clever and capable clan.  I don’t recall exactly what my sister needed done but Uncle Skip as everyone else calls him, and Uncle Larry, were more than willing to lend hands.

My nephews ended up with fiberglass insulation in their beds.  Uncle Larry advised them the the next morning that the very best thing was to take a shower just as hot as they could stand.

I’m forty five years old and I lock my bedroom door when uncle Larry is in town.  My niece and nephews now do the same.

For what it’s worth, I did a pretty thorough job of returning all my uncle’s favors at a family reunion some years back  I called an executive order on the fish caught in the creek that day and that’s all I can say for reasons of national security.  He plays with me like he doesn’t know it was me but I know he knows so I just lie my ass off about every aspect of it.

He is one funny little bastard.

I don’t worry too much about uncle Skip when he’s around by himself or with anyone but Larry.

They have a bond.  It’s interesting.  Uncle Skid is basically a sweet metrosexual but he can swing a hammer and dig a hole.  He could maybe be in the Village People but he’d need to buff up quite a bit.  Let me just tell you this about my uncle Skid who’s real name is Ralph, he used to have a handlebar mustache.  He’s a good looking, well groomed accomplished man or guy.  My uncle Skid rocks.

My uncle Larry is one obstreperous, ornery, mischievous sonafabitch and I love him too.  They are Hardings and I need to tell you what that means.  My last name is Douglass, but it is with pride and humility I tell you I’m a Harding too.  In many ways, Uncle Larry is no different than any other Harding.  My mother’s family is enormous, I believe I have over forty cousins.  Almost without exception, any one of these people would do whatever and jump at the chance to drop everything, sacrifice anything, to help anyone they love and care for whether they are family or not.  It is one very loyal tribe.  Just about everyone of them has a sense of humor somewhere between childish and devious.

They do love to laugh.

It is a family who’s love and respect for each other is more than unlikely for it’s size.

The in law uncles understand they are Hardings.  The in law aunts have been a bit more reluctant but they have succumbed or moved on.  It’s a thing.  Like The Borg from Picard era Star Trek.  Assimilation.

The rooster weather vane blew off the folks’ house this winter and my uncle Fred reattached it.  I overheard him on the phone tell someone that “Doug’s cock fell off so I screwed it back on”.  His last name is Phillips but he’s a Harding.  He’s a little bit of a whack job Republican.  Lives in the sticks and has an elaborate room/vault for the family’s guns.  I hear it’s impressive.  I’ll be the judge.  Uncle Fred is one of my favorites and always has been despite how profoundly different we are.  He and my uncle Bob take inordinate pride in any and all things they find along the road.  Chainsaws, guns, tools……  I miss my uncle Bob.  He likes to laugh.  A tall gangly mouth breather with a mysterious but warm sense of humor who had some kind of fortune to fall in love with my aunt Shirley.

Poor bastard.  You want everybody to be aware of something, tell my aunt Shirley.  For better and for worse, she is the Harding Hotline.  She sees it as a public service.  I adore her.  She loves hard.  If she loves you she loves you.

Cousin Scotty, who has nothing to do with any of this, once stabbed his licorice ice cream cone onto the enormous butt of a woman wearing white stretch pants walking by in a shopping mall. He looked at me and giggled.  He was missing his two front teeth.

They are all chapters.  It’s a close family.

Larry is an odd little man with big ass ears.  The ears and a sizable gap between the two front teeth, “The Harding Split”, are a genetic family marker.  Many in the family have since erased the tooth gap via modern orthodontics.  Mother lost hers in a car accident at eighteen so she’s long since been repaired.  Larry has the ears but must have had his grill restored.  I’m grateful to say I inherited neither.

He speaks in a somewhat nasally but gravelly twang.  His tone is smartass.  His hair has nearly disappeared on top and his build is particularly slight from the endless chemo and radiation treatments.

I remember him as an athlete.  A good one.  A smart one.  A man who knew what he was doing.  Always a little unpredictable.  Way too much piss and vinegar.  He smirked all the time.  He has always had smarts in his eyes.

About two and a half years ago he was suffering from chronic abdominal pain.  Initial doctor visits turned up nothing.  Eventually he ended up in an ER where it was discovered his body was riddled with stage four cancer that had spread from his colon.  My eyes leaked tears when my mother gave me the news on the phone.  By then, the percentage of him that had been consumed by sheer blackness was near overwhelming.  Prognosis grim.  My mind that night.  A protracted war with an all but inevitable surrender.  The news took my wind and kicked my legs from beneath me.

I wanted to know him better.

So he fought.  He battled.  He waged war by never letting his spirit or will be compromised in any way.  Any manner of subjugation to this potential death that certainly loomed over every waking second and doubtless inked his slumber in all manner of hopeless and desperate ways, was never allowed the light of his days in any way for anyone to see.  When he was all of 90lbs, gums bleeding and wearing a colostomy bag, he smiled and carried on with life.  There was no denial or self delusion, but rather a simple and resolute conviction that he would kick and punch until the contest came to an end.

He was and is a tough as nails and a perpetually optimistic clown of all trades.  He beat it.  I’m convinced it was sheer force of will.  Speaking only for myself, I was sure he was a goner.  I knew he’d bloody the nose and lip of blackness but I didn’t estimate him to have nearly enough fortitude or resolve to knock it down because nobody does with any such brand of so insidious and pervasive a malaise.

But, as an agnostic, I’m tempted to thank God that he did.  I am grateful.  Despite everything I’ve recounted, he is both hysterically funny and what my mother describes simply as a “love”.  He loves sincerely.  He would do and has done anything for those he loves.  He is a Harding.   He would sabotage you in a heartbeat while on your feet but he would carry you to bed if you were down.

If you share blood or friendship with a Harding or an in-law thereof, count your blessings.

Not too many months ago, he began to experience pain in his back.  He went to a chiropractor, to no avail.  Long story short, spots of cancer were discovered on his spine.  Radiation treatments, half a regimen of a dozen chemo treatments and he shows up here to meet uncle Skip for a visit with us.  He looks pretty good but a little like Gollum and I tell him as much.  This time he’s losing his hair.  I think I hope he was enough in the wind to not remember I said that or at least not have heard me.  Maybe I don’t care all that much given the Geneva Conventions on torture he violated with me as a child.

Some few days before they arrive, mother and I sit and watch two sections of backyard fence capitulate to a windstorm while having cigarettes and gin on the back patio.  Dad has a bum wing so mom calls uncle Skip and advises him to bring work clothes and call uncle Larry to do the same.  Easter Sunday I find myself with my two uncles attempting to repair the fence.  We get it done and it’s hell for stout.  The truth and cliche’ of all good stories is that it was the journey.

I’ve been pretty busy the last thirty years.  Careers and fiancee’s and new houses and the like.  Never had enough time for my parents much less my extended family.  The last year has borne witness to a pretty spectacular face plant on my part.  You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you can get what you need.  The silver lining to my very dark cloud has manifested itself in many many ways.  I had more fun in the wind and weather repairing that fence with my two uncles than I’ve had in recent or ancient memory doing anything.  The banter and teasing back and forth was profoundly ridiculous.  Crude.  Adolescent.  It was mean and vulgar and completely lacking in respect, decorum or discretion.  When uncle was unable to find a hole for a bolt or nail he was chastised for being unable to for a lack of hair around it.  We made fun of my old man in absentia for having only one eye.  If he sighted down the fence from his disadvantaged angle, he’d never detect the bow we ended up with.   When we were close to done, uncle Skid leaped on me.  Uncle Skid is a kid.  It’s why he’s so shiny.

There was a point where I noticed for the first time my uncle Larry’s hands.  He’d been wearing gloves but took them off for whatever reason.  They were very old hands.  Much older than the body they belonged to.  I was shocked and did a mental double take.  The sight hit me hard.  My tailbone ached and I needed to evacuate.  His battle with the blackness and subsequent treatment had rendered them nearly translucent.  Mother says she noticed it before, the last cancer, and it’s not permanent.  I could see every vein and half imagined the bones beneath.  I was reminded of his father’s hands.  My grandfather’s hands, before he died after some ninety five years.

Cancer fucking cancer.

We came in from the cold and had beers to continue mocking and teasing.

I will tell you that although he has more treatments scheduled, he is once again cancer free and officially in remission.  Whenever I think of this fact, my heart feels about to burst like a berry pie dropped from some guest window.

What goes up must come down (cowbell enters)
Spinning wheel got to go ’round (full drum kit enters)
Talking ’bout your troubles it’s a crying sin
Ride a painted pony let the Spinning wheel spin

Drinks for my friends.

“…..perfect unrepresentative left-wing machine dedicated to a secular socialist future.” -Newt Gingrich at the Southern Leadership Conference

Newt, the slimy little fucker, is far from stupid.  He knows the difference between socialism and what’s going on here.  By now they all do.  The acolytes.  They know that by their definitions of socialism, police, fire and library services would all be communist bovines for slaughter.  This is what makes them assholes.  They know and understand they are lying through their wicked teeth and across their lizard tongues.

Pricks.

The thing is this, the 1/4 paradigm or the great unwashed, don’t know or even suspect a goddamn thing.  They don’t ask questions.  They hate us.  Makes sense.  I hate them too.  Otherwise perfectly rational human beings.  Sometimes.  The things they don’t ask about are the the things they’re not rational about.  The less they ask, well, you see where I’m going with this.  They take pride in being underinformed.

The light in the fridge goes out when you shut the door?  What about the one over the stove?

They may be angry because they have begun to understand they are among the inevitable one in four.  I myself avoided an IQ test until my late thirties.  I just didn’t need any proof that I might actually be stupid.  I think they begin to smell something, they have begun the discomfort of not fitting in at a real job.  They realize they might be sliding toward a universal stupid.  One that everyone else recognizes.  One they can’t figure out.  They only have a chance for something in common with one of every four they meet.

They are lonely and pissed off.  Really bitter.

Wanna know why?

You’ll forgive the triteness of my thrust I hope.  That was funny.  But it really is the media.  Seriously.  An extravagantly trite thrust.  FOX NEWS is misanthropes anonymous.  All the air personalities and everyone who watches the incompetent and dishonest train wreck.  You know, the socially retarded, anal and brainal retentive, paranoid and spiritually compelled by some form of Christianity but so obviously empty they can’t help but judge everyone that isn’t like them?  Sometimes they even execute a sentence or two.

See, that was a pun.

Sometimes they wear pointy white hoods to fit their pointy white heads.  It seems like there might be quite a few of them but there’s not.  Americans love loud and stupid any way they can get it.  We just want to chew our nails or bite our palms.

It’s so sad.  I was really starting to think I could trust Newt.  Didn’t he and Hillary make bffs a while back?

My father would say “…..in a pig’s ass.”

Newt Gingrich sucks.

See here, the deal is this, these asswipes that are being so dishonest with their constituents as well as the public at large, at the same time they are at the very very least being egregiously intellectually dishonest with themselves.  They are husks.  Newt and Robertson, McConnell and Boehner.  While Hannity and Limbaugh can be a bit more nimble………………. Bachmann and Palin is a pairing/cage fight we’d all like to see.  There is one absolute sweeping generalization I can make about the great unwashed.  They are repressed.  Not just sexually, despite hating dildos almost as much as health care.

Fear of a black planet.

Give me a break.  Fucking Coburn blocking unemployment benefits tells us all we need to know.  They believe the average, out of work man or woman expects a hand out.  A triter thrust still but I whip it in anyway…………    What people want is a hand.  These people don’t want a free goddamn lunch.  They want a job.  Self respect.  Suspending their benefits for some bullshit inconsistent principal makes me wonder if you don’t belong in a dishwasher.  As in dish.  A DISH.  Just a dish…………

Asshole.

I’m going to go out with grace.  I’m still swinging, however.  I know the answer to all of the above and it’s discouragingly simple.  If you think you know the answer, leave it as a comment.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve never been able to stand those who would take themselves too seriously.  It is neon for loser and or phony.  Hand in hand are those who would believe they are smarter than they actually are.  Like they know something you don’t while they know even less but expectorate good energy after bad convincing folks they do indeed know something, some thing, and and stand resolutely for it.   It’s disgusting.

The degree of intellectual dishonesty chaps my motherfucking ass.

We are talking about Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.  The best and brightest from the GOP.  Crowdpleasers.  It’s true, they are shiny.  True, that they are the best the party has.  How sad is that?  I’m gonna go all rogue sexist, misogynist and chauvinist on you here here and invite them to my pillows.  Good on the stump.  See what I’m saying?  Hot dumb brunettes.  My kinda cheerleaders.

McCain attempts to slip slide away from ‘Mavericky’ while welcoming Palin onto his stump.

Heh.

I’ve dated very few blonds.

Where were they today?  Minnesota.  Oh boy.  The land of cankles.  No wonder they adore.  It is this simple.  Women want to be them and men want to bone them and nobody who shows up cares that they are as dumb as they so obviously are because they cater to the lowest common denominator and that’s who shows up.  The great unwashed.  The 1/4 Paradigm.

I believe the media is gullible and reprehensible but two vacuous hags doth entertain me.  We need a bikini contest and a talent segment.

Bring it!

Run these ignorant bitches.  I swear I can’t wait.

They will either be our demise or our cautionary tale.  Either way, it is a lesson the electorate needs to swallow.   These are, without a doubt, stupid and crazy bitches and if we embrace them, well then, we deserve them and the havoc they would wreak.

On the other hand, and I’m not willing to hold my breath, they may just be the example we need to prod us from our slumber enough to study the issues and the candidates for once.  I’m here to tell you that I look at these two broads and wonder just what the fuck.  They have both demonstrated ignorance beyond what any elected official should be in possession of.  Both have stepped in ass, thigh deep, more than a handful of times.  Shit has come out of either mouth that should have been slapped out prior to becoming a teenager.  I swear to God I adore and respect women more than I do men but I’m here to tell you that these are two extraordinarily dumb cunts.

Both were shameless in propagating with egregious profligation the idea of “death panels” when it came to health care.  Both have sought and seized every opportunity to de-legitimize the elected President, at and with, any opportunity regardless of obvious glaring fiction.

“Did you ever hear of a wish sandwich? Well it’s the kind of sandwich
where you’re supposed to take two pieces of bread and wish you had some
meat” -The Blues Brothers.

I hate that we’re still here.  That bullshit is still at nose level.  That the Palins and Bachmanns of the world can still find audience.  I hate it.  I do hope their hubris is enough for them to continue however.  We need them.  We need their stupidity.  We so need their soiled example as an abject lesson.  We actually deserve it.

It becomes safer and safer to say that the the Tea Party will end up splitting the Republican vote much to their detriment.  Can you say Ross Perot?  That is my wish.  That is my hope.  That is my prognosis.  I’m a glass full kinda guy.

My fear is the violence that is nearly inevitable.

Drinks for my friends.

This weeks assignment in my advanced memoir & autobiography class:  “…you are encouraged to find meaning in other sounds, and to convey that meaning largely by describing the sounds themselves.”

Where do I begin?  I can be lulled to sleep by the sound of heels clicking in a mall or chalk on a chalkboard.  Water trickling, ice clinking, waves lapping, rocks tumbling or bacon frying all hypnotize me.  A tiny fraction for example.  I played the drums for years.  I was never very good but my kit always sounded better than everyone else’s.  Once I understood that my passion for music had so much to do with the sound of it as opposed to melody and lyrics and not that I didn’t have a profound appreciation for those things, I plotted a course to become an audio engineer.

I knew I knew.

I did just that.

It’s a huge subject for me.  What I’ve come to realize is that it’s not merely sound that stirs me so vehemently.  It’s all my senses.  I can’t know that I’m different in this way, but I suspect it.  I’m so easily overwhelmed by what I observe.  I love to cook.  It occurs to me to be enjoyed by the same part of my brain that was so rewarded by mixing records.  It’s all about the combination of flavors and textures.  My repertoire is not extensive but what I do, I do well.  I try to pair my efforts with an appropriate wine.  Sometimes the wine is complimentary and sometimes it represents a ballast or contrast.

Smokey old vine Zinfandel with homemade pizza, sauvignon blanc with an arugula and asiago salad  or port with Stilton bleu cheese for example.  I taste each dish and its oenophilic accompaniment in my head before I begin.  I never cook with a recipe.  I gather all the flavors ahead of time and commence to combining them.  I’m not opposed to recipes, it’s just that they don’t often look like they taste like what I imagine in my head.  My approach confounds my mother somewhat.  She’s an excellent cook but doesn’t always understand my seat of the pants approach.  I can taste it ahead of time or I wouldn’t be able to prepare it.  I can see the meal complete with the soft focus f-stop photography of a food magazine.  I almost always plate it myself.

When I read or write, it’s a movie in my head.  I see it, smell it, hear it and taste it.  The best records I ever made I could hear almost complete in my head within the very first days of recording them.

It occurs to me that this assignment is meant to be about the senses in general and with obvious reason directs focus to one in particular.  I can’t separate them however.  I’ve no idea whether this makes me somehow different or unusual.  There is no way for me to ever know because I simply cannot climb into someone else’s head.  Most of my friends are artists of one kind or another.  I think it’s because they see and interpret things with the same degree of awe that I do. I believe everyone one does to one degree or another, it’s just impossible to measure or quantify.

Dude, it’s so subjective.

The distinguishing characteristic of humans from all other species is without a doubt, art.

Imagination is the purest and most important sense and I know I’m intimate with it.  For me it is fundamentally intrinsic.  I see it in my head.  I can feel it and touch it.  I can’t help that it is my prevailing impetus.  Without my hyperactive imagination, I would be blind.  I was in analysis for a time and my therapist told me I was hyper vigilant and commented often on the noise she was sure I experienced in my head.  I would rather die than have it somehow revoked.  I imagine that were it to disappear, I would go gentle into that good night.

Drinks for my friends.

“This is a big fucking deal”  -Joe Biden.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  -MLK

The Devil is thriving in the Catholic church.

The Ides of March have passed.

The health care bill passed with some drama.  As it should.

Outside, the wind blows hard.

My favorite part is that they lied without shame and cheated overtly and they still lost with ceremony all around them on worldwide television.  Republicans sucked the other day like they haven’t in decades and it was all on display.  They barked like dogs and continue to whine like toddlers.  Shameless.

I readily confess I don’t have my brain wrapped entirely around this bill and some specifics of the reconciliation language.  I have been paying attention.  I didn’t for a time and then I did again.  I got kinda sick of it all.  It does suck.  The bill.  As in sucking chest wound suck.  A mandate without fierce oversight, a mechanism to not only compete but provide accountability and barometric pressure is pure dumb.

A license to ill.

It was on it’s head already.  I sort of understand the economic imperative behind the mandate but throw us a bone bitches or don’t even bother touching me there.

 

I just can’t help but get caught up in the symbolism.  I know the bill sucks but it does accomplish some pretty important shit.  I’ll defer to the fantastic Ms. Maddow:

“On September 23rd…

• All kids get covered (no pre-existing conditions)
  
• Can’t get dropped if you get sick (no more insurance companies dropping you)
  
• No more lifetime limits (on benefits)
  
• Children can stay on until 26 (coverage up to that age)
  

On January 1, 2011…

• Premium payment reformed (80-85% for medical care) with rebate if you don’t use coverage
  
• Free Medicare preventative care (no co-pays)
  

By 2014…

• Total ban on all pre-existing condition denials
  
• Health exchanges open
  
• End to annual limits on benefits

Republicans want to repeal this…”  -democraticunderground.com

I’m not sure I want to “do” Rachel but I’m positive I want to get her drunk and cuddle.

So yeah, some good stuff.  It’s just that it barely flirts with incentive for fairness via non profit competition.

That’s the part I liked the most when we started this whole thing.  I see it as key.  Public option, extended Medicare, whatever.  Vital.  We have miles to go before we sleep.

Single payer, Universal, whatever label you choose and whomever you choose to accuse,  the richest spender nation on the planet ought to be covering it’s people.  We buy half of all the weapons.  Half of all of them.  Half of all the weapons made for war, we buy.  I don’t think we’re as big as Canada geographically, but our dick is way bigger.  Can you hear me now?  WAY bigger.  We could take Canada in 72 hours without the military.  They don’t have many guns but we do.

What exactly are health exchanges?  We now know they will be open.  How many?  Where?  I’ll assume that’s good news.  A place to trade bandages and syringes.  Do I have to volunteer?  I’m gonna have to choke a bitch.  I’m gonna have to read this bill and the 157 page reconciliation.  I’m working like twelve hours a week and taking a class.  You can see how I’m underwater.

My feet hurt and it’s humiliating.

It’s a simple problem and the answer is simple.  Shave five or fifteen cents off the defense budget and we can throw in some jobs for infrastructure.  Health care, jobs and mortgage relief.  We spend half the entire global budget on weapons and ten times as much as our nearest competitor.  China.  That there is my idea of Socialism, spending way too much of the people’s money on things they vehemently disagree with.  Wait, that’s Communism.  Isn’t it?  When they can’t afford roof and bread it is.  There is your Goddamn communism.

That there is your buttock.

Wars are your ass.

Your ass mam, has gone missing.

I’m trying to make a point here.  We still are a wealthy nation, despite our recent financial regress.  Much of it was concentrated without equity in the last decade but there is plenty of money right here in River City.  There is no reason, moral or fiscal, we should be denied this right.  It insults my intelligence when anyone complains about paying for it.  They talk about health care being 15 to 18 percent of our GDP.  The defense budget is well over half of every dollar you pay in taxes.  We spend so much fucking money on weapons, it makes the world go round.

Literally.  The world turns because of America’s efforts to be able to kill everyone of us.  Thank God for us.  Don’t piss us off.

Still, I’m impressed and finally proud again of the Democrats.  They pulled it off and scared the crap quite literally out of the obstructionist asstards by supplying them with an example of lockstep so long taken for granted as a fundament in the Republican playbook.  Smoked them at their own game.  Here’s hoping this bodes well and emboldens this heretofore assemblage of invertebrates.  See little Billy, we knew you could do it.  Now get your little ass back out there because the game isn’t even half over.  Be a Democrat for fucks sake.

Now the crazies come out like corpses of Laurel & Hardy with giant red eyed rats speeding off and away from their persons and pockets and folds.  Slack jawed zombies repeating obsolete talking points and swinging scythes.  The Baggers.  The Birthers.  The Hawks, Neocons, Bigots and Bible thumpers.  What an egregious ship of fools.  Obsructionist pricks for infamy.  Avoid their rodent familiars and do not dance with either of any of them.

It’s not safe to drink their liquor.

They really are beginning to parody themselves.

I’ve always thought that being a good loser is important.  I’ve been on the losing end enough to approach being gracious I think.  I’m hopeful that losing has humbled me, it sucks and it shames me but I try to learn and stuff and be polite about it.  The way one loses speaks volumes about one’s character.  If you listened to Boehner on the floor the other night or The Human Shitsmear and Butt Boy Hannity these last few mornings you might think the sky is about to kill you in your bed.

Not good losers, but excellent assholes.

These pricks are the epitome of sore losers along with the entire lock step, teeth full of Orios, lime green plastic tumbler full of cherry Kool Aid and rum mouth breathing members of the 1/4 Paradigm.  That was a pretty cool sentence.  If you don’t know about the 1/4 paradigm, categories are on the right on the main page.  Just scroll down.  I have a fairly general theory about relativity and how it applies without bias but with predictable pattern in a sociopolitical context.  I offer a bold constant.

I don’t really know about other countries but I understand very well that one of every four people in this country are ignorant dipshits.  My “1/4 Paradigm”.  In stores near you.

You’d think an invitation was extended to a banquet just ahead of the apocalypse.  You’d think because we passed a weak ass health care bill we were courting Satan himself.  The bill sucks.  Hello irony.  Fuck us in the neck.

The reaction has been of the meanest of spirit and bafflingly irrational.  Childish and callow.  Pointless.  Some fourteen state attorneys general have or intend to file suit.  Futile.  Not going to happen, if any single case enjoys a day in court it will be ashes, ashes and they will all fall down.  A waste of time money and the attention of even the dumbest citizens.  Give me a break.  Might as well piss up a rope.

Children of the corn.

What has my attention is the ugly and still gathering brutal reaction of the great unwashed.

Bricks through windows and awful terrorizing threats directed at our elected representatives that have finally and with courage, attempted the right thing on behalf of us all.  Stupak came around and they went after him like a common enemy.  Cheers Bart.  Those were your people.  An articulate bunch.  Very brave and very cool.

Kucinich is still the king of composure and principal.  What a class act.  I think Maddow and Kucinich should snuggle.  Just then, Dennis’ hot, six foot tall, copper haired, wife with a scorching accent enters the room in a black skirt, pumps and a line up the back of the stocking.  Nobody gets the Kucinich cool like I do.

Cantor’s claim of a bullet is looking dubious.  I bet that little prick is lying.

What frightens me is the virulence and vehemence, the irrational fury of those that would oppose a leap forward.

What makes me sick is the publicly elected officials who foment such dehumanizing disregard for common decency and difference of, or deference for, an opinion.  This is America.  We aren’t ever going to be herded onto boxcars for mass extermination.  If it ever happens here it will last an afternoon, maybe a day.  I’m not referencing irresponsible roundheads like Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck but rather the Boehners, Bachmanns, Cantors, Kings, Grassleys and Demints.  Allegedly responsible representatives who hobby, trade and wage in fear and dangerous incendiary nonsense.

Dirty, filthy immoral bastards who would blow anyone for $20k.  How do these people get taken seriously?  See above.

They deliberately cultivate and collect the same brand of bigoted, racist and ignorant subhuman that so violently opposed civil rights legislation.  Dumbass mouth breathing fucktards.  A handful of those folks have ended up being assassins.  Murderers.

American tradition and legacy is such that justice and liberty for all eventually prevails.  When there is will there is way.

It can take a while and never without a price.  The vulgar and profane consistently manage to extract more than a pound of flesh.  They are arrogant and bereft of humility.  At this pace, there will be blood.

They will go too far unfortunately and their cause will be consigned to history as ill advised and malattempted.  Political leprosy.  Social pariahs.  Just like McCarthy, Nixon and Dumbya’s entire posse.

These people are as ridiculous as they are dangerous.  There will be blood.

Just do the best you can to think peace.  It’s gonna get ugly.

It just might start rural.

All these earth quakes.  Bound to be a volcano.  See what I’m saying?

Health care is no mere privilege but a right that comes with being born human at least.  I believe that.  I always will.

Drinks for my friends.

Da do, da do, da do, da doont.

shoooom!

The watch looks still to me, it reads five after nine.  For days it reads five after nine. Everyone else can see the time while they admire it.  I think the way they look at it would compel them to tell me if it’s stopped.  I hope. People comment on it often.  I look at the second hand but can’t see it moving.  If someone asks me the time, I turn my wrist and hold it up or my answer will be a guess. Sometimes they say the time they see out loud as though I’m waiting to hear it.

I am.

So confused.

A pair of those reading glasses might allow me to appear less culpable.  I could fumble for them as I hold up my wrist.

If he’s of me in any way at all, he must own his cowardice.  I believe he does.  I see it in him.  Just like me.  He’d rather just fuck with me than confront me.  He shows me what he can do but he never comes straight at me.  A jackal.  A pussy.  Just like me.  He’s always running.

I’m going to kill him.

He thinks I can’t or won’t.

I think I can.

I submitted to a bully once. I was in the sixth grade. I was confused. He wasn’t any bigger, he was simply more evil. Mean. For awhile, I was afraid. I went to ridiculous ends to avoid him. I stole a small hunting knife from a sporting goods store. I would duct tape the leather sheath to my leg before I went to school.  I was desperately afraid of his face and his capacity for cruelty.

I pictured stabbing him.  I believe I would have.

One day the entire student body sat in the gymnasium bleachers for an assembly. A giant red brick structure built in the thirties with an ancient oval roof. Autumn. Cold inside, colder outside. I sat with my friends and spit Skoal on the floor. All of us had our coats on. We did our best to casually smear the tobacco juice into ambiguous weather puddles with our feet.

My friend Lance was next to me. He didn’t chew tobacco. He’s now some sort of neurological physical therapist and or surgeon.

His last name was Dalton and I could feel him behind me.  Every time the crowd would gasp or jeer at the ridiculous civil defense film on the soft sell of nuclear attack we were being shown, he’d hit me hard on the back with fist and middle knuckle.

It didn’t take long for Lance to clock it, look me in the eye and say “Who is this fuck?”

Dalton had always been a coward. He’d always confront me with his friends around him or never at least in a crowd where there was a chance of me having an ally. I would back down, because my shame was my own. There was no one else to see it.

This was different. He’d grown bold. I don’t think he was very smart. He certainly hadn’t thought far enough ahead to understand the corner he’d backed me into. Fear is a great force multiplier.  Fear can be everything.

I didn’t snap, but my decision came quick. I was humiliated and terrified.  I exploded. I spun around and swung as hard as I could for his head. He turned away in anticipation of the blow and my fist landed solid with a pulchritudinous smack on his ear.  It was all I had until he toppled like a raw turkey carcass on a tripod with a shit leg.  I went to work.  I swung and swung, over and over.  He bled and pleaded.  His blood and snot were all over my hands and sleeves.  They pulled me off and away from him.

He spent the rest of the afternoon sobbing and bleeding in the nurse’s office.

His meat was under my fist.  I defeated him.  He was mere flesh and fear.

It’s time for my fist again.

I am sure. I begin to understand him. It will be easier if I lure to him to a mall or a bar instead of an empty field or a park at night. I will kill him. We are the same he and I.  I am smarter.  I wonder how well he understands that.

I will kill him.

Does he know to look inside to figure me out?

Does he drink wine with his meat?

I’m giving him the name him Richie Cunningham.

I will kill Richie Cunningham.

Opie is toast.

The night is pleasant. Barely a moon. I’ve been asleep, the fire is embers. The carafe of water is empty and I figure that I can’t hold out until morning.

Something I hate; finding a bathroom in a strange house in the middle of the night.

In a hotel room, I just bounce around until my feet feel cool tile.

Whatever, I’m like a fire hydrant. I feel good. Energy.  I throw off the blanket and bounce up. Legs are good.  Barely sore.  Past the den and there’s a small bathroom with a light on the left just beyond the kitchen.  Thoughtful of Carlo.

There’s an actual urinal with a heavy duty chrome flush, what looks like a quartz puck that smells like fresh and disinfected heartburn, and one of those long low toilets with a black seat and an identical chrome flush all municipal style. White tile. It’s clean and smells good with an institutional dispenser that spits brown paper when I turn the crank.  The sink has no cabinet and is a white  deep porcelain tooth protruding from the wall.  A vaguely art deco wall mounted soap sprinkler vomits pink powder when I toggle the lever back and forth. I smell pine.

I piss.

I’m back in grade school.

As I’m draining I see the open door leading to the kitchen.

I rinse my hands again.

I decide to make my way back through the kitchen. It’s smaller in the dark.

I come around to the couch and sink back into it’s comfort.

I’m thinking I expect what’s next.  It begins as deja vu.  Creepy.

Richie smacks his hand on the windows. Running around the deck. Frustrated and in a frenzy. I’m spooked but I know he can’t get in or he’d be in.

I attack the fucking window.  I bang hard on it with my knuckles and demand that he look at me.  I scream at this fuck to look at me.  I want to see him. Close.  So I do.  It shocks me.  His eyes are desperation and rage.  He’s not here today.  His head is never still.  It shakes back and forth and nods up and down furiously.  It never stops wagging.  Like a relentless spasm disease.  I’m in an aquarium gawking at a manic shark.  But He’s the beast and I’m in the cage.

Sputum violence.  A misting of blood.

Carlo’s yard is full of dark swine with fear in their eyes.  They scream and stomp.  They swell back and forth like shiny schools of  slippery rapid fish.  There are hundreds if not thousands.  Blue black and brown, stinking of catastrophe and madness.  I think if I just had some weapons of mass destruction.  Guns.  I need guns.

He doesn’t look at me.  Panes of glass divide us.  Either one of us could reach through like the movies.  Pull the other through the panes as our first bad ass movie move.  Then we would do Kung Fu for a little while.  I end up blowing his head clean off with some giant gun.

Oh, man.

I yell and flip him off. I mock and tease.  I laugh at him.  Scream and curse.  I’m seventeen.

He’s sobbing and sucking back drool.  He bleeds from all the openings in his head.  It drips and sprays.  He’s a mess.  He’s in his underwear again.  It’s grimy.  Yellow.  I realize it’s a diaper.  There is dirt caked on his thighs and forearms.  He is hairless except for his head.  He could be comedy.  Tragic while hysterical.

I press my index finger and face to the glass and tell him I understand.

I tell him I understand it’s him or me and that it will be me.

I tell him I’ll kill him.  He will die.  It will be me.  I am shouting.  Promising to kill him.

I work at holding his gaze, his eyes in their convulsing head.  I promise with little breath left that I will kill him.  I will cut him.  I’m going to gut him and watch him bleed out.  I’m whistling and whispering, out of breath.  I’m out of breath but still screaming.  My face feels on fire.

He bounces off the front door.  Raging.  He screams in the yard.  He pounds his own face and head with his palsied curled fists and long ass talons.  He even throws rocks at the windows but none so much as crack.   He leaves sobbing and sucking it back.

I stand and watch his retreat.  He lights a fagot while marching away and his army of swine follow.

He cannot enter.

Dumb and exhausted, violent resolve is slow comfort.

There’s a particular and peculiar sensation upon a man experiencing when he needs to pee real bad.  It vibrates and tickles on down to the wrists and hands.  When the man is able to unleash, there is no greater instant gratification.  The body does quiver and rattle yet the the spasms are cathartic relief.  It is existential.  Primal.  When it’s over, it’s over.

All my fears and unrest go dormant.  The watch still ticks and I don’t care I can’t see it moving.

I go to sleep.  I dream of the watch.

It all stinks of asphalt and road.  Petroleum.  Oil.  It stinks bad.  I check the watch.  It tells me I have twelve hours to go on an eight hour shift.  Life smells toxic pink like nail polish and green weeds in the desert halfway between here and Vegas.  Heat.  Pulled Pork is a despicable term.

Dad says the watch needs a battery.  Tells me Wall Mart.

I leave the dream as we sit down for Rueben Sandwiches.  Corned beef.  Sauerkraut.  Swiss Cheese.  Rye bread.  Mayo and the Poupon.  Grilled.

Drinks for my friends.

This is a tale of beauty and simultaneous beast.

Personal.

I think one of the reasons we share for being here in this class is we’re willing to tell the truth about ourselves.

Can’t ever write engaging or effective if honesty is neglected.  It goes for fiction as well as memoir.  It goes for writing anything.  In the broadest context, taking pen to paper should always be an absolutely honest endeavor.  I’m pretty adamant about that.

Here we go.

Her name was Linda and she was lovely.

Women would approach us out having drinks or shopping just to tell her how beautiful she was.  To compliment her on her skin or her smile.  Her hair or clothes.  This in LA.

She was drop dead in the eye of many a beholder.

First generation African Canadian.  Born and raised in Vancouver BC.  She was an attorney and a fashion designer with her own line; shoes and handbags too.  She actually made a lot of her products.  Painfully bright, talented and like I said, drop dead.  It was as though the sun shone on her even indoors or at night.  I picked her up at least once or twice when she was a bouquet.  I opened the door for her and flowers spilled into my car.  She smelled of gardens and seasons.

She possessed an elegance and composure that I’d really never experienced.  I irritated her once by using the pepper before passing it to her when she asked for it.  Not a low maintenance woman.  I opened every door and ordered for both of us only after understanding her preferences.  But, we had fun.  Drinking and laughing and making out in public.  Falling from the sidewalk onto the street in an embrace.  Pressing and groping each other against cars of strangers in parking lots.  She commanded breathy that I put my hand down the front of her pants or my mouth on her breast while we sipped cocktails in a dark swanky lounge on Ventura Boulevard in front of an elegant glass fireplace.  Gardens and seasons and immaculately put together.  Very little makeup.  A gust of femininity.  A tide of sensuality.  I adored her.

She fascinated me and lured my lust with  billboard smiles and clingy dresses and I’m not here to discount the wit and overt clever.

So vibrant she crackled.  Gregariousness, soft and subtle but insistent, insidious.  She checked into my head like an anvil.  I was smitten.  I was briefly beside myself.

I remember following her home after our first date at her behest and kissing her before she pulled into her parking garage.  Kissing her for the second time and watching her go safely inside.  She turned just before entering and giggled “Good kisser…..” all girlish lilt, almost Irish.

Pecan pie.

She had me.

There was a dress.  New Years eve.  A dress.  It was her brown skin and the brown dress and the way it fit her.  People stared.

Vanilla Swiss Almond.

She was thus far, the most beautiful woman ever to entertain my affections.

Ten or twelve years younger, I can’t remember now.

She drove a black convertible BMW Z3 roadster.  I taunted my Audi TT would embarrass her up in the voluptuous curves of Mullholland or in the 1/4 mile.  I was pretty sure I was right.  She was game.  Chicks can’t drive you know.

We had an excellent time.

I am here to tell you, beauty can merely be, skin deep.

It’s an awful truth.  Trite but still just horrible.

A really hard lesson.  A lot of men have this story to tell, the version varies somewhat but the plot is consistent.  Middle aged man falls into lust and infatuation with some young harpy and and she cleans his clock.

She got me for $10K.  Her name is Linda Antwi and she suckered me.  She played me.  She sucks and I’m stupid.  I hate being stupid.  I’m a man who takes some pride in not being stupid.  I pushed the envelope by fancying myself possessing a modicum of common sense.  Impervious to the wiles and charms of seemingly winsome charisma and benign guile.

We’re having cocktails one night across the street from my place and she mentions she’s got an opportunity to go to the Sundance film festival and get her product in the gift bags of the stars.  Her store on Santa Monica Blvd. is opening in eight or twelve weeks.  I have money.  I’m not rich but I’m no stranger to a six figure salary.  I don’t remember the exact figure but she needs a few thousand dollars.

It was $2,900.

No sweat.

I offer.  I’m pretty well ensconced in the idea of this woman so I offer to loan her what she needs to make it happen.  I’d like to think she didn’t ask but she did.  I want to help.  She is smart and beautiful.  She can do this and I don’t want to regret not helping her when she could really use a hand.  I care and believe in her.

She hoovered it, with a cursory amount of disclaimer and promise.  When I do something like that, I’m prepared to be out the money.  I was ok with losing it.

A couple grand, so what?

I picked her up about six minutes after I said I would to take her to the airport for Sundance.  I left work to do so.  She pissed and moaned at me for being late, despite getting her there in plenty of time.  She told me she was “really angry with me”.  You’re gonna see a pattern develop.

I’m gonna tell you more, but I’m just gonna look even more like the kid who eats paste in the back of the class.

Okay, so she’s getting her wisdom teeth pulled.  I offer to take her and pick her up.  She’s gonna be anaesthetized.  I leave work to do this.  I take her to the pharmacy after being a limousine for the extraction and we wait for her prescription to be filled.  In the parking lot I help with the bloody gauze.  They are blood saturated pillows.  I remind her if she swallows to much she’ll hurl.  I take her home and make sure she get’s in her front door.  I tell her to call my cell or my office if she needs anything and I’ll drop it off on my way home.

Didn’t hear anything that afternoon, figured she was sleeping.  On the way home I stop and get some daisies with sunflowers and chicken noodle soup.  The second I walk in my own door my cell makes it’s noise.  She’s hungry.  I tell her I have chicken noodle and not the cheap canned crap, but from the Ralph’s fresh soup kiosk.  She tells me she likes tomato.  Ralph’s is across the street from my swingers paradise.

I’m like 43 years old and getting this elaborately suckered.

I deliver a fresh tomato gorgonzola and a tomato basil bisque.  I bring the flowers.  There are shoes everywhere.  Not random but neatly paired and aligned along a wall in the living room.  I think about how many shoes must be in the bedroom.  Her place is odd.  Not as girly as I imagined.  Overstuffed and Canadian.  Very clean.  I wave a hand at the shoes.  This could be a problem.  She said no, she didn’t see a problem.

On the way down the stairs to my car I realize she’s never thanked me once for anything.  Ever.

It pisses me off.  I understand I’m an idiot.  I loathe the role of patsy.  It doesn’t fit how I see myself at all.

Outside smoking just now and an owl hooting the same three notes.  No wind, no noise from traffic.  The same three notes over and over so consistent.  I’ll bet it could carry my littlest runt of a feline away and tear it to shreds while eating it.  Beauty can be vicious.

I think she got over me pretty quick.  She was passive aggressive while labeling me narcissistic.  It took me longer so I tripped on my dick and my heart for a while.  I was in therapy at a buck seventy five an hour.  Not because of her, I was already there.  The shrink and I concluded that I had a fair degree of humility and Linda was a bitch.  It was handy to be in therapy during this one but it was still too little too late.

A few weeks before she’s about to open her retail store on Santa Monica, the same week I’m driving downtown every week in a suit and tie to testify in federal court on behalf of the company I work for that used to sell glass pot pipes and glass dildos, and now only sells glass dildos, my cell makes it’s noise and she tells me her investor ripped her off for $20k.  She is distraught.  Tears.

Are we there yet?

Somebody say grifter.

She sends me an e-mail so clever as to be clumsy.  She needs $7500 and she’s desperate.  The tone is unusually humble.  I tell her I have to think about it and I do.  I mean, this woman is kind of a bitch.  Tells me her investor ripped her off for $20k.  We have drinks at Mexicali on Ventura and she buckles for my benefit.  I believe her.

Because I’m a fucking sap.

I do choose to believe her.  I’m wondering just how she’s ripping me off at the same time.  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.

She promises me for years she’s going to reimburse me.  Ha.

I’d just been with a woman, albeit briefly, who was sweet as pie but a bitch.  She was six foot one and had the most amazing face; it didn’t last long enough for me to get her clothes off.  At least she was sweet as pie.  She dumped my ass thank god.  She was a bitch.

I was just polishing what twenty year old chops I had so…..

Gorgeous though.  Oh my.  Just beautiful.  The sun was in her face too.  Really.

So anyway.

I loaned her the the goddamn money.  I can’t help but picture myself in a mirror with “dipshit” on my forehead backwards so I can read it.

I really can’t believe I did that.

I suppose I should be flattered by the amount of time she invested in making a fool of me and walking away with ten thousand dollars.  She worked hard at it.  Way short of earning it, she did apply her self with considerable effort to steal it.

Work with me here.

We were out one night and she got painted.  Hammered.  Linda Antwi is a good drinking partner.  There were two or three flights of stairs up until her door.  As waxed as she was, I had to make sure she got at least that far.  So I did.  She was able to find her apartment key and hand it to me.  The second we were inside with a light on she began to disrobe.  I paused.  I did.  I paused.  Spun around and raised my voice for her to lock it behind me.  It clicked and I surfed down the stairs with my head burning.  Perfume in my ears.

I don’t recall the circumstances but she needed me too open her store one day.  A Sunday.  So I did.  I thought it an interesting mission. All I had to do was open and close it.  She had an employee to work it who sucked.  She sold nothing the whole day.  The employee was tattood less than artfully.  Kinda dumpy and obnoxious.  She was dumb as a stick.

She checked up on me.  Called her store and I answered to tell her I was here now at five minutes to ten.  I think I bought a really cool coffee table off craigslist that day.

I don’t blame her.  I doubt she knows what she wants but it’s not me and that’s just fine.  I can’t help but be grateful for the heads up.  She just wasn’t that into me.  Fair enough.

It sucks to lose a chunk of  your ass to a woman who treated your heart like a pinata.

She is callow and shallow and she owes me ten thousand dollars.

She’s being very cunty about it and my only choice is to breath relentlessly down her neck.  I’m not sure I have that in me.  I entertain myself sometimes by plotting ways to make her regret and my mother reminds me that I don’t own a mean bone.

I will be dressing in Bear costumes and the like.  Tonight I’m the head of a pony……..Hey Linda……..

Now I’m a cowboy.

Tomorrow I’ll be a bird of prey.

She watched me lose my job and my apartment.  This while she was making money without rent or car.  Last I heard, two or three months ago, she promised to pay $200 a month.

I’ve begun to gather evidence for legal action.  I have other hobbies too.  It is what it is.  Someone who lies so well they are able to lie to themselves and a dumb ass like me who’s susceptible to beauty.  Two plus two = $10k.  Beauty is not necessarily three dimensional.  It may very well be just this tall and just this wide.  Not always.  I know different.

Really I do.

Drinks for my friends.

Mike,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             This is the most passionate, elegant rant I’ve read in a long time.                                                                                                                                                                                                The use of language is awesome.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Bob

I reckon back and forth.  Between today and yesterday.  I wish I could work in a record store again.  Those were the days.  Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin into today.

Remember vinyl records?  Polyvinyl chloride.  I remember scraping at the shrink wrap and peeling it away.  The smell of the ink and the black plastic disc that flooded my sinuses when I opened an album I’d bought and most likely peddled home hanging from my handlebars in a loose plastic bag.  The package.  The liner notes.  Who produced and who engineered.  Where and when it was recorded.  Who played what.  Listening to it and following along with the lyrics.  Listening to it.  Hard.  Listening to it really hard.  Busting with pubescent adolescent concentration.  I heard it.  I listened to it.  Couldn’t get it out of my head for days.

My brain was on fire.  Music set my brain on fire.  Melodies informed my day and tones haunted my waking and sleeping.  Magical.  No other word works here.  Magical.

Joe Walsh “The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get” which includes the single “Rocky Mountain Way“, featuring the just invented Talk Box later loaned to Peter Frampton for “Do You Feel Like We Do?” on “Frampton Comes Alive”; I think still the best selling live album of all time.

I worked in my hometown record store when CDs first hit the market.  Remember the long boxes?  They said digital was perfect but it wasn’t.  It sucked.  Third order harmonic distortion was the fuckery artifact of digital.  Analog trends towards even order harmonic distortion.  Complimentary to the octave either up or down.  In tune you see.  Odd, or third order harmonic distortion is dissonant and therefore unpleasant.  Not natural.  It was loud though.  Signal to noise was through the roof.  “Pachelbel’s Canon“.  I kept smoking the system in the record store I worked in.  I’d put it on at the end of the night and forget about it and the canons at the climax would arc the system and there was the smell of ozone while I vacuumed in silence.

Back then they didn’t have four year programs for audio engineering so I moved from Carson City Nevada to Atlanta Georgia to attend an art school with an audio engineering program.

I shot a documentary about the licorice pizza.  How it was made on down to the cost of materials.  I walked with a perfect 4.0 and received the outstanding graduate award. I’d barely begun to understand how records were made.  Records begat  CD’s and digital took over so completely there is no longer even a tangible product to hold in the hand today.  Recorded music is now the epitome of disposable.  For most, it is dispensed from a device the size of an individual package of sugar free gum with thin wires leading to buds inserted in ears.  No lifting the needle, rewinding or physically manipulating anything but buttons so diminutive that they disappear beneath our thumbs and fingers for instant gratification.

For our part, We never fired a sample (a bit of pre-recorded digital to replace an analog sound), We always recorded and mixed to analog tape and never entered the digital domain until it was time to master the record.  We would physically cut the 1/2 inch master together with razor blades and translucent blue tape.  Totally old school even back then.  On every record we ever made you heard what the band played.  Honest and exciting recordings, mistakes and all with the warmth and vibe and zero digital manhandling.  We joined the band.  Alex and I.  The “we” is me and Al and the band.  I taught Al to engineer and Al taught me to produce.  Al used to explain to others that I grew up listening to the sound of records and he grew up listening to songs.

We no longer afford this form of art the attention it deserves.  Matters not it’s the latest pop catering to the lowest common denominator of societal taste or a grand and inspired performance of a historied classical opus.

The once ubiquitous record store and the culture that enveloped so many of us, has vanished completely.  At least compact discs were a tangible product.  A package.  The Tower Record chain, with it’s full to overflowing shelves and it’s flagship Sunset Boulevard store vanished with a whisper some three or four years ago.  It breaks my heart.  I adored the perfume and pulse of my neighborhood record store.  The frenetic atmosphere and the snobby clerks.  That I’d produced and engineered a record in the top ten that would go on to sell 3.5 million copies at the time would earn me nothing more than a long look I’m sure.  I never mentioned it.  I would only ask after the latest Primus or Queens of The Stone Age or Lucinda Williams with humility for example.

I never could find that one ridiculously cool recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue and American In Paris I’d worshiped on vinyl.

I was grateful that the first record I ever made was released on vinyl.  A punk record but that still sold some one hundred thousand copies.

I own a stereo that I spent nearly a decade assembling.  Lots of time researching and listening to the various components.  Me and Shaq, Shaquille O’Neal, had the same audio dealer.  A crazy liitle guy named Elliot with a house in the dense foliage just south of the boulevard.  The amplifier, preamplifier, transport, digital to analog conversion and speakers ran me nearly fifty thousand dollars.  I paid thirteen hundred dollars for the power chord (AC cable) alone that plugs into the wall from the power conditioner with it’s oxygen and crystal free copper buss bars that provide pure virgin power to the components that reproduce sound in my living room.  Both pieces of equipment designed by a retired NSA physicist.  Two hundred fifty watts a side into eight ohms and twice that at into four.  When I crack it wide open with nothing playing it is dead quiet.  It doesn’t even hiss.  Two speakers, five feet tall, 180 lbs each, hybrid ribbon and soft dome tweeter array, no subwoofer, no surround sound and it sounds like God to me when I play anything at all no matter how quiet.

They call me an audiophile.  I kinda don’t like that.  I used to be a vegetarian and I didn’t like that label either.

Beethoven’s Ninth will blow your hair back like that old Maxell tape ad from the eighties on my system.  So will Fiona Apple‘s first record.  I love the lushness and hips on that recording.

It is simultaneously a pinnacle of scientific achievement in sound reproduction and hopelessly archaic in the eyes of most people under thirty five.  Small grapes for the ears vs. speakers that weigh a large man.  Data compression and convenience versus all out raging sound.  I fear the mixers are wearing the ear grapes these days.  Paradigm gone.  Window open.

Yet, God as I understand it in my living room.

Sometimes I feel as though the majesty of popular music enjoyed for hundreds if not thousands of years has been eclipsed by the frozen diet meal and a hard disc recorder.  I’m genuinely afraid that art is no longer more important than microwave popcorn.

I need to tell you this.  The difference between humans and animals is not reason.  That is embarrassingly silly.  The difference is isn’t even humor.  My cats crack me the fuck up.  The difference is art.  Human beings everywhere would do well to understand and remember that.

Drinks for my friends.

Carterenda has a smile that is slippery

Her smile slides over her teeth

Her teeth and lips are ideal flesh and bone

Flesh full lips beneath beautiful eyes across shiney lovely bones

Doe sweet eyes

Cinnamon skin some freckles and her hair silken from gold to black and around every fusilli

Her smile conceals all that she knows to be true.  She is wise and glistens.

I inhale her moisture and perfume

I am enchanted

She is flawless

She likes the horses, she likes the track.  She likes champagne and caviar and she’s adept at at concealing her distaste for the gringo

She wears a loose dress of subtle color yet her shape is obvious

She believes her hips to be powerful and her lips to be flowers

She is correct

Her lips pull back like you’ve no idea for a grin playing havoc with my belly too and she barely puffs from a long black stem with a cigarette at it’s end.  Her tongue escapes behind her lips and there is a tiny pop and a puff of smoke.  Her lips pull back again from tooths in wonderland.

She looks at me as though she’s about to ridicule.

I wish I was in a supermarket from my childhood.  Smelling the onions and grapefruits while marveling the glossy floor and symmetry everywhere.  Cucumbers.  The bread aisle pungent with yeast and grains and jars of mustard offending my pre-adolescent hyper senses.

Colors so vivid, I wanted to puke.

Pastries with jelly centers enveloped in loose glossy cellophane on shiny disposable tin foil trays…… all iridescent….rows of cereals, sauces and cans of everything.  Detergents and cleansers with shiny blue green orange logos.  Dirty sacks of potatoes that mother could make anything out of.

What does she want?  I’m really not sure what to do here.

Carterenda sparkles

I would take her home to do my best

Drinks for my friends.

Now you may or may not know that brainspank was down for a week.  It was an ill-fated attempt to at upgrading and advertising.  In the process I lost the graphics and only one blog.  My latest blog.  No word on graphics yet but I did discover a copy of said blog in my drafts file.  I took the liberty of editing and upgrading and here we are…….I’m just proud to be an American helping Americans one window treatment at a time.  Come see me at Costco………..

Without further ado: 

Michael Whitaker was the kind of guy who confounded most of the reasons I had for liking or disliking people.

Aggressive and smarmy.  When we first met, I thought him unctuous.  His enthusiasm was almost effeminate and rang bullshit to me.  I didn’t like him.  He seemed to know less than he thought.  I might have been aggressive and smarmy too.  I’m sure I knew less than I thought.

Cold isn’t a problem for me until the wind blows.

I was a cocky bastard.

Michael was rotund and sweaty.  About as big around as he was tall but obviously agile.  Belushiesque.  Always on something so he perspired so profusely.  Whatever you snort for pleasure is poison and it makes you sweat.  Toxins have no choice but to find escape from the pores.  I know this from personal experience.  I got into some bad biker speed one night in Pacoima and nearly lost my mind.

Long time ago.  A good story.  It involves Johnny Angel (Wendel), now a progressive radio talker, bodyguards, a professional big bust model and pink kerosene smelling biker speed that I was naive enough to think cocaine.

Anyway.

Corpulent fingers on hands that were amazingly strong.  There were times in the middle of the night, 2 or 3 a.m., he’d take it upon himself to knead my back as I sat with the tape remote between my legs or console in front of me.  He meant well.  It was an intrusion on my person.  He never smelled bad but but his nails were sometimes grimy and his face was a map of rivulets and streams.   I sweat.  I’m a sweater.  I leak from the head.  Whitaker’s head ran sometimes, like he just walked out from a car wash.  And he was thick and hirsute.

I don’t remember ever seeing him eat.  His eyes were so damn smart.  He clocked every single thing.  Like a cat.  Ever notice how some cats don’t want you to watch them eat?

Always completely about whatever we were doing.  Manic.  Hyper vigilant.  It was easy for him to tell me not to worry about things I knew I had to worry about anyway because he didn’t worry about anything.  He wasn’t interested in my world or anyone’s idea of else.  Michael’s world was completely his own.  I wondered sometimes where and how he lived.  We weren’t concerned about the same things in life,  in music however, we complimented each other.  We understood each other.  We visited each others world.  We made music in Studio C.

He filled out track sheets, box labels and had an excellent memory.  He remembered what I forgot.  He helped me in every way he could.  He helped us, the artist.  He helped us, the band.

Together we would guide artists around and through the obstacles that they might otherwise stumble upon.  We crafted and cajoled and reinforced.  We nurtured.

He bounced around my edges while I kept to the inside.  Did my best to keep the sounds fat and the performances with the right amount of rubber on the road.  I earned his respect about the same time he earned mine.  My muse.  His muse.

We did record a guitar out of time once through an entire chorus and neither of us realized it until after I mixed it.  Has to be the dumbest thing I ever did.  It was a forest for the trees mistake.  Patricia Sullivan, The lovely MissRicia, repaired it for us in mastering.

“Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!” -Ghostbusters and Bob Borbonus

I kept my control room at 65 and wore long shorts and a sweatshirt.  I wore a doo-rag with my hair tied back.  Oxblood Doc Martins that came half way up my calf with heavy wool lumberjack socks.  My partner Al would bundle up.  He had a fragile constitution.  I was fond of reminding him.  I was alert at that temperature and I’d discovered that sound deteriorated at a rate that coincided with an increase intemperature.  Twelve to sixteen hour days are best served cold.

Vitamin B (snortable), Vitamin C, lots of water and not so much coffee.  Juice.  Salads.  Fruit.  No booze until just before bed.

I’d go out to the guard shack and have a smoke when Hollywood was a hundred and one degrees.  Back to my control room to get some hot coffee and a banana.

I did so much then without even knowing what I was doing.  I slept there, I showered there.  I ate there. I drank there.  I learned about life there.  I less occasionally lost my mind there.

Easier to make a snare drum crack right in a control room that’s not a sauna.  Easier to make guitars bite and bass guitars growl and lumber along just behind the beat of the kick drum when even the kick drum hangs back.  Sometimes.  All electronic equipment runs better in a cool environment.  Now and then the AC would go down and every control room would rocket past a hundred degrees inside of fifteen or twenty five minutes.

Big fans doing a push pull at every control room entrance and exit.

Heat smears things to the ear the same way it shimmers and distorts the lense when looking at anything from a distance on an oppressive summer day.

I wish there was a past tense word like ‘shat’ for ‘shit’ for ‘sweat’.  Swat?  Perspired.  Michael Whitaker was fat and greasy and I adored him.

He was a human holiday.

Unmitigated enthusiasm and too infectious euphoria.  Sensitive to the artist as a cautious bull surrounded by china.

Whitaker didn’t really know how to play the guitar, I don’t think, but he could make it feedback in pitch and even get a melody out of it.  He really was a genius at it.  He played Mellotron on tons of stuff we did.  Mellotrons are unbelievably cool instruments: “The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical, polyphonic keyboard originally developed and built in Birmingham, England in the early 1960s.” -Wikipedia.

That works for me.

Press any key and it starts an actual loop of prerecorded tape of some component of an orchestra.  Completely analog.  The most amazing thing was you could play a chord on it.  The loops from each key played in time.  A pre synthesizer.  We had the same one John Lennon used for a while.  The ones I recorded were in tune with themselves, thanks to a genius A&M tech squad.  They weren’t always completely in tune with the track but a little dissonance isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Chili and lime.  Sweet & Sour.  Ginger, lemon, soy sauce and garlic and raw fish.  Capers, lemon and butter on whitefish.

A raging wall of collapsing guitars stacked upon each other so that the dissonance is harmonically irresistible.  So that you can feel the wind coming off the wall.  There really is nothing like that sound.  The feel and sonic force of 12 inch speaker cones literally warping and contorting while reproducing the distorted chords being forced down the throat of the magnets driving them.  It was one of my favorite sounds and I knew just how to make it.  When it came to big guitars, I could put the anchovy in the paste.

Cilantro and/or ginger.  A little soap in the gravy.  Maybe it’s not so comfortable on the tongue but you’re glad you swallowed it.

Like an oyster.

“Like disco lemonade.”  -stolen from some song I’m too lazy to look up

Always use celery salt on sauerkraut.  Always.

Contrast is as valuable as a compliment.

I digress.

We were talking about Whitaker.

Everything about him was fierce and gentle.  He had an office but no desk.  This was A&M records.  The most successful independent label ever.  Used to be the Chaplin Stage.  Charlie actually lived there; his foot prints are in the cement right before the steps to the studio.  It’s a protected historical monument.  I worked there for about a decade.

Geographically on the cusp of social unrest.  We all had to flee the riot.  It came up La Brea chaos ugly.

Michael’s office was pillows and bean bags and crappy playback.  We’d go there to listen to a mix and I’d  listen out of the corner of my ear only.  Crappy playback.  And a bong.  A giant bong.  I rarely took a rip off that monolith, so I can’t say I didn’t.  A policy that was part of my work ethic.  I never sat behind a recording console anything other than stone cold sober.

There were times I ended up behind one influenced, but never at my own discretion.

It was well lit.  Michael’s office I mean.  Cheerfully moody.  Rugs and candles and cushions and carpets and incense.

It occurs to me that I got away with what I did because there really was honor among thieves.

Michael, in a peculiar way, was a musical genius.  A production genius.  I learned a ton from him.  He never once thought inside the box.  His brain was untamed.  I was the producer and the engineer so I had to spend time within the box.  I had to decide about the box.  What size and what color and all that.  Big picture stuff.  Michael kept fucking with my box.  We agreed he could touch the faders after they were marked.  We came to an understanding.  He was free to contribute as he saw fit and we hardly ever disagreed.  There were certain things like delay times or reverb parameters we had to consult on before he laid a hand…..they were timed to the tempo of the song.  Meticulously.  All effects were in time with the track; no good engineer leaves that undone.

He was raw and intellectual talent.  He was crazy and combustible.  I don’t really know or understand where he came from.  I’ve no idea what his sexual orientation was.  He was goddamn swirly pudding.  He talked about his past in vague terms.  He told me once he could have ended up bad.  I think I know what he meant.

I don’t know what else he was actually.  I guess the A&R department paid him, but he had no power to sign anyone.  He didn’t have an expense account.  He had an office.

I’d cultivated the A&R departments business and this guy Jeff Suhy started to send tons of gigs my way and Whitaker was part of the deal.  He was nuts but I have tons of affection for him to this day.

We’ll get to Suhy.  He’s his own chapter.

One of us was the others muse constantly.  I got what I wanted when I wanted it because I was the engineer and the producer.  The stud duck as my my father would say.  But he still drank my milkshake.  The phone on the console would blink and ring.  “Fruzen Gladje?”  “Without reservation”, I replied.  Four minutes later, Whitaker pushes through the double doors and lands on my day.

He suggested one dark Sunday morning that we track a vocal on La Brea Ave.  Jessie Montague.  From the Studio C control room to the La Brea sidewalk was 150, maybe 200 feet.  We had to run mic and headphone cables all the way out.  XLR, low impedence, so  I was grieving over inductance loss.  We had more trouble from the cans than the mic.  A couple passive DIs and Bob was your Uncle.  Ask me about Bob is your Uncle.  He’s your lucky Uncle.  We had the guards open the gates.  I set up a music stand, headphones, a fet 47  or a 414, I wasn’t about to hang a tube mic on LaBrea, and a pop filter.  She sang a version of Come Together by the Beatles that slays me to this day.  Whitaker played mellotron at the bridge and some stabs in the verses.  We faded it on the cars going by.  It was then I realized I should have recorded it in stereo.

Like he was egoless.  Michael never once looked at his own dick the entire time I knew him.  Not even when we were pissing next to each other.  The metaphor is unlovely but apt.  Michael was all about the band’s dick.  The artist’s vagina.  I’m sure I looked at mine.  I know I did.  I called him “White Acre”, he called me “Douglass”.  That was it.  He looked at you and talked to you.  Sometimes I didn’t completely understand him but he always knew what he was saying.

I had a giant ego back then and Michael Whitaker handled me just fine.

When I think of Whitaker, it makes me miss the whole thing.  I miss the whole thing.

Making records is the coolest job in the world.

Drinks for my friends.

In my view, our founding fathers intended the filibuster as a sort of time out.  Procedural brakes.

Not an off switch.

In sports, the number of timeouts is limited.  Think about it.

The idea of unmitigated majority rule isn’t philosophically congruent with democracy.  I would argue it to be far more socialist than what which we claim to aspire to.  All for one and all.  I imagine the framers of our constitution intended to protect us from it.  Mob rule.  The meek of body versus the genetically inferior of brain.  See what I’m saying?  You never know.  Gorillas against Apes.

I’m not sure it should be messed with at all.  There are alternatives like reconciliation.  I would not change the majority number mandated for cloture.  The spirit of the filibuster has been machiavellianly tainted by teabaggers.  Abused, maligned and exploited.  It has been vulgarized.  Think of amphibious precipitation.  Imagine the smack and gore of it.  They live for this shit.  Think CPAC.  A carnival of the clueless lacking all but charisma.

These bastards are pricks.  I’m not gonna bother to look it up because I know they’ve been shameless in threatening and invoking the filibuster.  Off the charts historically.  Trust me.

I know it’s bad.  Maybe we should consider limiting the number of times it can be played.  Like in football or basketball.  I’m obstreperously enthusiastic about making them actually fucking filibuster.  It’s retarded to stand around swinging a bat all day if you never even have to hit a ball or run the bases.  It’s so stupid.  Do what you gotta do.  When they threaten to actually Ball, throw them a goddamn strike.  Throw it hard.  Make them take the conch and pontificate until they look like dicks.  Then take the conch away.

What is there to lose?

And so just walk around them.  Reconciliation.  My last count was 19 senators including Reid and 118 congressman getting all vocal and signing on to something about a Public Option via reconciliation.  Understand you fucks, when the mandate to buy in without a robust public option got by you, you lost me.  You fuckers, our fuckers, have been flirting with us too much.  You better goddamn be serious this time.  This is what we “progressives” expect.  Get it done.  Whatever means necessary.  Don’t fly a plane into Limbaugh’s ass or Hannity’s vag, try not to sew Palin up.  You just better not be kidding this time.

Remember that Civil Rights thing was dicey for a while………

Conservatives think liberals are anti-American.  We aren’t.  I’m not.  There’s only one other country I’d ever consider being born in.  Maybe two.  Liberals know that conservatives are stupid or at least willfully ignorant.  Their guns, a woman’s right to choose and fear of people with alternative skin tones blinds them to every other salient issue or policy.  Forgive my sweeping generalizations but they are nothing if not simple and predictable.  I know some.  Good people.  Generous, bright and funny but lack the prerequisite intellectual curiosity for the big picture.  Not the capacity but the curiosity.

They in fact, refuse it.  I like these people, I’m related to some of them.  They refuse to be informed.  With the exception of these men, all other self identified right wingers are fucktards.  Assholes.  A group that thinks they are smarter than they are while they equate knowledge with elitism.

I have no idea what to do about that and it’s not my job.

No matter what happens, we have the conch for ten more months at least.   Blow my skirt up.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m here for glucose.  I have a special tube that collects it.  Looks like a long horn.

I’m like a humming bird.

When you first lay eyes on me you’ll probably think about children’s books, like Dr. Seuss or maybe Sendak.  I’m odd.  I look like an aardvark kinda.  I’m very friendly and enjoy picnics and barbecues.  I eat anything and every thing but my tube gets clogged easily.  I turn blue.  I love cheese but it clogs my tube.  Beans, meat and pasta make me fart.  They also clog my tube.

It’s a small town so at first, people had no idea what to think or do.  I’m sure I looked a cartoon to them.  I did my best to be non threatening.  Non confrontational.  I learned to dance.  Trimmed my nails.  It sucks to be pastel purple.  I pack a blunderbuss.   I can pepper anyone inside of five or seven feet.  I wear lip gloss, mascara and perfume.  Giant hoop earrings.

I’m a tuber.  A root that grows in the ground.  You can eat me.  I’m nutritious.

Mom shops the sales.  The new bottle/dispenser of soap at the kitchen sink was a dollar.  On special post Christmas was this Christmas scented liquid.  Vanilla and fig, I think.  Took me a day to figure it out but it smells like strippers.  Eau De Titty Bar.  I tell my mother this and she’s the tiniest bit taken aback.  I’m all nostalgic.  Having enough money to hold court in a Vegas strip joint is royalness.

She needs a nickname.  Sean calls his mom “Bob”.  I like that.  I think I want to call my mother “Sweeney.”  I had other ideas but they were too many syllables.  Had to be one or two max.  Plus it rhymes with her real name.  I thought about “Jim” for a while.  Couldn’t get used to it.  My mother isn’t any kind of “Jim”.  What she is, is a Sweeney.

I confess, I’m not sure how I’ll do this.  I’ll be subtle and respectful.  I’ll drop it in.  It will take some time.  Patience.

At one point I’ll make her read this.  If I really want her to read something, I leave a post-it on the end of the kitchen faucet.

Sometimes I forget I did so and she has to ask if I want to know what she thinks after 4:30 during gin & tonics and cigarettes with at least one of two propane heaters blazing on the portico.  She is funny and doesn’t really know it.  She cracks me up.  She never stops moving.  I love her.  Oh man.

Kraut Dogs.

Ballparks sliced down the middle and fried in copious amounts of butter and granulated garlic.  Chop yellow onions.  The idea is to make the dogs  begin to curl a little as the butter browns and the garlic blackens.  Kick out the jams and toast the buns (endorsement of Ballpark buns) in the oven.  Then, slather them with mayonnaise and be generous with the mustard.  Best food mayo and anything other than some vanilla American mustard like French’s.  Guldens is good.  I once had a cognac mustard.  It made me weep.

Whatever.  By now you should’ve drained and nuked the Kraut and added celery salt to taste.  Be liberal with it.  The celery salt.

Immediately out of the oven, place a large store sliced square of authentic Swiss cheese on the bread at a right angle and follow up by spinning a smaller square of imitation smoked Swiss 45 degrees in any direction and placing it on top of the larger cheese.  It should look like a star.  Trust me.

Apply the greasy dogs immediately.  I like to cook with tongs and this whole operation goes smoother with tongs.

Onions generously and then the kraut.

Haven’t had it in a few years but maybe a Mondavi fume’ blanc?  I hate that it’s not in the frosted bottle anymore.

Open faced.  Fork and knife.

Macaroni salad.

Drinks for my friends.

By day I’m an excellent student of the fourth grade.  I turn in my homework.  I act the part.

Simultaneously, I am something else, an agent for an organization not unlike Starfleet.  We too have a General Order Number One.  A Prime Directive.  To interfere as little as possible in certain situations.  That’s all I can tell you.

I’m always on the lookout for ways to surveil.  In time I will study explosives.  I will blow shit up.  Then I will learn to play the drums.  I am here for your safety.

Just another day at the office until I notice our star, the sun, looks low in the sky.

A chilly willy.  My hairs are up.

Warm winter wind blows through the afternoon.  Before sundown it’s gray and still.  Then cold.  Nature begins it’s work slow and methodical.  Frozen drops and crystals appear in the air.  Flakes the size of my thumb in no time.  I’m rooting for it to pile up all night long.  I’m watching bone white cereal waft, lit by porches and cars.

Black & White TV and dinner and then a little more TV.

News.

Cronkite and Sevareid.

Get Smart or Hogan’s Heroes…………..

I’m in the bottom bunk thinking about snow and listening to the radio.

Morning comes.  Everything is different.  I saw it coming but had no idea.  It is grandiose.

A massive amount of snow has changed the world.  The desert seceded to the moon last night.  Wind bequeathed silence.  Cars and fences are now mounds exaggerated.  The sun blasts and hides behind cirrus smears.  I can’t believe it.  I step out onto the porch expecting the old cold to smart but it doesn’t.  The quiet roars.  I am hushed completely.  It sparkles all milky silica soapy snow cone and I get that the blanket is powdery and crunchy.

No school today.  An expedition is in order post haste.

Thick socks, heavy flannel shirt and a scarf.  I bundle and wrap in boots, new gloves and a shiny down coat. I put on my father’s full face motorcycle helmet with the smoked shield.  My sister lets me know right away she’ll be telling on me.  I don’t care for what.  I head out through the airlock.

The sibling I’ve been paired with is a pain in the ass.  She should piss up a rope.

“Giant steps are what you take, walkin’ on the moon.” -This song from the future

The chomp of my feet through the crust is self fulfilling.  The isolation of complete insulation afforded by my makeshift space suit is comforting.  The landscape is distorted so profoundly that is suspends my disbelief.  I’m on the moon, listening to my own breath.  I am on the moon and moving with the slow deliberation necessary for so little gravity.  I know that merely lifting the visor on my helmet will expose me to enough radiation to fry my eyeballs in seconds.

“I hope my leg don’t break, walkin’ on the moon”. -from the musical future

Without the protection of my air tight, state of the art, scientifically advanced astronaut suit, my fate would be horrible but instant.  I’d be baked to a cinder of carbon or quick frozen to a temperature where even oxygen is a liquid and just before either of those things, the air would be vacuumed from my torso like a gaping hole in the fuselage of an airliner at 37,000 feet.

Suction!

I must be careful. The environment is hostile.

All things are threatening.  The trees are festooned with ice.  The only sound is chunks of ice and snow thumping to the ground.  There are oil barrels outside other people’s trailers on makeshift scaffold.  Giant unstable Xs made with 2 x 4s.  “Tubafors”.  Smells like kerosene or diesel.  I’d never noticed them and now I’m upon them.  I crunch up to a tricycle; the only thing showing is a foil and cellophane streamer, flapping and glinting.  I feel that vague dread I get during Civil Defense and Fire drills or when we’re cooking something we caught or killed.

I can no longer afford to only look through the shield.  This is too much.  I understand that my powers allow for some exposure.

I’m so in awe of what I see that my entire premise dials all the way back left and down.  I flip up my visor the better to see.  No more fantasy.  I’m no longer from anywhere but here and what has happened is astounding.  All living things must now deal with ice and snow.  All inanimate objects and structures are under winter’s influence as well.  I worry about the load, the weight and the cold.

Breath is vapor.

Swords of ice a yardstick long dangling and sweating in shadows.  The day warms as the snow shrinks and turns barely blue. Water rushes everywhere.  There are tiny swift streams under the thick blanket of crusty white.  I hear them.  They flow toward the street.  I’m enchanted by the mystery of flows I can only hear.  Like wind.  At yard’s edge is a microcosm of what fields of glaciers must be like and it’s all the way down my block.

I’m off and down the road.  There are places I want to see.  I discover far more substantial flows.  Fast moving streams.  Gullies rushing.  I take off my gloves to try my hands at redirecting the water.  I use rocks and boards and broken brush.  Gravity.  I make a small lake in a desert field.  It drains to the south east and I realize that’s where it’s all going.

Clouds begin to gather and the snow turns barely green.  Blocks from home and carrying my father’s helmet under my arm like a fighter pilot.  Time to get back to the airlock.  I’m thinking about oatmeal and it’s warmth in my belly.  It’s begun to fall again.  Marvelous because the sun is still streaming from the west.  I walk a while in silence thinking and listening.  It’s really starting to dump.  I can’t see but a few feet in front of me.

I’m downhill from home.

Within minutes, all traces of movement are coated and disappearing.  It is quiet.

It is beautiful.  Spectacular.

I am in awe.

Getting cold.

I put my father’s helmet back on……….

The wind whips.

With the visor up, I can only look at the ground or the snow blows into my eyes.  With the visor down, I can barely see out of it and it fogs up in seconds.  I do the best I can to hang my head and look to the sides but I can’t see.  I don’t recognize anything and I don’t know where I am.

My bowels are percolating.

I need to go Northwest.

Drinks for my friends.