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.

I’ve let the nail on my left thumb grow.

It weighs an outrageous amount.

Subject to subtle surges of gravity.

It wedges and snags on things for days.

I can’t wait to clip it but I understand exactly why I’ve let it go this long.  It offends me.  I hate it.  I can’t help it.  My left arm tingles with the anticipation of eliminating it.  Sometimes at night, the left thumb aches from it’s weight.  It is ponderous.

I loathe it because it collects black grime and constantly informs me of it’s presence.  It disgusts me.  Even though I am able to help it, I can’t.  I just can’t.

I must do it now.  Right now.  I can’t stand it.  The need for relief from the mass I’ve allowed has reached past solvency.  I no longer understand it.  One compulsion usurps another.  This is crazy.  It won’t leave me alone.  It pulses like a sore tooth.  It digs at me.  I look at my hands and the symmetry is disrupted almost violently.  It’s a rogue tooth.

Why have I done this?  It’s an affront.  Yellow like corn at the end and clay from my everyday life embedded at it’s base.

Inside it.

It offends.

I want to scratch it against something filthy.

I consider smashing it with a hammer or making it pop like a grape in a vice.  My thumb.

Giant, pastel green grasshoppers suddenly suffer mass abdominal explosions, yielding orange flavored Tick Tacks of soft and sticky shrapnel.  Barely any sound.  I imagine my overgrown thumbnail digging at the giant tangerine rice grasshopper eggs ………

The time is now.  It is my Tell Tale Heart.  I rip up the floorboards.  A heart beats beneath.

I’ve done it.  I’m lighter.  Didn’t wait until I got outside.  Sheared it off over the kitchen sink with giant steel toe incisors.  Not sure it’s short enough but I’m relieved.  Relaxed.  It was a wet fish I stuffed into my pants on purpose.  Ocular organs of grasshoppers crisping and popping beneath my eye teeth.  Ants and mosquitos mingle in my gullet sharing heartburn.  They dance in my colon and I crap like a goose.

I need a shower.

My right thumbnail is still innocent.  Virginal.

Drinks for my friends.

45% of the world’s entire defense budget is spent by the U.S.  The top five health insurers profits are up 56% over last year.  About 18,000 people a year die for lack of health insurance.  Some 1,500 Americans lose their health insurance everyday.  Unemployment hovers around 10%.  60% percent of bankruptcies are prompted by medical bills, an increase of near 50% in the last six years.  Over 75% of those people actually had health insurance.  10 of the largest health insurance companies enjoyed a profit increase of 428% from 2000 to 2007.

We spend billions a month on two elective wars and hundreds of thousands have died.  Most of them had nothing to do with it.  There are more contractors than soldiers, but the former makes six times as much as the latter and we sign all the checks.  These contractors aren’t subject to the rule of law.  You think our military tortures?  Cake and ice cream anyone?

Keep war in context as we talk about the rest of it.

I just puked in my mouth a little.

Wanna know why?  Not only because of the avarice, not only because the health insurance industry spends in excess of a million dollars a day to maintain this most disgusting of status quos.  Not only because we are the only industrialized nation, as well as the richest, without health care for it’s citizens.  No, it’s not just that.  It’s that too many of our own citizens have succumbed to a fear of mere words they can’t be bothered to look up in the goddamn dictionary.  Words like socialism.  A word that many Americans believe to be synonymous with words like communism or even fascism.   I have little patience for stupidity.  I fucking loathe intellectual laziness and especially willful ignorance.  It’s not just that.  It’s that our own elected representatives foment such fear and vote against the best interests of the very people they are paid to protect from the onslaught of such wealth and evil.

It’s that a super majority of 60 democratic senators is unable to deliver a fair and equitable health care reform bill because of obstinance, obstruction and overwhelming plutocratic prerogative.  It’s that an actual movement, a titular “party”, has emerged to buttress any and all nonsense propagated by these assholes of industry, these pillars of piety who would take our money along with the filthy lucre of every corporation, interest group, grassroots or astroturf organization et. al. and behave as though they are beholding to no one save those that can buy or steal the next election.

The absurdity of the Tea Party makes my eyes water and my head ache like I’ve snorted wasabi.  Lowest common denominator.  “The 1/4 Paradigm”.  You can’t fix stupid.  Your best bet with these folks is to smile and wave.

The Republicans piss and moan about transparency in the health care process but as soon as they are afforded a public forum, they holler foul.  It must be a trap.  Jon Stewart so eloquently pointed out that a paper bag is only a trap if you can’t punch your way out of it.  It is to be a public discussion/debate on one of the most important policy issues of the day, not Little Bighorn.  What he’s saying is they’re afraid and the only reason is because they’ve got nothing.  They have precisely dick.  Fuck all.

Not only that, but we are pissing blood and crapping treasure.  Money and lives.  We should at least be on a gurney headed toward an emergency room.  We should probably be wondering,  just what the big dicked hooker happened?

We’re out of money and that doesn’t seem to be fazing anyone.  What happens when we run out of lives?

John Boehner’s office called this actual house yesterday.  House Republican Leader.  I answered.  The man on the other end asked for my father by name and said where he was from.  I asked him to repeat himself.  I heard right.  I told him politely that nobody in this house would want to talk to him.  He asked if I was a Democrat.  I said you fuckin’ A.  I told him that Boehner was an idiot and had a ridiculous spray on tan.  He thanked me and hung up.

Mother was disturbed they had our number.  I was thinking I coulda really milked that shit.

Drinks for my friends.

1. It won’t matter because according to the Mayan calendar, the world’s going to end anyway.

2. She’s  arguably HOT and definitely STUPID.

3. It’s unlikely the GOP will embrace her so she’ll “go rogue”,  run third party and split the mouthbreather vote.

4. Oh, the carnival.  Oh, the burlesque.  Sloganeering and jingoism will be the new vaudeville.  Late night television will crackle with the glut of comic opportunity.  I confess, this phenomena is much anticipated by yours truly.  It’s probably my guiltiest ulterior for hoping it all comes to pass.  Well, maybe not.

Somewhere in here McCain will fold in upon himself and blow away.

5.  The world will finally own the demarcation, previously a fine line, between the clever and the stupid America.  My very own “1/4 Paradigm”, will be accepted as an archetype by sociologists and political scientists across the globe.  The “1/4 Paradigm” posits that at least 25% of Americans are incorrigibly dumb.  Nixon’s approval rating was around 25% when forced to resign to avoid all out impeachment.  Dumbya’s was about the same when he left office.  These are the people who still believe Hussein was behind 9/11, Obama is a Muslim and not a citizen and that you might be queer if you don’t like steak or fail to objectify females and various ethnicities.  The Teabaggers who are still all obsequious for Reagan, despite that he raised taxes at least five times (mostly on the wealthy), tripled the deficit and expanded the federal government by some 61,000 employees.  The people who bring loaded firearms to peaceful political events when there own icon was felled by the bullet of some whackjob exactly like them.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Great Unwashed.  The “1/4 Paradigm”.

6. Hunter S. Thompson said famously, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”.  I’m really hoping this little prophecy finds some purchase.  I understand this is congruous with reason number four but still, I can’t wait to see what the opposition affords us.  The neoliberal may finally emerge as some metaphorical anti-matter to the the neoconservative and we’ll finally enjoy the grace and promise of a reasonably sane and progressive society.  It could happen.  What would a neoliberal be like?  How would it manifest?  Discuss.

7. Millions of little girls will come to know that they too, can do anything……………as long as they don’t buy their own shit and believe they’re something they’re not.  Something they have no idea about.  Learn to recognize when they’re in over their heads.  Maybe they’ll teach it to little boys.  See, this could be good.

8. Honestly, the effect on men if she won would be fascinating.  If roughly the same number of bigots and he-man woman haters came out of the woodwork as did racists when Obama got elected, we’d have quite a show.  A lot of men would suddenly wear their inner asshole on the outside.  Trust me.  Lift kits will sell like guns.

9. I really want her loser ass to get plowed.  I want to see her humiliated.  I thought Dumbya was an empty suit.  I’d punch Dick Cheney if I had the chance.  I just don’t have much patience for people who think they’re smarter than they actually are.  I’ve dealt with them.  I want to push her face in.  Most of us understand she’s a two dimensional attention whore who’s never thought more than a few minutes into the immediate future.  I have no respect for her and I want to see her disrespected.  Politically and metaphorically, I want to see her taste her own blood.

I bet I just made somebody’s list.

10. See number nine.

Drinks for my friends.

I just can’t stand it.  Life always imitating art.  The way art endeavors to imitate life.  The circle closes rarely for reasons other than mere serendipity.  It’s never on purpose or for any reason we are able to divine.  We spend our lives looking to make sense of it and it refuses.  It walks away without a word. It could not care less what we think or what troubles us.

I’m sure of one thing.  It reveals nothing to no one.  There is no game and there is no fate.  Everyone you know who thinks they’ve got it figured out is lying to you and themselves.  It is random.  Despite prophecy, religion or dogma.  I’m not sure math owns the show at all.  I think the universe barely affords the concept of time for example.  At the very least, it does so in a way we won’t conceive or imagine for much longer than we’ll be able to conceive or imagine because our time here is at best a mote in the eye of a spectacular and incomprehensible cosmos.  This I believe at the end of the year of our lord, 2009.

Whatever.

That is not to say justice should not be pursued.  Philanthropy, yes.  Self educate by all means.  Aspire to kindness and compassion.  Eat right and exercise if you must.  People should strive to be as good as they can for a reason that is simultaneously as insignificant as it is fundamental; as far as we know we have but one shot.  In that one run at it, we only have ourselves.

I’m really beginning to own that.

The only magic is brains and the only miracle is will.

A train of thought that sounds like a bowling alley in my head.  Or a train.

My legs are killing me.  I seem to be gaining strength, but they go from sore to searing in seconds.  I’m glad I remembered my cane.

“Coffee on the veranda?” His head bobs while the car absorbs the road.  He strokes his beard without looking at me.

I lean forward to look him in the eye and to say things to him absolutely.  I tell Him I’m beyond scared.  I tell him I’m horrified.

I hold his gaze and thank him as sincerely as I can.   I tell him I have questions.

“We have time to talk today.  My villa is not far.”

This is the furthest south I’ve ever been, everything looks tropical. The grounds are lush and manicured.  Gravel and stone paths.  Palms and grasses.  Plump cactus and moss just a few feet away.  Desert flowers. I glimpse a robust stand of cannabis through some trees.  A handful of fountains and sculptures. The air is perfumed with an organic that is damp and sweet.

It’s humid and cool.

I’m happy to be here.   I feel better.

The driver opens my door and it’s the last I see of him.  He’s never looked at me.  Not once.

Carlo walks me to the door.  The house itself is fairly modest.  Like an early twentieth century LA bungalow.  Broad granite steps to a deck of thick hardwood trailing around both sides.  The entire roof, including the deck, is charcoal to gray or in the turquoise of oxidation.  There is copper everywhere.

Some of it glistens and some a myriad shade of greens.

It seems the whole house has a copper exoskeleton.

Must be a riot in a storm.  Maybe he has seances for Nikola Tesla.  I’m smiling.

The twin front doors are heavy and black. Carlo opens them with a little practiced effort.  Ceremonious but subtle.

I half expected a manservant.

Inside is rustic.   A river stone fireplace of water polished rocks with a heavy wooden mantle.   Silver candlesticks, pictures in elaborate frames and brightly colored glass.   A pot boils over a small flame from coals.  There must be a housekeeper at least.  The floors are dark slate and stone or hardwood.  Beautiful, thick rugs and sturdy furniture.  Blankets and pillows.  Plenty of sunlight through giant framed windows, diffused as the the deck wraps around the house excepting the north side.

The fog has not burned off completely.

On the right is the living area with a high ceiling, the fireplace with pot boiling and beyond that, what looks like a book lined den.  On the left is a small dining area and a large kitchen facing north.  The appliances are robust and sturdy but not new. The floor and counter tops are terra cotta.  There’s a pot rack suspended from chains over and island.  Copper and stainless steel vessels glisten.  Blenders, juicers, toasters and processors, none too modern, festoon the counters and gleam.

It smells of smoke and apples and good tobacco.

It feels cluttered but everything shines in an obvious place.

Carlo grinds coffee beans with some hand powered device I’ve never seen.  Wearing some kind of welding glove, he takes the black pot from the fireplace.  We sit on stools at a small but high iron table with a wooden top.  There’s an old glass French press, a small pitcher of cream and a small glass bowl filled with chunky unrefined brown sugar.  Two spoons, two heavy mugs.

My guess is someone forgot about the veranda.

From the device, he pours ground beans into the press and the boiling water over them.  The aroma makes me crave it. He seals the top with the plunger up and says, “Now we wait.”  He is smiling.

He retreats to the kitchen and returns with a small plate of fruit and bread.  Strawberries, melon, papaya, mango, grapes and what is definitely buttered cornbread.

The cornbread is stupid, buttered sweet and crumbly in my mouth.  Lascivious on my tongue and in my cheeks.  It is delicate cake that makes me anxious to swallow.  It’s color is it’s flavor.  I think there are raisins in it.

I ask.  He tells me no.  Dates.

He raises his eyebrows, rushes to the kitchen and returns with a shiny pile of caviar and creme fraiche on a small bone china dish and an actual silver and bone baby spoon.

He tells me he thought about taking the coffee outside but thought better of it.  He nods as he proclaims it, acknowledging his own wisdom.  That’s how he explains it.

I understand he means he’s not sure I’m safe outside the walls of his house.  I don’t know that I’m safe inside the house so his optimism is welcome.

He smiles and says, “Killer with the cornbread.”

He takes off his coat and he’s wearing suspenders.

“Let’s talk now.”  He plunges the coffee patiently.  Slowly.  “You already know, you are in mortal danger.  Beset by a hound.”  Grinning.  He forces the plunger down a little.  “He is mean as a snake.  A doppelganger of sorts.  He is not your double.  He is not your………contrary or inverse, either, as they say.  They’re all a fucking nightmare.”  He leans a little harder on the press.

Just then, he walks away for a few long minutes.  He comes back to stare into the glass of the press a couple times saying nothing.

He finally returns to push the plunger to the bottom.

“Pale and vicious poltergeists will harass and terrorize a man until his heart explodes in his chest like a fruit pie dropped on a stone floor. The good news is, it is not the worst. The bad news is, it is very bad. Almost as bad as I have seen.”  His hands are in front of his face and his eyes are a little wild.  I go cold.

“He is not supernatural.  He is insane and barely human, but he’s no demon.  He’s just as smart as you believe yourself to be and twice as strong.  But he is crazy, and you would do well to remember that.  It is all you can take advantage of.  You cannot out last him.”

He pours the coffee and generous cream into my mug. It’s sweet enough for me to wonder if I missed him adding sugar.  It’s the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life until I think about what he’s saying and what he may be about to say.  He looks at me like he’s gonna tell me I have colon cancer.  Like I’ll bleed from the ass for awhile and then die.

He’s getting real good at looking at me like that.

“He is about you.  He is of you.  You are entwined with this hound.  It cannot last.  One of you must go.  You cannot both occupy this time and place for very long.  I’m confident you understand that?  Do you see this?  Of course you do.  One of you must kill the other.  He will kill you.  He’s as afraid as you are, believe it or not.  But, he intends to kill you.  He’s afraid but he is hunting you.  He’s begun to toy with you.  He’s long since made up his mind.”

How do you know?  How did you find me?  Who are you?

He raises his hand. “You found me. I was not aware of you until I was but a block away.  Well, I was aware of you but didn’t know you were here until you were here.  Really, the rest is decades of me seeing and understanding these things.  You already know, we are not all the same.”

I nod without meaning to.

He offers me a slab of cornbread with caviar and creme.  The bread is still warm and sweet.  The caviar is salty with marvelous texture in the creaminess of creme.  There’s the tiniest bits of sweet red onion.  It’s so delicious, I need to replay what he’s said in my head.  Hash is to pot as caviar is to sushi, all on brilliant yellow cake.

He walks to the other end of the kitchen and returns with two chilled champagne flutes.

We sip a minute.  Blanc de blanc oh banana.

I’m confused.  I come up fighting.  I can’t help but ask what he does know.  I ask him who he is and despite myself I press him hard on just what the fuck is going on.  I realize I’m pleading.  I try to shut up.  But I’m angry and confused and this dude seems to know something I don’t.  Why am I here right now?

“Do not look at me like that.  I’m not some ‘facking’ wizard.  His accent betrays him occasionally.

Our mutual intensity has us sipping from our mugs and flutes and looking down at the table.  The champagne goes well with the caviar, fruit, bread and coffee.  It all works

“Your only chance is yourself, but I think I can help.”

I tell him I was hoping for a wizard.

He flips me off with a sour look.

I tell him I’m tired and I’m a pussy.

He doesn’t smile.  He tells me my humor is inappropriate.  He is angry.  He seems much older than me, but even in this light, his face is unlined.

He walks to the end of the kitchen and back again.  He does this to gather himself.

“Let me put this as simply as I can,” he says. “Do not doubt that the randomness of life is in some way synchronized with all the things that we do not understand about the universe.  It is what we do know that confounds us. All the while, what we do not know blows us along.”

He pushes the plate of fruit at me with the rubied finger.  I reach and so does he.  We chew and look at each other.  We begin to talk like yesterday.  We laugh and point at each other.  At some point there’s not much coffee left and the bottle is empty.  He brings a single malt whiskey to the table in a strange old bottle.

We use our coffee mugs.

The champagne bottle is empty.  Check.

Now and then he alludes to the depth of my trouble.  I sober up some but he makes laugh again and peers inside my mug.

Next thing I know I’m asleep in front of the fire.

Dusk.

I’m on the couch under a thick quilt.  My shoes are off but my socks are on.  Carlo has left a carafe of water and a glass on the low table beside me.  I stare at it with fire on the other side and see that there are lemon slices in it.

His last words to me, “Sleep. You are safe here.”

I look past my feet and he’s in the den reading furiously, his fingers drumming on his forehead. He looks old from here.

I look up to a polished copper ceiling some twenty feet above me with the fire dancing across.

I head back to the party of what I’m dreaming.

There is the ambient noise of a gathering.  Shouts and laughter and the easy rumble of conversation among people comfortable with each other.  Twilight and the warmth of lanterns and candles.

I’m in a kitchen cracking eggs.  White on white and fluorescent lit.  The last one is discolored and it takes more effort to split, the shell is thicker and not so brittle, but leathery and moist.  Inside is thick and viscous.  Blood and short black curls of hair.  Even in the dream I understand this is my sin.  Dread drops my stomach and snatches my air.

Carlo is behind me in a top hat and cape.  A black dog, a hound in deceitful repose at his side.  I look at him over my shoulder as he slides an index finger under his nose.  A yellow to red orange rosebud on his lapel.  He says nothing while looking straight through me.  He flicks long nails through whiskers and I hear it.  With slow motion grace he reveals bird seed from his suit pocket and scatters it on the tile floor.  He blows on his hands and nails and admires them palms down.

He tells me to call him Charlie.

He said some shit.  An admonishment of the Supreme court and Alito mouthing not true.  The declaration to move forward on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  Calling them on their obstructionist bullshit by pointing out tax cuts for 95% of us.  The allegedly pro tax cut prick champions.  Turns out they’re only in favor if the rich get a break.

I’m a little late with my sentiments but it was an excellent speech.  Comedy by the Republicans for merely sitting on their hands like a little league team, obstinate over a black guy being allowed to play.  Not all racists are Republicans but if you’re far right, you’re probably a racist.  I’m betting you’re a dick too.

Dad needs to do the patties on a grilly grill.  Give them to me rarer.  Moister.  He’s nailed the seasoning.  Mom needs to make that kick ass Thousand Island.  I’ll need a copy of that recipe.  I’ll do my white onion, garlic, mushroom, teriyaki, soy, worcestershire, butter and red wine reduction with a thick slice of sharp cheddar over it all, as glue, texture and flavor.  Toast those buns mom picked out or onion rolls.  No butter but slather them with the Thousand Island.  I don’t think lightly olive oiled and tossed with a ground pepper blend spinach leaves would hurt.  A little texture, a little zip.  See what I’m saying?

Serve with a big stupid California style Chardonnay.  Big oak and vanilla, smoke and butter.  Be sure it has a decent chill on it.  Everybody is making their chards leaner these days and that’s a shame.  There is a place for this style and otherwise we have pinot grigio, pinot gris, fume blanc…..all sorts of skinnier, zestier and maybe even sweeter.  The 7 Deadly Zins (’07) works because it’s so smokey and silky.  You might look into a  dry dose like Sofia.  Anything fruit forward is a good bet for the contrast.  We had a Bogle petit syrah the other night that caused my skirt to disregard gravity.

What we have here, is a burger.  I’m going to perfect this recipe and share it with you.  It’s the aforementioned reduction I have trouble quantifying into regular language.  It’s a process of cooking and tasting and adding.  I’m reminded of making and mixing songs and records.  The biggest difference with cooking is you can’t subtract things.  Once you add, you’re committed.  When building a song, there are many opportunities to put your left foot in and shake it all about while getting to take your left foot out.

I was a young boy and it had snowed at least two feet the night before.  No school.  I bundled up in my boots, new gloves and coat and put on my father’s motorcycle helmet with the full face shield.  My sister let me know right away she’d be telling on me.  I didn’t care for what.  I was on the moon, listening to my own breath.  The sun blasted and hid behind high altitude cloud smears.  “Giant steps are what you take, walkin’ on the moon.”

Did you hear that Sarah Palin’s political action committee has spent more money buying her own book than on campaign contributions?  Her last stint on Oprah garnered way less attention than her first one.  Still, she can command a $100k speaking fee.  Yet her show is tired, her sincerity has been in atrophia since she found out for herself how full of shit she really is.  Sadly, her incandescence is on the wane.  She really has been her very own burlesque.  You want reality television?

I’ll miss her and I’ve been thinking lately about the devil you know vs the devil you don’t.

Always, no, never…..underestimate the gratification in talking to and old friend.  Peppered or poppy seed crackers and brie with apricot preserves.  The easiest thing is they tell you the truth.  The best thing is they tell you what you need to know.

Most drummers never get to the point where they can keep time, much less fuck with it.

That may be all I have to say about everything.

Drinks for my friends.

Rain drips slow.  The faux brick pathways glisten because we shoveled and the rain drips slow.

Mother pounds on my door this morning at ten ’til nine and clearly under the influence of her best authority, she barks throaty my first name and that we’ll be shoveling snow.  Sheezus.  Same way she calls me to dinner.  She grew up with ten brothers and sisters.  She’s very funny and she doesn’t know it.

Still, I’m thinking there might be a punchline.  Like she’ll come back an hour later advertising cinnamon raisin toast and hot chocolate.  I am not yet awake.

I’m not a morning guy.  I’m not an outdoorsy guy.  I don’t ski or snowboard.  I am not about any of this in any way.  I don’t hike.  I loath the cold as much as I loath the heat.  I’m forty four years old and living at home.  Temporarily.  If it wasn’t for the brutal knock on the door, these would not have been my first thoughts upon waking.  This morning, they sting me.  It is, after all, my own mother beseeching me.

I roll over while I roll my eyes.  I pull on some boots and jeans.  A shirt and it’s time to piss.  Check my eyes and nose for boogers.  A coat, and hat and here I came.  Not gonna brush my teeth yet.

Billy Jean, The Tripod Lab, revels in our shoveling.  She is black, happy and has a short but powerful whip for a tail.  She misses the right front leg clean from the shoulder.  She doesn’t care.  There are no social stigma among pets.  She can run like hell.  All the power coming from the hindquarters.  She doesn’t always steer very well.  She wipes out a lot.  We have no problem laughing.

She is happy and dancing.  To her it is a game.

I adore animals for their almost incorruptible innocence.

I throw shovels full of snow on her and she bucks and huffs with glee.  She is the world’s happiest dog and an anchor for my parents that you would have to witness to understand.  They dote.

The sun is out and I’ve taken off my hat and coat.  The sky is The Big Nevada blue.  I begin to sweat.  Mother is snuffling and sniffing but tearing it up.  Our breathy fogs hang in the crisp bright air.  My heart swells and I’m  grateful she got me up to do this.  I revel in the sound of our shovels scraping the ground.  Heels clicking and sliding on a polished mall floor.  Rocks tumbling from a pile.  Clay roller skate wheels on a sidewalk.

The sweet old man next door appears at the end of our driveway with a clattering red midget in his grip.  He ends up doing more good than harm.  Imagine what happens when the blower only blows two feet in either direction on a twenty five foot wide, seventy foot long driveway.  He let me make a couple passes but kept asking me if I was tired.  Never got to run one of these before.  This is an excellent morning.

It pulls to the right.

We’re in the back now and I think about throwing snow on my mother.  That she is out shoveling with me and moving just as much snow as me informs my reluctance.  I want to but this is going well.  I’m sweating and feeling vigorous.  I wish I could.  I will if the opportunity arises again.  I see me dumping a load of powder on her head.  I don’t mess with my mother much but I’m really feeling it.  Everyone owns a little crazy and I like my mother’s.

I might fling some and act it’s an accident.  I might, but I’m chicken.

Instead we shovel and talk, and I think about how vulnerable but how simultaneously tough she is.  I know what she’s afraid of and she need not worry.

Gin & tonics and cigarettes  at 4:30 with mother on the patio.  Billy Jean attends.  She eats dinner and her treats while mom and I wrestle her toys from her to throw as we survey the day.  We take turns negotiating the toys away from the Tripod Lab.  Smart dog.  We have to do good cop bad cop and variations thereof.  Mom and I talk.  I’m pretty sure we tell each other just about everything.

I know I tell her everything.

She tells me “You’re all I have everyday.”

We both have big mouths.

I believe it to be inherent.

We come in, wash our hands and begin dinner, sometimes I cook.

Rain drips slow.  The faux brick pathways glisten because we shoveled them and the rain drips slow.

Palindrome.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      ” a word, line, verse, number, sentence, etc., reading the same backward as forward, as Madam, I’m Adam or Poor Dan is in a droop.” -dictionary.com

So much attention being paid to an ass whooping that hasn’t happened yet.  Think if we got proactive and started coming straight at some of these douchebags, we might do a little better or at least not look like such pitiful invertebrates.  If you’re gonna piss and moan, save it for after you’ve marched and fought and then just walk away if your vagina hurts that bad.  Democrats are eying the back door, the party is crumbling.  Some already slipping out the rear.  We are such pussies.

For six months they talked about the deep fractures inside the Republican machine.  Teabaggers vs. Moderates.  Religious asstardian zealots vs. mouth breathing gun huggers.  Nazis vs. the Undead.  A big chunk of the GOP was looking to bend McCain over.  They still are.  None of it has left the building.  Both sides of idiot still think Palin is one of them.

They are three things.  Disciplined, organized and stupid.

See, it’s really easy to scare stupid people into organizing.

We are smart.  That’s it really.  Yeah, we participate and organize a little.  Brains never won an ass kicking contest though.  Part of the problem is we’re not so conveniently incensed as the dumb people.  “The 1/4 Paradigm”.  The great unwashed.  We’re not like them at all.  I could visit any house of worship on any given sabbath and have them lighting torches in twenty minutes.  I’d start by talking about the baby killers in our midst.

Then I’d tie gays and pedophiles together without mentioning the Catholics.

Now the independents vote for Darkside because half of them are Republicans anyway and the rest of them have been inculcated with a fear of Democrats.  You know, baby killers?  Homosexuals preying on young boys?  That sort of thing.

How the fuck did that happen in less than a year?  Sheezus.

Don’t forget “The 1/4 Paradigm”.  25% full blown and incurably stupid for life.  Can’t fix or cure double digit IQ’s.  Can’t keep them outta Baptist churches or the Klan.

“Look at ’em, ordinary fucking people, I hate ’em.” -Repo Man

Way too many of them believe we want to take their goddamn guns away.  If I can just impress upon you varmint eating woodsmen and you crank snorting lumberjacks one thing, it would be that we liberals, progressives, socialists, whatever you want to call us, are just not that panties in a bundle over your particular method of compensating for a less than grandiose dick.  We just don’t want you getting your shaky hands on explosives, canons or missiles.

Collect your guns and be yourselves.  Fingerpaint.  They’re yours to have and keep with our blessing.  Try really hard not to bring them with you.  You don’t need one at Walmart or at a campaign rally for a candidate you don’t like.  No family picnics.  Other than that, we’re cool.  When you do bring them with you, we hope you bring them to a place where it’s unlikely to shoot another human.  Not anywhere around here or me.

I did just hear that Teabaggers are chuffed with Sarah for supporting Doubtfire.  How tough is McCaine’s race?  This guy is really starting to have bad days and say stupid shit.  He’s a bullet dodged by a nation.  She’s a prideful primate.  We rolled our windows up in time to keep her out of the rented sedan.  Together they are anti gravity.  They do not like each other.  There was two or three weeks, in the very beginning where it was mutually beneficial.  Since then, it’s been nothing but more harm than good.

Codependence.

Like two cinema villains, they cancel each other out.  I like to watch.

I don’t know where I’m going with this but to point out the Big Top.  The drama.  The vaudeville.  If I could just be apolitical, it would be entertaining because it really is melodrama.  High concept, low expectation comedy.

Let’s run with that shall we?

It is the carnival that concerns me.  Don’t hate the player…..  Forgive me but I can’t help but think of politics in America as the WWE.  It’s just so absurd.  It’s scripted and the fans know it yet they lust for suspension of disbelief so hard, they become the willing fools.  I’m having a crisis of faith.  I fear politics has become my soap opera or my reality show.  If that’s the case, surely it matters just as little.  My go to impetus, my welcome catalyst, looks more and more like bullshit.

I’ve been observing this process closely for some twenty years.  What I see now, I can’t help but think is hopeless crap.  Roll your eyes and piss in the sink because nothing matters.  I can’t help it.  My cynicism is calcifying.  I’m going to pass it as a stone and it’s gonna have me on my knees.

Drinks for my friends.

The biggest bitch in contemporary American politics is the money.  The filthy lucre grows the machine.  Mucus and puss in it’s wake as it slogs toward inevitable conclusions.  Blistered and listing, it creeps with the powerful momentum of a slow swinging, giant iron gate on it’s way to slamming shut.

Inevitability is acrid in the thinking person’s nostrils.  Like brimstone.

Ha!

The 5 to 4 SCOTUS decision today is a fundamental betrayal of the 1st amendment in that it severely compromises an individual’s voice, right and access to free speech.  A seemingly venal verdict that in due course, will prove to be as cloying and stifling to the opinion and intention of everyman as any opinion yet rendered by the highest court in the land.

One impetus for the First Amendment was to protect the individual in the face of a collective.  The majority does not automatically rule.  Back then it was to discourage mobs of idiots.  Pretty much the same thing these days.

Are we not yet enough of a plutocracy?  Avarice and lust for power have not already eclipsed the voice of the individual enough?  What new devilry is this?

We are not men.  We are Devo.

Chief Justice John Roberts…..in his own separate opinion, said that upholding the limits would have restrained “the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy.” -CNN Ed Rollins.

I’m calling bullshit on that and if Roberts is sincere he’s a goddamn fool.  It doesn’t take a genius to understand what unrestricted, unregulated spending and therefore influence by humongous lobbies and corporate conglomerates will have on truthful discourse in this country.  One need look for proof as near to hand as any election within the last few months.  Money walks.  Bullshit talks.

This is exponentially worse.

What we have here is a wedding in hell.  The groom is bullshit and the bride is money.  The offspring are of quid pro quo corruption.

Truth is relegated to cleaning up for the funeral scheduled for the next day.  Then Truth will take a sick day.  Truth will be on holiday.

Care to guess how the vote fell?  Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy and of course, the ever pompous Scalia, all voted in favor of taking away your last bits of clothing in a shitstorm.

We can impeach a Supreme Court justice can’t we?  Let’s start with the Boy Scouts.

“Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 57-page majority opinion. “No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.” -The Christian Science Monitor

Fuck that.  Not based on it’s identity, but on the basis of identities who bring undue influence and advantage to bear on both process and individuals via media saturation because they’re loaded.  It amounts to the brainwashing of the great unwashed.  Trickle down stupidity.

I prefer to scrub the brain.  I most like to spank it.

Chuck Schumer:  “The bottom line is this: The Supreme Court has just pre-determined the winners of next November’s elections,” Schumer said. “It won’t be Republicans, it won’t be Democrats, it will be corporate America.” -the Hill.com

President Obama called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” -The New York Times.

“Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings……….. “The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind,” Justice Stevens wrote. “And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.” -The New York Times.

Stevens pretty much nails it there.

Unconscionable.

Drinks for my friends.

So, the Democrats run a lame candidate for Senate in Massachusetts while turning their backs on a nest of Republican snakes.  So, the Republicans simply cater to the lowest common denominator.

Meet Scott Brown.

He posed.  Hairspray on an empty corn cob.  He’s a goddamn lead singer.  How new are you?  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.

Maybe, just maybe if he wasn’t up against cardboard.

I should be angry.  I suppose I am.  Should I be angry at Republicans for being such ignorant, obstructionist asstards, or Democrats for being such paper tiger pantywaste losers?  I feel like being confused, but I’m not.  What I am is disgusted.

“The Republicans are playing chess and the Dems are in the nurses office because, once again, they glued their balls to their thighs.” – Jon Stewart.

Teddy Kennedy held this office for forty seven years.  The lion of the Senate.  I admired Ted Kennedy.  Comity no longer exists anywhere in the Senate.  It went from solid to gas.  The way of the Dodo.  What we have here, is piss all over his grave, equal parts Democrat and Republican.  It will freeze and eventually evaporate come spring.  It will still stink for summers to come.  Them with more mild sensibilities and weaker constitutions will wonder if the reek is merely rotting vegetation.  The dying foliage of deciduous urban landscaping.   Only in the fall.

You and I, along with the forest rodents will understand it to be the odor of personal weakness and the strength of filthy lucre.

And the shit of urban rodents.

No equitable, compassionate health care for the richest nation ever.  Health care is a right, not a privilege.  Yet this crap persists to blow in our faces.  Tens of thousands die here every year because of greed and cowardice and/or no health care at all.  Then there’s them that go broke.  Hundreds of thousands dead in Haiti, not because of an earthquake, but because of decades of poverty and neglect.  Wait til you hear how complicit we’ve been.  Hundreds and thousands die every month in the various wars we conduct.  Plenty of funding there, but no conscience.

We are getting sucker punched every morning out of bed.

I need to remind you that by shaving one tenth off our budget for the military industrial complex, we’d all have health care and groceries forever. Higher education would be free.  No potholes.  No collapsing bridges.  We’d all have enough for the fruit of the month club.  We’d be excited about the pears.

Pete Townshend once said something about ending The Who before they became parodies of themselves.  He was anxious for them not to become a joke.  It’s too late for America.

Since when did a party have to have 60 out of 100 votes in the Senate to scratch their own balls?  How is it that after barely a year under a new administration, a twisted referendum is allowed to hold sway in state like Massachusetts?

This is profoundly and spectacularly ridiculous.

I’m not sure I give a mad fuck.  The only option now is to ram the diseased phallus that is the Senate health care bill down the blistered, milky, puss oozing upper gastrointestinal tract of the house.  It’s a shitty bill.  A mandate to buy but no mechanism for controlling cost or avarice.  A non starter for me.

I’m having a hell of a time giving a shit.  Whatever happened to hope and change?  Does anyone remember laughter?

I am disgusted.  I’m romancing apathy.  Sure, there’s been progress, but on such an infinitesimally incremental level that I’m struggling with what appears to be a wish sandwich.

“Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich? A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you, hee hee hee, wish you had some meat.”  -The Chips 1956

This really is stupid.

You give me twenty, maybe twenty five bucks, I’ll make you the best salad you’ve ever had.  I have skills.

Drinks for my friends.

What the hell?

A thoroughly embrocated, hallowed chair and institution of itself, was became the Senate seat occupied by Mr. Kennedy for decades until his death.

Now threatened by an “independent” Republican goddamn teabagger.  I stumble over the last sentence more than once because it sounds so dirty.

In Massachusetts for fucks sake.  He posed nude in Cosmo for crying out loud.  Show me a politician with some juice and I’ll show you a lead singer wannabe.  Even Ashcroft had pipes but he was ugly, stupid and mostly evil.

A bitch.  A diva……

A frustrated cross dresser like Guiliani.

Scott Brown claimed to not know about the tea party movement but took their money after attending a fund raiser this very month.  He supports Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land” but pledges to be the the 41st vote against virtually any health care reform.  He says he drives a truck with over 200,00 thousand miles but is by any contemporary standard, at least somewhat wealthy.  What and who exactly is this guy?

According to his own website he favors lower taxes.  Forgive me, but a Republican never says that without meaning lowering taxes on the rich and to hell with the rest of us.  Trickle Down Economics is pure crap and anyone in favor of it is either ignorant or not a friend of the middle class.  The middle class used to be our moral, ethical and intellectual ballast.

Now that it’s in atrophy, we’re having an identity crisis see.

“Israel has made enormous sacrifices in an attempt to secure peace – including unilateral withdrawal from Gaza”  -from Scott Brown’s campaign website.  And yes, that is bullshit.

What we do know is that a health care bill is on a very steep hill if we lose this seat.

I’m having a tough time giving a mad fuck because the last one out of the Senate was prime swampland.  No public option but a mandate to buy with fines if you don’t.  Fines that go directly to the insurance companies.  There’s more but that’s enough.  Blow me.

Other than that, I’m real worried about Sarah being a contributor to FOX tie me to the bedpost News.  Not.

I gotta find that O’Reilly interview.  This shit is gonna be great.  What I’ve seen is already good.  Pray she doesn’t wig to early because the longer it goes on the more spectacular the flame out.  Don’t be afraid.  Embrace the Palin.  Encourage her celebrity.  Don’t buy any of her books though.  Make sure you don’t end up providing her with a dime.

The best part of this circus is about to be free.  Jon Stewart and the like are pants shittingly gleeful.

Cirque du Palin.

It works if you make the ‘a’ long……like Pawlin……accent second syllable.

Make the ‘a’ long….see?

Another thing that is bothering me still:  How much faster our black President responded to an international disaster of enormous magnitude than did our white president to a domestic disaster that was allowed to live up to most of it’s potential as a direct consequence of neglect and egregious incompetence.  Maybe it’s genetic.  Dudes from Hawaii with big ears are smarter.  Dudes from Texas by way of Connecticut with big ears are charismatically retarded.

It’s not racial at all.  Despite Limbaugh, The Human Shitsmear’s assertions that our current President has hopped and skipped to because of the color of your average Haitan’s skin.  Without a nod to any other megalomaniac with media access, it’s not racial at all.  Don’t forget that.

Understand, Rush Limbaugh is a racist.  For those about to rock, we salute you.  He’s a turd in the punchbowl.  He’s a bloviating, pontificating, make shit up as he goes, racist, bigot fucktard that I would debate or play chess with or both in a heartbeat so I could pull his limbs from his body after spanking his brain with the brick of my own.

Sincere political debate pivots on policy and reason and a modicum of comity.  That there’s a dialog here about Haiti beyond what to do, is proof that the conversation is in the woods.  Proof that a lot of us still aren’t paying attention.  Let me say this, 25% of Americans are incurably stupid.  This is a long standing theory of mine that consistently bears itself out.  Proof can be had on this very show.  It will now be known as “The 1/4 Paradigm”.  You will think of it often as one of every four people you meet is a dumbass.

That’s all you need to know.

Drinks for my friends.

Nine million people.  At least a third in serious trouble.  Pitifully poor country.  These people were miserable before this happened.

Big surprise.  They’re fucking Catholics.  They believe in God.  Spell check compels me to capitalize them and it.

I’m in a bad mood so I just want to point this out.  The Vatican could sell a painting or two and pay for the incredible gathering of forces converging on this microscopic nation to save as many lives as possible.  It’s kind of amazing the relief effort being mounted.  Specialist teams from a dozen countries with dogs and literally tons of equipment and supplies.  Various militaries steaming toward.

I’m thinking this is gonna be horrifying but kinda dramatic.

Anybody heard from the Pope?  I’m sure he had something to say.  Anybody?

Meanwhile Limbaugh the Human Shitsmear and Pat “I wish God would fuck him in the neck” Robertson both busted a nut today.

Robertson: “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about. [Haitians] were under the heel of the French…and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, ‘we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And the Devil said, ‘OK it’s a deal.’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”  -collegenews.com

“On his radio program Wednesday morning, Rusty [Limbaugh] said that President Barack Obama and company would use Haiti to get closer to the “light-skinned and dark-skinned black [communities] in this country” while adding that the U.S. has “already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.”  -collegenews.com

Al Franken wrote a book once called “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot”.  It was all true.

Shitsmear then endeavored to compare Obama’s reaction to the Fruit of the Boom bomber to what he’s doing for the people of Haiti.  Huge mistake to measure your response about a man who failed to ignite his underwear on a commercial airliner.  A man who’s in custody and no longer a threat to anyone.  A man who may know things above and beyond how to detonate his fucking diaper or not……………..

But shame on you for acting so quickly when three million people are in real trouble right now.

Man I hate these guys.  Robertson blames everything on the Devil and Fags.  Limbaugh blames everything on everyone smarter than him.  I hear the latest thing is three dimensions.  Math check.

This shit is killing me.  I gotta bug out.

I mean really.

Let me say this: These guys are dicks.  They really have nothing to do with any of us.  Filthy rich whores who have opted to trade soul at the crossroads quite some time ago.  Notice how large their heads are.  How the noggin seems to float above the torso and shoulders like a balloon, bobbing and jerking to the random currents of air.

Think of others who appear this way.  Discuss.

Drinks for my friends.

I wake and I’m blank.   I’m alone.  I understand that’s wrong, but it’s all I know.

Hanging over the opposite side of the bed I sleep on.  There’s a tiny smear of blood on the bed skirt.  I dab at it.  It’s sticky.  Not yet dry.  I check my mouth.  Not sure what I expected.

I’ve seen the last of Shirley.  I begin to think about that.  I’m sure it was brutal.  A bird of prey on a rodent.  I want to shit myself.

Nope.

The bathroom door clicks and she’s in front of me in my robe.  Beaming with self satisfaction, she holds aloft a platter of steaming pastries. Ever seen the album cover for Breakfast in America by Supertramp?  There is fruit and juice.  The aroma of cinnamon and sugar.  Her cleavage strains against the robe as it becomes the uniform of a diner waitress.  Sun bangs through the window and it’s warm.  She feeds me pastries from the platter but I can’t taste them and I’m thirsty.  She is matronly and jolly.  I grab for the fruit but it’s dry on my tongue.  Cardboard, styrofoam.  I gulp the juice but it’s air.  Everything looks cloudy.  Everything feels cloudy.

Blood begins to leak from her eyes.  Her face panics while it folds and creases.  She screams.  Snot erupting from her nose and streaming off her quivering chin.  Thick black whiskers sprout and curl as though fertilized by the blood and mucus.  She’s a lumberjack and she’s not okay.

I recoil into consciousness.  It’s violent.

Like I’ve been wailed on until I open my eyes.

I’m awake, still wearing this beautiful watch.

You fucking A!  I’m awake.

Here it comes.  All of it.  She’s gone.

I gotta piss like a racehorse and I’m shaking while it sinks in.

The mirror above the sink confuses me because I mistake it for blood at first.  It’s lipstick and the message is incomplete.  My name and Shirley had a lovely time, then a smear that trails to the bottom of the mirror and her lipstick is in the sink along with the clear plastic cap.

I look like a chicken fucking McNugget.  What we have here is a deep fried and greasy countenance.

I must have gone down after the blowjob.

She wiped me off with a warm wet towel.  There it is, still damp between the bed and the bathroom.  It’s orange.  There’s no condoms, my junk isn’t sticky and there’s orange lipstick on it.

He killed her right there and then.

Right after my righteous hoovering.  She went to freshen up and maybe spit?  Did she already have the towel?

There’s blood, viscera and hair in the shower.  Blond hair.  His knife is there too.  No batteries in the waste basket.

Housekeeping can change the linens, I won’t ditch the bed skirt.  Absence being more conspicuous than a smear of blood I figure.  We’ll see.

Carlo hammers at my door, calling my name.

I’m freaked out all over again.  I don’t know anything about this dude except he’s fucking odd.

Man I’m in trouble.

“How bad is it?”, he barks when I open the door.  He hasn’t slept, he’s pale and a little bug eyed.

I wonder how he got on the boat.  Carlo probably boards airplanes at will.

I wonder how he knows.  I wonder how he knows what he knows.

I tell him what I know, and what I think I know.  Somehow I’d managed jeans and a t-shirt.

He folds his hands and rests his forearms on his knees, looks up at me from the corner of the bed.  The watch he wears is identical to the one he gave me.

He bows his head, then comes up with a grimace.  He goes to the closet and pulls out a plastic bag for shoes to be shined.  He doesn’t look at me as he collects the evidence, the bloody viscera, lipstick, knife and hair into the bag.  He starts the shower, hands me the shoeshine bag and tells me to lose it while indicating the balcony with a nod of his head.

I’m outside and it’s chilly, I look both ways before letting it drop.   I wait for it to hit the water.  It seems too loud, but I probably only imagined hearing it.

I slide the door shut behind me and he’s back in the bathroom methodically cleaning the mirror with toilet paper wrapped around his open hand.  His hat is off, he sweats a little.  It is here I begin to trust the man.

I need a cigarette.

Holding up a finger he disappears out the door.  As quickly he’s back with paper towels and a spray bottle of blue he’s lifted from a cleaning cart.  I now understand that lipstick is very greasy.  The blue liquid is a minor miracle.  I’m able to make short work of everything.  I consider dousing my genitals with it.

This is some bullshit.  No fair.  I’m just not equipped for this.

I can’t help it.  I sob.  I choke.  I dry heave into the tiny sink hard enough to bleed.  I’m aware of stomping my foot as I convulse with anger.
He’s behind me in the mirror all about sympathetic chagrin.  “Shower, but be quick.  We need to get you out of here.”  He points at the floor.

I am grateful to hear it.  I need to wash this off of me.  I need to be told what to do.

I’ve no idea where to go from here.  It’s all way too much.  A woman has been murdered.  An innocent woman.  She was nice and she smelled good.  She didn’t deserve to meet anyone like me.  It wasn’t her fault but it was mine.

She suffered a violent dissection with a a dual D-cell powered, serrated knife.  Not fair.  It’s not fair and I’m in the middle of it.  It’s entirely my fault.

I knew what would happen.  I knew it absolutely.  I fucking saw it.  Now I’ve gotten more than an eyeful.  Now I am guilty.

I’ve just dropped evidence into the ocean.

Mr. Tarcisi hands me a towel.  He is anxious for us to leave.

Before we leave the boat, we stop for eggs, coffee and a muffin with butter and jam, Carlo insists.  I can’t eat.  I’m numb.  I can’t take most allergy medicine because it traps me between wanting to catch a frisbee in my mouth like a dog in a commercial or napping until the solstice and this is exactly how I feel right this minute.  I seem to be vibrating with a low frequency panic and something octaves up that would make for excellent surveillance camera footage.

By the time we’re in his car his impatience is obvious.  Fuck me.  Fuck him.

“I need to take you to my home for a bit”, says Carlo through a smile and a brown cigarette.  He looks out the window when I look at him.

Drinks for my friends.

This fucking Harry Reid as a racist thing is comedy.

Harry Reid will never be caught in an ethical or moral scandal.  My Mother was his secretary and he is at least an honest man.  I will take your money over this.  I simply know it to be true.

I blame society and the media.

Really, I do.

I haven’t always agreed with him and he’s pissed me off.  I understand he’s not polling well.  I dare say it might and maybe should come down to the Devil you know versus the one you don’t.  Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader is a big deal for a state with our meager population and vast tracts of irradiated desert that Washington wants to turn into the nation’s toxic nuclear septic tank.

Fuck that shit.  No more nuclear energy until we figure out what to do with the waste.  Thanks be to Harry thus far.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described in private then-Sen. Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” -Yahoo

Sounds a little rough.  Context kids.  Biden said something like clean and articulate.  A far poorer choice of words and he’s Vice President.  See, Mr. Reid was speaking with candor among colleagues.  He was assessing the candidate’s chances of success in light of how racist America remained.  Remains; because, bear with me here, we’re really finding out just how racist America still is.

You must admit it’s really reared its ugly head.

Mr. Reid was guilty of being matter of fact in light of what the stupidest quarter* I’ve alluded to before would end up thinking and doing.  For the record, the stupidest quarter have behaved exactly as we all thought, thus vindicating Senator Reid.  They didn’t make fun of how he talked and only accused him of being an Arab or maybe Muslim.  Turns out Harry was exactly right.

Senator Reid apologized immediately and our President said, “I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart,” Obama said yesterday. “As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.”  -Yahoo

More than enough for me.  To be fair he also characterized the comments as “unfortunate”.  Who knows what he meant exactly but I agree.  Unfortunate.  Yes.  It shouldn’t be an issue, but it is, and you’re an idiot if you can’t see it.  I’m not here to apologize for ignorance or stupidity and I don’t believe that’s what has occurred here.  What we have here is a truthful man speaking privately in support of a man who would become our first black President.

I know it’s awkward but Harry Reid was being honest and I admire his prompt contrition.  He knows what he he meant but he’s humiliated by how it sounds.

Michael Steele called for Dirty Harry’s resignation today.  Didn’t see that one coming.  Let’s politicize racism and who better to foment than a black Republican?  He asks rhetorically.  Somewhere Gomer Pyle chuckles with abandon.  Surprise, surprise, surprise.  Michael Steele should be the titular Head Douchebag of the Republican party forever.  He’s as good for the world as Sarah Palin because they’re both the same caliber of stupid.  The somewhat sociopathic kind that is relatively rare in most walks of life but prevalent in low IQ conservative, ideological and fucktardian political circles.

You know, the kind that fail up.

Is this racism?  You bet.  Is Harry Reid a racist?

Piss up a rope.

Drinks for my friends.

*When Nixon was forced to resign, his approval rating was about 25%.  When George W. Bush left office, his approval rating was about 25%.  I can think of no better proof that one in four Americans is a dipshit.

So I made fast friends with this guy named Hunter Oswald.  The drummer.  He played drums.  Like a motherfucker.  As soon as I heard him I was happy to work with him.

The experience of making this record was daunting and cardio pulmonary.  It was hard and I complained.  I whined.  Mark Harvey reminded me that if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.  I wonder what he thought that day.  A mere few years earlier he told me I lacked confidence while I stood in front of the same desk and he was absolutely right both times.

He told me to shut up and get on with it.  Both times.

Mark charged us next to not a damn thing for Studio C while we had it locked out.  I think our bill might have been as low as $17k.

Best boss I ever had.

So this prick’s name was Hunter and he was a fucking punk.  He celebrated his 21st birthday during the making of, and I threw him out of the control room for participating in record making while drunk and surly.  It wasn’t really hard to do because I liked him.  He was a cynical, mocking, steps ahead little bastard.  Barely corrigible because he was so smart and so reckless.

Great goddamn drummer.  I don’t know how he plays now but when I recorded him he was Keith Moon meets Phil Rudd.  Really.  A buck twenty five maybe, but he’d chop up cymbals and burn through a snare head in two takes.  He had a way of looking at you and mocking you with a shit eating smug fucking grin that warmed the cockles of my heart.

Toothsome.

It was like I saw him and he knew it.  Plate of shrimp.

He told me once that he thought of me as an older brother.  I don’t flatter easily but that blew my skirt up.  I had the privilege of doing another record with him and it was just the most entertaining and somewhat nuclear of experiences.  Do yourself a favor and read it:  http://brainspank.org/wordpress/?p=102

We’d been in rehearsal for a few weeks.  We had no name for the record.  Half the songs didn’t have titles.  I knew what they sounded like and I had some ideas but this was seat of the pants for me.  I was totally winging it.  Alex took the wheel while I swam around and figured out what I needed to do.

We hung some huge poster board at the entrance of the control room for possible album titles.

They had this roadie they were all fond of.  His name was Jimbo.  He contributed “Whiskey Dick Chaos”, “Fuck & Suck Circus” and “Ebola Ain’t Shit” to the conversation.  The album was eventually to be called “Punkrockacademyfightsong”.  He could drink a 16 oz. Guinness in like three seconds.  After four of those, the power of Christ compelled him out of the control room too.

I may have told this story before.  Hunter is on the couch to the left in the very front lobby of A&M.  He knows The Stones are across the hall and he spends his off time making friends out front because he knows that’s where everyone comes and leaves from.  He doesn’t have a lot to do because he’s the drummer and he’s barely post adolescent.   And It happens.  One night Hunter is hanging out and in walks Keith Richards.  I was there.  Hunter was off the couch lickety split and he said, “Keith Richards” while pointing………

and Keith said, “Funny you should say that, that’s my fucking name.”

I eventually figured out what to do with the record.  As soon as I did, it was over and time to mix.

I was seeing Jules Bergman’s daughter.  Beth.  He was the science correspondent for ABC when I was a kid and covered all the cool stuff during the seventies including the Apollo Soyuz link up.  She had a great rack some freckles in her cleavage and rosy nipples, a moon rock, webbed feet, great lips and a beautiful blue eyed Sheppard Husky mix named Girl.  She was a lawyer and played violin and she was interesting.

I showed her the difference between tube and solid state amps.  I made her her a tube girl.

I’d recently stopped seeing an international Penthouse Pet I met in traffic court while bargaining with a judge over my shitbox VW Bug and the boot on it.  She was so hot I was intimidated.  Damn.  Her name was Olivia and she had a trust fund and a condo.  Damn.  My vagina was huge.  She was in AA but kept cognac in the cupboard for me and she made heaping steaming bowls of pasta.  She lived in Brentwood.  I knew she was older but she never let on how much.

I imagine coke was her vice.  She told me George Carlin was her sponsor.

When she wanted sex, she invited me into the bedroom to watch a movie.  She was hotter than Georgia asphalt.  She would remind me the VCR was in the bedroom.  She’d smile and ask me if I wanted to watch a movie.  Olive skin, tan lines, silk bras and lace panties.

I was about to mix the first record I’d ever recorded and tried to produce and my head felt like it was consumed by bees and ants.  We started in D.  Arguably the worst sounding console at A&M.  Beth was with me that night I pushed the faders up and began to listen to what I had.  The working title of the song was ‘Sam Police’ but it became “Minusame”.  We ended up remixing most if not all we did in D, manually in C.

Beth was wearing a Stones T-shirt that night and her tits were a major distraction.  Beth once got me drunk and fooled me into boning her while she was menstruating.  It was dark and she kept telling me not to look down.  One morning I woke up and she’s already been to the store and returned with raisin bread, orange juice and condoms.

She called cognac “wood drinks”.

I did know when I pushed those faders up that we had a record.

Somewhere in there was this adorable young black woman.  Lexi.  I really don’t remember where I met her or how we knew each other but she gave me a pedicure and a blowjob for my birthday.  It was dark and rained hard the next day.  She had small but perfect breasts and had just pierced one with a tiny silver hoop.  She spent the night at my place in Hollywood.  I drove her home past collapsed apartment buildings in the Valley.  She was beautiful and I don’t even know her full name.  We saw each other only a handful of times probably because I was a mess.

Drinks for my friends.

Listen up, this story is important.

Promise it’s a good one.

My first time engineering and producing a record.

I had no idea what I was doing.  No shit.  I really didn’t.

There’s no rhyme or reason other than right place, right time.

It’s gonna be more than one chapter.

It was pretty cool.

So I think I was twenty six or twenty seven years old.  I’d gotten a pretty good grip on most of the A&R department’s business.  Enough so that when another engineer appeared on the schedule, I could get proactive.  Sometimes I was actually able to take the gig away.  Other times I was at least able to insert myself as an engineer and avoid some full orchestra AT&T jingle or some ridiculous nine day mix of a single song with a total of 10 tracks of music with Don Smith and Shelly Yakus.

Some dog and pony fiasco by some major superstar or not that I didn’t give a mad fuck about either way.

It’s always good to work with others, share ideas and interact but you could check out the set up, talk to the staff guy, survey the gear, the mics and their placement without anyone bothering you.

I ended up under some dipshit named Graylin (sp?).

The band was Down By Law.  An Epithaph band.  This guy Graylin was a piece of work.  He thought himself some sort of wizard.  He wanted to meet me and talk production beforehand.  We had drinks and he told me he liked to sometimes bring a ladder to a session and sit on top of it while the band played.  Just to throw them off, he said.  I told him that was fine by me but I warned the ceiling in studio C was only about eight feet.  I ended up paying for drinks.

He was an idiot.

Turned out to be an excellent band and Graylin was the turquoise cummerbund.  Mouth breather.  We left him behind the first day.  I did the best I could.  I liked these guys.  They could play and they had passion and this producer they had was full of shit.  He had no idea what he was doing.  He had no idea what he had and he didn’t understand his band at all.  He showed up the first morning of the gig and burnt a wad of sage in the live room.  We were setting up mics and it took less than two minutes to smoke us out.  Studio C had a very small live room.  I tried my best to be nice when I asked him not to take it into the control room after kicking him out of the live room.

Before I ever pushed a fader on this session, I understood this guy Graylin to be a douchebag.

He was getting all bullshit native American spiritual for a punk rock demo.

Nobody cared.  Dumbass.

Graylin ended up being quite enamored of my capabilities.  Why not double the rhythm guitar?   Why not do so with a different guitar and amp as long as you can make them compliment each other?  Why not check the snare head between takes especially if the little fucker plays as hard as this one does?  Why not check tuning constantly?

Why not pay attention?

Why not wear your sunglasses in the control room?  Really, and a fucking trench coat.  What a dick.  Rock stars and wannabes wear shades in the goddamn control room.  I really can’t blame the rock stars sometimes.  The only time I ever wore my sunglasses in the control room was for a photo shoot.  I looked like a smug dick.

The session went well.  Good songs.  Great band.  Full of personality, humor and heart.  I got excited.

We let Graylin have the couch.

They could play.  They could really play.  Different tempos and sensibilities than I was used to.  I’m big on dissonance and the way Dave played wasn’t always tonally congruent with Sam and Angry John.  Usually worked out pretty good though.  Lovely dissonance.  I like when rhythm guitars rub a little.  Punk rock is a good venue for dissonance.
Oh, and Hunter.

Hunter has become one of my best if not closest friends.  Geographically inconvenient.  He’s a cracker and I’m white trash.  He’s upper Florida and I’m LA by way of trailer in Carson City.  We’ve both crossed the country to work together.  For years when Hunter was on my side of the continent he left a simple message: “plate of shrimp”.  Whereupon we would drink and such.  One night he was at the Roosevelt and we ended up with this group of high school girls from out of state on meth, seriously.  They were some kind of team.  They were tagging each other until sun up to do drugs in the bathroom.  I woke up among them.

Creepy.

I think I walked home.

I adore Hunter.  It’s a man crush but I’m not looking to give him the business or anything.

There’s no mirror that reflects half of what everyone needs to know.

I made sure, I did my damndest, to make sure they left with good rough mixes.  Graylin would be taking his vagina along with the rest of himself, to mix somewhere else.  What kind of an asshole takes his demo to another studio to mix when he has free time at a place like A&M?  When the band is being considered by a major independent label like A&M as opposed to a minor independent label like Epitaph was at the time?

I didn’t have much time but I spent every minute left to me on good aggressive punk rock mixes because Graylin thought he was working on prog rock.

I’m sorry Graylin, wherever you are, but you were an ass.  I’m sure you’re not a bad guy.  I hope not anyway.  I could be wrong.
It was alarming and depressing to know that such a poseur could somehow infiltrate this level of things.  Whatever.  I’d already seen this movie too many times.  Another day in the life.  Never expected to hear from Down By Law again much less Graylin.  Dave Smalley called me three weeks later and asked me to produce his next record.  I told him yes.  I told them all yes back then.  I had nothing to lose and didn’t believe a single one of them.

So many so willing to kiss without even touching.  I was already a whore.  What were they waiting for?

I was giving it away.

Long story short.  Six or seven months later, Dave came back around.  There used to be a diner on the corner of Sunset and La Brea, I honestly can’t remember the name but it was a very faux Hollywood/Fifties, suck my dick, touristy kinda deal.  They had pretty good milkshakes.  It may still be a Boston Market.  A family restaurant two doors up and across the street from a titty bar.

Crazy Girls.  Eh hem.

I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but Dave contacted me at the studio and asked to meet me.  We met at that diner.  I think he told me he wanted to talk to me about making his next record on the phone.  I think he said that but I didn’t believe it so I don’t remember it.

We order fries or onion rings or something and he asks me, with his lovely wife Caroline present, if I would make his next record with him.  He said he didn’t have a lot of money to spend and he might not be able to pay me anything up front but he said there was money for the studio and points available and I didn’t care about money.  The offer was to produce, engineer and mix a record for Epitaph, for a band I already liked, had already recorded and sort of understood.

In the intervening months I’ve become a much better engineer.

My ass puckered because I didn’t really expect to hear those words.  Even at that young age, I was used to allusions and promises.  I’d heard it all before.  I thought maybe, maybe, I’d get offered this record but I didn’t own it at all until Dave Smalley actually asked.  I’d kinda forgotten about it.  I remember smiling and and answering.  I walked back to the studio wondering if it was real and what I had agreed to.

I barely understood what it was to produce a record and I would be engineering too.
I took the gig.

I accepted Dave Smalley’s magnanimous offer.

Al Reed was in front of my lobes.  Al and I had begun to work together but he probably still thought I was some kinda dick.  I couldn’t be positive he’d take this on with me.  I’d thought about explaining that I’d never produced a record before and that I really was relatively inexperienced as an engineer……..I thought about it, but Dave knew it, and it just didn’t bear repeating.  We were on the same page.

He wasn’t just willing, he was enthusiastic about taking a chance on me.  Turned out to be the best selling record Down By Law had ever or would ever release.  We really did see into and understand each other enough for us both to know I would do my best.  I did.  I did do my best.  Alex Reed did his best and helped me and the band to do our best.  We honestly all did our best.

It was fucking swell.

I struggled.  I lost and regained my confidence a half a dozen times.  Alex was amazing while he worked to define his own role.  We had a blast.  I melted down a couple times but not in front of the band.  I was sure I didn’t belong there, either as a producer or an engineer.  Al would shove some sturdy lumber up my ass and I’d be back the next morning and so would he.  The band embraced Al because he was so smart, organized and intuitive.  I’ll forever be grateful.  I made up my mind that I would never, if it were up to me, share anything but equal billing with Alex Reed ever again.

Once again, Alex would teach me, sometimes by example, what I needed to know.  An early symbiotic relationship.

He brought everything I couldn’t.  That smacks of melodramatic but I’m here to tell you it’s not.  We share a birthday but that is almost all we have in common.  Very smart guy.  Way more musical than me.

Could not have done it without him.

Much more to come, and it gets better.

Drinks for my friends.

My girlfriend flies in tomorrow night and I’m a little uneasy.  Concerned.  The whole industry is in panic and disarray.  As you now know, terrorism has reared it’s ugly head and begun the new plague with a single man successfully igniting his underwear but not the bomb therein.  Trump’s wife got thrown off some flight and there was some other different skinned guy with another funny last name with food poisoning.

The golden trifecta of international terrorism.

The man with the explosive underwear was thwarted by passengers.  I like that.  Just like Richard Reid, the notorious and equally incompetent, “Shoe Bomber”.  Ha.  The people did rise up and they did smite the evildoer.  They did so to save themselves, maybe their fellow passengers and that’s probably the only two reasons they had.  I’m not saying it didn’t take courage, I’m just saying it’s logical and these passengers weren’t stupid.

What are we so afraid of?  Sure, it would be horrible to be the one tackling the guy with flaming underwear in the middle of a fuselage at thirty thousand feet.  If I were about to be a martyr, I might have shit my loin diaper.  So, Al Qaeda has pretty much obviated a Keystone Cops comparison.  These guys are losers.

They suck at this terror thing.  Makes you wonder.

Perhaps Yemen holds the answer.  First, there is mime school.

It is comedy.  Wanna be terrorists find their way onto a commercial airliner headed to the states rather easily and we’re regulating personal products by the ounce, specific sizes of Ziplock baggies and taking our shoes off.  I hear now we won’t be allowed a pillow or blanket on our lap or a trip to the piss trailer for the last hour of any flight.  LA to Vegas is about 45 mins.  Your not allowed to urinate or conceal a bomb in your underwear for fifteen minutes before you board the flight and of course, the duration of the flight.

This shit is dumb.

I refuse to believe any terrorist attack was ever halted by the seizure and confiscation of a regular consumer sized tube of toothpaste.  That happened to me.  It made my bloomers constrict.  They took my decoder ring and that little chunk of strontium 90 I had in my cigarette pack and my lighter but not my matches.

Reactive when we need proactive.

Duh.

Our guys are more Benny Hill than the Keystone Cops.

None of this shit means a thing.  If someone is determined to blow up an airplane and isn’t any sort of fucktard, they’ll blow up an airplane.  If a decent car thief wants your car, it’s his.  All this policy and alleged regulation while 95% + of shipping containers coming in never even enjoy a glance.  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.  They deliberately inconvenience and annoy the gen pop to impress upon them that something is being done about something I really doubt we should be so worried about in the first place.  Nothing is being done about anything.  The only two retards to make it on a plane sailed through security and were stopped by passengers.

I imagine that’s all I really need to know.

Anything else I might have needed to know, I’d have gleaned from the typically reprehensible attempts by jackass Republicans like Pete Hoekstra and Jim Demint to either cash in on the event or shamelessly exploit it into politicization.  I’m telling you, Republicans are dicks.

America is smarter than this.  There really is nothing to fear here but fear itself.

Don’t even bother to get distracted.  Move along.  Nothing to see here.

Drinks for my friends.

I feel like I told a big lie last night but I can’t remember it.

I had a damn nice Christmas with the Nebekers.  An excellent family despite the virtue of a Catholic rotisserie among other things.  They all are tanned by the requisite guilt.  None of them seem to really mind.  They are the single brightest family I know.  Meris or “Bob”, meets me at the door with a glass of wine.

Meris “Bob” Nebeker is marvelous.  Her cheer and optimism are infectious.

Right there is about as good as it gets.

A story so nice I had to tell it twice.

Meris is the matriarch and a happier or more lovely woman would be hard to find.  She has been a second mother to me since I was but an ignorant boy.  Her opinion of me is beyond important.  So is that of brother Miles.  We all  simultaneously remembered Miles driving us to Budget Tapes and Records after one of his summer softball games when he was in college.  I bought Supertramp’s Breakfast in America on LP.  Sean and I would later man the counter at that same record store in a strip mall on the other side of town between a Raley’s and a Mervyn’s.

Miles was my first inspiration to write.

We were “rock geeks” and were ruthless to almost anyone appearing at the register with music we didn’t approve of.  At the time, that meant almost exclusively metal.  If you liked Depeche Mode you probably owned a trench coat and had gender identification issues.  On Sunday mornings after a night of drinking until 4 a.m., we could be particularly brutal.  Sean would ask the customer whether they had ever “danced naked with their uncle with a pickle in their mouth”.  Fluster and confusion before I said to never mind and inform them of their total and take the money.

Good system.  Kinda good cop, bad cop, kinda Belushi and Akroyd.

There’s this hardwood chair here in the office.  I broke it.  Leaned back too far.  Hataway said I could blame him.  He and LZ saw it happen.  I was pretty hammered so it wasn’t that bad.  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen but I think I need my brother’s help with this chair.  I’m sure I do.  I wasn’t sober and we were gathered in the office of the Douglass compound.  I was playing them some Gooch.

The Gooch is the shit.

I leaned back in the chair and there was a tremendous report.  I went down.  Over.  Ankles above ass.  I knew I was fine but because of the sound, Chris and LZ were alarmed.  There was cracking and snapping.  I made clear I was golden.

I was good but it’s not cool to break furniture in anyone’s house.  I’m in my parent’s house.  That’s so not cool, I can see my breath.

I know my brother can fix it but I don’t think we’ve spoken for at least four years.  When I was younger I had a problem with him.  I don’t anymore.  Partly because before that, I adored him and then I grew up enough to understand what it was liked to be judged.

He’s a good man but we just don’t have much in common.  We weren’t raised together, I didn’t meet him ’til I was 10.  He was 20.  We were both kinda 15.  I’m not really sure how well I ever knew him but we had fun and we liked each other until I was about 15.  He has quite a bit to do with who I am.  More than he knows.

This could really be a good and positive thing.  I need his help.

Chris brought Zeek over today.  I had asked for it.  Typical for me to dread visitors but when they arrive I’m a little beside myself.  Before striding into the house, Zeke tossed his snowball over his shoulder.  Ezekiel rocks.  At first he set about entertaining himself by exploring the house.  Opening doors and surveying contents.  He got bored for awhile.  We watched a reality tv show with police chases and wrecks.  I offered him a Coca Cola and he said yes.  When I brought it out and poured it over ice, he relented that he hadn’t been sure what I was talking about.  He wasn’t about it at first but eventually sipped on it and told us he liked it.  I asked him if he’d like a straw.  He liked that idea and I’m all over straws so I figured I’d really hit on something.

The straw was the deal and he slurped the soda.  The idea that he’s six years old and unfamiliar with soda makes me wonder if I’ve breached some serious etiquette.  Chris told me not all, but I wonder.  Next time, I’ll have real fruit juice without high fructose corn syrup.

This kid is excellent.  There were plenty of other revelations during the hour or so.  Chris interacts with him so adroitly and they function like a father and son that understand each other very well.  It was pretty gorgeous.  Thanks be to the Hataways and I guess I’ll see ya all tomorrow night for the taco feed.

Trying to think of how to impress Zeke.

How cool that Hataway brought his little boy to meet me again.

Then cousin Marlo shows and spills.

Drinks for my friends.

I just watched a half an hour of wrestling.  I have no idea why.  It was the stupidest and most gratuitous thing I’ve ever seen.  I’m seriously confused.  What blows up the skirt here?  Why do people watch and follow such obvious chicanery?  It really is spectacularly dumb.

I need to remember that fully one quarter of America is stupid and there’s nothing to be done about it.

Miles helped me with that tonight.

My personal contrast is that I’d just spent an evening at the Nebeker’s.  You know, right before the wrestling on TV.

I spent Christmas with the Nebekers.  Bright, lively and hysterically goddamn funny brothers, Tom, Jeff and Meris the Matriarch who treats me like a son.  Jo might be the only adult that lost track of the conversation when she went forth with zeal towards the mess.  It was the absolute best conversation I’d had in a long time.  Come to think of it, the last best one was with the Nebeker, Sean.  He of best friendsmanship, honor and humor.

It was a Goddamn delight.

Miles was the “Vodka Whiperer” and after a not so brief cell phone conversation he told me, because I was stupid enough to ask, that it was a wrong number.  I brought a bottle of gin, diet tonic, a bottle of wine Chris and LZ left last night, A half tin of cookies my cousin Rod gave me, two cans of V8 because I wanted to make red beers and I knew Meris had capers and worcestershire and she would never be without lemon.  Miles called it an Irish lunch pail.  You can’t ask for more than sitting around the kitchen table in the house of Meris.  Worlds collide with humor and grace.

I really want to tell you the story of Miles going from looking like Michael Bolton, To Kelsey Grammer to Benjamin Franklin.  But I can’t.  I mean because I can’t.

Several people let slip the word “fuck” in the presence of Meris in one iteration or another and I’d like to remember I wasn’t one of them.  Jo’s potatoes rocked with creaminess and a rich swarthiness of flavor.  We had ham, tamales, a mixed green salad with walnuts and apples and croissants.  Everything rocked.  I was sent home with two foil covered plates that I’m pretty excited about.  Sean fixed my plate tonight and Meris made two for me tomorrow.

I can’t remember now if I asked for rum cake or pumpkin pie.  I bet I asked for pie.

Oh and then Chris and LZ last night on the eve of the Xmas.  Both brilliant funny and engaging.  I was so happy when they rang the bell.  I knew exactly who it was.  They stayed for a good long while and it made my reality.  Chris brought a sketchbook, he always does, but he left it behind.  I’ve already flipped through it twice and laughed out loud.  Wondering how long I’ll get to hang on to it.  I bet tomorrow it’ll be back in his hands.  I really want to see Zeke.  I can’t help but be so flaming curious about this boy Ezekiel raised by these two smart, sane and creative souls.

Then I got this excellent call from Faris, King Larel his own self.  We talk about everything, Lew and I.  I think about the Sue of Lew & Sue.  And the lovely young girl they would not sell to me.

I’m learning an important lesson here.

Spent an evening with cousin Rod the other night.  Rod is my favorite sonafabitch.  He’s surly and defiant but if likes you he likes you, and if he loves you he loves you.  We seem to understand each other.  Ten minutes in he told me my breath stank and got me some gum.  He’d already gotten me a beer and Tanqueray on ice.  I came home with cookies and goodies.  His woman is adorable, we played air guitar together.

Tuna salad must have texture.  Olives and onions at least.  Red, white or yellow onion.  Fresh garlic if you can find elephant garlic or similar, not too pungent or hot.  Try pickled garlic.  Relish is a cop out.  Chop some Vlasics and use good mustard.  Serve on a neutral cracker.  Your mayo is the other major component.  I’ve even fried and blackened the tuna, but tuna salad needs mayo.  East of the Mississippi it’s Hellman’s.  This side it’s Best Foods.

That’s a done deal.

Don’t even think about Miracle Whip.

Miracle Whip is for a bologna sandwich on white bread with store brand bbq chips for texture.  I have no problem with that but it’s not what we’re doing here.

There’s other things to talk about.  Get some fresh dill.  Dill can be subtle, so don’t be shy with it.  Lemon is good and so is lemon pepper.  Some caution if you’re doing both.  Do it right and you won’t need salt.  Everybody thinks canned tuna needs salt.  Nobody is right.  Use capers if you must.

You should never make the exact same tuna salad twice.

There’s all kinds of appropriate variables, paprika, peperoncinis, green onions……..there’s ginger and mint and Vick’s Vaporub.  Mercury and lead or clams and crawfish.  Even if you’re among the stupid 25%, never make the same tuna salad twice, explore yourself by trying different things.

Expose yourself to different things.  Try drinking straight vodka while listening to disco while making your tuna salad.  Think about that.  That sounds like a good idea except the taste in your mouth when you wake up.  Still sounds like a good idea.  I’ll have to insist on different music.  I wouldn’t mind hearing the theme from SWAT……..but we’ll need some metal and some blues.

Pepsodent?

Drinks for my friends.

‘Well, there was Mystery,’ the Mock Turtle replied,
counting off the subjects on his flappers–’Mystery,
ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling –
the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used
to come once a week: he taught us Drawling,
Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.” -Lewis Carol

I need to ask you.  What would you do?  I mean just what in fucking hell would you do?

Forgive me, this question careens in my head like an air hockey puck.  Just as noisy and just as random with the underlying hiss of air.

Here I am suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Back on this boat and he’s fucking right here with me.

I knew he would be.  I knew it.  I ran but knew I couldn’t hide.

I’m the goddamn protagonist here.  I need some sort of secret weapon.  I’ve got nothing.  I’m gonna get my drink on.

I want hard candy with a soft slick center.

One of the few things I’ve actually learned in life is that the thing to do with an antagonist is to seize any opportunity to ignore them.  Best way to discourage.  Remove the contest by refusing to compete.  Sounds good.

This is convenient for me as I sit at the bar.  It works.  He fades.

It’s not really working, however.  This fucker is relentless.

When later I look, I can still see my name in the glass behind the bar like ghost writing on a mirror long after his steam is gone.  How is that even possible?  This really fucks with me.  It’s right there.  If anyone were to blow on it with hot moist breath, everyone would see it.  This can’t be real.

Those chalky mints with the green nucleus.

A 16 pound bowling ball in my head.

It’s still early.  The only thing I can think of is to drink.  Finish my drunk.  I make up my mind to do it like William Holden.  I switch to twenty year old scotch with a single cube of ice and think about picking a fight.  Whiskey makes me mean.  I bet they have some sort of jail they can throw me in.  Bet I’ll be safe there.  But I’m too much of a pussy and know that If I’m successful at getting into a real fight, I’ll lose because I’ll be so fucking hammered and I don’t know how to fight and I’m a pussy.

I’m sure I’d get my ass handed to me.  Probably get hurt pretty bad.  Not sure I’m willing to do that.  I’d like to punch somebody though.  I just can’t invite that.  It would be nice to really punch somebody as hard as I can.  But I can’t.

So that’s out.

I go back to gin.  Another double Sapphire.

I’m a lion.  I’ve got a mane of hair that curls and is blond.  I go to the bathroom, take off the terrycloth scrunchy and fluff it up.  It’s length and luster.  I have broad shoulders and a deep voice.  Thick blond facial hair and sideburns.  I am a Lion.  I’m a fucking Clydesdale.

Gonna get laid.

Back to the bar.

I’m sporting a serious chronometer.

I have another double Sapphire, gin is me and I am gin, and I decide the rosy cheeked kinda dumpy chick in her Sunday best is sexy.  She’s happy and I’m drawn to it.  I’ve never been the type.  I don’t know how to do this.

I’m thinking about those mints, you know, they’re buttery but soft and green and minty.

I send her another of whatever she’s having.  He tells me her drink is full.  I tell him send it anyway, he winks at me when I tell him to do this.  I stare through him.  What a dick.  Stupid porno mustache pencil neck dickhead.  It must suck to wear a vest that colorful and that dumb.  Like a cheesy tropical duvet.  I think it’s the same pattern as the bedspread or drapes in my suite.

She seems to be game when she gets it.  She waves to me and mouths hello.  I’m close to shithoused or wouldn’t have a chance here.  I wave back and try to look like I have friendly humility.  She giggles and picks up her two green drinks in silly glasses to approach me.  Doesn’t spill a drop.  I learn from her approach that she has big tits, skinny lips and nice legs.  Two out of three ain’t bad.

Good calves in pumps and thighs thick but not too.

Guess where from?  Alaska.  The furthest you can get from America and still be American.  Except Hawaii.  She smells great.  Tropical and sweet.  Like grapefruit and papaya or mango with honey.  More like Hawaii than Alaska.

I like a clean woman.

Her name is Shirley.

Oh well.

Fuck Hawaii, the other furthest place.

Whatever.  She’s friendly and I’m as honest as possible.  I was recently involved in a car accident, that explains the cane, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I was going bug fuck and needed to get outta the damn house.  I’m single.  Nope, no kids.  I guess I’m selfish and understand that about myself.  Better than being a shitty parent.  I confess this all to Shirley.

She’s a little bucktoothed.  It charms me.  I have a thing for bucktoothed women.

I’m not happy about my candy apple red invalid cart.  Is it still outside my door?

Maybe it’s the watch.

Something is nagging at me.

I tell her how cool my suite is.  She says she doesn’t even have a window.  I have a balcony.  She wants to see it.  Look at me, I think.  We could watch a movie she says and tells me her name is Shirley again.  In the elevator she takes my hand and hopes out loud that I like to snuggle.

There’s a snag in my head.  I don’t know what it is.  Can’t describe it.  I’m hammered and can’t isolate what’s clawing at my cerebrum.

I want to roll my eyes but it makes me glad.  I would like to snuggle with this woman.  I would like, I think, to eat and drink with her.  I would like to have a friend.

Her dress is garish and tight but she’s sweet.  Pastel lime lycra.  Push up bra.  She’s a little round but well distributed.  I bet it’s all good when she’s in the flesh.

Her lipstick is kinda orange and her teeth are a little crooked.

She may have a bit of a mustache but it’s blond.

She’s an excellent kisser.

Trying the door gives me pause.   I’m fucking scared.  I know he’s in there.

Now I understand my trepidation.  What risk am I exposing this woman to?  I’ll just insist that she can’t sleep here.  I’ll make sure she leaves before we sleep.  I can do that.  We’ll have breakfast together, I’ll tell her.  We’ll do our business and I’ll make sure she gets back to her room.  I’ll figure out what to say and she’ll understand.  I just can’t fall asleep with her still here.  It will be fine.  Her breasts are enormous and challenge the fabric of her dress.

She’s got her hands on my shoulders while she breathes green drinks on the back of my neck.

I wobble a little on my cane.

I know he’s not here.  I just know.  I can tell.  I smile over my shoulder and get the door open.  If she even had a single clue she’d run panicked, screaming, tears and snot.

No smell of pigs.

I’m cool.  No sign of him.

I cease to consider the danger I’m exposing her to.  I’m a dick.

She goes straight to the balcony and I take a piss.  His electric knife is in the sink.  Fuck.  I take the batteries out, throw them in the trash and cover them with toilet paper

The knife goes in the toilet tank.  I’m thinking that ruins it.

What am I doing?

Somehow she’s found Steel Magnolias on the flat screen above the mini bar.

She yells that she loves this movie.  I smile.

I yell there’s a good one about the ship’s engines on another channel.  I brush my teeth and tell her I’m kidding.

She asks if I have a robe.  I take it off the bathroom door.

She lies on the bed, head propped up by a hand, grinning with sex, straps off her shoulders, boobs spilling out.

Next.

She’s in the robe and her bra is orange.  Orange?  Maybe it’s a bikini top.  It matches her lipstick.  Didn’t say she was a supermodel.  Her tits look pretty good though.  Milky white with a small mole on the left halfway down the expanse of her rather voluminous cleavage.  Tan lines just above the cups running over.  Shirley has natural double scoops, that’s why she’s here.

She smiles at me and lifts her other arm under her breasts so they swell.  Tan lines and areola.  I resist the urge to roll my eyes again but I’m liking the idea of giving her the business.  I like that move.  I have an eye for the subtle and the slutty.  She possesses rosy cheeks and a certain youthfulness.  I more than appreciate the contrast.

Kinda like Bleu Stilton on a cracker and a good dry, but sweet port.  Kinda.

More like she’s wholesome but wants to fuck.

Whatever blows your skirt up.  She does smell nice.  Very clean.  I glimpse where she’s stopped shaving at the knee.  No matter, it’s a light down from there on up.

She spends time touching me.  She does it well.  Her nails, fingers and toes are pristine.  She uses them with grace and carnal acuity.

I ask what she would be up to tonight in Nebraska?  Alaska, she says.  I’m too drunk to be embarrassed.  I’m not sure what I’m doing but I press on.

Hot and bubbly.  I gawk at her voluptuousness.  She’s spilling out all over the place.

She pretty much blows the lid off by asking me if she can put me in her mouth.  I acquiesce with a laugh.  I don’t know what else to do.

It’s all the permission she needs.

She climbs on top of me grinning devious.

She’s a little bigger, but I like the way she feels in my hands.

This is going well.  Her panties are orange.  It’s a bikini and it frames her wide wide hips in a way that begs for my hands.

Her mouth is on mine.  It’s blissfully sublime.  Her tongue is soft and fat.

She reaches behind with a thumb and yanks her bikini bottoms down to her thighs.  She uses a foot and toes to take them off.  It is velvet brown.

Cool trick.  I wonder about my blowjob.

Turns out to be a scorching hoovering.  She is adept.  All the way down.  Again, all the way down.  Again.  Looking up at me right at my eyes whenever she swallows me whole.  Shirley has talent.  Again, all the way down.  Giggling and moaning that I can feel through my stem.  My root.  My pelvis and up through my spine.

I lose consciousness somewhere.

I sleep fitfully.  My forehead sweats but my feet are freezing.  At first, there’s the standard dream of not being able to run very fast or hit very hard.  Impotence.

Next, I dream of a mushroom cloud.  I’m on some some sort of island and there is to be a missile launch.  On my wrist is the watch Carlo gave me.  The second hand moves smoothly to twelve.  I’m outside and I look down at the missile as it begins to glow on the pad.  This isn’t right.  I’m on my balcony, above it all, excited, full of anticipation and suddenly fearful.  It’s not right.  Something’s wrong.  It arcs over the ocean, glowing orange and then an angry red but not into space.  My stomach drops.  I understand it carries a  nuclear warhead and seconds later it crashes into the water and the weapon detonates in the blue ocean maybe fifty miles away.  A city skyline high froth of water rippling and bursting without any respect for gravity.  Massive and threatening.  Continuing to grow and burst and rush toward the island I’m on.  Orange and fiery on what was peaceful ocean glass, it parts the clouds with dark and foreboding strings and horns of the Russian Symphony.  The sun is a sixty watt bulb.  The music screams and barks.  Then it’s a billion watts.  The wind gusts and the ground begins to dance.  It’s spectacular but no shock wave moving towards me like in the movies.

I’m knocked down flat and hard.  I can’t get my breath.  I vibrate with fear and dread.  I feel and hear the impossible crack and boom as buildings shake and dust and chunks rain.  It’s in my mouth and nose.  I look behind me and all the walls and windows are missing.  My clothes are shredded and smoking.  I’m confused and bleeding and see that my skin has melted away.  My hands and feet are fused into balls of bone.  Phalanges curled and shrunken to clubs of naked gray rounded stumps.

Death on the way.  In an awful, terrible hurry.  Death comes.  Death is here.  Doom is here.

A knife with a hollow green blade.  The hilt is silver.  I’m calm.  I slide back down.  Neither here nor there.  Above and on the bottom.  Into purple clouds.  Out of the blue and into the black.

Officer Jim Sampson questioned Dracula that day on the school playground and concluded he had to cut the creepy little bastard loose.

Dracula can’t help but notice the seaweed thin booger flake waft from his right nostril onto his left index knuckle during his interview with Stone Phillips.

Dracula just adores the way lipstick emerges from the tube like a an Irish Setter’s penis by simply twisting the bottom of it.

Dracula salts his meat lovers pizza.

Dracula joins the ranks of the teabaggers, only to slip his hand down the back of their pants and slide his pinky, with it’s cocaine ready nail, up their rectums when they are otherwise distracted and pontificating on matters about which they know fuck all.  They either screech with delight or surprise and Dracula hugs them into silence or unconsciousness.

Dracula cries for Argentina.

Dracula minces his words.

Dracula only ever addresses his crew with “you boys”.

Dracula takes his Corvette to Jiffy Lube and won’t leave until they wash and wax the fucker.  At first they refuse, so he bares his fangs and whips out his python like penis.

Dracula really digs Blue Oyster Cult.

To avoid long lines at the supermarket, Dracula shanks the customers in front of him and piles his basket of cow tongues, frozen peas and presto logs on the black, ever forward moving conveyor.  He’s sure to have his membership card in hand and all coupons at the ready.

Dracula is not above blowing a homeless dude in the park for some fresh puppy meat and a little crack.

Dracula cannot help but love the way he looks in a chiffon prom dress.  A strand of pearls with matching earrings completes the effect.

Dracula shaves his chest hair only to find that his nipples are puffy and swollen and feminine.

Dracula can’t get over how magnificent his python like cock looks in maternity compression hosiery.

Dracula loves to shit himself while wearing said hosiery.  He likes the way the moist wad of feces feels while he drives and the way it works it’s way down the backs of his thighs while the odor offends everyone around him as he strides boldly around malls and supermarkets.

Dracula doesn’t visit the world with a smile but he does always leave his front door with an optimistic grin.  You can take that to the bank you fucking turkeys.

Dracula hates yams.  He hates the flavor.  He hates the texture.

Dracula loves prison.  He really likes the solitude.  When he gets tired of it, he just leaves.  It’s good to be Dracula.

We talk politics and religion.  Celebrities and ordinary people.  He’s friendly and charismatic.  A quick smile and hazel eyes that seem easy to read.  I can’t help but like this man.  We smoke and drink and talk.  We tell each other excellent stories.

He smokes Dunhills, I smoke American Spirit Ultra Lights.  We try each other’s.  He tells me mine are like smoking angel hair pasta without any sauce.  I till him his are like meat lasagna with a layer of charcoal.

After a time, Carlo looks at me and says with some gravity, “Let’s us visit my shop, you and I.  It’s just round the corner and up the street.”  I tell him I’ve suffered an injury to both of my legs and can’t walk far.  I’m conserving energy for my return to the ship, I say.

“I have a car”, he says, “I’ll get you back in time”, he slides open his phone.  He texts.

Like the movies, an immaculate black Mercedes sedan emerges from around the corner.  The sound of it’s slow rolling tires on a wet and dirty street is something I can’t help but exalt in my head.  I love this sound.  Car wheels on a gravel road.  “Wait, bring your drink, get him a refill!”, barks my new friend Carlo.  Once inside the car, our drinks are passed to us through the open windows in plastic cups.

I’m drinking snake bites.  Hard cider and ale.  Bad idea.  Makes me mean.  Carlo sips from a clear plastic tumbler of what looks like cold medicine with weeds in it.  Who knows?  A mojito?  I haven’t ordered or bought a drink since he sat down.

“I’m going to sell you a watch my friend”, we’re in the back seat, charging up a hill.  He smiles big.  Teeth immaculate.  His face is round, young and enthusiastic.

“A good watch at a good price”, he says.

I don’t feel like I need a watch.  Is that all this is about?  I’ve had no success with them.  They quit working or I lose them.  I like watches.  The precision and the aesthetic.  I’ve always admired them.  I’m kinda broke, most likely unemployed.  I say nothing.  This is a bad idea.  I look out the window.

The surroundings speed by and atrophy by the block.

I was thinking I’d made a friend.  I like this guy.

Past twilight.

No shit, I’m confused.  Some cosmopolitan oddity that I’ve just bonded with on a muddy sidewalk in a third world country wants to take me to his store to sell me a watch?  What the fuck?

Flags go up.

How do I get myself into this shit?

Who is this guy?

I can barely walk.

I look at him and he nods his head while patting his knee.  He’s composed but anxious and I don’t know what to make of it.

I listen to the tires.

We get to the place and the driver puts a fedora on his head before stepping around.  He opens the door for me, then Carlo.

It’s dark.  There’s a single lamp at the end of a long road.  A spooky business district that probably evacuates just before sundown.  Every venue with bars on the windows and those segmented security doors that roll down and lock at the bottom.  Curbs but no asphalt.  Sidewalks but no street. I swear I hear bats.

I won’t succumb to fear.  I can’t allow it.  This isn’t right.  It sucks.  It’s dark.  My legs are killing me.  They will betray me.  Something will deliver me to him right about now and I’ll be helpless and Carlo will laugh maniacal.

“No worries my friend, you’re safe”, he says, looking me in the eye while he pulls out his keys.

I tell him I’m fine and remember my cane.  I’m sweating.  My back is damp.

My shoes are noisy as fuck.  His aren’t.

I’m a little light in the head and breathing hard.

Then.

The shop is a wonder.  A modest storefront on approach.  “Carlo’s Emporium” it says, red and gold in a nineteenth century font.

Labyrinthian inside.

Aisles and rows, irregular of shape with dark corners and odd angles.

The smell of Soaps and salves, potions, lotions and concoctions.

I smell lavender and sandalwood, cinnamon, ylang ylang, patchouli, verbena, licorice, vanilla and earthier more subtle aromas.  An olfactory feast.

Behind the counter all manner of teas, dried weeds and flowers, tobaccos, herbs, insects………a mortar and pestle on the counter next to an ancient scale, paper funnels, empty but corked glass tubes, tins and jars.

Bird’s eggs, fossils, telescopes, globes, animal fetuses in backlit jars, glass eyes, pipes, cigarettes, cigars, lighters, maps, watches, real skulls, human bones and tusks. Guns, rusty knives and swords.

Mounted dragon flies, wasps, beetles, scorpions and black widows.  All giant and arresting though nestled dead in cotton batting.

Masks, odd statues,  ancient anatomy books, old diving helmets and suits made from canvass and brass, velvet paintings, pinball machines and an impressive array of gumball dispensers.  I smell hot greasy fries and ketchup.  Popcorn and maybe the spun sugar of cotton candy.

A popcorn cart.

Everywhere I turn there’s something to covet.   This place is fucking unbelievable.

A huge bin of superballs in neon or with glitter inside.

Cool paintings.  Old posters.  Unopened model rockets from the seventies.  Bins of comic books and bookshelves of The National Geographic.  Old Swamp Thing comics illustrated by Bernie Wrightson in protective mylar.  Original Frank Frazetta, Arthur Suydam and Barry Windsor Smith.

I look closer, there’s a beaker pale green and bubbling with a two headed rodent bobbing.  Organs floating and churning in red or yellow aqueous.

The more I look, the more I see.

There are live owls in the rafters.  Almost completely silent but not at all shy about staring through me.  There’s five at least and they never stop shooting beams.

You know, owls are fierce predators but the biggest ones weigh a mere few pounds.  Their bones are hollow but they are fierce predators.  I could take one out with a badminton racket easy.  For five, I’d probably need a bat or at least a tennis racket.

He reaches under a dusty counter for a tray of watches, and I’m dismayed.  It just reminds me that I don’t understand what’s happening.  I’m confused.  Why would this guy bring me here to sell me a fucking watch?

I mean, Carlo Tarcisi has far more going on than selling watches to dipshit drunken tourists with an unexplained handicap.  As far as I know anyway.

The owls mock me.

I look deliberately at the tray of watches for the first time because I don’t know what else to do.  Craftsmanship.  Nice watches.

Brand names.

There are maybe two dozen and he goes through them with rapid grace, naming the brand and features, weight and thickness, jewels etc.  He smiles while he does this.  He’s proud of them and pleased to offer them to me.  His hands are fast but old.

His hands are old but his face is young.

I know enough.  I’ve admired exclusive watches.  Bezel, band, movement, crown, case and crystal.  These are gorgeous.  They are real.  Authentic.  I’m sure.

I tell Carlo that although I literally just got off the boat, I have no money.  I apologize to him if I’ve somehow misrepresented myself, allowing him to think I was a man of means and in the market for a luxury timepiece.  I am embarrassed and still very confused.

He calls me by my first name, smiles and says, “It’s a gift.  Compensate with friendship and honesty.”

This confuses me further, so I tell him I’d like to buy him one last drink before I go back to the boat.

The Owls compose a very complex chord.  Dissonant and spooky.  Seems to be a note to signal wrong answer.  Everything seems green and blue.

He beams at me and seems lit from beneath, “I would recommend this one, Swiss movement, light in weight, still detailed in a way that appeals to one or both sides of your brain, not too flashy but still intricate and you clearly don’t favor gold.”

Just like that and it’s on my wrist.

It is silver and glistening.  A black detailed face with a style that doesn’t afford contemporary simplicity any more than a nod.  Despite Carlo’s words, it’s heft is still impressive.

He’s given me an authentic and beautiful chronograph for the sum of nothing.  I’ve made it clear I have no money to spare.

I remind him I’m good for a drink and he says quickly, “My friend, it is time we get you to your boat.”

He tells me on the way that I wear, an aura of trouble.  I look in his eyes and tell him I’m haunted and it’s as bad as he can possibly imagine.  He looks at his old hands in his lap and says, “I know”.

I knew he knew.

“We made friends today, you and I.  We are not finished”, he’s smiling.  “You like your new watch?”  I tell him it’s fucking awesome.  “Wear it to bed”, he says.  He nods at me to tell me he’s serious.

We approach the boat and he breaks character to become nearly ferocious when he grabs my collar to say, “Tell no one you’ve met me.  Say nothing of it.  I will find you tomorrow.  I’m going to try and help you.”

I’m frightened all over again.  The door is opened and he tells me with severity, while I gather myself, not to be foolish.  I immediately wonder what he means.

I barely have time to thank him and I’m stumbling with pain up the plank without knowing why any of this happened today.

Ever seen those electric meat carving knives?  My mom had one and could slice up a holiday turkey like a goddamn samurai.  Even as a kid I worried a little about that appliance.  It disturbed me.  I made my peace with it when I realized it was only formidable for the length of the cord.

I guess now they’re available battery operated.

After finally figuring out how to work the fucking lock on the door of my suite, he’s sitting on the end of my bed flicking a flame on a Zippo and then snapping it shut.  Over and over.  I’m frozen.  He looks at me and sings guttural that he got it from Carlo……  He’s in a pair of tighty whities and the blood from his eyes runs down his chest to stain them.

At his side, on the bed, is one of those knives.

I back out.  He screams HA, I can’t tell if it’s angry or amused.

I scramble for a bar on aching legs, I don’t know what else to do.

In the middle of the ship there’s a glass elevator that starts in the lobby, near the bar where I sit, it goes all the way up.  He mocks me from it.  Dabbing at his eyes to write my name on the glass with blood on his fingers.  At first he writes it backward.  Then he get’s it right and he’s delighted.  The passengers don’t seem to notice.

This is not my father’s nightmare.

We’re in for a very long night.