More Testimonies From A Life Sent To Hell....

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL ~ Jonathan Swift

That time in Evergreen, 1984, July, just around my 30th birthday, when, after cutting up about the black mountain squirrels ubiquitous in the mountainous valley thereof; after dubbing the pointy-eared wonders "The Trained Colorado Attack Land Bat", I soared out into the resplendent summer afternoon, drunk and in a filthy tee shirt, wrist rocket in hand, and began shooting chestnuts into the Aspens above.  

"I'm hunting them attack land bats in the trees!" 

I ran around like some out-of-balance dancer, prancing around, chestnuts in hand, loading, reloading, firing chestnuts at the sky.  Why?  

I was beginning to get bored with drinking all the time.  

Inside, through the window, my three compadres laughed as they watched my performance artwork, one better than the one involving Lebowski's landlord was he did a dramatic shadow dance with some kind of whatever.  

Big man commits crime; little man gets fingered for it.  

Big man is fat, porcine, wealthy beyond measure.  Lebowski is simply an aging hippie with nothing better to do than smoke dope, sniff the cream in public, and bowl with buddies.  How oh how did Lebowski commit the crime of the century?  

Ah, yes!  Rather than wonder what lunkheads want with one, one can shoot chestnuts at squirrels, most of which are on the ground, standing in amazement as if to say, "What the fuck???"

Yes, boredom was beginning to stalk me.  For one, I was swollen with beer's tendency to put water weight onto anyone who drinks too much. Then the water weight transmogrifies into fatty tissue.  Thus, I didn't feel too good.  Bored with the games.  What did I do?  

I rebelled.  Resorted to continue to read "The Brothers Karamazov", a library book I had taken along in order to continue my own private need to connect with something called: 

C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-I-O-N

One evening, as Brian Sanders and Jay cavorted out in the front yard, drinking, getting sloshed, I sat at the kitchen table and read Dostoyevsky's famous Karamazov segment named "The Grand Inquisitor".  What an allegory.  Jesus inauspiciously reappears in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition, is found out by the inquisitors, and then captured, tortured and then offered a bribe: Keep your mouth shut about who you are or we will kill you.  

The birth of a great Mafia movie. . . . 

Why such a "bargain that cannot be refused"?  Because big money was on the line for Dostoyevsky's conception of the Roman Catholic Church: If Jesus is allowed to return, there's lots of cash to be lost.  Well, that figures.  

In some respects, the Dostoyevskian Jesus is perhaps an allusion to the years the great writer spent in Siberia, as portrayed in his "memoir" of the time, "The Insulted And The Injured".  Ah yes!  Nothing quite like cockroaches in one's soup when one is practically frozen to death after felling evergreens from dawn to dusk. . . 

Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for four years--possession of the high crime of holding onto a printing press.  He was a young anarchist.  He lashed out at the obvious oppression of the Czar.  The Czar's "capos" arrested him (they were true believers), sent him in a process of what is labeled in Russia as being "put in".  No longer a danger to St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky was placed far distant from where the big big action was taking place.  

Then came the moment of Dostoyevsky's final sentence: execution via firing squad.  Cossacks, real Cossacks, marched him and fellow prisoners into a killing field, lined them up, blindfolded all, and then, from right to left, began firing three shots to fell one prisoner, then the next, the next, etc.  

Surely Dostoyevsky was chittering and shivering as he counted the shots coming closer to him and his momentary demise.  

It came his time to be perished on a killing field.  The Cossack captain ordered lock and load, clicks echoed across the park...

...but suddenly, as if out of a dream, a horseman galloped up to the firing squad, hurriedly delivered a message from the Czar: Spare the author of a novel the Czar liked: "Poor Folk". 

Dostoyevsky fell to his knees and became the greatest Christian novelist in human history.  So there.  

Some of us are spared; others are ignored.  

Now, I begin to ponder the Hemingway novel, "The Sun Also Rises", a roman a clef that is clearly somewhat autobiographical, but mainly a metaphor, an allegory: 

There is the protagonist, unable to have sexual contact with the woman he loves, watching the matador with the bright red cape.  Slowly, the matador seduces the raging bull to charge, and at the instant of near-death, the matador deftly runs his sword through the velvety curtain of his cape, and the bull is killed.  

Everyone cheers.  What does this remind me of?  It reminds me of the trumpery team's obsessive compulsion to "git them-thar leftist lunatics!"  Right-e-oh.  Something lures the retrograde and convenient idiots, and BOOM!  Next thing anyone knows, the United States comes much closer to how the Bolsheviks viewed the United States: as another pre-Nazi state of affairs that only needed a little push and a shove to coerce itself into mimicking the most horrific killing machine ever.  Ha!  Guilty!  Look at the convenient idiots run someone else's show.  

What?  What is this?  The Bolshoi Ballet?  Pretty little ballerinas in DOJ: Donnie's Tits N Ass Injustice Team.  

"Oh!  Just look at me!  I'm surrounded by 'the ladies'!  Who ever could claim I'm a rapist and likely also a pederast!" 

CYA Donnie.  

Or also, a story I was told about Nazi architect Albert Speer: Once in Spandau Prison, Speer, during his exercise routine, managed to march around the distance of the world globe 21 times.  I do not know if that is a factual tale.  But it was fun in 1984 during Live Aid--when British Goth band, Spandau Ballet, sang to the US--from London.  

Live Aid's full-group song?  "Do They Know It Is Christmas?" 

Wait.  Reference to Santa?  Or maybe to the December, 1972, Christmas bombing of Hanoi?  

Wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder.  

One of the rudest incidents in my life involved going to a sort of reckless camp out near Lake Palestine in 1987: After a night when it snowed in April, after bearing up to the idiocy of all my fellow campers slipping inside a decrepit trailer in the woods to mainline methamphetamine, after waking early to stoke a campfire after pushing the tip of a log into the fire, and over the night, slowly pushing more log into the fire (this is an old school way of feeding fires in the woods), and after I put chicken wings onto a grill over the fire, and after I slathered the raw chicken with barbecue sauce, and then salting it so much as to be nearly inevitable, and also after I brought out some trail mix for my breakfast, I watched the fire: a circle of warm dirt surrounded by a field of gentle white from a snow in April.  

The three others awakened stiffly, went for the salty chicken wings.  Oh boy!  Such saltiness!  Problem?  They had drank all the beer.  No water, no nothing to slake the speed-freak thirst combined with salt.  

Then I took a walk.  A beautiful spring morning as snow, light snow, melted off the dirt road.  I was really happy by myself that morning.  Birds sang, a breeze blew warmly.  I had brought one of those Eighties-fashioned Walkman cassette players and was joyfully listening to James Taylor's "Walking Man" as I circled the big field and then returned with the song still echoing in my brain.  

What did I see when I strolled around the road's right turn and toward the camp?  

David Bridges and his buddy Roger had erected a huge Nazi battle flag to "greet me".  

Incensed, I gave the assholes a piece of my mind.  

"It was just a joke, man...."  

Why conduct such nuttiness the instant I was enjoying tranquility and nature?  

Dallasitis.  

Bridges eventually brought his emotionally abused wife, Jody Rich, with him to live in Austin.  She had a business creating custom banners for businesses, for individuals, and for homeowners.  She is likely still an excellent seamstress.  However, Bridges continued to abuse Jody--until she left him, returned to college, received a Masters in Psychotherapy, and is how a psychotherapist in Austin.  She has cut off all ties with the bunch of cretins who surrounded her.  What's hilarious to me is that several males in that rancid bunch of heavy drinkers and users of hard drugs is that many of them were in-closet gay men.  That's their own business.  I had already realized those facts, but I didn't mind.  A couple of those people remain friends.  Only one, Ray Pascoe, seems to have recovered from that half-decade of licentiousness and near-depravity.  

A wild ride through the punk rock primitive?  Maybe.  Lots of those guys were unliked by most of the creative people residing in Deep Ellum.  Actually, I half-enjoyed some of their antics.  I was in full-throttle rebellion against one and only one fact of my life: 

Prefabricated failure. 

The end.  

Big man commits crime; Lebowski is chased all over Los Angeles for something he doesn't know he has.  

Right.  That must have taken his left ball for all his flight to get away from nihilists on Vespas.  

So silly what some will do to manufacture a beast, eh? 

Poke, poke.  Prod, prod, prod.  What's the deal?  Apparently deals are almost all around me--like gnats, and the Lord of the Flies?  Who is Lord of The Flies?  See it?  A corpse on a stick covered with flies.  That's a metaphor for Satan.  

Ever read Golding's lesser known novel, "Darkness Visible"?  A poor child, scarred beyond belief from a Nazi bombing in London, staggers free, is found, is hospitalized, but is left so scarred he feels like a complete nothing.  Then, we learn that he becomes a subject of fascination: a literal bunch of misdirected businessmen and powers-that-be in London find him somewhat a messiah.  Golding labels them red and blue men.  Anything young Mattie says or does is seen as visionary by mystified fools who seem to think they have themselves a true seer into the darkness.  Poor Mattie.  How he meets his demise is part of one of the saddest stories I have ever read.  It involves all kinds of "directed terrorism".  

Why all all this to escape out of me?  Who knows why?  I like to write.  Apparently I "write real good for free".  

Someone needs to teach me to play clarinet so I can stand in front of, say, Nieman Marcus--and busk for vague ideas like plane fare or vacations.  

Aha!  I haven't had a vacation since 2010.  Will the wonders of moneyed-grubbers ever amaze me into their perpetual blindness?  

There I was, firing chestnuts at the sky.  There I was, reading a complex novel about three brothers who commit parricide, and how only one finds God.  There I was, reading the book while a PBS Special, the 1984 update of "Splendor In The Grass" glides across the TV screen in Evergreen, Colorado: Oddly, a scene of the seduced man making love with a raven-haired young vixen in a rushing stream brings back memories of my moments in a stream with one Leah Daniels, star and world class twirler, a young lady who only claimed she did not want to be connected to her mother and father's mob connections.  

Who else in the world wears blinkers as a fashion statement?  When the targeted subject sees through much more than desired, for him to see, what happens next?   

A punk poem: 

UPROOT ME AGAIN (LITTLE AMERICA'S MOMMY)

Kangaroo outboxes youngish

bloody outhouses way down South,

as seen on TV for $9.95, 

all for nothing, nothing for all is how

it's done among the Air Patrol, 

Ground Out Of Control, 

a Congress in the blackout beds of

inhale me. There goes a good

Karen, yanking up 

crops, trudging over careful furrows

where God lives, all to keep it

all too quiet.  Karen

where is you if not is-ing it to be a

North Star Polaris Bear up

outta sight it's so

cloudy.  Love is watching a fool do

"Gary, Indiana" in a musical 

all summer long, closed

when the ice comes like a real hot

girl.  Men now wear powdery

loose dresses, women

sport torn Spandex with the runs

all the way up in there, and 

look don't look look

at the sea.  Get into the always

Americon murkin, wail like

tomorrow came

early.  Punk it out via erasure....

Black inky heartthrobs 

all for 

these traditional housewives of 

Hellish submissiveness

and railroad car dominance out

in the far high deserts of 

Texas smells like 

someone cut one three times as

it escaped to leave so much

gas: steely, and so flapjack flat.   

*poetry doesn't necessarily "have to be" about pansies and daffodils, sometimes you got to put down the shit-dicks...."put me down / right here inside my arms... / ...tired of playing Pollyanna..."

*

We've only now learned that Fake President Int'l wanty-wants the Insurrection Act so he can punch out his own shadow. Leftist lunatics? A projection of his own ill will. I honestly don't know who yanked his chain in the Sixties but whatever that was he wants to get back at what likely was a woman who geared him up for "big plans". Will the US Supreme Court relinquish the role of gelding refereeship and hurl the baseball at him instead?

Questions questions questions. And 4,000 federal employees laid off by Russell Vought? Three zeros: a hit job.

*

Aside from the veritable mountains of dust the ever-oblivious Texas Department of Transportation is raising as dump truck after dump truck moves pillars of dusty earth without--get this!--sprinkling the ground with water before moving it. The entire neighborhood is rife with particulate air pollution. What's next? Retirees and children coming down with "brown lung disease"? It's insane whatever the case. Two blocks from here, TxDOT has been working for SEVEN YEARS to widen LBJ 635. It looks peachy. But even at rush hour the spot is gridlocked for miles.

Add to that the horrific allergy levels of August through September and even people like me are starting to really feel the pounding.

Asked a TxDOT employee as the bunch was repairing sidewalks that did not need to be repaired why it was TxDOT didn't bother to think about retirees and cripples who have to walk as pedestrians. Who could in any sane way of thinking believe such a deflection is even worth hearing in the first place? It's not as if people do not realize this. I know that, even with an air purifier (I use the UV to lower airborne particulate matter), I have to vacuum the apartment more than once a week, I guess. For that! I think the Abbott, Patrick, Paxton axis of evil is Satanic. Such hypocrites. How can any professed Christian have such a devil may care attitude. Upshot? Those fools need to be called out.

"This is a federally funded program." Why didn't he just echo Eichmann and intone, "I was only doing my job"?

At the Forest / Audelia streetcorner, as I waited to cross the street this afternoon, I noticed that more and more lately I'm smelling filthy and noxious auto and truck exhaust. So I looked up the problem: As of January 1, 2025, the rightist reactionary refuse-nik sent out an edict from his home of comfort in Austin: No more auto emission mandates for non-commercial vehicles. Since the area seems to boast all sorts of "commercial vehicles" (all anyone needs to do is put up a magnetic sign on the side of his white pickup, and there it is: immune of charges of destroying the entire planet), it's easy to sideline what few laws on "the otherwise auto".

Sorry, buddies, Jesus isn't going to fix that. "The meek shall inherit the earth" is one of the final words in the New Testament. Abbott and his kill team have revised that:

"The meek shall inherit scorched earth rendered too much hassle if there's no money in the planet."

Hypocrisy rules the state.

What bugs me at times is that many fundamentalist Xians believe this: that once "saved", Jesus will render one immune of any and all common sense laws. Why?

"The only law is Jesus!"

How's that measure up to Adams' remark that this is a nation of laws, not of men?

"But Jesus is God, not a man!"

Really? I always thought Jesus became flesh and blood to walk among humans. So sorry I didn't get that he came from Barnum & Bailey Circus to perform a few magic tricks and then leave.

OK, humans. Just stand on the corner and rotate as the Texas axis of Satanic evil destroys your ability to breathe. This intractability is almost as bad as what George Floyd was put through at the hands of some cop a little to anxious for his wishy-washy whimsy of becoming a harbinger of a police state.

*

The SCOTUS decision to reject the State of Texas' bid to privatize a "high level" nuclear waste facility in far West Texas' Andrews County--Storage Partners had apparently won the bid, subsequently challenged in federal court (rejected bid), then rejected again on appeal and then, as usual, passed off by the SCOTUS--a bunch of old grapes who simply love putting things like the most dangerous substances on planet Earth into the hands of a rightist flunky with tons of money.

Tons of money versus 100,000 tons of dangerous nuclear material? Seriously? I didn't know this:

Irradiating the entire Oglala Aquifer + big money = hey, dude, we gave the State of Texas nearly an hour before us!

Strikes at the very balls of simple loyalty to things like common sense, honor, loyalty to the American people, and of course, the continual struggle to keep even the SCOTUS out of the hands of extremist and reactionary far-out rightists who, apparently, "see gold in them-thar waste materials". Whatever could go wrong? How would it be like if physical and quantum research found a way to leach U-238 or U-235 out of old hospital gowns and even more dangerous "items" like nuclear power rods that, if handled correctly and cleanly, could light cities across the country.

Nah, the Court designs. Let's give it to a radical rightist flunkie too clever to be nailed down as another chintzy ideologue who is only out for himself and, well, his clan of whatevers.

The issue of nuclear waste touches me close to home. I don't like the idea of putting hazardous materials that could kill the planet for 15,000 years in the hands of intellectual weaklings who likely never spent one single day without a good meal.

O. So. Clever.

An hour = "stop the commie pinkos!" Bunch of scardy cats who clearly don't know that first comes the fascism, and then comes, um, the revolution. That's long been the plan all along. If socialism is tailor-made to fit each targeted company, how about severing the intermingled linkages between government and capitalism, and then giving the capitalists the rope to hang themselves. At least that's what Italian Marxist Alberto Gramsci outlines in the freakin' 1920s. The New Left took up the cudgel, and whoops! The Yippies became Yuppies and Ronald Reagan was so proud.

Why does radioactive poisoning hit me hard? Because I had AML leukemia in 2007--most likely causes either benzine exposure or nuclear radiation poisoning.

Ah yes! A very special bottle of red wine. I remember the evening only weeks before I came down with AML how a bartender, Jennifer O'Connor at Absinthe, knowing I liked flutes of red wine while we chatted, pulled "a special bottle of red wine" from way up high so no one could get it without a ladder. She served it to me.

Maybe, like, what???

Whatever.

The ham-hand behind the proposed sale of a nuclear waste facility directly there on the Texas-Mexico border or at least close to it is well-known as a rightist troublemaker in North Texas and all around the state: Owns big oil. Lots of it. Owns real estate. Lots of it. Now owns a privatized (ideologically insecure) facility with enough uranium dope to blow the entire country sky-high.

What's wrong with that? Thus sayeth The Roberts Court. We should rename it The Robbers Court: New Left plan to create schism between capitalism and a republic, and there they are, six supposed Justices salivating over the girl in the tight black dress who, metaphorically, wears her fishnet stockings to mass or elsewhere.

Lust for power much?

"Vee must prepare for zee End Dazy!"

Right. The annihilation of the human race--to please J-E-S-U-S. What a dumb scam that is. Can you say, Civil War II? Complete with flattened metropolitan areas?

When Notre Dame Cathedral went up in smoke in 2019, a beheading four years earlier of French satirist Charlie Hebdo led to mass rallies in Paris and beyond----Je Suis Charlie the battle cry--the horrific blaze of falling steeples and black towers shocked the nation.

Wait. What did Hebdo do? He designed a toxic cartoon about Islam.

Hebdo was "a secularist", meaning he didn't go to church or temple or whatever. Sin, sin, sin. Said nobody who has even one single cowlick of common sense. What is whatever's excuse for a mind.? Certainly, Hebdo tangled with the wrong people. To Islam, images of Mohammed are sacrilegious, and in terms of that particular religious belief's is penalized by death.

It's obvious that Hebdo challenged Islam in France and possibly in Europe and beyond. Europe and the multitude of Islamic nations have a history: The Crusades. Some of the more paranoid of us--France, Germany, Denmark, almost everywhere, even the United States, are bridling over what some insist is "Islamic reformism" or subversion of Christianity via a slow motion changing of the guard.

Clearly, to the SCOTUS Six, secularism is not sacred. Thus, it sometimes seems to me that, to those theocratic ideologues, the United States must be carved up like veal on Christmas Day. Yuck. Eat the "Lamb of God" for Xmas? That is something familiar to some Satanists. But Satan is beyond the point. Even if the wiseacre Justices don't seem to believe they could be possessed by demons. Arrogance, Inc.

Anyway, during the Charlie Hebdo protests--Je Suis Charlie!--I noticed a perhaps-sarcastic play on three words. Entertainment? Je Suis Zeus = Jesus? After all, when rumors that some of Jesus' family may have had escaped into Southwestern France (Chartres), and had--dammit!--formed their own Christian denomination as Cathars, Roman armies swept into the region to kill every Cathar in sight. Holy, holy, holy.

Who knew Jesus Christ was to return in a gray uniform and preach the wonders of being a money-changer? Or else!

You know the rightist SCOTUS Six's battle cry is, "If it don't fit--force it!"

Way to go on supporting a nuclear waste facility atop the Oglala Aquifer. One small leak in the next 10-15,000 years and North America becomes desertland where no crops will grow. How's that for free market economics?

Oh I can see old Roberts now: He's shaking his head. "I am all wise! Can't you tell that nuclear waste is freedom and that freedom is $$$?

Money-change this. How can anyone claim to be pro-life while allowing the privatization of a nuclear waste facility atop the aquifer of the entire Midwest of North America?

Here's a suggestion: Put this heading atop all SCOTUS rulings: HYPOCRISY DAILY. Then, for the SCOTUS women's auxiliary, try WOMEN'S WEAR DAILY. This is exactly how to be afraid of great big men in girlie-girl dresses. Hah! Fear of the gay certainly looks like another old totalitarian chestnut: You are either a male--or you are a female. Or else! People around the world have been killed for taking medical scientific research seriously: Sexuality is not a hard fact; it is a flow--so many options in evolution that, without those options, guess what:

The human race becomes weak and cannot challenge anything--including The Greys in sweatpants all flying around in flying saucers. Some fund the NFL from outer space.

No one should become that infatuated with capital as a belief system: When the entire concept of capital becomes an ideology, this is where Karl Marx objected. The politicization of capitalism is what the ancient Romans did, and also what did the Romans in--the last time around.

*

Very interesting and odd connections: Remember Trumpy's talk show jibe when he started talking about Med Bed? Then, in another sector of his untoward galaxy altogether, he sends Maxwell to Texas:

Med Bed M Ax Well.

Just a thought.

Then, there is the other strange thing: I'm seeing more and more examples of some sort of exodus of MAGA from the so-called right to the left. Likely in anticipation of tossing Trump now that he's in big trouble. I did foresee this: It makes perfect sense now the mid-terms are coming right up like oysters at a Dallas Mavericks game. Eek.

The colors red and white will soon be of great fashion along the lines of the borderlines who believe their guy is in the right and on the right side of Jesus. Also fashionable is the color violet. It's a complementary color to yellow, the Yellow that gets directly into the middle of Red and Green, red being "commie-o-phobia" and green being "commies cashing in to amplify the free market collapse no one but they want to happen. Yellow?

Yell low, sweet chariot. The bright color on a Proud Boy's emblem. It's long been a signature of a typical fascist or Nazi tactic designed to get in between any and all attempts of solidarity of anything the fascists deem "commie"--which basically is every little thing they wish it to be. Say a "bad thing" to J. D. Vance on ABC? You're "a leftist". How does Vance know so much about the left? I'm wagering this much:

N-O-T-H-I-N-G

This know-nothingness seems to be quite a problem to those who seek to "economize" the political: Those people tend to know a lot about free market economics--or, as anarchists of the right dub it, "the freed market". But they seem to know little about how right and left extremists are calling and responding to one another as if this is a church choir or the typical "Amen!" whenever the preacher lands a zinger.

I thought I knew all about Bolshevik Maximalism and Bolshevik Reformism--think maybe Lenin and then Trotsky or, better, Democratic Socialists: All of those many socialisms involve making history: using history (thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or dialectic); all intend to create socialism, not support capitalism as both Progressivism and modern Liberalism do. It's hard for people who tell the truth to get a foot in the door these days, and then there's Joe Rogan, wearing a white scarf around his teeshirt (whites, scarfin' for food) with what almost looks like the collar of a priest while he's broadcasting. Then, the next week, Pope Francis requests public figures to abjure lying. But what about the low road? What about the alleycats who believe they're going to be the next Goodfella or Godfather: high road, low road: well known in the Middle Ages, never even spoke of in 21st Century America.

Looks like there is going to be a creeping rightist subversion into the country's already robust culture. Looks like the GOP is prepping for its abandonment of Trump. It looks like the old Stephen Stills song, "Change Partners" is coming to ideological fruition. Or Townsend: "The parting on the left becomes the parting on the right." Didn't Steve Bannon advertise that he is a revolutionary who is going to use the tactics of Leninism to "defeat" all of those scary commie enemies of...well, what?

Oh right. Absolutism. You go to heaven or you go to hell. No other options. Why is that the formula identical to Czelaw Miloscz's as seen in his "The Captive Mind"--simple formula to identify totalitarianism: Either--or. Do what we say, or you will suffer.

A longstanding vengeance campaign. I don't like that. But I'm beginning to see through some of the awfully-casual uses of either--or. Either you allow D. J. Vance to sidle away from answering a direct question, or "you're a commie" who must be tortured, starved, abandoned, whatever.

Totally sucks. Totally anti-Christian.

One niece in law, whose husband is becoming increasingly connected with figures like Roger Staubach, real estate exploiter-of-the-poor, and others like that Harold Slimmins character, just announced has adopted a new mutt:  Violet.  Opposite of Yellow.  

Or last week, behind Olivia Benson, an American flag with not red and white stripes but red and white interrupted by gray.  Who are the white stripes if not the innocent of all that crass weirdness.  

Her and her inlaw family, maybe not all of them, seem to be preparing to become great artists.  Art without equal time to opposites isn't art; it's advertising.  Poetry without negative capability, the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in the mind and the poem at once, is usually fodder for second, third and fourth, fifth and sixth drafts.  

What's odd about all that is not that such politicized or ideological movements are uncommon.  Many people involved in "the revolution" in the Seventies became artists.  I remember being attacked by a number of artists (not good ones) because I had scored a couple of book reviews with The Dallas Morning News.  The reason I got them?  Because at the time my mind was too scrambled and slow to be a functioning reporter.  I got niched.  Likely an propitious development for both me and for The News.  

Remember: because I rattled a hurricane fence during an anti-nukes demonstration on 07-04-80, I became a total commie.  Hell, like J. D. Vance, here is what I knew about communism: 

N-O-T-H-I-N-G  

Talk about getting pegged.  Sadly, some two-legged opposable digits around here are still hanging on to their own self-concocted idiocy about me and about people like me.  Those sodden paranoids...

That sounds like a great stock market option: Paranoia Finance LLP.  Guaranteed to get your friends to take a stock market dive.  

Tiresome childishness.  

Still no word about Parkland Hospital's Oncology Clinic accepting my offer of cooperating with a blood test before consenting to half a dozen of absolutely pointless procedures.  

Med Bed M Ax Well.  

Maybe Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton helped.  Anything to stop honest men.  That has a name.

C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N

*

This morning, as I twaddled around with the cacophonous nonsense that continually seeks to take up residence in my head, upspringing and fleeting ideas fighting off crazy ideation, I came upon an amazing question to ask: What story-line does the GOP, as hijacked by the conservative mass movement, measure up to most?  Is it Poe's "M.S. Found In A Bottle"?  Maybe it's Hugo's "A Fight With A Cannon".  How about Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus? 

The first, a favorite harbinger of fantasy/science fiction, describes how a storm casts a ship far off from Tierra Del Fuego (Land Of Fire), only to be marooned in ice-pack near the coast of Antarctica.  Stuck in ice to the point of near starvation, as I recall, the captain and crew watch flocks of birds flying farther south: Thus, they embark on a dangerous journey into the continent beyond the ice.  What do they find?  A primitive race of natives, natives that chase them until the stranded crew finds native canoes and leave the horror.  Luckily, they find a steamer which rescues them.  

Hugo's "Fight With A Cannon" does not involve getting all out-of-sorts with Dyan Cannon.  Nope.  It tells the story of a warship caught in a raging hurricane.  As many who study nautical history know, in the 19th Century, many shipboard cannons had wheels.  Those allowed crews to rapidly move them in order to fight an enemy ship more effectively.  Then, in the storm, one exceptionally large cannon breaks loose of securing chains, and begins to roll, perilously, destroying all the wooden superstructure on the cutter--until all is lost.  

Finally, Longfellow's "The Wreck Of The Hesperus", also a story of a ship caught in a vast storm, is a typical Longfellow narrative poem, one my father, a Navy man, dearly loved.  He'd shove the poem under my neck, just as he liked Robert Service's poem, "High Flight".  The story of the Hesperus is a tale of an arrogant captain whose pride and arrogance in a storm (Only I can fix this!) is shipwrecked.  

Longfellow's poem, in my opinion, serves as a warning: A leader's bid to be a ruler rather than a governor or president is the consequence of serious character flaws.  Like many founding fathers warned, Longfellow also worries about self-interest when it drifts into extremism.  

Maybe the entire novel by Herman Melville, "Moby Dick", also serves to point out to the STEM dependent that obsession with killing an ocean behemoth leads a man named Ahab to sink the Pequod (meaning, "What is wrong?), a whaler that in some ways has to do with "having" in place of "to love".  Melville's is astute observation, nearly oracular.  It's not so much a morality tale as one that deals with theocratic belief systems that have gone far too far.  The story, in my opinion, could be a pioneer of what later came to be known as postmodernism.  Many critics complain that Melville dwells far too much on the nuts and bolts of whaling (apparently metaphor is a bridge too far for people reading in the fast lane).  Others complain about the portrayal of Queequeg (my "all knowing" online spell-check went for "squeegee" in a bid for vocabulary mastery!), the tattoo-laden Polynesian king who has boarded the Pequod in order to "see Christianity" in action.  

Poor Queequeg: got gypped.  

But see the parallels?  Ahab goes obsessive-compulsive because the Great White Whale wounded him to the point he's coerced into wearing a wood and iron peg-leg.  

Mike Johnson?  Can you hear me now?  

That Melville: secular liberal "troublemaker".  Damned.  Doomed because he didn't join some church and thus add to a sect's power.  Not a denomination, a sect.  Like a Gnostic mystery cult.  

As for the near-countless mystery cults emergent around the time of Jesus' birth and death, my favorite is the Orphic Cult, often a fave-rave of the Romans: The initiation ceremony is rad to the gills: In a secret lair, Orphic members (think Elks Club or Rotary Club) dig a trench.  Over that, thick and heavy logs are tugged over that to serve as a sort of bridge from before to after.  Then, like the Minotaur of older myth or tradition, a huge bull is chained to the "bridge".  The initiates?  They crouch beneath the snorting, smelly bull.  Then, the Orphic priests sever the bull's neck; blood drools through the bridge and then douses the initiates, all the ritual designed to symbolize "new birth" into a sort of heavenly reality.  

Who gets "washed in the blood of the Lamb"?  

That's not really so bad: You kill the Beast inside, and thus, once released, released into a sort of faith, the Orphic adherent is reborn.  Back in the times of the mystery cults, rebirth by sacrifice was almost as hot as Paris Hilton fame.  

After I nearly died from a rash of what is called "white blood", otherwise known as leukemia, I purchased a small, stainless steel ankh.  This is an ancient Egyptian emblem of "house", and "life-giving power.  Each time I put on the inexpensive pendant around my neck in the morning, I'm reminded to be grateful for my life.  Life, symbol of Horus, the offspring of of death-bound Osiris, the Egyptian god who was cut into nine pieces, only to be magically returned to life--as Horus.  

Resurrection anyone?  

OK.  I am a dreaded secular Liberal.  I'm not out to dispel the wonderful rituals surrounding the Christian concept of dying and consequent rebirth.  The Christian ritual symbolizes much the same as the Chinese Tao: release oneself from Self--atone (become at one) with the universe of black and white (like, um, words) and then move on ahead from those bonds.  

Christianity holds incredible but excellent ideas: I appreciate Jesus' written suggestions in the Sermon on the Mount much better than I believe in the older version called The Ten Commandments.  Faith, hope, and charity (caring for those outside of heaven).  He describes love.  He also behooves his disciples to carry in their eyes and ears faith: Not simply to him as Dear Leader (That's, just, like, my opinion, man) but faith for everything and everyone.  I've long had trouble comprehending how anyone can hold faith exclusively for Jesus.  Why is it that some proclaim this? 

No faith in science, no faith in medicine, no faith in education, no faith in democracy, no faith in Democrats, no faith in government, no faith in the state, no faith in one's "enemies", no faith in anyone.  Maybe some will seemingly flip a dime to their fellow men.  But those are only the big chest-thumpers as seen on TV: Who is the biggest Christian of all?  Bang!  Not the secular liberals!  "Spawn of Satan!".  Wow.  That pitches the story of the good Samaritan right through the garage door.  

No faith in government?  The United States, not a suzerainty of some Italian guy named Amerigo, is based on Reason, and Reason, oddly enough, is based on faith.  Postulates, hypotheses, everything to be disproved until a likely answer to the original "faith-based" postulate is uncovered: and then the judgment.  Just like in the Bible--but without the magic show.  

Literalism was relatively unknown to the simple and hardworking individuals who lived at the time surrounding Jesus' supposed birth and death.  Faith in science?  Who's using his or her PC today?  What happens if we lose faith in what is in our hands? 

Go back to "M.S. Found In A Bottle".  

I write this because a movement is unrolling where hot and militant "warriors of Christ" are casting their lots on redefining what culture in the US is "supposed to mean".  At least by them.  That is perhaps what philosopher and expert in the ways and means of totalitarianism called a movement of the half-educated.  

Value judgments are opinions, subjective beliefs with objective consequences.  My subjective belief about what is "right and meet" is different from those of all the rest of us.  But where is the "meet"?  Where do our subjective valuations meet?  At a garage sale?  

Values are useless for all without some kind of compromise and mutual agreement.  Just as is politics, a conceit where we choose to agree on certain all-encompassing principles borne to us by Reason, not "divine right of whoever that preacher thinks he is when he recites 'My Way'" at a crowd of people who seem to have been fooled into believing the Holy Spirit is mere sensation; you know, "the experience".  

I enjoyed the movie, "The Last Temptation Of Christ" a great deal because the movie, best it could, portrayed a Jesus with actual human characteristics.  Obversely, the movie "Apocalypto" stunned me: agit prop passed off as "the truth" about how unruly, crooked conquistadors marched in from the sea (Gulf of America) bearing the holy cross, ready to "save" the poor, barbaric Aztecs.  What?  

More blood and human sacrifice to "save" people of a ritual involving human sacrifice?  Someone ought to read Mel Gibson the many tales of the horrific corruption, self-interest and imperialistic murderousness well-known about the conquest--a thing that happened right around the bloody Spanish Inquisition.  

Look: The evangelical inquisition is targeting people like me: secular art.  Oddly, and ironically, propaganda and theocratic marketing do not make for art or literature or poetry at all.  True art involves opposites, equipoise, and allows viewers to come to their own subjective conclusions--which after all can have objective consequences both in the mind and in the world-at-large.  

Oh no no! those interlopers insist: The is only one way, and Jesus is above even Reason.  

How is religion itself not a form of conceit?  Some fellow I read about is demanding to find "the truth".  All I can say is, "Good luck, Chuck!"  Perhaps representations of the truth are more representative than truth?  

I worry about verbose shadow-boxers out there (The Shades of ancient Greek perhaps, the spirits of the dead in a "the word killeth, but the spirit giveth life" kind of dead-in-the-headness, emphasis on the "nessie" part).  

I try this on all the time: A group of Christians band together as "the Chosen" (who shall choose, by the author, Whoever Decided He Is Chosen"); then a line is drawn on the ground (concrete) to separate "The Chosen" from the rest of us".  Very special.  I'll hypothesize right here: If Jesus did return to the world, he'd take the side of those who have been excluded--just as he did the first time around.  

Don't mind me.  I'm a mere secular Liberal.  I'm apparently doomed because I didn't perform the ritual of baptism with "the correct folks".  

As if the Dominionists cared.  

Care is by far the most important concept in the New Testament--by my lights.  Which are opinions in a world where nobody knows what the truth is.  I certainly don't.  I can only point to my opinions of what it may or may not be.  

The United States is humble in that its government is based on this: Opinion, Debate and Discourse, and eventually, Experimentation.  What is the given?  

Choose, then choose again.  My little sermonette is over.  

*

"The Mystery Religions: A Study In The Religious Backgrounds Of Early Christianity", by S. Angus, Dover Publications, Inc. New York,  1928 (1975).  First published by John Murray in London in 1925 under the title "The Mystery Religions And Christianity">  Need the ISBN??

*

There they go, the big dirt movers of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), limestone dust billowing from the huge army of dump trucks, the aftermath of seven years of widening LBJ freeway here in Dallas as if Dumbo The Elephant has been enlisted in some vagary of a war against...well what?

Wait.  I have the answer.  A war against fresh air. 

The entire neighborhood of Five Points is now a dust trap.  Only a week and a half ago, as I rode the bus toward North Skillman, we passed huge hills of limestone or dolomite left over from a dig of behemoth proportions.  Ahead of the bus?  Some dump truck caked with slurries of limestone particulate.  So irresponsibly.  Massive machines: a danger to life in North Dallas.  All of North Dallas, not merely the poor part of North Dallas.  In fact, the billows blow straight north, true north, and since I live north of the giant molehills of automobile transportation, I have to breathe that idiocy.  

Manly men.  They wear masks too.  To protect themselves, but like any devil-may-care figures of dilapidated care for the lives of others, those of us who are uninvolved in the massive project which, as far as I can tell, is useless anyway due to the fact that, come rush hours, LBJ is still caked itself: a long snake of rubber, steel and plastic and glass, gridlocked for miles due to suburbanites, mainly, people who seem stymied by the mere prospect of mass transportation.

The result?  Masses.  Of pollution.  Limestone particulate is harmful to the lungs and to health in general if inhaled.  In fact, simply looking at those dust blowers we call earth movers, I couldn't help but wonder if people are using limestone particulate to cut crack when cooking it in their kitchens.  Yay.  Big shot manly men: out to kill anyone who happens to be standing nearby or are "guilty of attempted life".  

Bollocks.  That's a British vulgar euphemism for "testicles" or "nonsense".  So.  Let's translate vulgar carelessness into vulgarism: 

Boys with big balls live nonsensical lives because their big fat egos get in between their unconscious consciousnesses and the rest of the world.  

Like the movie, "Girls Gone Crazy" or "Debbie Does Dallas", or maybe the hilarious song by a band called Southern Culture On The Skids: "Camel Walk", the one that coddles and satirizes Li'l Debbie.  

Walk, you ethnically incorrect li'l camels!!!

Indeed.  Southern culture on the skids.  The local version.  Emphasis on "loco".  

What happens when you burn limestone?  The need to burn it, according to "Limestone Legend", the process essential to concrete (and concrete shoes) releases pollutants into the atmosphere, mainly calcium carbonate, a chemical that, if inhaled, can damage the lungs via inflammation, which often causes lung and throat and sinus infections, and if the particulate limestone is inhaled the inhalation can calcify the lungs.  

Way to go, TxDOT.  

Limestone is a sedimentary rock.  TxDOT is apparently a sedentary highway builder who sits in an airconditioned, air purified window office thinking about "How do we spend all that federal government money?"  That's apparent in the longish campaign by TxDOT to "refurbish" the sidewalks on Audelia, sidewalks that were neither damaged or overgrown.  

Remember when I asked that TxDOT employee in front of Get N Go why TxDOT didn't consider the needs of the crippled, the wheelchair bound, and the elderly.  

"T'it's the federal government's money."  

Typical "conservative" State of Texas excuse factory terminology for, "Get the f-- outta my face I don't give a shit." 

Way to go, TxDOT.  

Not giving a shit is a Texas tradition.  Maybe that's why the state is now experiencing a serious IT brain drain after all of Governor Greg Abbott's bragging that Texas was "now the IT capital better than Silicon Valley" or some such bollocks.  

For some reason, Abbott has been hating on California for years.  Those damned hippies!  They must have really ruined Abbott's buzz when he was a child.  Once a child, still a child.  Apparently it's obvious.  When Abbott wanted to make downtown Austin more amenable to commerce, he ordered 100 year old blackjack oaks to become lumber.  While many dissented, Abbott went ahead and felled the treescape of the area, thus making downtown Austin around the UT campus less alluring than it was only days before the buzz saw hell bent upon turning a lovely city into a buzzkill.  

Of course, Abbott, poor man, was crippled by a falling tree.  Maybe he hates trees more than he hates California.  No one knows.  Everybody is possibly afraid to even speak.  

Maybe limestone particulate floating around the DFW metroplex as a dangerous airborne event like the one portrayed in Don DeLillo's famous novel, "White Noise" is Greg Abbott's idea of "rock music."  

Which blares and blares and blares.  Poor gov.  He's "just a poor boy" caught in his own "tornado sandwich".  Must be awfully difficult to come to the realization that the governor is likely more meat than neat.  

Don't get me wrong, but this is the part of the stock phrase "don't get me wrong" that is essential to Texas journalism.  No one wishes to insult the Governor.  But when the Governor clearly and dearly enjoys tyrannizing all those he considers "the ENEMY!", something is very wrong on the inside of his meaty brains.  

Speaking of meat, this morning I stumbled upon a word: auroch.  Unlike many readers, when I come to a word I do not know, for the sake of comprehending a line or a sentence, I look up the word.  Some readers casually go blind when the big words pull into the station of their page scans.  Auroch?  This is a long-horned and extinct ox.  

Aurochs bore horns, according to a definition I found,  that look look like ancient lyres.  I'm certain Neolithic humans found their amazement in the somewhat "lyrical" call of the Auroch.  Here in  Texas, the vaunted Texas longhorn has horns wide enough to block auto traffic.  Longhorns are honored in Texas with the twang of a busted guitar string.  Oh, the testicles of vaunted slang slingers.  

Last night, I moved my long-suffering air purifier to the bedroom so I could sleep without coughing.  I have a low grade sinus infection that seems to have been badgering my sinuses, mouth and throat for quite some time.  Whenever I ate anything spicy, my tongue hurt.  In lieu of antibiotics, I've been doing the old salt in the nose trick.  It's working.  Combined with that sophisticated dust catcher, I slept last night after a fun afternoon with my annual ophthalmology check at...Parkland.  Right before I reached the Moody Clinic, right there at the Market Center orange line stop, Parkland...called...again.  Oncology department.  Anxious to, well, I asked the nurse, who literally did not respond to my riot act to Oncology Clinic that I refuse procedures and "protocol" until I receive another blood test.  Those creeps are so anxious to cut, prod, poke and medicate me that honestly, I feel like I'm being invaded by gnats.  

I told the nurse as much.  Asked her when the new vivisection is intended to begin.  She did betray some anger--let's call it madness--in her tone of voice.  But I persisted.  No pokes or prods or vivisection by oncology extremists so anxious to peer into my penis and my balls that I really think that, in lieu of their inability to respond in kind to my requests to be treated fairly, I'm of the mind to send Doctor Wang a good DVD of gay sex.  

Such interest in my bollocks.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  It's as if I need to be tied to the grounds by facsimiles (mimicry) of family ties.  With a name like mine, one would think jerkwads would tire of worrying I'm about to bear Adolph Hitler's little tiny, 8 1/2 baby.  

Good luck with that fascination.  Why play along with idiots who still believe in biological essentialism?  Essentialism is a "family tie" to the Big Daddy-O of ethnic nationalism.  Currently, we are in thrall, against our will, of some "genius" who thinks he can pull off economic nationalism as a leading act for his real wish: totalitarian nationalism.  Totalitarianism, by the way, is NOT political.  It is anti-political in that the Big Pussy wants to leech onto an entire country via social oddities and edicts standing in for public-minded suggestions from the Executive Branch.  Branch.  Not root, claw and tooth unreason and prejudices that the US is going to be his next pillbox hat.  Like the one in Dylan's classic song, "Leopard skin Pill-box Hat".  

Could that have been a jab at Jacqueline Kennedy?  Dylan, like many, has long been alarmed at the imposition of the old Lucky Seven Crew that is determined to turn a democracy into a gambling parlor a la Las Vegas, Nevada.  

My mother and father?  Both hailed from the lovely but tiny town of Las Vegas, New Mexico.  That was before "the Shades" decided to mimic and mock, it has sometimes seemed to me, the name of "a problem" called our lives.  

The duple (spell check suggests "emoji") pupils.  Dylan reported on them in his book of poetry, "Tarantula".  Reference?  A hairy and poisonous eight-legged little star of the spider kingdom.  If you defang a spider, the spider is still willing to bite the way a "retired bloodhound" possibly can gum to death the mailman.  

Which brings me to a laughworthy name for country music: Emo Country.  As the mob continues to move on commercial music--again?  Payola wasn't enough?--"like a bitch".  

Back to crack.  Crack cookers often use things like talc, even chalk, to adulterate the pure cocaine (which is never 100 percent pure as given or sold to them), in order to make it pay more money to them.  That stuff can really adulterate the human lungs.  Calcium carbonate--right up the air chute.  Ain't cute.  

So.  Maybe a downstairs neighbor, a real recluse who stays on El Interneto all the time (it's in his bedroom), may be smoking crack down below.  131.  

Last night, around 12:45 a.m., a sudden surge in the air purifier I placed in the center of the bedroom woke me up.  I looked.  The surge was quick, on and off again.  Something sinister had hit the air.  I wonder what else is caught in my filter beyond the sordid lack of care of both TxDOT and crack addiction.  After all, Dallas is the southwestern hub of cocaine traveling to Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta Georgia, and Kansas City.  

I'd like to see El Presidente dancing the boogie-woogie at Kansas City's "Howl At The Moon Kansas City.  Do it!  On TV!  Hold a press conference before his/her ball-room days are over, man.  

BTW.  Yesterday, during a WH press conference, there sat Dear Leader.  His two hands?  Around his lap, he made the world-famous Sign of the Vagina, a Mafia signal.  Will wonders please cease?  No wondering about a heyboy for criminal elements that operate on three e's.  The fifth letter of the alphabet.  

"I SEE E".  

* 

El Presidente cites China (and Argentina?) as in possession of "a philosophy" (Marxism?) when while its perfectly apparent he wouldn't know a philosophy to save his lame behind, his "commentary" in the Oval Egg-Shaped Office means that someone/somewhere behind him is putting words in the little puppet's mouth again.  

*

Question: Should ideologues be allowed to make politicized decisions while hiding behind the "non-partisan" label?  Isn't that a dodge?

*

Right.  Asian fusion, only one Asian in the five-star: A Japanese biker, black leather jacket, sushi chef named Elvis, sleek black pompadour, always a-grin, and the often-wealthy diners absolutely loved him.  

Who wouldn't?  A nice, clever, highly-skilled with sharp knives, which I believe he'd twirl in the air to entertain his guests at the sushi bar on the first floor of Shinsei, a wonderful restaurant located across the street from the Inwood Shopping Center, also wondrous, a cool place to shop for luxuries.  The often occluded Inwood neighborhood, nearby, hid the most wealthy men (and women) in Dallas--maybe beyond.  

As for that neighborhood, an exquisite creek backed by white cliffs is backgrounded by lovely mansions.  When I owned an automobile, sometimes I'd take dates and friends over to look at the area from afar.  Sometimes, however, when my mood was especially rough on me, I'd resent the wealthy.  Of course I would: Bipolar Disorder breeds subjective resentment.  The mind is hurt, the mind projects the hurt it fails to comprehend.  Such are mood swings.  

Shinsei is likely still one of the big meeting spots for new wealth in the area.  Of course, beyond that, I'd sometimes step out of the office where I served as a weekend telephone receptionist bidden to answer the phone for take-out requests.  Once, whispery word circulated that George W. Bush and his wife Laura had entered the second floor dining room.  Secret Service agents also dined--of course they did.  At the time, he was the President.  Thrilled, but also a little angry over how the administration handled the Iraq war, I stepped out to look.  

Nope.  High security.  Regardless, I smiled.  Cool to see powerful people eating Asian Fusion on a Saturday night.  

That night reminds me of the Saturday evening years earlier, around 1991, when my neighbors at 4422 McKinney Avenue, Carlos and his family and friends, lingered outside near and on the tailgate of his smooth-running used pickup.  That's the night when, Carlos and his son motioned me to come over and drink a little El Presidente with them.  That's a Mexican rum.  Pretty stout stuff. 

I'd already asked that bunch to teach me a little Espanol, but whatever the request, those guys taught me every danged epithet and cat-all imaginable--en Espanol.  I still laugh at how I sometimes horsed around with those guys.  

Snapshot: Carlos, tan, gimme capped, flannel shirt, raising his near-empty bottle of El Presidente, hooting and hollering, "George Booooshhhh!  He gimme freedom!"  He said something about "free stuff", but he wasn't believable in that regard.  He worked hard for his money: as a landscaper and part-time auto repairman, Carlos would step out of his proud truck and slowly wander into the inner disaster of apartment 102, first home his family had ever experienced an actual floor.  

Those guys were hard on that apartment.  Doubtless, they (and I) knew in our hearts that our crazed apartment building would be scheduled for destruction.  Big plans for that section of McKinney Avenue.  Gone were the days when that street held Dallas' version of a hippie hollow--even though sometimes it was difficult to tell the hippies from what we called "Sanger Harris hippies" due to hippiedom as a fashion statement.  Sanger Harris?  That was a local department store that had served my childhood's family a little luxury, less expensive than, say, Neiman's, on Main Street.  Sanger Harris was, I think, located on Ross Avenue, maybe Bryan.  It's been long gone.

And no longer was the neighborhood a haven for local artists in search of inexpensive living space.  When I first moved to the area in late 1982 (shared an efficiency with Greg Merriman, a sort of fast-and-loose con artist from Lansing, Michigan, he said, a guy out to get him some of the opportunity I had as a sort of free-lance book reviewer for The Dallas Morning News (Bob Compton).  Compton agreed to allow him to review L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth", possibly a quiet hint to me to be careful around the braggadocio all about being an anti-nuke activist, etc.  

Far beyond that, only a few artists remained in the area by the time I moved into that squelchy efficiency courtesy of Merriman, a man also fast-and-loose with the women he worked with.  He was stationed in the first floor's back area.  He said he was a writer.  I remember when one lovely woman, installed in the third floor writer's room began discussing with Merriman.  He'd asked her the weirdest question:  "Are you a receiver?  Or a transmitter?"  

She told him, "You're a transmitter."  I still laugh about her response to the often-creepy but energetic Merriman.  Greg Merriman.  Said his father was an executive at Watchovia, a bank and insurance company.  Watch Over You!  

Weirdo.  

The actual artist, one lingering in a neighborhood that had been home to many local artists in the early 1980s before they were shushed off to find other digs somewhere else (as always), Georgia, epileptic, often worried about seizures, which had worsened over time, an absolutely beautiful and talented young artist who had an eye out for me as I, a little confused yet wondrously lit up by the two-dimensional plastic arts about which I wanted to learn.  

Georgia eventually committed suicide, I've heard, her former boyfriend, Mark Bartos (he claims he has Czechoslovakian roots and is adamant in his ADHD wirehead ways in spreading his terror over the present administration.  He's been silenced by Facebook, mainly because he's so loud about his fearfulness.  

I keep telling the guy to "keep it down a little".  I've recommended he read a few books about totalitarianism: "On Tyranny" by Snyder, and especially, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Arendt.  Also a history of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath by Richard Pipes, an assistant to Ronald Reagan--that's an especially concise summary of what happened and possibly why when the Bolshevik Revolution, actually a second-hand military takeover of the Duma, a legislative body still weak under Krensky, and also one confused as to how to approach democracy.  The Bolshevik predators quietly occupied the Duma during a night meeting, locked the doors, and replaced a budding hope with another patriarchal one-way-or-highway bit that today has been replaced by gangsterist Putin's KGB-money-hogging (a safe place for Soviet wealth?) junta-of-a regime.  Red Shift.  Like how stars are viewed from afar.  

Of course, somehow Bartos knows all about that.  Seriously?  He's a bit deluded.  He's a conceptual artist who often brags about his Asian girlfriend in Los Angeles, the one who apparently, according to Bartos, is mothering him a bit and helping him get gallery time out in California and maybe here in Texas.  

I often change the subject when he starts yammering in fearfulness that it's all over and blah-blah-blah.  He's doubtfully Czech.  Maybe his mom was Czech.  But he has "traditional knowledge" of what Hitler did to "his country".  

I'm not so sure about any of that.  The other night, when he called, I engaged him for nearly an hour about our ornery wild times.  As for that, Bartos was in much worse shape: cocaine, speed, lots of beer.  He became a sodden outcast in the nineties.  He's been in recovery for over 30 years, seems much better put together than long ago, yet his ADHD has him fractious to say the least.  He's a wiry-headed live wire.  I hear he's beginning to make inroads into the local arts community--now? so late?--a community that had shunned him for years.  

Back to the Asian Fusion restaurant named Shinsei.  

I didn't actually see W. that night.  The second floor restricted traffic.  Not odd at all.  Usually, on Friday nights in particular, the second floor hung filled brim-heavy with veritable walls of young, wealthy professionals.  All dressed to maybe the eights.  Who knows?  If I had to carry a message by hand to the Maitre D, I'd have to wend perilously down narrow wooden stairs packed with happy hour celebrants, all carrying fine wine in flutes, chatting loudly, and worse, glaring at me when I'd politely request to be given way downstairs to deliver a message if the telephone lines were all occupied.  

"Don't you know who I am?"  Weird.  These young cats and their women (or something) are all social climbers.  Remember?  Shinsei is or was located only blocks away from by far the most exclusive neighborhood in Dallas.  

Weirdness.  My search engine came up with this when I searched for Maitre D: Materiel De Def, French for "defense equipment".  

I've long chuckled to myself that those climbers (on the stairs!  what a place to get a message out to the super-wealthy! no wonder I received scowls: get outta our game, peasant!) 

Stairway To Heaven anyone?  

The one fine thing about working at Shinsei happened to be my perk: I could have all I could eat from the menu.  I'd often order sushi.  Mainly, to fill myself up, I'd order chicken-rice, a stir fry dish loaded wit brown rice, tiny cubed veggies and of course lightly cooked chicken.  

There, the pair of wives of locally and maybe nationally famous chefs--Dean Fearing (super nice man) and another mean-assed and overweight chef named Rathbun.  The buns of wrath, visiting the kitchen per white courtesy telephone... 

Rathbun's wife, social climber extraordinaire, was "bad cop", Fearing's wife Lynae, stood out as breezy, often translucently clad kindness.  The latter would circle the dining area as if a moving decoration.  I really did like Lynae.  She and Fearing sometimes would sit out on the balcony's space and softly chat.  Sometimes, I'd heard, smoking dope.  No biggie.  In the State of Texas, even Texas, from what I'm hearing, yes, Texas itself has been outlawed by reactionary tyrants out to foment--whatever.  

Ty-Rants.  

One frequent Saturday night take-out caller, possibly a lonely man with lots of money, youngish voice, always ordered the same from the menu each week at precisely eight p.m.  On Saturday nights, as a receptionist for takeouts and sometimes reservations--hence the messages to downstairs--I'd not be able to remember every little thing.  One night, the man called me as if I was his long-lost best friend.  

"I'll have the usual." 

"Sir?  Can you tell me what the usual is?"

He huffily informed me, then called for the manager: How dare I not remember precisely what he had ordered!

"Don't you know who I am?"  

Oh well, wealth does not obliterate loneliness and alienation.  I did sympathize with him, yet still: to complain about not getting special treatment? He would eagerly arrive for his takeout.  Was that possibly the only night out moment he had under his belt?  

Lots of weirdness in the Inwood area.  I had to bus out to the area on hot August afternoons.  A long ride.  Two transfers.  But I'd always get to the shopping center early.  My goal?  A cup of Starbucks before taking to the iron wheel of "receptionism".  

I remember distinctly how I would sit and enjoy the coffee.  I did have money to buy a New York Times daily paper.  I'd quietly read about the McCain-Obama duels and enjoyed that for 2008, the US had two excellent candidates from which to choose.  I liked (still do) both public personas.  While I was busily working in my spare time manning my telephone as I called practically everyone in Florida and other states to remind people to vote (often with horrifying but hilarious results), I was an Obama man.  I stumped for him.  I hoped Obama would win the election--which he did.  

There I was, casually turning pages of the NYTimes, sometimes going in deep with the extensive reporting that was and is so far and away less biased (if that is the word for it) as the right-slanted Dallas Morning News (DMN it!).  Behind me sat one white prune of an angry-faced woman.  She baited me, or attempted to, by making a loud comment about "The Communist New York Times".  I didn't like that kind of catcall.  Directed at my back.  

I stood, turned to face the hissy fit of a lady with nothing to do with her time but to react at anything suspicious or possibly so, raised my right fist into the air, and loudly proclaimed, "POWER TO THE PEOPLE!" 

Oh, was she angry.  

Then another, particularly and disgusting character frequented the Starbucks, and literally, no bones about it, stank up the place.  Nickname?  

Mister Poopy Pants.  

Black-suited incontinence, right next to the restroom.  He stank like he'd not bathed in months, and the fetid fecal-smell permeated the entire Starbucks.  Baristas?  Not happy about that.  But in he'd come, stink up the place, sometimes loudly bellowing out something or something else, as if he literally (that word again) the Lord of the Flies at a corner table.  Oook!  

What a way to ruin someone's coffee.  Worse, as I was only six months free of AML chemotherapy, a 50ish man with a compromised immune system, I'd often leave quickly.  Later, the waitresses (one time) called to me to see Mister Poopy Pants strolling by like the ever-stinky cock-of-the-walk.  

I still yuck when I think of that clearly mentally-ill old man.  His suit?  Black.  Sometimes his elegantly-clothed back end was not only wet but also traced with brown halfway down his leg.  

Let's go to the "bright" aspect of my short run at Shinsei (which means "peace" I believe, a Buddhist term, so subtle!): I have recalled the poor prospects of Ernesto the dishwasher.  Incensed, I began writing in my MySpace blog about that and about other observations of what I then-believed and still do in part, incidents of oppressive repression here in the Big Duh.  Much of it was directed at new wealth social climbing and arrogance.  Particular target?  Rathbun's wife.  Too often mean to her employees, the riding crop bad cop.  I didn't like her much at all.  She seemed all about becoming a moneyed elite rater than one who serves that group.  

The man who had gotten me that part-time work; he claimed to be a "knowledgeable" libertarian.  He clearly was not that.  I didn't have to study to see that Kelly, a poor case of the consequences of sudden trauma and tragedy and orphaning, wanted to be seen as important; likely to fill his hollow of emptiness.  Kelly's mother and father were killed in a head-on when he was in his teens, I believe.  Seriously wounded, he used his inheritance-insurance-etc trying to fill that hole.  He could not play guitar--but had five of them.  He had all sorts of brand-spanking new hardbound books, many of them classics.  He held onto many CDs.  In a hardscrabble rental (yellow) near Oak Lawn and Inwood, he seemed to be holding court like a sort of libertarian-styled King Arthur straight out of Mark Twain. 

Kelly had a border collie.  He'd never bothered to house-train the loving female dog.  When I asked him why he loudly barked at the beleaguered dog, he blithely informed me that, since he needed to be clear he was the Alpha Male, he had to bark at a confused pet in order to force a flippin' pet to comply.  

Poor dog was unable to hold her need to go outside.  She hadn't been trained to "ask out".  Nope.  She was a neglected and highly intelligent border collie.  

Kelly had recently "broken up" with Viviane, an amazingly beautiful woman from Brazil.  She also clearly came from a wealthy family.  She sunned on the beaches, she said.  She'd broken up with Kelly (for unknown reasons, likely so she could sleep around...), and yet she still roomed in the house, a crowded-with-things house.

Kelly?  He'd bought one of the most expensive mattresses known to man--all to sleep on by himself.  The mattress was so big it did not fit onto the bedframe, making it look ridiculous.  Wow.  Lord of the Castle of his own alienation, nihilism, and emptiness.  

Kelly had been scanning my blog.  Big eyes.  I think he was a little obsessed with my poetry and me.  Why?  He wanted the trappings; in old school vocabulary, even before Marxism, this is called: bourgeois.  

Kelly had a bit job: Waiting tables at an expensive five-star loaded with prominent businessmen and officials, mainly from Dallas, but also from other parts of the world.  I remember one laughable tidbit from my time there:  

One habitual business entrepreneur took is clients to Shinsei.  Loudly, and at a table full of goggling gaggles of prospects, he'd order a $1000 bottle of fine red wine.  Once the waitress arrived to present the bottle, she'd pull the cork table-side, and then offer him the cork to sniff.  OK.  Then the ritual taste, the swish-in-the-mouth, etc.  

At that, loudly, the business entrepreneur dismissed the bottle ($1000) as "bad".  He'd demand another.  His clients seemed impressed.  Seem?  Who knows?  

Sometimes this went on three times on nights when he'd appear with a retinue.  Where did the wine go?  To the office.  On a shelf, halfway re-corked.  Rathbun's wife routinely took home a bottle of $1000 red wine--probably a write-off biz expense.  

As Dan Rather is famous for saying: " Kenneth, what's the frequency?"  Who hurt Rather's head?  When did that incident occur?  What context?  What background?  I certainly don't have any answers.  But one deal is still clear to me: a move on China and Japan was underway here in Dallas.  The scarlet A, hanging loose under the chin of China.  

Kelly reported my reports about Shinsei's darker side.  Rathbun's woman was apparently incensed.  

One night, maybe a coincidence, I ordered chicken fried rice, did my work, and went home.  Only to awaken at three a.m. chilling, sick beyond belief.  

Food poisoning.  Serious danger for a man only months out of the hospital, months full of a compromised immune system.  I can't remember exactly what I did about it.  I should have gone to the hospital.  Seems like I didn't.  I used a lot of "schedule obedient" Tylenol and added ibuprofen.  I took hot baths, I shivered alone in bed.  

Worse, my feet and lower legs swelled.  I could barely walk.  Somehow, I took a cab, was immediately given a bed, and for the next nine days, after my rheumatologist informed me I had an expressly rare syndrome called reactive RA.  I already struggled with ankylosing spondilytis.  I was freaked out.  The rheumatologist, a world-renowned expert in ankylosing spondilytis, familiar with fellow researchers and doctors in the world--he studied my syndrome.  Very rare for those with my form of RA.  And dangerous.  I strapped on the little air-propelled pedals designed to keep my circulation in my legs.  And muscle relaxers.  And the typically uncomfortable beds of Parkland.  For days, the rheumatologist (with my amused cooperation) examined, blood-tested and theorized, fascinated, and even brought in his med school class--all to look at my feet.  Hysterical, in a funny way of foot examination.  

Apparently, the rheumatologist had never seen such a condition in someone with my form of RA.  He researched, he spoke to fellows across the country: this condition, I believe, may have been unique.  Even after nine or so days in hospital, I could barely walk.  I hobbled to the bathroom.  

I had no visitors.  

Anyway, when time came for release from foot-swollen bondage, in fact, in the very middle of all the medical assistance, I received a telephone call from Rathbun's wife.  She fired me.  While I was in the hospital.  Kelly had given her the location of the MySpace blog, she had read it, and thus, because it spoke negatively of "Peace", she volcanically "took revenge.  

There went my extra pennies.  On a very bad day of a hard-won life.  Anyhow, I was offered a physical therapist session to help me lean how to use a cane until I had fully recovered.  In the woman came, stunning me with the greenest emerald eyes I have ever seen.  

"We need to wrap this sheet around you--so I can hold you steady as I teach you how to get around with a cane.  Stimulating experience?  Indeed.  In fact, I was so impressed with the physical therapist I pretended too stumble several times simply so the woman would catch me.  I think she knew about that one.  

Released, I took a cab back to my apartment, then waited for the next home therapist to call.  A nice, but slightly erratic lady.  She taught me how to hobble around by getting me to walk around the apartment (on Douglass) and dutifully, in some pain, I cooperated.  I wanted to get back on my feet ASAP.  That took a month or so.  Gradually, swelling diminished.  Another PT dropped in periodically to help me keep my apartment, which was already filthy not because of me, and finally, I could be on the loose again.  

Kelly?  He defended surveiling my blog by demanding I believe, "Sandra Rathbun has every right to spend her money wherever she wants!"  OK.  How about spending it to help pay for Ernesto, his family, and a better life.  That man was an impressive man.  He never stopped smiling.  

Ernesto is likely still glad to be here in a land of freedom; albeit freedom endangered possibly due to far too much "liberty".  Liberty's fine.  When liberty is excessive, it becomes license.  That is not to the advantage of any government anywhere.  Except Brazil or Spain or Italy or 1930s Germany.  

And poor border collie.  At least Kelly could cook.  Regarding me, I suspect he was doing as best as he could.  Before all the nonsense at Shinsei, he cooked his roommate and me a wonderful "gourmet" dinner.  This is a happy memory.  After dinner, I read to the two men a Wallace Stevens poem, an immortal: "Sea Surface Full Of Clouds".  Yes, per Stevens, everything about the sea and an ocean liner in the poem remains the same.  The colors however create a cycle of change.  

That's reminiscent of something-something... 

 

*

Fun times from the past.  

I certainly have no idea if anyone reading this remembers playing "Beetle".  When I was a kid, 

my best buds and I eagerly played the game from the backseat of the cars that delivered us to places like this:

The State Fair of Texas.  

Poncho's (a Mexican restaurant that held court at Mockingbird and Abrams for a decade and more). 

Medallian Shopping Center. 

Especially Northpark Mall, the McKree public swimming pool, Shakey's Pizza.  

The latter?  Amazing to a nine-year-old.  Shakey's, to the left of the front entrance, welcomed us kids with a plastic pane behind which "a dough thrower" flipped discs of processed flour and water, and man!  Could those guys twirl that undercrust!  I mean, like, tough-o!

What?  That was the concoction of the two friends who lived on a rise just above where our family garbage cans, made of "the real stuff", sat.  They were all wrinkled, tarnished, crushed.  Wind sometimes rolled empty cans down the alley.  

Some nights, we kids could hear those garbage cans tumbling down the alley.  One could not chain them to the ground, for trash trucks couldn't get them off the chains.  Hence, all sorts of garbage would be strewn all over the entire area; right where the alley pulled a "45" to the right.  

Leslie's family hated it when a half-empty chunk of creased tin spewed all over their alleyway parking.  I'd have to go pick the stuff off the weeds and haul it to the uprighted cans; a chore I had to do--or no allowance.  

And now using the garbage can lids for Frisbees, especially not even when playing Captain America in the front yard, or worse, pretending we were ancient soliders sword-fighting with swords fashioned of used stake sign holders, crossed with pine crossguard (or quillion).  

To be super-cool, my neighbor brought out some Marks A Lots and we colored the steely nails we had pounded to keep the refuse wood stable enough for mighty sword fights.  

I had red and blue on mine.  Who did I think I was?  

Who knows?  

Back to "Beetle".  We called VWs that in the mid-Sixties.  The cars looked like, as Earl Bills told me, rolly-pollies.  IN technical entyomology, those little armadillo-shaped bugs of grey are called Armadillidium vulgare: They're a sort of crustacean.  Touch one, and the rolly poly would roll into a protective ball.  Then, we'd knock the unbelievable thing with an index finger: Those bugs would scurry against their so-called will--onto the concrete.  

Cruel kids?  Nah.  We were--remember--nine.  

I don't know who started the "Beetle" game.  In memory, there I am with any number of many friends, Beetle-spotting on the way to the store or even to church.  

"BEETLE!!!" We kept score.  The one with the most spotted Beetles got something important: a win.  

Not too often, Beetle pickin's were rare.  But usually, because of their Sixties-era popularity, Beetles were almost everywhere.  

Daddy: "I don't know why anyone would wanna drive one of those death-traps..."

"But they're way cool!!!"

"You think that tarnished egg-yellow is neat-o?"

"At least they have an interesting shape, daddy.  See how they're low at first, and then go way up, then down real fast?" 

"What about the white ones?" 

"Can we get some scrambled eggs after we get back from church?"

No answrer.  

Such is life, eh?  

Back to that game: Calling "BEETLE!!!" first was a true contest.  Remember how we eagerly scanned the highways and driveways and roads to and from for those Bugs?  Whoever saw the Beetle Bug first became something of a rapid-fire blurt-out.  Sometimes, the calls were so crowded together that one parent or another, bored stiff and a little disrupted by us horsing around in the back, would have to decide the winner.  

Yes, losing a call stung a little.  We were nine.  

Many years later, when one of many Xmases rolled around, I noticed my nephew had received a nicely-wrapped--well what was it?  

"It's a video game." 

"How expensive are they?"

"Good point.  I can't get one if I don't save up."

Being the nutty uncle, so to speak, I lowered my voice to inform the whippersnapper kneeling on the rug beaming over his new video game: 

"You wanna know something?  When we were kids we could have more fun with sticks we'd steal from the house construction out back--and that was free!"

"Wha...???"

"For real.  And we made slingshots outta leather from thrown-out shoes, cut a diamond in the center after we'd shaped the rectangle and punched a hole on either end of the long side, tie old shoestrings to them, knot a loop on one end, and then twirl a rock.  Man!  Once we got the hang of that, we could shoot a bird off a branch!" 

I added: "I got in trouble for killing a sparrow.  Mommy swatted me.

We'd also play "Super Heroes": nothing but an old towel tied around our necks.  Watch it!  We're flying to find the bad guys.  Mad rushes down the lawn until all of us were nearly breathless.  Nearly.  Not ever out of wind.

Or that time buddies and I decided we were actually able to fly with our "magic capes".  An old magnolia held court in the right front yard (lawn, divided into two sides by a walkdown out of the house).  Nice.  A weird tree.  Always green atop each leaf, brown or tan on the bottom.  So what?  As nine- and 10-year-olds, we'd climb to a fairly high branch, unfurl our terrycloth "magic" and leap.  

For nearly a half a second, nine-year-olds can become Superman.  

No deal.  Earl's mom called mine, exclaimed, "Them boys are gonna break their danged necks!" 

Off that magnolia.  You get a dressing-down for messing with weird trees, it seems.  But Daddy?  

"Hope you didn't break any branches. . . ."