TALES, TESTIMONIES, AND OTHER TROPICAL FISH

Sometimes, I'm a sparkler.  I'll light up like one, and bursts of pure fire spray in every direction.  This is what happens in my head.  So many ideas can float by without us getting a record of them.  Hence, here are some of my stray experiences, ideas, and ruminations:

After this weekend, June 21, 2025's US bombing of Iranian nuclear installations, security and calls to alertness among the police and the populace have been high.  Police are everywhere.  In my neighborhood, an area of many immigrants from South Asia, I'm certain undercover agents are everywhere.  

So.  I'm entering the elevator on my bimonthly therapy sessions--when I run into two security guards.  One has the gall to ask me, "Where are you going today?"  

What did I tell him?  "Oh, there's an international terrorist convention and barbecue taking place on the 4th floor."

Blank stares.  

What's noteworthy is that this building contains Texas Senator Ted Cruz's Dallas offices.  There have been protests there for some time.  Maybe the rent-a-cops thought I was one of those.  

*

The wintry afternoon was a perfect moment to take a good, long walk.  I passed a shop called Vice City, and found inside a wondrous head shop.  I got to chatting with the female cashier, and when she asked me what I did, I told her, "I'm a poet."  Of course I did.

"You write poetry?"  I nodded.  "I do too!"  

"Cool.  You have any here you'd like to share?"

"Yeah--yes! "  She looked into her cellphone until she found a poem.  

Then added: "I'm scared to show you this!" 

"Don't worry.  I'm not going to judge you.  Read it out loud." 

Thus she did.  Her poem had elements of rap in it, but one line remains with me.  How lust can prevent love.  "I like that part."  

"What are your poems like?"  

"Oh.  Pretty much the same.  On the subject of your poem, I'd probably write something about the cherries versus the cherry pits.

She and I chuckled, but what she didn't know is that I was telling her the truth.  

*

Kirk assassination in Orem, Utah.  I love playing with words.  I used to live on Oram here in Dallas in 1980-81--back when I committed the cardinal sin of dissent against the Comanche Peak nuclear power construction project.  Raised voice--a sin.  Rattled fence--sin.  Gave state trooper a Coke--a sin.  Talked to two FBI agents about "stopping the Nookie Poo Poo."  I wasn't there to attack the United States.  I was there to dissent against nuclear waste.  A cardinal sin directed toward a project that benefited Texas Utilities, a private corporation, likely federally subsidized at the dawn of the Ronald Ray Gun era.  

Sometimes, I think about secret court rulings that "He'll never play in this town again!"  Redneck verdicts on every little thing, especially Donald Trump's, um, fist.  

Paranoia is fun.  Spell Orem, Utah backwards: Hat U, Mero:  I had leukemia right after parting company with Jennifer O'Connor, bartender at a swinger meeting place in the Southside Building in 2027.  Weird, eh?  Jennifer painted cowboy hats.  Made a really nice American flag hat for Toby Keith.  In July 2007, I contracted leukemia, possibly due to radiation exposure.  Oh yeah, a special bottle of red red wine?  Paranoia is awesome.  

I'm laughing about the allegations Kirk's assassination had engraved tiny bullets with pro-trans slogans or whatnot. That's nutty.  Who else do you know who has engraving skills that awesome?  

More paranoia: U V U = 21, 22, 21--since it's a valley, it's like a wide V.  I like this kind of pseudo-cryptological wordplay.  22 in Tarot indicates "universe"; 21 = "world". And it's left and right too.  I've played with that as well: how the New Left committed itself to becoming a sort of lure in order to pull reactionaries further to the right, and to accelerate the dominion of capitalism over anything remotely democratic--all in order to begin the final division between bourgeois and prole.  MAGA is in many ways a sort of proletarian mass movement, and like in Lenin's time, it's being led around by the nose by a group of seditious and subversive ideologues who inhabit the far right.  

I read recently that David Horowitz, a major voice in the SDS in the 1960s, a man who in his memoirs tells how he "reformed" after the Black Panther murder of a white secretary in Oakland.  That never sounded quite right to me.  But there he was, countless times, as a Fox Pretend News expert.  Reportedly, it was Horowitz who was pushing Stephen Miller hard to really crack down on the undocumented.  Hmm.  More cracks in a divide and conquer situation almost ready-made for subversion: North v South.  That line in the sand is practically a gift to any subversive in the paranoid world I'm writing about.  

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

"By their fruits ye shall know them."

~ Matthew 7, 15-16

"Capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development..." so that it "...ransacks the whole world...all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilization and all forms of society."

~Rosa Luxembourg
“It is the nature of the state that, insofar as it claims to be political, it will govern for the good of the entire community and not serve primarily the interests of a particular class or group: this is the democratic ‘truth’. But insofar as the state in question takes a particular form, say, one mainly controlled by the wealthy or by corporations, it will by virtue of its actual nature rule in the interest of a part of the society, that is, false to the democratic principle of the good of the whole community.”
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Democracy And The Political”

“The bourgeoisie, he [Marx] declared, are compelled to create the agents of their own destruction. By exposing the proletariat to the advanced culture of industrialized society, the ‘political and general education’ of the bourgeoisie is unintentionally transmitted to the workers; by inveigling the proletariat to help in the bourgeois struggle against remnants of the old regime, the workers are ‘dragged into the political arena’, rendered more politically conscious; and by associating workers in the social activity of production, their sense of common association is stimulated. Thus, the bourgeoisie is compelled to set the proletariat in motion’.”
~ Sheldon S. Wolin, “On Reading Marx Politically”

“In short, the American government ought to be unambiguously committed to a vision of a society based on freedom of expression and information; to libertarianism and pluralism with respect to culture and politics.”
~ Richard Flacks, founder of Students For A Democratic Society, 1988
*
That time when a local and very narcissistic slam poet with insecurities and the need to dominate others to fight those insecurities (apparently by projecting them, as in T.R.U.M.P) held an event in Deep Ellum's Green Room here in Dallas:

I was drinking back then, and before the big event, featuring two Scottish poets from the then-sensational "Manchester Beat" movement from Great Britain, I stopped by a spot and drank mead for the first time in my life.  In fact, I drank too much mead.  

By that time, the late spring of 1995, I'd gotten a little frustrated by "Clebo" (his biker name,. i.e Cleburn, Texas, or some metaphorical iteration thereof) and his Trumpian tendencies to declare himself to be the best slam poet (he was pretty good) but also his need to control every little thing.  For good reason, I've always had my own tendency: to "return the services" back to the bully.  That may be something from childhood: One way I learned to fend off bullies is to torment them.  Sometimes I tormented Clebo the bully.  

Inside the Green Room I went.  Found a good spot in a booth up front, right under Clebo's nose.  The two Manchester Beat poets were sitting a couple of booths behind me, having been routed to the event by one Robert Trammel, another poet of questionable quality (as I was too at the time) but also a poet with an awful lot of undeserved acclaim.  He was wealthy.  OK....

Clebo The Bully, obviously out to "totally impress" the two poets, began some pseudo-profound slam thing, announcing this, announcing that, mostly about himself, and then he began his impresario clam spam slam.  Drunk enough, every time he paused for applause, I raised my right fist, and hollered this: 

"FIST FUCK!!!!"  

All of us in the audience were laughing.  Hyacinth Bouquet upstaged, continued.  FIST FUCK!!!!  FIST FUCK!!!!

At the end of his Hyacinth performance, he stopped by my table and to frost me with spittle-mist as he upbraided me for my behavior.  He hadn't asked me to read.  All the other poets got to read.  I'd brought a few poems to read.  Something already was deeply wrong with that.  I also was "sort of a celebrity", having won the local poetry slam six times in a row.  I sensed jealousy in the air.  Maybe, welp, conspiracy.  This always seems to happen--as if the powers-that-be don't want me to speak at all.  

FIST FUCK!!!!

Then, once the event ended, I tottered out, but when I passed the two Manchester Beats, both of them high-fived me.  

"That was the best part of this entire thing," one hooted.  

What happened the next night at the poetry slam was straight outta Eddie Haskell from "Leave It To Beaver".  The judges?  Jack Myers, a nationally-known "conversational" poet, and his wife, Thea Temple.  When my moment arrived, I stepped onto the stage and began a poorly-pronounced Cajun-accented slam version of "Interview With A Vampire", something I'd called "White Raisin Vampire Dude".  

Honestly, the crowd was roaring in laughter as I went on and on in a fake Cajun accent (something I suggested in the text had to be Lestat's true way of speaking), and then I again won the slam.  

As long as Myers and his wife were in the room, Clebo the bully was like Eddie Haskell all right: "Good mornin', Mrs Cleaver, beautiful day isn't it?"  

But when they left, I mean the instant the door closed behind them, Clebo charged at me.  He literally knocked me out of my chair.  I could have sued him for assault.  But a poetry acquaintance, Jason Carney, picked me up off the floor, laughingly, glad I hadn't broken any bones, and then we left--with two young SMU students in Scottish skirts.  We took them to the Video Bar, but that wasn't right either.  The two young ladies, lesbians, were playing for the wrong team--maybe two wrong teams.  

Heroism in Dallas poetry 101

* 

Censorship:  

I tried and tried posting this comment on a thread where George Will blames the government for censoring Jimmy Kimmel.  No bad words, only a truth as I see it:  Censoring us groundlings must be way fun for Oliver Cromwell's New Model Newspaper.  

 it some persuade as if it's some kind of necessity to rush this directly past us all to universalize every issue lit up by the Trump administration to this: 

"Oh.  By the way, I don't like the government if it's modeled to address the issues of the late 20th and now the 21st Centuries."

Here's a recipe for authoritarian mass movements:  

"Things were perfect way back in the past, now they suck, but when we take over, things will be perfect again".  

Really?  Right here?  Seriously?  

Let's say there are "leftist lunatics" all over.  I've been watching the call-and-response for years.  Nuclear power? Or Nuclear Family Values? Oh, yeah.  Square off!  The left often serves the right a fishing lure, and dagnabit, the reactionaries on the right always take the bait.  Then, weirdly, they openly bait the left.  Which is silly.  Best policy?  Do.  Not.  React.  

What's this got to do with Jimmy Kimmel?  He's just gotten baited by some cretins.  It's sad to see.  Left versus right, and then outside, we have  opportunists using the fights for purposes beyond mere fist fights.  

One tactic of the New Left is this:  Push the rightists (or capitalist defenders) so far to the right that eventually the people (under a class system that is determinedly not classy) rise up and react themselves.  

Why do simple people need to explain simple common sense and reality to those so infatuated with left versus right that they can't see reality?  Without sense that is common (not elitist), equality (even the conceit of it we tend to accept--except some people) is impossible.  As is unity.  

Take the Overton Window.  On the top left is "leftist authoritarianism".  On the bottom right is "libertarianism".  Why is it that the Soviets and pseudo-conservatives always put sawdust in rice crispies to save money for the "masters"?  

I'm tired of boxing matches.  Why keep punching faces? 

Why hold down those who speak the truth?  Censors?  Tell us what is wrong with us.  

*

Let's talk more about leftism, Weather Underground, and censorship, along with maybe COINTELPRO, blacklisting, red-baiting, and all the other stupid games provided free of charge to people like me, courtesy of reactionary paranoids.  

Back in 1980, when I was a clueless 26-year-old already struggling with the low perceptive ability that comes part and parcel with Bipolar Disorder, at the behest of a couple of guys--Tom and Bill Swift, from Washington DC, and likely agitators), I began going to meetings of the Comanche Peak Life Force, a core group of activists protesting the Comanche Peak nuclear power plants (two of them) under construction and almost wittily constructed upwind from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.  

Why'd I join?  I didn't want nuclear waste destroying me.  That's it.  Not anti-state, not anti-capitalism, not nothing, not even some vague "special interest" use of various issues by very real revolutionaries.  

I sat in meetings, quietly questioning how such a thing as a privately built nuclear power plant could mean anything more than questioning the use of nuclear power.  Some seemed quite agitated.  Many were leftovers from the antiwar movement of only seven years earlier.  Why did those numbskulls co-opt a rising national protest?  

Because that's what they do.  

I went along.  I sat in a circle with some agitators, along with some people just like me: innocents, people who were politically naive, people who wanted to protest nukes.  Sigh.  I went to a rally, and rattled a chain-link fence, sat around guarding a camp at 113 degrees.  I even offered a County Officer who was in a laying position just over a small rise, actively training a rifle at my head; I walked over and offered him a Coke.  Here's a Coke please don't kill me for exercising my First Amendment rights OK?  

Paranoia is the number one product of the State of Texas.  

The rally, on July 4, 1980, looked to be a bust to me.  Worse, parasites called the Revolutionary Communist Party, sought to inflame the crowd in hopes of generating violence under the myth that violence would start a communist revolution.  What did I help to do about them?  I helped guide them away.  We told those idiots to go home.  

All fine and good.  Until, at later meetings, some CPLF members began chattering about "monkey-wrenching" the nuke.  By taking jobs at the plant.  Sabotage from the inside.  

Me no likee! Courtesy, a peasant.  

At the time, when I had befriended Robert Compton, books editor for The Dallas Morning News, at one meeting, one that took place in his car as he brought me back home to my apartment on a mysteriously-named street called Oram, I told him about the planned monkey-wrenching.  I told him, "I think I've had enough."  

Later, several days later, a woman, apparently suspected of being FBI by the group's leaders, called me to tell me of their loud accusations and that she'd been kicked out of the CPLF "for informing".  

I sympathized.  The FBI?  What about the hotshot training a rifle at my head as I sat talking to two likely FBI agents who were teasing me with STOP THE NOOKIE POO POO!

She was accused for what I did right: I was the informant.  

I started getting books to review like Abbie Hoffman's "Square Dancing In The Ice Age", or Russell Banks story collection ( I don't even remember the name of the goddamned thing), a well-known member of the SDS.  Or Ken Kesey's "The Demon Box".  All "the commie novels".  

Was I being baited? Why yes I was being baited.  Even though I was the one who turned in the flapjacks who decided to get violent.  

Paranoia is the number one product sold by The State of Texas.  I hear paranoia, the product, is going national.  

Hey!  Good times for paranoia!  

*

Needless to say, I cannot help but wonder how many decent if innocent citizens have been beaten half to death, sometimes for their entire lives, simply because someone big, fat, nasty and bigoted found it propitious to silence them, to redbait them, to blacklist them, to impede every single thing they do for themselves to make their own life better.  

Dallas is full of those big-time victimizers.  Some are even famous real estate developers and oilmen.  

What does it mean to yam-scram another human being simple to protect one's ideological bigotry to the point no other viewpoint can get through?  Apparently, it means a lot to some of those idiots, especially the ones who have built vast monuments for themselves where they can sit, pretend to be intellectual or all-knowing while they sit at the very bottom of their very own bat cave: crass little batmen.  Morlocks who have to have more, more, more--while locking humanity, the competition, clean out.  

I have a very strong suspicion that sooner or later, those poor cud-chewers are going to be quite surprised when they know the jig is up for them.  What happens if some wiseguy pulls the plug on the international economy?  What then?  What if little King Midas' piles of gold, which they may have received as a reward for buying their own rainbows, lose first the money, and then the power that goes with it?  What happens then?  

I don't mean to belittle men and some women who have already self-belittled by assuming money means even one damned thing in this world.  I don't believe in some vacuous, nebulous afterlife.  No one is saved unless, as was told to Jesus, "You have to save yourself!"  Maybe Jesus, the thief in the night as said in the Bible, what if he cones and goes undetected because (this is what the best thieves do,; they don't steal everything on earth because they're "sacred") he is here to judge, not turn Christianity into a cult all about salesmanship?  What then?  Thieves come and go in the night, never heard nor seen.  

OK, plutocracy, go now: get strung out on the Lord.  What?  You mean even the Holy Ghost is merely a physical sensation?  

Please.  Tell me more.  Tell me how good you used that concept of physical sensation to pull many many desperate people away from anything but more of the absolutist nihilism you so desperately need to make yourselves look Great and Big.

*

Now I'm laughing.  According to the sponsors of this blog biz, this post has been given a dire warning to readers for "content", citing, once again, "community guidelines".  

Maybe the vast vast majority of the world is "of the wrong community".  Hitler ran on "decency".  

*

That time in 2001 when the Dallas Homeless Coalition met, a wide circle of all the service providers--food banks, clothing banks, homeless shelters, women's rape crisis shelters, and more and more.  

Yeah, that time when The Dallas Morning News sent out a metro reporter to cover the meeting.  She sat next to me.  

That time she turned to ask me, "are you a leftie?"  

"Yeah, I write with my left hand".  

I'm sure some snazzy editorial board director made her ask me that question--probably because he or she was (and likely continues to be) too flippin' dumb to know this: 

Liberalism is not leftism.  

The woman, with whom I spoke by telephone several times, confessed to me: She'd quit her post because she had an important story on offer, but the editors unrighteously refused to approve it.  

Paranoids are simply convinced: Everyone not in their family or friendship circles (like the Rotary Club or the not-really Lions Club) has got to be a communist.  

Liberal is not left.  

As a friend of mine once observed of such snotty sad sacks: Stoop-fucks.  When he said that, we laughed and laughed and laughed.  

At the ones who have earned the title.  

*

I always laugh at the press whenever I pitch an opinion and their reaction is: Do us the homeless thing again!  It reminds me of the time Joni Mitchell commented to an auditorium of people that she too was tired of people constantly asking her to do "Both Sides Now".  "Do Starry Night again!" she scoffed at their wishy-washy obsession with packaging her.  

Airheads will be airheads, right rightists?  

*

When I wrote a feature story for the street newspaper Endless Choices, I recalled the incident with the Dallas Fire Department that led me to become homeless.  

I called the story, "The Cat On The Roof Incident".  I don't know if I got any "ravenous reviews", but I'm glad I 'fessed-up.  

In December, 1993, only six months after I'd left the first appropriate treatment for Bipolar Disorder--an SSRI--I had another manic episode.  

The stressor?  No money.  My unemployment insurance had finally ended.  Right before Xmas.  In 1993, after I "called in dead" to the offices of Gardere and Wynne, a prestigious Dallas-area law firm, after Christie, the firm's receptionist and a friendly, called the police to try and rescue me from my destroyer of choice: Advil.  

While I was only in the psych ward for 12 days, I returned to find this: My apartment had been ransacked while I was away, the drawers of the fireproof file case where I stored my journals were all over the ling room, and my poor cat Loopy was terrified and absolutely freaked as she called out to me and jumped into my arms, quivering.  

Welcome home from your life-saving experience!  

I did call the police.  Someone had crawled through the bedroom window, conveniently situated in a location out of sight of the street, and worse, shattered glass was all over my pillow.  My suspects?  Down the hall, in room 101, hung a local cocaine dealer.  Someone had written "Toys" on a small wall also facing away from the street.  That location, two identical apartment buildings facing one another, separated a parking lot that some nights was crowded with Beemers, Mercedes Benzes, luxury cars, many belonging to very pretty college students from nearby Southern Methodist University, all of whom filtered in and out of a coke and crack dealer's apartment.  Meanwhile, from room 101, the fathead dealers served as the distributors.  They'd buy, send a little girl with a baby buggy filled with the products across the parking lot and into an apartment on the other side of the lot.  

Creepiness embodied.  

Big, baby-blue Cadillac.  Those cretins had Beatles haircuts.  Big gangstas, eh?  Perhaps they'd spotted me taking photos of the area graffiti, something I enjoyed doing with my college graduation present, a wonderful Nikkormat camera complete with a Nikon lens.  "Toys"  The billboard.  That's a name for both coke and heroin on the streets.  

Six months later, while I was still fairly isolated (at least in a sense) although I'd begun attending a big Monday night poetry reading at a bar and club called Chumleys, when the cash vanished just before Xmas, I landed on another planet: Fear, some delusions, mainly paranoia--not as serious as the episode that had hospitalized me six months earlier.  

Then, as a December ice storm approached, I heard it: a cat, fearfully calling for help.  I remember going outside in the frigid weather as storm clouds approached from the Northwest.  I could see her: a lovely house cat with a tiny pink collar.  Poor thing was terrified.  I called the Dallas Police for advice.  They passed the buck to Animal Control--which told me over the telephone "We don't rescue pets from roofs".  I was panicked enough to even try the City of Dallas--no response, a flatline.  Then, out of deluded exasperation, I even tried Greenpeace, left a message.  Finally, knowing the poor, furry, white cat was going to freeze to death, I called 911 and said I had a serious emergency.  

Sometimes, house cats that are not familiar with the out-of-doors get themselves into precarious situations.  Who was the animal lover about to lose his or her pet?  

The Dallas Fire Department arrived--with dispatched.  My famous last words?  

"Where's the fire?" 

"CAT ON THE ROOF!"  

I'm so sorry I believed in the propaganda that a fireman would kindly rescue a cat trapped in a tree or on a high roof about to turn to ice.  Ha.  ICE.  

Three blazing firetrucks.  The head of the team, on hearing that he wasn't going to get to put out a fire, angrily belittled me.  Then he filed suit, convinced some silly County DA to file the "false alarm" as a felony.  Lucky for me, a judge with common sense immediately knocked the charges down to a misdemeanor.  I had made another false alarm about two years earlier--also under a manic episode.  Context.  Background, history, proximity in both time and space--those apparently didn't matter to a money-hungry DA.  Or something.  

In February, Dallas County Cowboy Constables arrived at my door to take me to jail.  "Can I go back to my bedroom to put on some shoes?  I have a wallet.  I think I may have money enough to pay bail..."

"No."

Really now.  They handcuffed me and shoved me into a white squad car and carried me to their version of a rescue: Dallas County Jail.  

After two of the three days I was interred in Lew Sterett's Jeremy Bentham opticon-style eight-sided jail, listening to prisoners bragging about "why you in here?"  

"I accidentally killed my wife with a hammer!" 

"Cool!  I used a butcher knife!" 

"Me?  Cat on the roof!"  And like in the song Alice's Restaurant, they all moved away from me.  Eyeing me.  A ready kill or simple paranoia that I was a CO?  

I bailed on that second day, pleaded suicidal ideation simply to get out of that lair of dirty, nasty, toilet-paper free weirdness, and landed in a five-by-five isolation cell.  I think my parents had been drug down there to pay $250 bail for trying to get City Officials to help me rescue a feline--hell to pay for that too. 

Sort of released, I landed before a judge.  He seemed to figure I'd plead out and pay him some $$$.  

"How do you plead?" 

"Not guilty.  I want trial by jury".  He seemed shocked, told me that if I didn't comply he'd put out a warrant for my arrest.  I demanded a pro bono lawyer, and yep, I got a corporate lawyer who was putting in time to help poor peasants like me.  

With his reluctant assistance, I reset the trial around 26 times.  Friction.  I wasn't going to fall without a fight.  When treated absurdly, resist.  Never surrender.  

Warrant issued, I could not find a good job.  When you don't have a telephone, and you don't have rent money, and a warrant is prohibiting you from finding appropriate work, DA, what happens? 

Oh yeah!  The homeless shelter.  For four years.  I wasn't going to let go of my rights.  With some help from family, I found a woman I'd known since childhood who went to Parkland Hospital, scoured files and found a document that indicated that, just before that incident, I'd been hauled to a Dallas Police observation unit because it was obvious I was having mental issues.  

That took nearly four years.  Of homelessness.  Finally, after "agitating" as a writer for a homeless advocacy newspaper, after rocking the City of Dallas with the unexpectedness of encountering a homeless person who could write better than anyone on the Dallas City Council, with document in hand, again with the help of the pro bono corporate lawyer, I went before the same judge.  With that, the DA had no choice but to drop all charges.  She did demand, um...

Money.  $150 for court charges.  I opted for community services.  Not too bad, really, in the hot July sun of 2001, I cleaned up the concrete floors of the Dallas Farmers Market.  An interesting choice: I'd stemmed some lousy real estate developers from their wet dream of putting up apartments where the City of Dallas chose otherwise: a secular shelter right smack next door to the Farmer's Market.  Poor puppies.  Again denied an opportunity for this: 

Money.  More and more and more in a mentality where enough is never enough.  Such invisible irony.  

Finally, after nearly seven years of pointless travail, I went before the same judge who'd put a warrant out for my arrest.  

"Here.  I completed community service.  I told you five years ago you weren't getting one red nickel out of me.  How's it feel to end up out of pocket?"

He simply looked surprised.  No comment.  He simply signed the papers ending the dumb warrant. 

The poor kitty?  After the ice storm, I spotted it, a pretty pink collar studded with costume jewelry.  

I think a long gone lover, the Harkness Monster, an animal rights activist and all-around agitator, would be smiling at me from Heaven.  She too had been delivered stupid fate at the hands of another corrupt judge.  

What had she done?  As a court reporter for a judge who'd become notoriously famous for delivering a creepy press statement in support of the killing of two gay men in Reverchon Park, she'd registered a complaint.  

That park was once beautiful.  People picnicked there.  It was also a gay meeting spot after dark.  Some lunkhead had laid off and lured two gay men into the woods, and killed them.  Homophobia at its worst--supported by yet another reactionary fool allowed to judge the victims in the press.  

The Harkness Monster used to eat her lunch in the courtroom.  She'd been doing that for months.  But one day, constables ordered her out.  She complied, headed for the front door, but was directed to leave by a back door.  

Stepping onto slick, wet grease, she reached for a stairway handrail--which happened to be missing.  She fell nearly three floors, landed on her hands, broke her wrists, survived with some head damage, and was left without the vocation she loved: As one of Dallas' finest calligraphers, she'd not only supplied graduate names on all the diplomas for Southern Methodist University, something she enjoyed, but also gained some underground countercultural fame for calligraphic designs of her own making.  

All gone.  In 1990, I happened to be bicycling down the street where Harkness had once lived: Kenwood.  I spotted her mother, Wilta, in the front yard, and stopped.  

Wilta sat down on the curb and cried to me: "I think she was murdered. She disappeared after her accident, was registered as missing, only she was found three streets over at a dead end in her lime green Toyota pickup, slumped over in the driver's seat.  She had a Jack N The Box milkshake between her knees."

That hurt.  What is the weather underground? Dig it?  Dead soldiers.  And Barbara Harkness, a woman who could brighten the weather even after she had perished.  I think of Barbara every single day.  She was one of the best people I have ever met.  

OK, paranoids. Scapegoat those who have perished.  How does it feel to instrumentalize your own paranoia--and all so one can fell all big and scary--even at the expense of the US legal system? 

*

That time the Harkness Monster and I sat on her vinyl couch under her beloved track lights and watched Tom Snyder of The Tomorrow Show interview Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics--naked as two jaybirds--may or may not have been the summen bonum highlight of our relationship in 1981.  

We grinned like two mannequins while gaping at Williams' stark weird platinum blonde mohawk.  The Mohawk Nation was being born.  But both the Harkness Monster and I were more interested in the arts--for while the plastic arts (get it?) have always struggled here in Dallas, we went to a few galleries.  She assisted a local artist conduct his artisanal duties--you know, to feed his "creative habit--and once he even invited me to assist her to mount the nicely turned letters that spelled...

C-L-A-R-I-D-G-E

A luxury high rise condominium which overlooks the interestingly named Turtle Creek which ranges from Highland Park parkland all the way to Lakeside Park, near the formerly named Lee Park, overflow spilling over a dam, something which makes both the fountain and the spillway lovely noises.  I've wandered around those places many times.  I distinctly remember sitting down on a retaining wall one lovely Autumn afternoon to read Seth Abramson's excellent "meta-modernist" poetry collection, "Northerners".  Abramson, by the way, is a lawyer, and a political activist.  His meta-modernism seeks an angle outside of the reigning modernism/postmodernism in such a way as to question the values of both.  A later collection of his, "Meta-Americana", an often-humorous series of poems about people like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber.  "Meta-Americana" straddles the borderlines between poetry, prose and art.  In fact, one of the more fashionable genres of poetry involves outright mixtures of poetry and art.  That would have been taboo in 1981.  

Speaking of the Claridge here in Dallas, a place that has been home to people like Kathleen Turner and (possibly) Patricia Wettig, a female lead of the 80s-era TV series, "30-Something".  Most importantly, I accompanied my Humanities manager of the Dallas Public Library to pack up books donated by local socialite/authoress Frances Moscowitz, a woman who wrote impressive biographies of some of the ancient aristocracy from before and after the French Revolution of 1789-92.  And the Napoleonic era--which was a sort of pro-democracy order where Napoleon seems to have served as a janitorial service bidden to wipe out the old order to make way for democracy--which, after the US revolution of 1776, had become part of the European rage lit (literally) by Thomas Paine.

Frances Moscowitz, who had recently died and donated her literary legacy to the public library, used to reign like a queen at the Dallas Public Library's writers room.  A really nice lady who may or may not be easily mistaken as a "blue-hair", but who was actually pretty down-to-earth.  Her kitchen wall decor?  Totally Seventies--orange and yellow stripes.  Go figure.  Right?  

Before we'd left the library to drive over to the borderline between Highland Park and the Oak Lawn neighborhood to load up the books, my boss, Frances Bell, told me this: 

"Gordon.  You're a brick." 

What?  As usual, I had to look up the word in the Oxford Dictionary.  English slang for "indispensable"   

Barbara Harkness and I clowned around as we carefully drilled holes in a cloth-covered wall that would sport the name of the hotel's lobby.  Hard to accomplish.  Easily, one could mount a letter out of sync with the straight line preferred by the English language.  Yes, at the time, as the Reagan era began swinging, the word was out: BE CAREFUL.  

The Harkness Monster was all about care.  Her drink of choice?  Kir.  Later, when I looked that up, I came across a Bolshevik era name: Sergei Kirov, famous person who became the head of the Leningrad Communist Party.  St. Petersburg?  Or Leningrad?  What's the difference?  

Who really knows about the mystery surrounding the Harkness Monster?  After we had a breakup of futility the summer of 1981, both of us crying under the impression that I was of course too young for the lovely, green-eyed 35-year-old (born in 1946, a postwar baby who truly was a natural babe), but I hung in there in my own way.  Her father, Carl Newell, a former US Navy Seebee stationed in Ja Pan, a man who blithely had abandoned his family and headed for Alaska for a couple of years with no reason, he said, beyond "exploration", gave me a job Barbara Harkness definitely approved of: Help the junk collector untangle his Pleasant Grove area garage, and clear out all the junk he'd literally placed in a snake-infested bamboo thicket surrounding that building.  Oof!  I was heartbroken, but there I was, actively working with a former lover's father who, apparently became inspired enough by me for the heart-patient to start climbing trees like a 25-year-old.  

Every week, Carl and I would head to a nearby A&P grocery store to gather three-day-old bread, then to a creek to feed the wildly acclaiming duck population.  Wow.  Getting paid to feed the ducks?  I didn't care how hot that summer was; I loved working with the guy, old gray body overalled and all.  He'd have to stop to take his potassium.  I always abided him with a watchful eye.  But he did good.  His wife, Wilta, said she hadn't seen so much life in him since he was much much younger.  And Wilta?  Fantastic dinners.  Oh yeah.  

Carl also had a yen for getting all kinds of things from the Ross Avenue Sears, and I especially found myself impressed with the grand deal he swung with Sears to buy all their mismatched paint, unsaleable, for a dollar a gallon.  Thus we painted both garage and house.  Grey in the front, white on one side, aqua blue on another, and so forth.  His wife of course was livid.  But he and I liked it.  

That had taught me something.  In 1987, tired of my "bomb shelter" apartment at 4422 McKinney, especially its moon-cratered kitchen, where I worked at writing poetry and prose, a friend, Tom Newman, and I ventured to sears, bought some mismatched purple and white gallons--for a dollar apiece.  Then we poured all the paint into a five gallon plastic bucket, mixed the colors, and came up with a fantastically beautiful light purple.  We painted the "purple kitchen".  Much more relaxing on the eyes than bruised, scored white.  The manager didn't like that when she saw it, but then she sold the building before I could change colors.  A laugh there.  

How had I met the Harkness Monster? Her next door neighbor, a former college troublemaker who continually got me in trouble at SFA in Nacogdoches (Carl Worsham, currently a MAGA man I happened to abandon 25 years ago because he liked trying to use me to get access to the women who liked me as a trusty and non-gamey person.  Carl, by the way, actually hacked into my Facebook account around three years ago, I caught his telephone number, and I can only assume the sociopathic narcissist was upset I'd kept his account blocked...I contacted the FBI)...he had a big house party. 

Barbara Harkness had been invited.  However, she was shy, only then recovering from breast and cervical surgery, and didn't seem happy among all the social climbers--IT pioneers--and seemed sulky on his sofa.  She had her "uniform": a Casey Jones striped cap. And round glasses.  Later I'd tease her and call her Admiral Yamamoto.  I think she liked the nickname.  Because, often gentle with me, if angered, she was a banshee.  Wouldn't quit.  Usually won arguments.  But she never seemed to lose her love and desire for me, a then-awkward and inexperienced shy person who--amazingly--knew that care if more important sometimes than love.  She ate a lot of eggs.  Good for halting inflammation and anxieties.  Of which, close after her surgeries, which were delicate issues, and though the surgeries didn't leave much scarring on her breasts, did leave a line along her pelvis--causing her a great deal of insecurity.  What can any lover do but kiss her scars all the time?  Scars are what make humans real.  

I remember her anti-smoking extremism.  I smoked.  She allowed that--but only with me.  She'd laughingly accuse me when I'd kiss her after bicycling to her after work at a nearby Skaggs Alpha-Beta grocery store, and make me wash my face.  She recalled the time she was in the very same Ross Avenue Sears shortly after her release from cancer surgery--only to catch some guy walking around the aisle while smoking.  She'd asked him to stop.  He refused.  She reached for the cigarette--and he slugged her.  Whoa.  She got up and slugged back until the manager arrived to break the boxing match up.  She warned me after inviting her to a non-smokers club shindig dinner she was hosting.  "You'd better not have smoke on your breath!"  I was really diligent about brushing my teeth.  Those people were really nice, but I had a joke to pull off: I'd brought a cigarette butt along, hidden in a front pocket.  Once the crowd got toasty from white whine with strawberries, I went to the bathroom, lit the cig, waved a little smoke around, then dropped the butt in the toilet.  

Like any agitator, I stepped back to watch the pandemonium ensue.  Harkness knew I'd done the unspeakable to those people.  A ruckus began.  Barbara approached me and whispered that the stunt was hilarious.  

Harkness had a way with animals I still find almost unbelievable.  She worked as a volunteer for Operation Kindness, a no-kill shelter in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas.  She took me along once--cats under a house--but without trouble at all, she had those cats mewling in her arms in less than 12 minutes.  She had two cats herself, and when I rolled up after work, there they'd be--the watch cats--scanning the area in anticipation of what I believed might be my arrival.  They'd sit like sentries--in the middle of Barbara's front yard.  Her dog, Ranger, a dog with some anger issues, barked and threatened every entrant but me.  Barbara, he apparently knew, had deep affection for me.  So he allowed that.  

That party.  Insane.  A bunch of self-described tech geniuses--and weirdly, a woman I knew: Kim Malin, perhaps the most beautiful woman I've ever known.  She'd become a Playboy Playmate in either '80 or '81.  Before that, she'd won some kind of beauty contest for a fitness obsession magazine.  Kim was in tow of a little, gangy, little guy who seemed intent upon keeping watch over her.  Not too happy for Kim.  I never asked her how she felt about being pawed at so much.  Perhaps she didn't like it.  Kim, enthusiastic almost to a fault, likely didn't care about those hanger-ons at all.  But I turned to Barbara.  

We talked.  She told me of her recent surgeries.  We sat as if in the center of a drunken, doped-up hurricane.  Carl Worsham's roommate, a kind of misogynist in that he liked using women for sex as if they were Big Macs, told women outright--likely including Malin--that he'd gotten a vasectomy because he wanted to have sex without worry.  Definitely a "turn on" for sleepwalkers.  Carl and his roommate: users.  

Harkness and I exchanged numbers.  Not long after, I invited her to a party I held on Oram Street, only a block and a half from the then-roaring entertainment everyone called Lower Greenville Avenue.  

The walls of that four-plex had paper thin walls.  I was surrounded by three retired ladies, all of them thrilled to have a man in the place. I warned them of the party I'd planned. They all were quite enthusiastic about the oncoming wildness that actually happened.  A wild party with a near-empty apartment with a seen-better-times record player.  What a rock-out that time was.  Barbara arrived late, brought a portable black-and-white TV...so she wouldn't miss "Dallas", she said.  I think she wasn't too enthusiastic about the wild-drinking partiers.  Who got rowdy.  I sat with Barbara almost the entire night.  Watched "Dallas" with her.  She demonstrated she liked that.  

At party's end, as Barbara got into her oddly-painted lime Toyota pickup, I squeezed her hand, but then weirdness occurred: Tom Swift, now a sculptor in Denton Texas, leaped into the bed of the pickup and apparently tried to "take her home".  He'd been doing that to all his friends.  I think he thought he was recruiting women for his actual leftist campaign of well "O-ganizing".  Coffee talk.  When I learned he'd done that to me, I gave him the business.  I told Barbara he'd done that to nearly all his friends, including his cheating on his wonderful girlfriend, Beth Powell, a woman who later became a reporter for UPI.  

"Get lost!  You're not doing that to me."  What is a friend doing one-upping another friend like that?  It was crazy.  I think he had some sexual issues.  I left his friendship.  I carried on my friendship with Barbara.  Quite protectively.  I understood her issues about not feeling womanly after her operations.  

"Care" was Barbara's motto.  She doctored me, I doctored her.  We had a wonderful friendship and love life.  We lounged around together, and I always admired a folk art project of her: using a welding torch to large tin cans, scoring and opening designs in their surfaces, thus turning them into lamps she hung by chains from the ceiling.  Red light.  Green light.  Yellow light.  Those things sold like flapjacks.  

Who was the Harkness Monster?  She told me that she and her ex-husband had gone mobile around nine years earlier--1972--and scoured the United States in an Airstream.  What a life.  I didn't care about her past, but I did appreciate her confession that she had been friends and schoolmates with Anne Rice, who only recently had published "Interview With A Vampire".  

Lastly, because I smoked, I had a little private fun for myself by cleaning ashes from my ashtrays and gently filling a small glass flower holder with them, then putting the sculptured class on the windowsill.  Barbara offered me her signed copy of "Interview"--on loan.  A Saturday night I sat in the middle of the scary book, all wrapped up with LeStat, Barbara used her key to skulk into the apartment, scared the unholy hell out of me, then tackled me on my ripped vinyl easy chair.  Down tumbled the glass of ashes.  

"Hey.  Those are my dad's ashes!" 

She desperately went for a paper to scoop them into.  Laughingly I told the anti-smoking advocate she'd been punk'd.  

*

So.  One evening at the almost famous Mad Swirl "intermission", the one where all the poets who chose to be involved with that thing ventured onto the Southside on Lamar sidewalk in front of The Absinthe (which is greenish, an intoxicant, the full doses of which are illegal in the US) to smoke green (pot), and horse around for 23 minutes or so.  I used to venture out there with the bunch.  I liked the reefer.  I wanted community.  I was "part of a crowd" there--first Wednesday of every month, often a late-night excursion into what the Mad Swirl's host suggested (after the intermission) was "holy".  Sometimes the readings lasted until two a.m.  Those who worked by weekday usually filtered out of the speakeasy step-down in the old Sears building.  

The year?  2013.  Johnny Olson and Mike Clay, the host and his somewhat opportunistic sidekick (and friend to me at the time) began talking about women.  

It must be really kind of someone in sarcastic retrospect to listen to two "studs" saying this about women: "Basically they're dickbags" (or "dicksacks"?)  Both chuckled "so knowingly".  As the third person objective standing on a sidewalk and feeling the typical pot uplift, still, I listened with quiet disgust.  No one should refer to a woman with such a description.  But Olson?  A lothario who, in my viewpoint, exploited women.  When his wife divorced him a few years earlier, he played the victim.  But the incident which finally "broke" the two apart (they remained "friends") involved him capitalizing on an issue between a couple of friends: As Jeremy, a wonderfully kind descendant of the Mohawk in New York, began having marriage issues with his lovely, redheaded wife, he seduced her just as they were making a sort of rapprochement, a hopeful moment for Jeremy, and the marriage imploded.  But Olson?  Ever the victim after cheating on his wife.  Maybe not cheating.  Maybe something entirely different.  

Should we be for this; a man-boy interrupting a delicate negotiation between two people who loved one another but needed to make adjustments?  I continue to see Olson as an opportunist, a sexual opportunist.  And quite grabby: Even talking to his former wife, Lisa, meant that he'd approach and say something along the lines, "Quit hitting on my wife!"  When did speaking to a woman involve hitting on her?  Maybe on Earth 3 that might have worked once upon a time when Snow White was shagging all her dwarfs.  

Olson continued to sleep around.  One woman wanted him to commit.  He continued to use her: more victimology among the swingers, I figure.  She'd once attended a Mad Swirl in 2012, caught my eye, and when I spotted her on Olson's Facebook page, she messaged me, told me she believed my 2012 version of of poetry, and suggested we get together "for coffee".  I took her up on the offer and we did meet on a frigid January day that year.  

In the neighborhood where I lived at the time, the denizens of the area had three coffeehouse choices: One, right across the street where I'd once lived (Bowser and Knight), was the "gay Starbucks"; another, on Oak Lawn near Cedar Springs stood the "lesbian Starbucks".  A crazy gay neighborhood by stereotype.  Actually, the area provided a thorough mix of gays, lesbians, LBGTQ+ others, and then artists, "hipsters", and a wonderful bunch near Maple Avenue locally famous as an enclave of Mexican-American families and a few clubs, auto body shops, mechanic shops, tiny restaurants (some of which are wonderful) and then me.  One of those none-of-the-above people.  

I say that with a little jest in my heart.  Lots of shut-ins as well.  But I wasn't one of those either. 

In the lesbian Starbucks, which I suggested, the lovely woman (Richelle Bannon) sat before me to tell her apparently sad story.  Weirdness there--halfway unbelievable.  She talked about wanting to forge a relationship bond with Olson, but that he was infatuated with a Choctaw beauty, someone connected to the Choctaw casinos in Oklahoma.  Eh?  Hear that?  

That blackhaired woman could definitely turn heads.  Richelle, sitting before me, told me that when she was six that her mother left her to travel with a member of Three Dog Night.  Thus, I assumed at the time, she had a hole as big as a Volkswagen Beetle in her heart.  Sad story.  One involving dogs--again.

I did like her mien.  She said she was a legal secretary somewhere in Plano, north of Dallas, where she supposedly lived.  "I really want to be in a relationship with Johnny, but he's involved with [the Choctaw]."

"Is he using you?"  

"No, I don't think so..." 

Dead giveaway.  Why is it next to impossible for some people to separate sexy time from love?  Both of course pair.  But with the swinger scene (The Absinthe was also a swinger meet-up location...), the two are apparently identical: physical "Christianity".  And likely either conservative or leftist.  Who knows?  I never really got involved with those folks.  

I sympathized with Richelle's story.  If she really did have a hole in her heart due to abandonment (I know I do with my father's abandonment-by-suicide), she certainly wasn't dealing with it.  Maybe she believed sex is therapy.  Way fun therapy.  

How could she be happy to be simply another "dickbag"?  Over the telephone or on Facebook, she she was really unhappy.  Come Valentines Day, I peppered her Facebook page with Valentine hearts, not as a "hit" but as gestures from an acquaintance.  Then came the kill-shot: She was also "hanging out"with the swing scene's dear leader, Kevin Christensen: typically a leader in the swinger Land of the Midnight Sun.  

"I don't know why Johnny won't commit," she pleaded to me via Facebook DM.  "I have a five-year-old boy (what???) who needs a father."

"Why don't you find a man who'd make a good father?" 

Richelle blocked me.  Seemed a little like a sort of set-up, a recruitment game.  

Earlier, when Richelle, informed by me that I had recovered from leukemia, had said that she was trying to get Olson, an avid advertiser for his motorcycle cred (hilarious, really, those steely pistons pumping away), to take her along for a Leukemia and Lymphoma Association-sponsored motorcycle rally.  

"He just won't do that!" Was he "jealous"?  Or was he trying to sweeten a deal?  

The big baby. . . 

Why get involved with an "innocent little girl on the railroad tracks"?  I was glad to be rid of her once the facts came to light.  

Most mature adults know women are more than what's between their legs.  Much much more.  The amazing parts are in a woman's mind and heart.  I've never been one of the men who spot for women they believe are dumb enough to fool.  But that's the way in the minds of some "entrepreneurs": Honesty is the second-best policy.  

I've known people like that.  Some are narcissistic like Olson.  Others are full-on sociopaths.  

That cement gray evening listening to two "big men" rattling off crappy asides about women.  Clay, for example, has a lovely wife.  She's younger than he is.  She's also fine with his bisexuality.  He's really a pretty nice guy when he wants to be.  Olson strikes me (and many others) as a kind of robotic snake.  Down there in Zombieland.  

Bannon.  Hilarious.  Was she Opus Dei too?  

Op US D (E I E I O)--Not "God's work".  More like part of a deeply rightist plan for, well, something-something.  Like the Matrix.  Left and right become Punch and Judy, while thieves who think thievery is "Christlike" try to run away with the pie.  

Some believe democracy is a daydream.  As is religion.  As are all human-made constructs.  The daydream, the illusion, is how we shelter our civilization from the random, the unforeseen, the uncertain, and the chaotic.  

Why force a conceit that has so succeeded as to bring half the world up--to fall down?  The US: target for the next try for a Holy Roman Empire?  Who knows?  Some would buy that.  Most Catholics wouldn't.  

Who'd have thought the Doo Da men are both the minstrel show and the medicine show?  Maybe they're also the magic show.  

When pushed, I now know, it's best to put the hosts on ignore.  

*

Here's how I lost my religion.  It's a "totally cold story".  

As a young boy forced to live in loud-voiced crossfire somewhat similar to what I hear when or if I venture onto the AM talk radio dial, I found refuge in the local Episcopal Church. 

While some enjoy the "party all the time" evangelical scene, and prefer it over the older and more common style of kneeling, showing quiet reverence, and praying in a pew, or listening to a well-constructed sermon by often excellent speakers, for some odd reason, I got the meditative and the sacred.  I loved going to the church.  I was part of the church youth choir as a sixth-grader, sang with my friends in a special presentation thereof, enjoyed Sunday school as taught by parishioners and fathers and mothers we all knew, and generally liked that spirit so much I seriously began thinking of entering the Episcopal priesthood.  

Then, after I continued going to a nearby Episcopal Church just off campus when I began my freshman year, I apparently made a mistake.  No, it wasn't me picking up on dope smoking.  No, it wasn't because some mock-worthy epithet called "secular humanism or liberalism", my decision to leave all churches was the outcome of the Southern Baptist Church's Baptist Student Union.  

See, I had something that BSU choir wanted: I could play trombone, and had partial scholarships for my musical abilities.  What did the BSU lust in me?  That.  

"Hey," a Southern Baptist country boy in the band suggested, "We're going to Los Angeles with our choir.  The chaplain would like to offer you a spot both on the BSU choir and in a more special sort of rock group called [now get this!  Haha!) The Grateful Sound."

"How much would it cost me to go there?" 

"Fifty bucks!"  

So I joined the BSU choir.  This first semester away from home had been a lonely two or three months for my already somewhat solitary ways.  I wanted to make friends with people.  But I was a little too unaware (Bipolar, emergent) to really catch onto jokes, pranks, and as usual, wild drinking parties in the dormitory.  When I went to my first meeting, people were friendly, but also many suggested it would be better for me if I "got saved." 

Honestly.  I wasn't that credulous.  I already knew, from my church's teachers, including the church priest (a man who should have been a seminarian he knew so much about doctrines and Christian ideas), that a simple baptism is merely symbolic.  No magic happens.  No lights in Damascus.  

In my church, babies were baptized.  A tradition.  A very old sprinkling of a few drops of water on a baby's head.  Why the sprinkles and not a trip to the river?  Disease.  The medievals had learned that exposure to dirty water is dangerous, especially if disease ran rampant in the winter.  

"Get saved!'  From what?  From myself?  From gremlins?  Who really knew?  Actually, many baby-to-grave evangelicals believed more in what I now call "the magic show"--all the miracles, the amazing events, and especially the promises of the Book of Revelations and some of Jesus' words about the days of his promised return to earthly reality.  

Thus, I conferred with the chaplain.  He wanted me.  But I had a caveat: "Sir, I was raised with a good Christian education.  I don't want to be saved, or reeducated. If I'm not forced to spread gospel words, I'll go." 

Who knew a so-called Christian was lying to me?  

We were hearing rumors from preachers that Los Angeles (City of the Angels) was a den of Satanism, immorality, and even, weirdly, sightings of witches high up on mountains surrounding the second largest city in North America; witches, in black, with pointy hats, casting magic spells, with wants, and will blackened intent.  

I scoffed at that.  I had been given a good Episcopalian education.  We learned not to be too mystified by miracles because most, it seems, are mere allegories; allegories that indeed contain a great deal of wisdom and advice on how to actually be a Christian without "mystery dependence".  

I don't think the chaplain and preachers who assisted him cared about my opinions at all.  But smiling those Giancanda grins famous in the ever-arch South, they promised not to turn me into "another boy for Jesus".  

I liked the singing.  I liked playing for songs arranged by a university professor who later arranged music for Charlie Pride, and later, Lee Ann Rimes.  Some of the songs actually had strong rock beats.  Chicago, the rock band at the time was very popular among us "band mullets".  Everyone wanted to learn to play like the members of Chicago.  So.  The mimicry of the big rock groups seemed to be a strategy known among insects: The Monarch butterfly has many imposters.  

Also, I had a great chance to wear the sick, burnt orange leisure suit that, to my horror, seemed designed to make me look like Doc Severinsen, Johnny Carson's supposedly "mod" trumpet player: 

Eeeeee-Oooooooo.  

Yuck.  But the flowery red and white shirt, while it clashed with the burnt orange, was, like, disco, man.  

The generation gap in 1972 was a real cultural battlefield of sorts.  My own mother, raised to dress formally at Stephens University in Columbia, Missouri, expected me to dress in dress clothes.  She bought me two pairs of some of the most horrific pants I've ever seen.  I took the entirety of my $50 buck monthly allowance on some Levis.  "Oh....wearing the clothes of Levi in the Bible...."

Double-yuck.  

Fly out to Los Angeles we did.  Once there, we met our sponsoring families.  Mine happened to be a family near Huntington Beach, a surfer paradise, and the young guy my age in that home was a surfing enthusiast.  My Church Lady roommate, Jimmy Battle, snorted--at sinfulness I presumed.  

Best moment of the stay: A visit to LA's then-world-famous Tower Records.  Whoa.  Everything under one roof.  Just to spite Jimmy Battles, aesthete of whatever music (Samuel Barber) he had chosen as the only music possible to enjoy, I purchased Alice Cooper's just-out album: Billion Dollar Babies.  

"Jimmy!  Come listen!  This song! 'I Love The Dead'.  Amazing.  Do you think it's about dead people?  Maybe he's describing The Grateful Dead." 

A sneer.  On command.  

We headed to East LA Community College.  All the young Baptists were really excited to spread gospel among the Latino-majority population.  Signs of Satanic activity?  All the tags on the sides of stucco walls.  I liked those.  Needless to say, the 20th Century version of the betray of Jesus, perhaps, occurred when I was commanded to issue fliers.  This disappointed me--badly.  

But the afternoon was saved.  I met a member of the Hell's Angels.  Right there.  Outside the university center.  He had a scored black leather jacket, wild hair, and patches: Kicked Out of Nebraska '66, Kicked Out of Wyoming '67.  

"Hey, man," I asked.  "Do you think you'll get to wear a patch called Kicked Out Of Everywhere '68?"

"Man, that already happened." 

He was kind.  We drank a soft drink together.  And chatted.  He knew people like the late Janis Joplin. I liked the guy.  He had a good vibe.  Not a scary one.  But, you know: I had "strayed from the path" to visit Hell with--Goshdog!--a biker.  I'm laughing as I write this. 

The chaplain was "on to me" or something.  He'd pair me off with especially reverent kids.  That was no fun at all.  

Then it was off to the University of Southern California.  I was excited to see the statue of the Trojan, named as I later learned "Tommy The Trojan".  When I "arrived" to disappointingly sit in the shade of the Trojan warrior, I giggled: Someone had put a bra on the valiant warrior.  

I had all my gosple and "Chick Comics" fliers to spread.  I didn't want to spread that kind of news.  So I sat and sat.  Then a wonderful woman named Geneva, pert, blonde, and a hippie, sat down and asked me about it all.  

"I'm supposed to spread this garbage..."

"Let me see them!" 

At that, she stood up and tossed the entire stack of weirdness into the garbage right next to the statue.  

"Go back and tell them you're a Gnostic!" 

"What's that?" 

"Someone who believes God has given them special knowledge, knowledge to be guided by spirits when reading the Bible!  Special knowledge no one else who is uninitiated or saved can possibly possess!" 

Sounds good.  

She and I cavorted for around three hours.  We kissed a little.  I liked the woman's kindness and happy attitude.  

Later, I was called to the carpet for even speaking to "such a woman".  Wow.  I was being indoctrinated, shoved into a cult-like atmosphere.  Against my will.  

I complained about this to another not-so-sure outsider who had come along mainly for the fun.  She and I hit it off.  That's when she told me about an off-campus party: at an off-campus fraternity party. "The USC basketball team is going to be there." 

So we went.  We took the tram through the then supposedly infamous Watts area.  I enjoyed the ride.  

There, the woman, named Patricia, and I joined a wild party in the house's basement.  Both of us got completely sloshed.  We ended up back on the tram around midnight, hit the Tommy Trojan statue and made out a couple of hours.  

Apparently, I'd missed some kind of curfew.  Enraged, the chaplain and several members of Grateful Sound intervened: "YOU ARE HERE AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF JESUS CHRIST AND YOU MUST BEHAVE LIKE A GOOD CHRISTIAN!" 

Really?  What hurt afterwards was the horrific process of "separating someone from the flock".  Now I know this is part of the indoctrination.  I was singled out for blame, guilt, shame, and for my apparent kowtowing to Satan.  Those freaks of nature did the same thing to the girl Patricia.  We were barred from even speaking to one another.  Wow.  Sinfulness in a kiss.  Where had I heard that one before--in the Bible? 

Next day, the last day, the choir of the supposedly Chosen visited Knott's Berry Farm.  The owners were allies--i.e. collaborators.  Disneyland?  The Devil's Magic.  This to me was so laughable that, had I not felt so beaten down and depressed, I would have begun making all kinds of smart remarks about Don Knotts and Knotheads.  

On the plane ride home to the ironically named Love Field, I was isolated, condemned to sit alone.  It was a long, saddening plane ride for me.  I was being cast out.  On purpose.  In hopes of "turning me".  Even the chaplain took advantage of me over this idiocy. At the Berry Farm, he approached me, told me the reason I was sad was because I hadn't "found Jesus".  

I think I told him, "I hope he doesn't look like you."

This, I hear, is typical cult behavior.  This was the early 1970s.  This was six or eight months away from Roe v Wade.  That was the arsonists of the far out right's candle to burn down "secular liberalism." 

I made it back to the appropriately-named Dorm 13.  I had to use the restroom.  I peed blood.  Terrified, I called my mother, caught a bus, came home, and stayed in the hospital for nearly a week.  

Stress.  I have delicate capillaries up in there.  The stress not only busted my guts, it destroyed my trust in churches of all kinds.  Thus, you can imagine how I must have felt during mandatory, daily mandates to sit through the same old thing for nearly three years at Union Gospel Mission, conveniently located in an Irving, Texas, warehouse district.  You know: to keep the sinners away from mainstream society, which, I heard time and again, is the Home of Satan.  

Great to know, eh?  If people claiming to be Christians draw a line between "The Chosen" self-designation and the rest of all the people, it's likely that if Jesus is there, he's standing on the side of all the other people.  

*
When did I first hear Led Zeppelin's "Dazed And Confused"?  

I remember those moments distinctly.  I was at a junior high church student group retreat at a monastery southwest of here.  That cabin,with a nice fire in the fireplace, a step-down group area for prayer circles and group discussions, even a lecture if I remember properly, stood on lovely property, and one amazing aspect of that weekend journey was, at least for me, an underground area for, I think, a sort of tiny necropolis.  

I was 13.  My friends and I explored that place after dark.  So much fun running and shrieking and laughing outloud.  

A year prior, I'd befriended two actual hippies.  Old clothes from the Twenties, and Carl wore a top hat, while Jennifer wore beautiful and flowery dresses.  While the two went to high school, counselors invited them because, during that time, many suggested the hippies were horrible, immoral, lazy and in contempt of the US.  Carl and Jennifer were avid churchgoers at St. James Episcopal Church--back when it was one tiny building.  Soon a small extension with a kitchen (for spaghetti dinners!) added to the slowly-growing congregation's satisfaction: The church needed more room.  Bob Lily of the Dallas Cowboys attended our church, and his wife, Kitzi Lily, controlled him as if he was her giant robot.  Think of that: One of the fiercest and biggest Dallas Cowboy linemen, while not henpecked, as gentle as a butterfly around his wife.  Carl and Jennifer (and everyone) liked the couple.  

The youth group retreat: We studied Biblical passages, prayed together, enjoyed a lecture from one of the monastery's residents, a wise man, as I recall, a man exemplary of a Christian approach open to change, liberty, freedom, and especially, faith and hope and charity.  

At night, all of us, monk not included, played tag in the darkness outside.  

Carl and Jennifer brought albums with them.  Ten Years After.  Janis Joplin's Big Brother and the Holding Company.  No Rolling Stones.  

Hence, during free time in the evenings, the couple treated us junior high kids with some really good music.  "Dazed And Confused" stood out.  A little scary at first, at least to me, I found comfort with two hippies who watched all of us closely, protecting us, but also teaching us.  

"Gordon, you're going to be a great hippie when you grow up!" Jennifer told me.  Now, when I think back about that particular moment (which thrilled me), I now realize she and Carl likely had spotted my never-ending sense of alienation, low self esteem, and the attention span of maybe a gnat.  

Always OK to laugh at ourselves.  Learning to see ourselves as fallible and fragile is the true road to Christianity.  Nope: Militancy is a mockery of Jesus's suggestions.  

Yet something seemed a little off later that particular night.  Jennifer and Carl suggested we leave them alone.  They retreated to the community bedroom, climbed to the top bunk of the bed closest to the right, and began what to me seemed to be one super-long, exceptionally deep conversation.  Uncanny.  

Not long thereafter, I suspected what had occurred: The two dropped acid.  Those early days, however, stand out because LSD was pure: not contaminated by additives like strychnine, a poison that supposedly heightens the tracers and colors of a trip that, otherwise, merely unlatches a subconscious doorway in the mind.  

In other words, Jennifer and Carl were having a completely sober conversation.  Outside, where I spent most of the weekend, my first girlfriend Nancy and I laid back on the resplendent wild grass and, astonished by the crowded litter of stars in a deep blue night; we, still Platonic, felt God.  

The Sixties weren't all revolution.  Remember how in 1967, San Francisco's hippies held a funeral for Hippie?  That's when hippie became "freak", and freaks ran on outrage, dope, and anger toward a military conflict that, by any eye, sparked controversy over some creepy abstraction called The Domino Effect.  Why, if the Viet Cong took over Vietnam, the creeping communism all the rightists of the time were literally foaming at their mouths over; that would be the end of "good times".  

Nineteen Sixty-Seven is known for "The Summer of Love".  Be-ins.  People joining hands to remain in light in increasingly darkened circumstances.  What was this summer of love?  Less about hot weather, more about love.  

Why do so many in 2025 still want to outlaw love?  

Maybe such reactionaries like lust much better: not necessarily libertinism; something about all of us being together in a trusting fashion.  That was no "commie riptide".  As I now see that period, what I perceive is that, after our parents had endured, first the Great Depression and then World War II and then the Cold War--the hippies and postwar youth in general were tired to the dulled numbing-out our parents seemed to believe was the only way to behave in this world.  

I don't blame parents for that.  Parents of "the older generation" had been through multiple hells.  Why not cheer up the world a little?  Why not bring to the surface such phenomena as polyamory, something that of course had existed underground among our parents and especially the powerful for decades: all secret.  One thinks of Britain's Profumo Scandal, a girls-for-hire outrage that, when uncovered (lots of corruption), nearly took down the Macmillan government.  The movie, "Scandal", a dramatized movie that involves all sorts of corrupting influences that fed on temptation, for some odd reason, is not to be found on streaming services.  

The Profumo Scandal, of course, is now especially pertinent.  

Decades later, after years of enthusiasm for what had happened pre-freak days, I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco.  I'd attended a conference of the North American Street Newspaper Association.  Ben Bagdigian, survivor of the Armenian genocide, activist, journalist, and commentator, spoke to attendees there in a small auditorium in Haight Ashbury.  After the speech, a pert blonde who claimed to be a reporter from The Columbia Journalism Review asked me what I thought about the conference.  I told her the truth: I attended to find new ways to explain to the public in my community what homelessness actually is without stigma and stereotype, and what homeless people need.  

"We're writing an article about this," she chirped.  

I never found the article.  Yes, I searched for the article.  

Later, the publisher of a British homelessness and social justice news magazine, The Big Issue, invited my publisher and I to have coffee and cake at a nearby bar-cafe.  We sat and chatted in a booth for a good hour before check-in time.  

Only naturally, I easily sensed there were attendees who were less about homelessness as an issue of consciousness-raising, and more yet another "single issue target" for those seeking to instrumentalizing it for ideological/political purposes.  

Should I immediately have taken the first flight back to my city?  

Right-e-oh: Cut and run.  The way of sissies.  

I remember walking to the area my mind had mythologized since my early teen years: Same old particle board billboards lined the sidewalk, billboards overflowing with messages; lines of second-hand goods shops--where one could pay what one could for almost any item on offer.  I talked to one woman in one shop.  The place?  A melange of all kinds of awesome old relics of times gone past.  Every chotsky imaginable--perfect for any bohemian's digs.  

I did not see Puff The Magic Dragon lurking anywhere.  Pot is legal in the areas of the United States where freedom still exists.  

Dazed and Confused.  I certainly wasn't.  Not in August, 2001.  Not in the late summer of 1967 or so.  I remember one psychotherapist in 1985.  When we talked about illicit drugs, she soberly joked, "Gordon, you are already there; you don't need to amplify that.  Just be yourself."

My mind-changing chemical issue?  

Not pot or dope.  Alcohol.  See it?  I think of Texas State Legislators holding forth on the evils of marijuana while drunk on Jim Beam right there in the chambers.  That's one way to put out their lights.  Maybe, what Jesus told his disciples about the problem of putting light under a barrel comes to mind in terms of what alcohol abuse does to close the American mind.  

So, yeah.  I became a sort-of hippie.  I wasn't "strung out on the Lord".  I was strung out on beer.  That's no way to be free.  Abuse of any little thing, especially the United States Constitution, demonstrates authoritarian addiction issues.  Definitely in need of either a recovery group, or better, a cult deprogrammer.  

*  

Ever been smitten with someone, so overwhelmingly smitten, while absolutely innocent of the mess the object of your infatuation actually is?  Think of me as a Bipolar drunk in 1985-86.  I drank so much that, even as I'd get up on a hollow stage at a club called The 500 Club (I think)--which was a tiny box of a place surrounded by a hurricane fence, an open-air place to hold one's poetry up to be heard--I certainly wasn't being heard.  I remember how that felt.  I remember how lost I felt.  I remember how I fell for the most physically pretty female in the weekly readings, "Words On Wednesday", headed by one Octavio Solis, an aggressive, but talented playwright who really seemed please to be capable of wowing audiences with often strangely-abstract imaginations like his long, serial play, "Geometricia".  

Indeed.  Rational--but in her place.  

Granted Octavio was (maybe still is...I've heard he owns a small farm in Oregon, has had a few plays receive rave reviews over his descriptions of being Latino in El Paso as a young boy) quite pleased he was also wowing The Dallas Morning News and The Dallas Times Herald.  And Words On Wednesday?  A sensation for a city which up until then had no literary "scene" outside bars like Shakespeare Books and a gathering spot on Lower Greenville Avenue--a spot that had been active since the 1960s.  

I'd first met the man at a bar only blocks from my McKinney Avenue apartment: The Knox Street Pub.  That one also had been a gathering spot for mainly Bohemian wannabes, the type of people who seem to try and affect Britishness--Irish cabby hats, plaid shirts, lots of beer, pool and darts in a back room. Lots of odd or shady characters there.  Some tentatively obnoxious poseurs who talked big "cosmic intellectuality", believed in the then-new Dallas Observer (back when it was owned by a man named Ken Kirk, a local, a guy who really did promote the local arts culture in 82-87) as if it was the alternative weekly a city dominated by the business community needed.  

Octavio attended bar there.  He had recently graduated from Trinity University, a Catholic private university near San Antonio.  I'd go in there skunk drunk on Saturday nights, and in my mind, after I'd striven to write short stories and poetry until 10 p.m., getting crushed by tapped beer was "the reward".  I was pretty lonely.  A little more than dead in the water at the time.  

It seemed at the time Octavio had befriended me.  I'd gotten wind (not from him) of the big readings at 500 Club (I think that's the name of the place; after the club went out of business as Deep Ellum and Exposition Park clubs outgunned in entertainment and style the spot for simple reasons reasons--it became a junkyard after the club-crash..it was a horrible place, and all the bands that played nightly played outside).  

I attended the first reading.  I had been all prepared.  I'd written some thing about Jim Morrison, and carefully told Octavio to press "play" on a little tape recorder when I gave him the signal (I had dreamed of wowing the crowd with "Crystal Ship", but had inserted the tape wrong, and out came lots of applause).  Strangely, enough, my tiny crowd of miscreants (two were early IT techs, one was working for the federal government, building guidance systems for the jets that blew through Tripoli.  Smart guys.  Who wanted in on the punk/New Wave thrills.  Other friends (we were one sick crew at the time, or so we thought) joined us.  And soon our rowdy table became a sort of loudness central.  

We'd park at a round table right in front.  Sometimes a friend would mock the readings--like the time my old friend Ray Pascoe stood up and read The Dallas Observer, not down the column inches, but across them, thus creating a bogus "postmodern" atmosphere which drew the kind of laughs some of the more serious poets and foolish leftover activists, one of whom claimed he was once an actor in France's Living Theater.  Or something.  Hans.  Really wanting to stir up political trouble.  Another fellow, one I took under my wing, was so lost and confused he once complained to me "I feel like a comic book character!"  Indeed, with his sometimes hard to comprehend poems, and with his inability to read signals from others, he was often laughed at by some of the more "serious" arteestes there.  

Then there was Angela Hayden.  Like an angel.  Bright blonde hair, well dressed, had a failure of a performance band/group, but I was so innocent at the time, I couldn't tell that.  Honestly, I couldn't see straight.  I had not yet become an adult.  

Barely 30, I was in the maw of a horrific cycle I'd been tossed into as an infant: an emotionally distant mother.  For years, I could not trust anyone.  I had learned love was about distancing, mistrust, suspicion and deception--and, as an infant, I somehow believed all the crazy around me was all my fault.  

Unworthy of connection anyone? 

I still like to pretend that, at the time, I was a harbinger of "punk poetry".  I'd write a poem about petting an Afghan gently, while yelling at the top of my lungs.  I was a sort of provocateur in a busted literary sense.  Who knows?  Maybe I made a mark.  But I wasn't part of the in-crowd: serious, self-absorbed poets and leftist radicals pretending to be those as well.  Actually, I could see through some of that.  Then Angela arrived in my life.  

I tried to take her under my wing.  I'd seen many men pawing at her.  I wanted to believe she was better than that.  Now that I think about it, she definitely wasn't better than that.  Poor thing.  After our miniature dust-up over a misunderstanding (soon to be on the 3:00 a.m. news!), I learned she was not only a coke head, but that (as rumored at least) she'd screw a club owner (Club Clearview) after hours just for some more pinches of white stuff.  I don't know nor care if that's really true or not.  As a matter of fact, how I remember Angela is that she was a woman of delusion and unrealistic dreams with a self image that clearly did not match her sense of self's reality.  

One Saturday afternoon around Christmas 1985, I offered to cook her "lemon chicken", i.e. chicken, rosemary and some lemons dumped atop of the legs and breasts.  I even borrowed my next door neighbor's car to go fetch Angela.  We ate the lemon chicken with wild rice--then I turned on the television so as to watch "It's A Wonderful Life" together.  

Angela had never seen that movie.  That should have been a red flag.  I later learned that her childhood in Wisconsin had been a mess of emotional and possibly physical abuse.  My issue? 

I just wanted love.  Not necessarily lust.  I don't think I had the self-esteem or the knowingness of how to get anything I wanted.  Bipolar destroys one's awareness.  When one is depressed, one has two emotions: up and down.  Or black night and bright white.  Both are blinding.  

One afternoon, near five p.m., when I worked as a clerk for the downtown Dallas Public Library across from City Hall, Angela showed up: told the librarians she wanted me to "show her how to use the dictionary".  She literally had dressed up in yellow and black stripes: like a bee.  That struck a hopeful note--like a book you wanted to read but could never find.  

That night, Angela called the fellow I called confused: Jock.  He claimed to be French by Way of London And Of America.  Or something.  He had plenty of delusions.  I was kind to him.  That Spring, the Sunday of the local big thing, The Greenville Avenue St. Patrick's Day parade, I went with real friends, got drunk, made fun of people and then went back to that raggedy apartment that, unsurprisingly, given it was located next to an entry lane for I-45 or Dallas Central Expressway, made for great crook escape routes.  Do the biz, get out fast.  

Jock arrived at my door later.  He'd been ticketed, he said, for "breath of marijuana".  He also had what he said was "herbal ecstasy", greenish pills he said could get a person off.  The cops "copped" those too.  The things weren't illegal--yet.  

That night, with Angela dressed as a honeybee, and Jock as our "chaperone", we stumbled around downtown, and ended up in then-under-construction Renaissance Tower, a giant Ray Hunt tower that looks like a quartz crystal.  Now why would someone build a building just on the outskirts of downtown Dallas, one that looks like the sort of rock that serves to empower--soon-to-come personal computers?  Questions, questions.  

We climbed the crystal tower, which was unfinished at the top.  We took a freight elevator to gander at the sight of our lives: A windowless wall almost 40 storeys above the ground.  Enervating?  I'd almost say so.  I was terrified.  

Then we caught the bus when the evening sprouted a strong spring rain.  We all were wet, especially Jock (or Jacques), who had closed in on a moving DART bus and got completely doused--to the point that when he entered the bus, people started laughing at him. 

The night I took Angela home after "It's A Wonderful Life", I took her to the door--shock value, maybe?  Every piece of furniture in her one room bid for a place to live as shattered, tables, chairs, couches, everything.  Maybe she had a pimp.  I really do not know,.  She did run with some shady characters, her band sported a French guy, Renard (I believe), but the sight of that horror of a room, that was a painful one.  She lived--now don't miss this part--less than half a block away from the very Jack N The Box where the Harkness Monster had purchased the milkshake police found half-drunk in her lap at the end of a dead-end street.  

Puzzling parallels.  Barbara Harkness believed in care.  She drank Kir.  I don't know if she ever read Kirov the Bolshevik.  But boy oh boy had she been punished for being a believer in something more important than dollar bills. 

Then, we have to offer special treatment for Carl Worsham, the fopdoodle who believed I was a chick magnet with which he could get women, parasite style.  Two friends, Tom and Betty Newman, had a small dinner party. Those two were artistic friends--and good friends.  They invited Angela, myself, and what?  Carl?  He and Angela were signaling from across the longish antique table in Tom and Betty's dinner room in that old Prairie style mansion on Worth Street.  

Betty, clearly aware of what was going on, later told me, "I don't like Carl." She wasn't the first woman to tell me so.  Betty was sharp.  Worked for a music marketing firm.  

Whatever, somehow Carl offered Angela a ride home.  "Let's stop at 7-11 for an ice cream.  She sat up front.  I was in the back.  He took me home first.  Even though I had the awareness of a gnat, I did get a red flag out of that deal.  

Needs love; let's amplify the paranoia, hurt, suspicion and alienation!  Dude!  How much fun is that? 

After that night, I spent a great deal of time drunk.  I was hurt.  I wanted Angela to like me.  She wasn't interested in my kind of friendship.  Not. At. All.

Another odd incident.  When the 500 Club closed, Octavio--he cut bait: He chose "worthy poets", formed "Poetry Circus" and began weekly performances of some of the most inept performance art I think I've ever seen.  Dopers.  They're so symbolic.  I was not included.  But I did try supporting local poetry.  Not that my support actually gained an audience.  In fact, when Octavio Solis announced he was moving to new locations--California?  I don't remember.  He put out a 'zine with Poetry Circus poetry.  I'd been there for the open readings every single time.  I was not asked to submit, and even in the list of people who supported the group, my name was not even mentioned.  Fragile enough by then, I was emotionally crushed.  

That incident?  I sat with Angela and a woman, Lisa Taylor, a reporter for The Dallas Times Herald.  She too had befriended Angela.  But Lisa deserves respect.  She was and likely is stable.  At Poetry Circus at Club DADA Lisa, Angela, and I sat together at a table.  Then arrived a stranger, indeed, one of the weirdest strangers I have ever seen: Vicki Page, self-styled on her greeting card as "Two Peaks To Ponder".  What?  She had big boobs.  But she went for me--at least for the night.  Angela did seem halfassed jealous, but Vicki gave me a ride back to my bomb shelter of an apartment.  We kissed in the car, I got all started up, but when we went to the bedroom, all Vicki would allow was for me to admire/caress/kiss her tits.  Weirdo. 

Strange times for me all right.  So many puzzling parallels and botched connections.  Finally, Angela announced she too was leaving Dallas.  Where?  I wasn't sure at first.  She had a last performance inside the 500 Club--more creepy stabs at singer-songwriting and lousy performance art.  Still, she looked lovely.  She'd found a boyfriend, a nice fellow.  She'd moved in with him into a loft apartment above a place in Exposition Plaza called The State Bar.  Of course, I'd remained a distant admirer.  As always.  But that was then.  This is now.  

That night, I'd bicycled around five miles to get to that club to see Angela's last performance.  Her boyfriend, John, was there.  He wore a cheerleader jacket.  At performance's end, Angela asked me if I'd like to ride in her car. Indeed, I got into her "boyfriend's" car, and she drove me slowly in circles around the lot.  High strangeness from that chick.  

When I knew that our platonic friendship neared its end, and here's the big kicker, I drunkenly called her.  I was drunk, feeling forlorn.  We chatted a bit, and then I told her in the wrong way that I would always be in her heart: "I'll always be inside you forever..."

Scandal!  People attacked me.  Even Jock said he needed to protect her.  I pleaded innocent.  I'd misused words.  High crime in a world of poseur poets.  

She left for Hollywood.  Yup.  That's where she went.  Perfectly believing she'd instantly hit it big.  She had the looks, but no brains, met a man who promised her stardom (I believe that, still...), then knocked her up, left her alone, and look: She hitchhiked all the way to Dallas, pregnant and desperate, and angry.  I hear she sued the man for $10,000 dollars, won the case, and thus began feeling her leftover oats as if she'd conquered the universe.  

I was a persona non grata.  

With nowhere to go.  Alone.  Incapable of pulling myself out of a deep depression.  

Then, apparently, she met a man, Khalil, a Moroccan man, clearly one, I hear, with Moroccan ways: He beat her, I hear.  She had her child.  He had her completely cornered, desperate and worse.  Somehow, she got away from the brute, and then, shockingly, I hear she was "kidnapped" to Morocco.  Who's to know such things are true?  I didn't know.  It certainly seemed like her speed.  He'd apparently gone back to Marrakesh, found some other brutes, who spirited her out of the US and, some said, imprisoned her in some kind of locked house.  If true, that's a horrible situation.  If not, it's entirely possible much of the story is completely fabricated.  

Dallas's underworld "underground": spy versus spy versus spy.  Lots of gamesters and gangsterists playing God with the weapons of naive politics and pass-the-body around O-ganizing.  Literally.  

Years later, Angela Hayden appeared on a local afternoon broadcast at PBS affiliate KERA FM.  Oh yeah, she was a "changed woman".  Ready to take her act on the road.  A poster child for victimization.  Who really knows the truth?  Morocco and Algeria after all both were "refugee centers" for antiwar revolutionaries after the reason for their organizing had dwindled.  Who knows?  Maybe she holed up with Graham Nash of CSNY, the guy who wrote the song about Marrakesh.  

Several years later, I happened to run into Lisa Taylor at an anti-Gulf War rally at a place called The All-Good Cafe. Many of us were infuriated with the move to stage the first preemptive attack on a foreign country by US forces after which the American people learned the entire shebang was conducted under false pretenses.  

Do I know all about it?  No I do not know all about why that war was made.  How could I?  I'm one person, a pinhole viewpoint's "point of light".  But there I was, angry at John Ashcroft.  Lisa Taylor was in the audience.  In 2003, I was sort of a come-and-go local celebrity, somewhat famous for standing up against real estate developers and for helping to get the first local secular homeless shelter built by the City of Dallas.  I'd always felt like Lisa was on my side.  

"How's Angela?" I asked Lisa. 

"We're not friends any more.  She pretends to be in recovery but still snorts the powder." 

Unsurprisingly.  

Then, in 2005, I ran into Angela and her new husband at a Brave Combo (they play polka music with an edgy spin) extravaganza at an oddly-named clubhouse called Sons Of Herman Hall.  I never liked the idea the name implied.  

Two friends and I stepped into the smallish bar-cafe in mid-concert.  Angela sat in the corner.  I stepped forward, asked her if I could talk to her.  This is when I apologized for the overblown scandal among fake friends.  "I didn't mean for it to come out that way," I told her.  "I need to apologize.  I am so sorry." 

I told her I'd seen Lisa Taylor a couple of years before.  The answer?  Typical Angela Hayden: 

"Lisa's not a nice person." 

*

  News reports this morning from the pay-wall frenzied Dallas Morning News, and also WFAA TV's coverage of some current events, indicate that a shooting took place at DART light rail's Pearl-Arts District station, the first (or last) greeting (or farewell) from Dallas's downtown business district.  

I always thought it odd that for one to get to the Dallas Museum of Art on foot, well, if you're in a wheelchair or half-crippled, you're going to either have to fork up some bucks or limp.  

Anyhow, I've been watching that usually sunny light rail station--all four light rail routes--blue, green, orange, red--stop there--descend into a malingering ground for all kinds of shady characters who do not happen to be homeless or street people.  Some will sit there long after all four trains come and go.  

It's transparent: no one who needs to know seems to stop and ask questions of people who may have been there over one-half of an hour.  

I know nothing of the details of the shooting other than the extraordinarily limited information The News is willing to provide: Fork it up and we'll let you read you a story.  

For those who work at the adjacent twin-office-tower and ice skating rink (with lots of great shops!), I'm sure firearm violence right were they depart and arrive for work isn't going to drive up their or anyone's interest in taking mass transit to work.  Ride DART!  Please avoid shootings!

I no longer use Pearl-Arts District's location due to--malingerers.  Some young high school students arrive on weekday afternoons from the downtown distant Arts Magnet High School.  Those kids are great.  They study.  That's why they were accepted at the school.  

The next stop: The St. Paul station.  On the departure-from-downtown side of the tracks, yup yup yup--there it is: more malingering.  The idea that somehow the grandiose Dallas Mayor has "vanquished" downtown's street people is bogus.  All anyone needs to do is look: I was panhandled on Friday afternoon as I waited for my train ride north.  Poor old man.  Staggering.  Stooped.  And somewhat drunk.  After all, anyone who chooses to examine one's surroundings will immediately catch-on to the right-in-the-face reason for malingerers: 

Across the tracks sits a street-entry 7-11 convenience store.  Rule-of-thumb: If one sees people hanging around that 7-11, some asking for money, others offering glares or standing around way too long, the reason likely is that the 7-11 serves beer and wine, even fortified wines like MD 2020 and possibly even the ironically-named (for the location) Night Train.  

The immediate sidewalk around the 7-11 is a sticky gray nightmare of concrete.  So much standing around, so little sidewalk clean-up.  But how was that problem addressed?  DART removed all the benches on the 7-11 side.  

That's right: Punish all riders because a few people abuse seating privileges for riders.  

I'm not out to "get" DART.  I do ride the bus.  I stop at the St. Paul station at times to keep away from the sun's flames.  

Next stop: Akard Station.  On the west-pointing side, DART's corporate HQ.  There are benches.  Some if not most are free to those who choose to use the trains.  But on the side opposite, well, on Friday, when I stopped on the way West, I noted to myself a prostitute was shimmied up to a traffic light pole. Green light?  Maybe red light.  Candy Man: A traditional blues song.  At the stoplight, wealthy men wait to cross Akard; I doubt many are willing to take a leap at the yellow just to get free of sales techniques.  

Next stop?  West End Station.  This means the station is next to the ever-wild West End, a touristy entertainment area with all the trappings.  Big rib houses, big steak houses, an excellent Mexican restaurant.  And indeed, this is Ground Zero for every kid who ever strayed into downtown Dallas for a few jollies.  That station is always filled with people.  No use to sit there. 

I'm sure this is identical to the status of many city mass transit systems.  But what worries me is this: the combo platter of local mass media fear tactics and stray bullets.  

Oddly, I've noticed a number of scruffy white men at some of the station stops.  Most look furtive, many have luggage.  Most look around as if arrogance is the way to fly.  

Where did they come from?  Why here?  

*

I'm listening to an old Donald Fagen record, 1982's "The Nightfly", a now-classic jazz-rock album I totally missed when, released, apparently filled the then-endangered yuppie community (here in Dallas, the counterculture hated all the Tom Selleck clones, the one who sported Selleck's classic mustache and maybe permed their hair) because, as far as the local arts community, the yups were part of the problem, not the solution or calming force anyone I knew wanted anywhere around, well, everywhere.  

But that's all water under the ever-stock bridge called looking back at it.  

Back then, here in Dallas at least, while the yups seemed to get all the attention, the long-standing cultural drag of town, Greenville Avenue, became a sort of broken arrow: Above Mockingbird Lane, all the ritzy clubs like Confetti held sway by the bunches and gobs of money-ardor-filled young professionals: They were actually clean cut and thus working for the conventional, middle of the road, value system I can only assume were safer than us sloppy old punks who, in reality, didn't really bother all the much with mohawks and leather and silver chains.  I know I didn't.  What the hell did I look like? 

The "Gordon uniform" became a kind of scruffy, painter-pants-saggy, chap with a navy blue sweatshirt.  Had I even known about Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, I'd likely have thought he looked like me, not the other way around.  Yes, who looks like what?  A point of pride, something around which to base one's life like it or not.  White painter plants.  Usually some kind of sandals or maybe cheap shoes.  I did have a couple of "arty" shirts, one in particular, a glistening black sports shirt that, even now when I think of that thread, I see it as really beautiful.  Painter pants?  White.  But purposely dirty.  

But none of this reverie is about that at all.  What this series of quips is all over is this: my first FM radio.  

In the late 1960s, the generation's music shifted away from AM to FM, and yet, even thought I "chilled" on Three Dog Night and Alice Cooper, the real action was beyond my reach.  I think the "date of acquisition" may have been Xmas 1967 or so: A present surprised me: green clock radio.  Silvery dials, and I could set it to turn itself off when I also turned off--around 10 p.m. sharp every weeknight.  

At 14, what does any kid do?   

I hermetically sealed my room.  While I didn't get away with large and ominous warning signs like GET AWAY OR MEET THE CIRCUMSTANCES! or THIS HERE-ROOM AIN'T YOURS!  Nah.  I placed the smallish, rectangular radio with a real clock on it next to my writing desk, one of those corner desks.  I think my dad had to give blood just to get that desk for me.  I wrote my first poems there.  And stories.  Then, way late at night, on would arrive "the underground", a place to reform the entire world through a couple cuts of the latest and coolest records.  

I don't know about anybody else in 1968, but my friends and I, all of us science fiction dweebs, knew beyond doubt the end of the world was nigh.  At least until lunch or, more pointedly, just before it was time for me to empty the garbage.  First record I ever purchased with my allowance money?  "Farewell To The First Golden Age", a sort of best-hits collection by the Mamas and the Papas. Rumors soared like samizdat: they were breaking up.  I always too the title to be reassuring.  I never wanted them to leave my world.  There they were on the cover: sitting in a windowless and abandoned bus.  

At the time, those wonders were by far the best vocal band anyone I knew could believe in.  Andrews Sisters?  Weird hair, gumdrop weirdness.  Cass and Michelle Phillips set up some of the finest harmonies as John and Denny Doherty set up John's remarkable songs with strong beats and a folk singer ethic gone at least somewhat electric.  

I bought the record at Kresge's, a TG&Y precursor--$2.99.  Prized possession.  The trash ritual paid off in my bedroom.  But the clock radio?  That was occult, arcane.  As the "revolution for the hell of it" began to gain steam, groups from all over the country appeared on FM--to the point the powers-that-be likely began conspiring to eat their own paranoia alive in a projection routine "Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture". Movers.   

Or Movees.  

Late at night, I'd hear Quicksilver Messenger Service, the San Francisco band that asked questions almost too serious for me to handle.  Or Hendrix.  He may have been above my head, but since word was out, even though I didn't understand "word", I decided everyone else was correct, sir: Hendrix was the greatest electric guitarist who ever lived.  

From what I've read from Fagen's memoir, "Elegant Hipsters", a lively and subtle collection of stories surrounding the musician's life and aspirations as he moved through Bard, beginning as an English major and then somehow ending up with his first love: classic jazz--from the forties forward, possibly earlier.  He wrote how he idolized numerous jazz stations and DJs.  He also regaled science fiction, a genre he claims in "Eminent Hipsters" involved publishers Ace,Ballentine and Signet--all of them spreading the sort of heroism found today in rightist heroism and bully-boy toxic masculinity.  

Rush Limbaugh?  The double-B or B-3 emblem behind his microphone: Ballentine.  These days, I recall, I would sit absolutely blown away by Andre Norton, visualizing the writer as some Van Dyke-goateed veteran of maybe Austrian espionage, white hair, emblematic.  Later when I learned Norton actually was a female, I was surprised how deft her stories, many involving Cold War rivalries taking place in the Stone Age as Russian and US time travelers tugged at who got to change history far into the future.  

"Galactic Derelict".  In fifth grade, that was me.  Not merely figuratively.  In my psyche, I was derelict: the only safe space for my sense of belonging happened to be out-of-doors.  Friends and I would run with the wind in our faces.  Entire blocks.  As fast as we could go.  Bath towels around our necks.  

The galactic part?  Definitely not a Ford Galaxy or some kind of top-heavy top whirling to beat the fastest and most dogged tail-chaser in any TV show involving pets.  

Like Fagen, perhaps, the radio gave me some peace.  The big station at the time was called KNUS.  It was underground, the Dallas version.  Back then, the underground was safe: the people who thought H. L. Hunt's "Life Line" didn't even know the Moody Blues even existed.  I'm sure old H.L., a wealthy curmudgeon and world class paranoid, had he known about "monkey music", as some adult detractors called the Mercy Beat and the "hippie sounds" like "Winchester Cathedral", practically a hippie classic for those of us who didn't really have any clue who were are....

...and melt down the station for precious minerals before using the rest of it to form infrastructure for vampirism, otherwise known as oil drilling.  Old H. L.  As kids, we grew rowdy when daddy took us to White Rock Lake's famed Mount Vernon mimic--only about two miles from the house.  We could have walked there dressed as ghosts--but surely, even if we were short stuff, would have been a five-alarm threat worthy of either the fire department or the U. S. Marines.  At the door, as we were all expecting gold and wonderful candies for Halloween, the man at the door dropped only a few pennies in our wide-open sacks.  

Disappointment in the wealthy, for me, began right there.  

But of course: How could I understand the need to be a chintzy old tightwad with delusions of saving America from the dreaded commies?  Once in a while, I'd tune in to Hunt's "rave" on WRR AM, where, late into the night, the poor man called for the heads of all the commie pinko faggots and leftists.  I didn't know what any of those things even were, but for some reason, I was cold-cocked by loud words: maybe Hunt was turning us all on to "decency".  

Studies of Hitler many years later informed me Hitler too was all about decency.  No degenerate art for him.

How can any child save himself from such animus?  The green clock radio.  I'd lie prone on the top bunk of my old wagon-wheel bunk bed purchased at some loss leader furniture warehouse for pennies, red pennies, and listen to the KNUS DJ (I think) named Crash.  

A total doper act.  Spoke in monotonic and cosmic despair--all of it a bit--and I remember howling after midnight when Crash put on Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture on the studio pie plate, and all of us youthful hippies were in bondage, around 18 straight minutes of some of the most dramatic remembrance of the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812.  

Then the war of a record ended.  But, as anyone knows, the old record players didn't automatically reset.  Nope.  If left unattended, the turntables would continue to turn as the needle made a test pattern of a scratch on repeat.  

Which occurred that night.  For an equally long length of valuable time of night, the needle kept scraping and scratching--until, as if surprised, Crash woke up.  Sniffing.  Snorting.  "Wha...?"  Then it was on to The Stones.  

Not even a sorry.  

This sense of my high schoolish sense of alienation (which never reached the nihilism stage of ultimate coolness) was something to feed: rebellion.  I remember babysitting for a family just up Eagle Trail from the house.  As the young infants slipped off into sleep, I began perusing the father's paperback book collection: I found "Brick", the story of a wild teenage girl who'd do anything, possibly even river snakes, at the drop of a tiddly wink.  

My sexual education.  Otherwise, my mother in particular, afraid to break the news to me that the stork I already knew was an absolute lie worthy of a descent into the netherworld far beyond one's navel, concealed a sex ed book in the top drawer of her dresser.  Obviously she already knew about my curious explorations of all the forbidden things.  Like the sock drawer or the ceramic kangaroo key chain and change contraption that sat next to some of the most polluted perfumes imaginable.  "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex".  I found that book.  Wished I'd stolen "Brick".  Much more interesting.  The very interesting awakening wasn't frightening at all.  What was happened to be all the loud-voiced taboos to "don't do anything funny at that junior high dance tonight!"  Right.  As if I would have even begun to have even the faintest idea of what to do with a cheerleader or a drill team member, many of which continued to catch my eye all the way through high school.  

Banned books.  Dad had a copy of Fanny Hill concealed next to mom's Harry James records.  Don't even ask about mom and dad demonstrating the jitterbug as "superior" to "throwing your arms all over the place while acting like an ape" dances of an emergent way of looking at the world.  Even Laurence Welk would have been embarrassed.   At least it was fun to watch my father swing my mom around his waist without skipping a beat.  

An amazing dancer, that man.  In many ways, I imagine.  Long story.  

My best friend at the time, Don Grayson, also began collecting rock records.  He didn't seem to appreciate Chicago, 1969, 1970, 1971, and further forward.  Once in college, for example, I borrowed the Oldsmobile station wagon for a summertime visit.  I had The Yes Album.  As far as I was concerned (a little so even today), the best musical achievement since maybe Orpheus.  Who I didn't know much about other than he lost his girlfriend when she got knocked up on dope, something called a pomegranate.  Obvious.  She went down for more death cake, and when he tried to drag her out to rehab, she wouldn't follow.  

Orpheus, the Anita Bryant of the ancient world.  

Also, in 1973, the year of Watergate, that summer afternoon, hot as the devil's nether regions after sitting down there too long, I tried fronting him a listen to Steely Dan's "Countdown To Ecstasy".  Well, that totally went over.  He sniveled.  His choice of "bossness"?  David Bowie, the glitter king.  Space Oddity.  See? Science fiction apparently has many different euphemistic meanings.  How were any of us to know?  

Man.  I'm telling you.  Nobody, even in college, "got" The Dan.  Of course, where you're getting schooled in the Piney Woods, what with all the small town boys and girls, you may or may not receive the sophistication you initially expected.  OK, all right.  Nothing clear about either signification.   The underground hit in Dallas?  "King Of The World", a sci fic scare-scape.  One of the oddities about right-wing relocations of registered history of the Sixties and Seventies counterculture is that they were the ones about to set the planet on fire.  By mistake, obviously.  Like, "I just stabbed her 37 times with an ice pick, but it was an accident, I swear."  

Right-e-oh.  "My Old School".  At the time, I didn't even know what Annandale even is.  Cass's Swarthmore?  I think I'd heard that was some sort of underarm deodorant.  Who was to know?  This was, and is, Texas, after all.  

As my dad would have said, BIG SWEAT.  

Cooler than anyone on the block when it came down to being a real hipster.  One afternoon, the block's most beautiful, Claudia, brought her boyfriend, John, a bowl-cut cutter with long legs and bell bottoms, and for some reason (likely in search of the stones of the earth just down the street. . . ) he came bopping by my dad--who was sweatily grabbing crabgrass off the parking of our cul de sac front yard. 

John shoots daddy the peace sign.  "Peace, man..."

Coup de Gras!  Just amazing!  

Daddy, still on his knees, lifted three spread fingers and muttered, "Two pieces!" 

John boogied on down the hill.  He almost liked my dad but wasn't sure after that one.  

There I sat, the spring of 1973, my second freshman semester, abandoned by a "frat rat" dolt of a dude named Bubba, in part because his Phi Delt frat house had space for him.  Never related to him much.  All he did instead of actually studying was hold onto the phone receiver for hours in desperate attempts to get some Tri Delt or Chi Omega to sing Greensleeves for him with her legs spread.  

I had a miserable excuse for a stereo.  A Don Grayson cast-off.  Fine with me.  I liked having stereophonic superpowers.  Without grass.  Indeed, even at 18, I was more than merely kind of cosmic.  Thin as a rail and outraged mom thought that if I wore dress pants to school during the era of revolution I would be respectable.  More like this: laughed at.  One day, in a fit of anger, I went to a local department store and cashed the entire monthly 60- buck allowance on Levis.  

"Why'd you do that???"

"Levi was in the Bible, right?" 

And very blue it seems if I have any memory left at all. . . 

In indigo I was nearly coolsville.  And handsome.  Without realizing it.  Steely Dan was a sort of haven for a young loner like me.  I liked the other dorm guys, but they were too into sports, and into drinking, and into not really understanding anything at all about what had been happening in the real world beyond the Barnum & Bailey's make-a-millionaire vibrations that seemed to represent the actual subversion to me.  

See?  I was "literary".  No big surprise to any of that.  Once a poet, still a poet, even if the poet has been stilled.  

Or stewed.  Or brewed.  Not even shrewed, or even screwed.  Yeah.  Screwed all right.  And alone in that icy pit of linoleum and harsh white walls, you come home with a live chicken clucking in your closet, and when you try to get out of your room, you note to yourself that your buddies have penny-locked the door, thus making it impossible to get away from the dumb chicken sitting on your dirty underwear.  

Penny-locking?  Some know about that.   You squeeze five pennies in your fingers, lean hard against the dorm room door, and wedge them in tightly enough that the trapped prisoner can't get out. 

Never once thought about calling 911 or the local non-existent HOA.  At least I could look outside at my nasty Earl Sheib '66 Ford LTD guzzler of gasses.  That thing still lurks in my more unwieldy dreams.  I tell you, it does.  

What's gray and smells like bananas?  Lots of stuff. Cheerio, folks.  

Finally, I would be released from prison.  At least Mike, a Houston hippie freak from Houston who lived in the room across the hall made sense to me.  Blonde, burly, and curious about the world beyond beer cans, he and I would talk mysticism and philosophy.  That guy gave me some solace away from the dorm dicks down the hall.  

Show Biz Kids.  Didn't quite throw out their gold teeth as much as, in Texiana, "thowed them things". 

Never quite caught the meaning of Fagen and Becker's "Razor Boy".  At least until I met a couple of those while wandering around on the downtown business district's streets.  

"Yeah, bucko, you've got a razor in your pocket?  Mine's too round to cut baloney." 

Remember: as far as I knew I might as well have discovered The Dan.  The Blue Danube--not so much.  I always have been a barbarian: BAR!  BAR!  

Perhaps my favorite Dan song is Doctor Wu, one of the principle masterpieces off of 1975's "Katy Lied". 

Are you with me, Doctor Wu?
Are you really just a shadow of      
the man that I once knew?
Are you crazy?  Are you high?
Or just an ordinary guy? 
Have you done all you can do?
Are you with me, Doctor?

I'm certain, I've often thought, "Doctor Wu" was a likely favorite of the brave few escapees from Homeowners Associations out to see if they can speed across the entire country in one weekend.  I know if I was out riding the highways and hanging in cheesy motels, while imagining witches, and trying to get a lock on when the beer store closes, that one would have been my number one.  I'm probably wrong.  It's also probable about either heroin dealerships or rat poison salesmen with hottie chicks in tow.  

I could go on about Steely Dan and how much I've adored Fagen's lyricism. Like many poets, I like puzzles.  So I puzzle.  I look for connections.  My memory is full of connections.  Not many of them as reliable people as I honestly have wished they had been.  You walk around in peace (and innocence), and then what happens if you get nailed for "practicing peace in public"? 

Back to my punk rock visitation to yuppie hollow's big colorful club on Greenville Avenue.  Sheesh!  Those people annoyed me.  All style, no fashioning what that even meant.  Friends and I circa 1983 decided to "invade" Confetti's one Saturday night.  No we weren't in pre-goth couture.  Nor were we anything but ourselves.  But I do remember wearing a Polo Shirt with a green stain on the front.  Lots of lovely women.  At the bar.  Some, if they looked bored, perked up with a few crude jokes, and soon, you're tormenting tomorrow's business leaders with something they may or may not have been capable of comprehending: 

Non-STEM-dependence.  Nothing gets the right gal with a little chat about what New Wave is about.  

"Isn't that from France?" 

"Um, yeah, maybe, but,well,no." 

Scansion is important in a room full of classic rock dance team members.  Who all looked like Selleck in white pants, deep-as-sea sorel curls, and perms designed to look "natural".  Who else was cashing in?  

I was spilling drinks.  

After all, if you're into a sell-out, you have to have an idea of who is cashing-in.  

Ah yes.  The unmerciful land of the economic exchange.  Some guy steps into your room to sell vacuum cleaners, tosses dirt on the carpet and then shows how easily it cleans up even dog doo-doo.  Everyone just loves meeting people who are ready to sell them something.  

Like the time two reliably communistic brothers I'd met in the late 1970s laughed about two incidents: 

The time Bill ate an entire onion pizza, then walked into some sort of torch lounge, let out a big one, and then casually walked away, only to turn like a debonair doer--all to watch entire knots of very serious people forming large holes in the crowded room.  

Or the time he and his brother Tom figured out an experiment: Find a lady who is sad, sympathize with her for some time, invite her over to listen to some music and get high, and then, because she's drowning in hurt or sorrow, your partner in crime, behind the activity on the couch, begins manipulating the song selections--until the poor girl is about ready to burble her life away in a waterfall of tears. 

Then Romeo makes his move.  

It did work.  I found that disgusting.  But there it is: the power of intoxication of any kind, and the ability to manipulate angst, agitation, upset, sadness, frustration, honest to God pain, and POW.  

#winning

Those are some real nice tears you got there it'd be sad to see you lose one.  Here.  Let me help.  Just call me Doctor Love.  

What I like most about Fagen and Becker's music is the musical perfection.  Indeed.  That was big in the 1970s.  Everyone was just so smooth.  It was fun for me later, in '76, to hang with the local folkies, guys who could put a neat spin on a note that fit exactly--like a deft remark.  Even though I couldn't do that, I wanted to.  

Yet, in music theory class, earlier, in 1973, our professor--a mod wannabe evangelical with a soul patch on his lower lip as if "soul" is bound to be Jesus himself, not Aretha Franklin or even Kool and the Gang (it must have been quite a task to have gray hair while posing as Chuck Mangione years after the record, "The Children of Sanchez" hit the remainders pile at Sound Warehouse)--informed the class that The Beatles were lousy musicians.  He cited Eric Burden, a famous vibraphonist of the European jazz variety (ECM), as the standard for musicianship, likely innocent of the fact Burden happened to be a gay man.  

I got tired of hearing that jazzy composer and lab band professor putting down people like Bob Dylan and other harbingers, trailblazers, and iconoclasts who--by the nature of the musical beast--are often scrappy in beginning new musical models.  While true musicianship is of course wondrous, and admirable, often exceptional in beauty to be found only in perfection, I've long noticed that in popular music that some of the better known musical fire-starters seem to fuzz-up the music with wrong notes--which give songs some real life.  

The Eagles come to mind here as a contrast.  Yes, the musicianship is stellar, and the songwriting perfection, but in the end, at least at times when I listen, the music has a hollow quality to it.  There's nothing wrong in there.  It is the flaws that make us beautiful. 

Yet some musicians manage somehow to transcend the limitations of too-perfect expression.  Fagen and Becker accomplish that.  The missing link among many bands admired for perfection: 

An ear accurate enough to spot where a note or a harmony should go.  And Fagen's drive for perfection is legendary.  The ear.  It's all in the ear.  If it's not in need of ringing, the music may actually be singing.  Driven, Fagen's music had strong messages too.  In a way, he's like a person who has a certain skill and knows how to use it.  

So let's get to the corny ending.  If you don't get corny endings, you may very well be a Bodhisattva.   

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