Forgive Me DADA, For The Eye Hath Sinned...

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

Forgive Me DADA, For The Eye Hath Sinned...

When in 2025 the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trumpery Prez-Wannabe Junta happens to be the very first Jewish Confederate Hammerskin in contemporary US history, a sort of Benjamin Disraeli from the right side of the locomotive tracks, one needs to know that a Confederate Hammerskin is also known as a branch of the skinheads.  

Friends?  Remember those?  In the spacey-case of Miller, it should be that he secretly may drive a Yugo.  

I mean, once my eyes cleared, I could almost see him driving an official car, a very pretty Volvo.  

Here in Texas, "Volvo" can refer to a sexy-time joke of sorts.  As in take a look at that bright red Volva.  See?  Miller is the lady-part of the anti-American dream team.  Who could not be for that?  But keep it under your hats; even when a miller invades your home and dusts the walls and ceilings with insectile dust.  

Last night, I had the weirdest dream ever.  I was lost.  In a huge underground labyrinth called a mall.  Lines and lines of stores, some selling chotskies, others loaded with veritable walls of athletic garb, all of which were priced way above even Reason itself: What?  $95 for a pair of pretty sweatpants?  Oh look: It's official, cotton blend with an official brand name.  

The bad dream must have been a visitation from the "good side of town".  

Beyond the chotsky-laden shops and branded sweatpants stood what seemed like a vast labyrinth of cafe society similar restaurants, the kind of places where the eaters and noshers and drinkers sit in a sort of front lawn with low metal fences--all to be seen lisping nouns that cannot be heard by anyone who is not close enough to kiss the mall-whisperers.  

Is that what life is like in Santa Monica, the really nice-looking neighborhood in Los Angeles, otherwise known as LA?  

LA!  As in lalalalalalalala!  Exactly what one'd expect from mall rats on the lurk for some "cat". 

I am not confused.  I actually enjoy luxury.  My mother once gifted me a beautiful yellow cashmere pullover sweater from Neiman Marcus.  I love the gift so much I am almost afraid to wear it out here in the suburban ghetto otherwise known as "the neighborhood love left behind".  

Indeed.  It seems I am stuck in a pretty beaten-up apartment complex which was constructed in the mid-1980s--likely by real estate developers lusting to cash-in on the Ronald Reagan Revolution of the Three R's.  

Remember Pee Wee Herman?  "You RRR but what am I?" 

I'm uncertain of the history of Five Points after the dreadful 1987 Savings and Loan crash-and-burn, accompanied by the Dallas area Liberaces of oil crisis doom.  No, those oily men (and their very important warrior women) and used dirt salesmen, both groupers all dressed much more profusely than Harry Dean Stanton as the bossman of an auto repossession crew in the Michael Nesmith movie, "Repo Man".  

Remember: Repossession in nine-tenths of the broke law here in Dallas, Texas, the land of dirt.  

Say a bunch of folks have been possessed by demons that emerged from each's vanity mirror.  But suddenly, the possession fades due to an economic downturn.  What happened?  Why, that's EZ as a Laff!  Repossession!  

"O, Lardy-Lard, repossesseth moi!"  

BINGO!  It's done!  

Back when my devastated life landed me in a cabana apartment near Dallas Love Field, the huge complex shaped like the vast spread of airliner wings due to its designed intention of housing airline pilots and especially "their" stewardesses, squarish apartments meant to be occupied only temporarily in order to allow those valiant laborers a place to land for a night or two.  

Why did I land there?  An acquaintance from the off-Central Expressway 4422 McKinney apartment complex, a place that, while also a nice place once upon a time, nice and inexpensive enough to offer hippies, and later, local artists in need of low-cost shelter, had become possessed by dope dealers, crooks, fugitives, hardscrabble and often drunken WW II colonels and a few refugees from much-the-same in Central America. 

I'd been evicted from there during an incredibly precarious time when I was beginning to recover a little from decades stricken by Bipolar.  I had a few "friends" back there, namely an artist of sorts, a guy who called himself B.J. Taylor (his real name is Charles Taylor, a not-really relative of the infamous Charles Taylor, the Liberian police-state president known for his leadership in the First Liberian Civil War (1989-96), his starry role as a warlord for the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.  That Taylor was doffed for war crimes.  Kind of similar to the "judge, jury, executioner" fashion slavery involving the destruction of speedboats presumed to carry drugs.  

Ha!  No evidence needed!  Prejudice, embodied!!!

Whatever, after the uncalled for eviction complicated of course by a summary lack of family support for things like a telephone, that "non official necessity" people need to get good job opportunities.  No phone number?  You must be a failure! And we don't hire failures!  

Right.  Toughen up, dude; toughen up.  

Toughened up, then, left derelict during one of the most vulnerable periods of my life, I landed at BJ's studio, a place he called "Stigmata", a place emblemized by a BJ-creation: three hypodermic needles.  Yay!  A supporter!  BJ claimed to be a former Confederate Hammerskin from Oklahoma.  Reformed?  He did date a young, sophisticated Jewish lady named Debbie Tannenbaum--at least for a while.  He broke her heart on some kind of campaign to impress a part-time dominatrix (no lie, no matter how weird that seems!) who, it turned out, had a yen for me.  

BJ had really tricked-out Stigmata Sudios.  All black.  A mandatory upper bunk bed made of two-by-fours in order to aid in the prevention of climbing mice and rats.  

Stop right there.  Rats!  Climbing rats!  In the Trump administration, all dissenters are supposedly rats!  In Mafia-talk, a rat is a stooly officially known as a stool-pigeon, a treasonous, sedition-laden refusenik,a dissenter who refuses to follow his mob-infected "order", otherwise known as "the offer you can't refuse".  

Which indeed is refuse.  Nothing like dumpster lovers following men who have been marked as "yer gonna be one-f us!"  Refuse.  Garbage.  Of the "we could wreck the world" variety of Norwegian Wharf Rats, big black ones, some as big as French Poodles.  

Hard landing.  BJ reluctantly allowed me to bring in my once-lovely sofa (it was expensive for me in 1985) to use as a bed.  That, actually and almost laughably, stood akin to my mother's withdrawal of love tactics whenever my father staggered home at three a.m. drunk off his ass.  To the couch!  Ad Astra!  

Note: immediately prior to my vaunted eviction, two incidents are necessary to recall: 1) I'd been charged with "false alarm", first listed as a felony per a fire-captain's insistence I be punished to the very limits of the law, but then marked down by a judge as a mere misdemeanor.  Is felony still on my papers?  I've never bothered to look.  Words, words, words.  I'd only called the DFD to report that a cat was trapped on the roof of that then-decrepit apartment building.  I'd fretted in the middle of a poverty-led manic episode only six months after leaving a hospital psych ward, successfully treated for Bipolar.  

Yeah, yeah.  I was still in weakened condition.  My mental health doctor said recovery from massive neural exhaustion and possible damage after a lifetime of the hereditary syndrome.  Whatever.  Once I'd begun to experience the sudden tranquility of being freed of the two Bipolar moods called "black and white", BJ was happy to enable a period where I really let loose and into the first happiness I'd known in 19 years.  Yes, he bought me beer.  We lit up.  We stayed up late.  And BJ almost always supplied the supplies.  

I know now I did everything wrong.  Whereas anxiety and a near-futile attempt to stanch it via bicycling sometimes 21-47 miles-a-day, something that had slimmed me down, once the anxiety had gone like a bad wind, all I wanted to do was sit, eat, feel pleasure.  I should have remained sober, clean, and full of exercise.  I went to the poetry slams when the money ran out.  While still on Welfare (for a mandated 14 months, no more), and a recipient of food stamps, I could rest in some security and still have food on the table.  

But what about toilet paper? What about toothpaste?  Or body soap?  Or dish soap?  Or cat food?  

UNBUYABLE!  

No wonder poor and retired people bear bad teeth.  

I soldiered on.  I won six poetry slams in a row.  While that sort of monologue-as-poetry does not fully qualify as pure or private poetry, its combination of spoken word and theatrics was an easy enough formula for me to follow:  All I needed to do was sit in on slams, take notes to see what garnered applause and laughter, and then go to the typewriter and gin-up some truly absurd monologues.  

I especially enjoyed slamming a monologue I'd titled "WHITE RAISIN VAMPIRE DUDE", a Cajun take on "Interview With A Vampire".  My best friend, Sam Modica, a former Marine, was somewhat Cajun.  I felt like honoring from the stage of Deep Ellum's Club Clearview.  Boy, while my accent was sketchy, I belted out the story about how the protagonist had been bitten by something--and thus turned into a vampire that bore a shriveled white head that resembled a white raisin in the sun,.  Lots of laughs, and given the night was judged by a famous SMU poet-professor, Jack Myers, a leading exponent of a school of poetry called Conversational Poetry, a poetry designed to actually expand the audience of poetry by bringing the language a little closer to the voices of the average human American; yes, given the approval of him and his wife, Thea Temple, as the ultimate yesses, I won that one hands-down and walked away with $50.  A grand slam I could use for necessities, mainly cat food for my "right arm", a fuzzy black cat I'd named Loopy.  Because she wound around my legs as an expression of affection.  Loops.  Get it?  

2) Prior to the eviction by one John Holmes, a sort of sketchy landlord who ushered from Highland Park, Texas (his office was on the second floor of a building near Snyder Plaza, a very exclusive shopping center and home to the Highland Park Cafeteria), I'd come down with a case of pleurisy: I'd gotten an infection in my lungs.  I was seriously ill with no way I could find to get to a doctor.  Of course, at the time, my awareness and ability to protect myself by simply busing to Parkland Hospital--that was psychologically unavailable to my still-noisy-at-times inability to use common sense.  

After years of manic depression, a sufferer remains locked away into a sense of futility and fatality.  And yes, with pleurisy, I was so sick I could barely stand.  

In that contributing event, I was also going to a smallish poetry circle nearby in a luxuriant shopping area called Travis Walk.  Cafe Society was the product of two beautiful lesbians, and the brand was a suggested appeal to perhaps bring Paris to Dallas, the so-called International City, which, to me had been a Field of Bad Dreams.  

Luckily, with pleurisy in my lungs, I stumbled upon a nurse, Susan Ramsay.  I told her how sick I was, and only days later we met: she gave me an Azithromycin 5 Day Dose Pack.  In five days, she hoped for me, the powerful antibiotic regimen would defeat the lung infection.  

Ah  yes! Broken lungs in the Days of Survival During Poetry Slams!  The nurse fixed that.  I recovered from the immediacy of the bacteria.  But full recovery would take much longer as my body cleared itself of infection and its consequent physical detritus.  

"Go!" BJ cried.   There is a pizza joint up on the corner of Exposition and MLK! I think the guy'll hire you to make sandwiches for him!"  

In hot August sun, I walked with pleurisy on my ability to walk, and overweight and beginning to once again dive into depression, I interviewed.  The man did hire me.  But that lasted only a week.  

Remember?  My body was "dirty"with the detritus of infection.  My body was cleaning itself.  Due to the self-clean, my body stank.  I sweated too much.  Yes, I was a mess charged with meeting the public and making sandwiches for eager customers.  

The owner didn't feel like listening.  He told me to my face how badly I stank.  No questions, no excuses, just get walkin' now, boy!

Back to Stigmata Studios, I took the little cash I had and got as drunk as I could possibly get.  Shoot!  This recovery from manic depression was becoming an exercise in futility.  

At the time, the very night this occurred, an incident of bad luck interrupted an invite from one Matt Seitz, then theater critic for Dallas Observer, a man who sincerely liked my absurd offerings in both letters to the Observer and my then near-incomprehensible L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. 

I remember one person exclaiming to me at another open mic reading at a spot named Chumley's, "Your poetry makes no sense to me, but I dunno, I really like how it feels!"  

BLAM!  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.  "Poetry should not mean but be."  A long-loved axiom offered by one Archibald McLeish in his poem Ars Poetica. Poetry really should be, he advocated in the poem, less an explicit detonation of meaning so much as an expression that needs no interpretation.  A modernist theme that still fits when I'm writing about pure expression.  

See?  I'd read books.  Books suggested to me by Jack Myers himself.  That experience?  I walked--walked--to Southern Methodist University, was granted audience by the head of the English school, offered Myers a longish poem, received kindly his suggestion that "this is almost poetry", and then took a list of recommended books to read on the subject of writing well.  I still have the book by Jonathan Holden, "Style And Authenticity In Postmodern Poetry". I learned as a sort of autodidact by reading that book--as well as one I still own, "The Truth Of Poetry", a survey of European poetry and its influence on America's version of modernism from Baudelaire (who learned from a US citizen named Edgar Alan Poe) to the 1960s.  Another Myers recommendation: Robert Hass's collection of essays and reviews titled, "Twentieth Century Pleasures".  Another?  A real trooper for beginners who want to know what it is they're actually and already doing: "Sound And Sense: An Introduction To Poetry", a battleship of a book that aids in the definitions of many tactics available in a poet's tool chest, provided by Laurence Perrine and Thomas R. Arp.  

Ha!  Arp!  Jean Arp!  Surrealist poet of France!  Oh man.  I slurped up those books.  And the textbook I'd used as an auditing member of Stephen F. Austin State University's MFA poetry composition course, Shapiro and Blum's immortal, "A Prosody Handbook".  

Shhh...!  Don't tell the United Nations or Amnesty International the poet is both self-taught and highly educated!  Without that totally necessary slip of vellum, one may not enter the agora of all poets in human history when they meet all day and all night, apparently in some secret hideout where only the officially educated my enter!  

Other books aided my understanding of the wild-eyed enforcement of "all poetry in Dallas but those approved by hillbillies is to be left on doorsteps and cast away by wind!": One details what art as a subculture espoused: "Art Into Pop", by Britishers Simon Frith and Howard Horne.  This one's an eye-opener.  It details how artists in Great Britain, most attendees of the British government-supported art schools such as the Royal College Of Art and London's University of the Arts London.  

The US?  "Poetry is totally scary and many result in way too many people who know too much and thus must remain unsupported by taxpayer money!"

That garbage-thinking reminds me of Marianne Faithfull's song "Broken English": "What are you fighting for?...It's not my reality!...  Say it...in broken English...." 

Right, America.  Christianity on steroids and ready for some stupid boxing match sponsored by both papists (masters of pap) and those who protest even the very teachings of Christ Himself.  

Remember Matt Seitz?  He'd wanted me to attend a Dallas Observer roof party where, as he'd advocated for me to have a column in the weekly alternative newspaper, I could meet the staff.  Pleurisy, termination, poverty, no good clothing, and WHAMMO!  

Dallas' evil wins again.  

Seitz still travels the corridors of movie and theater criticism on the US East Coast.  

No matter.  Although the Observer staff had always lauded my often-absurd letters to the editor, especially the one where, in "defense" of poetry in Dallas and it's much-abhorred in "official circles" use of profanity.  The letter?  I "defended profanity" in a short letter where I used "fuck" and variations of the word I think 47 times.  The staff loved it.  The editor, a Seventh Day Adventist named Ryan (rhymes with rayon) found it tasteless.  

Ryan had about as much common sense in regard to news as an alternative away from officialdom, and seemed to be a self-run candidate for "Grand Descendant of Queen Victoria Herself". When later, desperate, homeless, and alone, I'd begged for an audience with her to pitch a potential newspaper column as an alternative to, like, tossing fliers and cleaning up after house fires, or landscaping, building decks for suburbanites, all day labor: 

No show, no go, mere manners in a mannerism-fest of a former hope for mass media in Dallas that isn't propelled by rightist business interests.  

Ah yes!  Steely Dan's "The Royal Scam"!  Play it again, Sam?  Seriously? How many times do those fudge-buckets need to tell us all what they and only they desire for poets-as-pets or poets-as-Peter Pan?  

Hence, the American outlaw movement.  It's biggest problem: "We don't want no education!"  

See the double-negative?  I always found that line from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" to be especially enlightening in regard to the proto-Nazi mass movement where its dear leader is a germaphobe careful to keep his fingernails clean when he orders his fools to do the nasty on anyone who disagrees with him.  

Great!  A so-called president afraid of criticism!  What more could a flagging light of the world need to own?  

Thus, while this confession does not end here, we're back to Stephen Miller--out hunting outlaws that are merely projections of his own Jungian Shadow Self.  Interesting: Miller and the vaunted SCOTUS shadow docket.  

"Dock that poet!  Make him pay and pay and pay!"  

Love, the United States Supreme Court.  More like "El Supremo" from another Steely Dan song from the 1970s, the ME decade.  

Nothing like running justice into the ground from the point of third-person omniscience...

A common observance in the homeless community is this: "Out of sight, out of mind".  Let's let paid experts serve as "the one true oracles of America's now-flagging 'superstate'!" 

Wow. Paid to be an oracle!  Totally capitalistic and elitist to the max!  

No, the story doesn't end there.  In fact, my dream mentioned near the beginning of this recounted set of memories that all led to five years of homelessness, continues.  

After being terminated from a dumb job making sandwiches for some dude at the corner of Exposition and MLK Boulevard, an operation that loved to specialize in making sandwiches for the punks next door, those drunken dopeheads who ushered in after a hard night at Bar Of Soap; and after being told to get out by "ex-Confederate Hammerskin" BJ Taylor (he always urged me to never have children, but rumor has it I have several out there); I was "taken in" by one Michele Reed, a friend and wishful contender for me as a boyfriend, and her live in lover, Noah Miller (oh, Miller time again!), and truck loaded up, the couple shipped me to Denton, Texas, a university city 40 or so miles north of Dallas, city of hate and assassins.  

Strange territory to me.  Where was I?  Inside my mind, I was already still figuring it out over a suddenly brightened and colorful world I almost didn't remember is called "normal";outside my head, I had no other options.  Reed, who was living with Miller, thought it good to allow me to use her on-the-edge of Denton apartment for a period long enough for me to get my feet on the ground.  In a strange town.  With unknowable streets or locations of where to even begin to get work.  

Where else was there?  I jumped.  The pleurisy, as I continued to sweat in the "BJ Motel for Sado-Masochism Wannabes", had ruined my prized and expensive sofa.  I'd always called it a couch.   It was hot in there.  BJ wanted to save electricity.  I didn't blame him.  Privatized electricity ownership soaks the common man but those who can change that never bother to ask any questions.  Down in Texas.  Really down.  

No evidence!  Off to Denton, I went along.  Landed in a little girl's menagerie of a college apartment.  Reed was a fantasist of sorts.  She loved the idea of witchcraft.  She had little statuettes of angels and fairies shelved almost everywhere.  Clearly, her parents had ladled enough luxury on the now-adult female to keep her innocence unbitten by the Norwegian Wharf Rats who think they own the arts, the letters, and all creativity--all with nary one clue to what making art with words and spaces between them even means to the wellness of civilization.  

Hence, outlaw poetry.  Art that reciprocates artists being treated like absolute shit by investors in art who only see the worth of an artist or poet's heart and soul as hot investments and tax dodges.  Right.  Make the equity partner a wall piece of a banana crossed by duct tape, charge several million for it, and whoops, investors kindly pick the piece up and, lovingly perhaps, pay the artist.  Still.  Why do real estate developers chase artists and studios around while only interested in the cachet involved in building luxury condominiums in arts districts?  To toughen up the artists until the artists are too callous to even bother being creative?  

The US does not currently support independent artists and poets.  What does the US support?  EZ Laffs: STEM dependence.  No autonomy for the people!  Just get to work and make us some bucks!  Way cold.  

Doesn't everyone just love those commercials to support the starving artists?  One look into one of those convention center gigs reveals mass produced decorative art. And meanwhile, the tech bros are "so enthusiastic" over the ability of algorithms wresting poetry right out of the minds of those who actually celebrate something called imagination and inspiration.  

How dare us!  

My gig in the Reed's apartment didn't last long.  I didn't have much in the name of money, dress clothing and catfood, including the cat litter I knew would be necessary for a cat that, frightened outside, might have gotten lost all too easily.  

Ha! Bad person!  Tries to take care of cat, must be rendered into poverty!  The Texas Way.  

In Texas, a person of some talent must be wired to the wheel and forced to relinquish what is judged a clear and present danger to the used dirt salesmen and Lords of Lard.  

They'll all shatter themselves with pride with the proverbial platitude of "equality of opportunity does not result in an equality of outcomes!'  

Still here, motherfuckers.  Waiting for my "equality of opportunity".  I've looked everywhere for it.  I keep being met with prefab complications.  "To toughen it up, its humanity must be killed!"  

Anyway.  The gig at Reed's lovely apartment went bad.  I didn't get up and out fast enough.  Not for her boyfriend, Noah Miller.  He seemed the abusive type to me: At a "dinner party" where Noah The Chef fixed a nice meal for his mother, Michelle and me, he showed off his and Michelle's new kitten.  But when the tiny cat-tot managed to do what kittens do, namely climb the drapes in the middle of a Dinner of Serenity and "Proudness", Noah Miller grabbed the kitten in his fists and even growled as he scored his knuckles into the poor frightened kitten's neck and body:

Abuses animals, is royalty.  Sound familiar?  

One Sunday night (I had managed to drink much of Michelle's high-priced liquor, mandatory for a college student of financial difficulties trying to get a decent education as I managed to do...), the two showed up unexpectedly.  An intervention: that's what Mister Noah of the Michelle Ark of Human Salvation called it.  

"You're not working!  You're a lazy asshole!  We've decided to get you out of Michelle's apartment!"  

Lovely.  Noah even tried some Mexican stare down with me as a means of amateurish intimidation he might have learned from a cowboy movie.  Then he told me the ridiculous: "I'm from Naval Intelligence!"  

What???

Then I guessed it. I'd left a trunk that contained almost all of my cherished memories.  Inside the trunk sat a large stack of WW II photographs taken in Okinawa and Saipan, two islands my father visited as a US Navy radio man who helped in rear-guard recon at the Battle of Coral Sea.  The trunk contained documents, documents important to me. Photographs of my father (reality has allowed me a few and I cherish the memories of a suicide father before his life turned into a bucket of horrors).  

Perhaps the predecessor of NCIS had long been a self-administered role model for Naval police work.  No matter, sans "right arm Loopy", I stood up, walked out, found a nearby ditch, and nearly freezing the entire night, I huddled in what I took to be a safe place.  

I found the Union Gospel Mission the next day.  Haven.  Not solace.  I did follow all the rules.  What had I to win by not following them?  

Picture El Presidente Numero 47 sleeping in a ditch or landing in a private and religon-owned homeless mission?  

That'd make a great 30 minute comedy.  We could call the sitcom "30 Seconds Over Donnie".  

"A hit!  A performance of verve and value for the closed caption set!"  

After a mercifully shortish stint at the shelter, actually a cool place save for the very rural of tenants who found me possibly Satanic for the outrageousness of thinking as an independent individual, after I walked something like five miles in October in search of rescue by the local branch of a public mental health clinic, where I was given a free ticket on The Eagle, a bus for students who need assistance in moving back and forth from Dallas to Denton, by a kind counselor who also called the Dallas branch to inform my doctor and caseworkers I had gotten lost in a strange city and wanted to come back to familiar territory.  

On my final afternoon in Denton, Texas, as I walked along with a garbage bag of belongings, the Denton Police accosted me, told me a rapist was on the loose near the North Texas campus, and, when I told them I was headed for The Eagle so as to return to a city I knew, the cop took me to the bus itself.  Nice. Still, I was lost on the inside.  Dumb luck.  Busted in the face by more tragedy, unnecessarily in the life of a man a little too delicate for that kind of rough treatment.  

I remember Michelle's next door neighbor.  I'd met her before.  She'd come to the slam.  Was a modern dance student at NT.  At the time, when I told her I was going to host one of the Clearview slams, she seemed thrilled when I suggested she perform something silly for the audience: "Would you think it would be fun to tap-dance to Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?"  She had said that would be great. 

However, her response "at me" in Denton was a 180.  I knocked on her door one afternoon to let her know I was OK.  She cursed me out and told me to leave.  

The kindhearted were simply everywhere--all of them "at me", not for me at all.  

Riding on The Eagle, I learned, meant I could get off the bus near the Salvation Army's Carr Collins Center.  That place apparently does everything for a person rendered homeless--always with the prospect of "saving" one for a version of a very exclusive Jesus Christ.  

After bicycling for years, suddenly atrophied (by my own passivity) muscles in my right thigh had seized, likely due to so much of the Stress For Poets Who May Know Too Much Program To Protect Wealthy Hillbillies, and I could barely walk across the street to Parkland's Urgent Care Clinic to see if I could get help.  The morning I was to do that, however, some prison-guard-wannabe counselor charged with waking a roomful of homeless men, tried to evict me when I couldn't easily get out of the cot due to the seized sciatica.  Not fast enough up?  You're out of here!  

I limped across the street, waited several hours for a doctor, who readily suggested some careful leg stretches and also prescribed a smallish amount of muscle relaxers, and then returned to the Carr Collins spot.  

Not to beg to stay.  But to inform the man in charge of the center of what had happened.  Luck!  The man told me unconditionally that I could stay!  

That night, after sitting outside with nowhere really to go, I returned to the Center.  Who did I meet but the prison-guard-wannabe who looked too much like Mickey Mouse to be believable.  He snarled: 

"You know what you did? You got me fired, you little-----".  

Evangelical love, Mickey Mouse style.  

Not long later, I was told I had a telephone call.  Someone was offering me a place to stay.  The voice?  It was of a former 4422 McKinney neighbor (apartment 101), Jamie.  I'll pick you up tomorrow!  He did, and took me to his cabana at the Love Field location for stewardesses.  Sans the stewardesses.  

Jamie had once confessed to me that he "likes little boys".  I kind of laughed him off. But the cabana?  It was located across a narrow parking lot abutting a nursery school.  Wait.  Hadn't Jamie said something about teenage boys at the mall?  

Whatever.  I was gladdened by one kind episode of unconditional support from a barely-acquainted acquaintance.  Once I settled in on the cabana's furnished couch, I questioned the guy about is life as a sort of pedophile.  I never used that word.  I was curious.  I wanted to know how such an obsession works.  Jamie told me that, no, he didn't hunt young men.  Rather, he said, they often found him when he'd go to places like Northpark Mall.  

"Really?  How do you know?"  

"I just do."  

"Do you signal each other?" 

"Kind of."  

"Do you understand why you're attracted to teenage boys?"

"I think it's instinctual." 

Wow.  I thought. This is totally weird.  Uncomfortable, I asked him an important question: "What do you think of the laws that forbid such behavior?" 

"Why should I prevent what is instinctual?" 

Hell, I thought, I control my impulsiveness all the time.  "Is the impulse to meet and sleep with young men irresistable?"

"I've been with lots of women," he retorted.  

Very odd.  I didn't exactly like being in his presence.  Jamie, always wearing a union blue sweatshirt, a sort of uniform, always pot-laden, happy to remain stoned.  But then something went awry: As my questioning continued, and after I'd managed to use a few dollars to "score" a 90s-era cellphone so I could call my temp agency and get to work again, and after I did get a sort of job that paid too little for me to strike out and get a decent job, and after I learned Jamie had used my all cellphone's time, ostensibly to find a job for himself, he basically left me in a cabana efficiency with barely enough money to really begin to climb out of the mess. 

My belongings at Reed's luxury apartment? I managed to get in contact with a long (and somewhat sinister college days acquaintance, Carl Worsham, and after contacting NCIS Noah Miller (I'm laughing), I agreed to meet him at his mommy's workplace, a warehouse where Noah and another bloatedly overweight partner ran a two-man call center in attempts to sell higher quality ovens.  Weird, eh?  

Old Carl, who'd been using me for the mere fact women are attracted to me (as I am to them, something that has to be within our mutual presences to even happen at all), picked me up and we went to Denton to pick up those belongings first. Yup.  There they were: stacked on the sidewalk for any taker to come along.  We loaded them on Carl's pickup, took them to a Public Storage location near the cabana, and then went to Noah's NCIS warehouse to retrieve the remainder of my things.  

What?  When we arrived to the West Dallas area warehouse--no automobiles.  We were there early too.  We waited for at least an hour.  I even knocked.  No answer.  

Finally, we left.  When I called Noah NCIS Miller, he was sharp: "We were there!  We gave you a drop dead deadline!  We're selling your shit!"  

Wow.  With friends like Miller, well, you know....

I'd lost my valuable trunk full of prized mementos--like my high school graduation diploma and even my high school second place short story contest award certificate, and most importantly, those Okinawa and Saipan photographs, and of course, nearly all the pictures of my father.  

Zombie.  The Cranberries.  That was on the radio that afternoon.  

It was a Sunday afternoon in 1995.  I'd lost some of the most important things I owned.  My treasured WW II era crystal radio--the one I listened in on H. L. Hunt's "Lifeline" radio rant-o-rama on WRR AM late at night.  I'd clip an alligator clip to the airconditioning vent and listen awhile.  It had been my father's gift to me. 

Gone.  

Last night I dreamed of being lost in an underground mall.  I even met a dreamworld transformation of the otherwise fat-calved lardass Noah Miller.  There, Michelle Reed, looking much the same as remembered.  The woman had once shown me a high school photo of herself.  Once, she had been a very beautiful young woman, but then at that time and also in the dream, she was overweight.  I'm sure that change had always been hurtful to her.  

I also noted to myself in the dream, that I had a friend, Valerie Crowe, a fellow poet who also had been dragged around very harshly by a suspicious and abusive husband.  She was in the dream.  But I couldn't find her, a woman who today remains a good and platonic friend who is loath to let me down for anything.  

Gone too.  But without feelings of bewilderment and sadness in the dream, I woke up a little late this Sunday morning, glad to be awake again.  As I returned to awake consciousness, I felt a welcome glow, smiled to myself, and went to the kitchen for coffee.  

One more question: Tell me again there is no such thing as political oppression gone social in the United States of America.  

 

  

 

Self-Love, Disparagement, Used Dirt Salesmen With Lard On Their Faces

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

This short story is one hell-bent on describing the surreal, fictional or holographic existence of far distant Space Cadet Alien manipulators far beyond the wall of the space-time continuum who send an inferior race that is bred to destroy entire planets--all so the Space Cadet Alien manipulators floating in dead space can nosh on human flesh and drink human blood.  

Well, I'm a vampire, baby
I'll sell you 20 barrels' worth
Good times are comin'

I hear it everywhere I go
"Good times are coming"

I hear it everywhere I go...'

- Neil Young

Do Not Feed The Harbingers

Take a look at Artie's Daleridge's top-drawer personal liberty.  

See him?  We're looking down at a teeny little human standing atop what's left of his front yard.  The earth movers have come, and to us, that's beauty incorporated.  Why big yellow and black caterpillars made of high-stress steel and all dressed up like painted ladies?  Why not?  The federal money and the street.  Full stop.  

Artie's just come home from a backbreaking job at an Amazon warehouse.  He's been standing on his feet all day, and though a black rubbery pad is set out along the box-packing line, after nine hours of that, even Sylvester Stallone, the Italian Stallion, would have trouble limbering up before his next performance.  As all intellectuals already understand, Stallone is Da Man.  

Artie's been working on a novel in his spare time.  Friends who've read chapters one through three think he's a pretty good writer.  Then, when he got home late this afternoon, he saw it, piles of fresh brown dirt clods all over the front yard, the parking, and especially the sidewalk.  

The full plot line of Artie's book is still a little indeterminate.  Why so? Because Artie, after poking around the public library, found information from famous fiction writers like Ann Beattie and other writers and poets, facts that suggest sometimes literary people simply let the characters of the book tell the author where they want to go.  

Sure.  To us here at Traffic Control 57, that's completely out of sync with the real world.  No one should let go of design when plotting next to anything.  The road to success is painted by intricacy and close attention to the sidelong consequences of certain moves a character takes when presented with the plot.  

Dirt.  All over Artie Daleridge's front yard.  All kinds of noise.  Artie's writing career, so far as Saturdays are concerned, is a little like Bing Crosby accompanied by industrial noise.  Artie croons, the machine growls back, and thus the plot: A man pursued by robo-zombies.

Automation Nation--so fun. 

See?  That's witty.  To call the world of the future a patently suburban world that is under the thrall of a huge, computer-assisted political machine that, somehow, is adept at creating zombies via pressure tactics intended to stir various targets into murders, bank robberies, attacks, and random shootings--now, that's wit for you.  

Inspired by a nightmarish dream, Artie Daleridge imagined a man who could kill with his thoughts.  Once awake, once the sun had risen close to its apex before dropping like a stone-drunk tramp in the middle of an August afternoon in the park, Artie imagined a man, cornered and abused, a man who had horrific but suppressed rage.  Whenever the man blinked--a distant disaster. In the novel, that was at first a subject of shame for the little character.  But after that, once the black-and-white of kill or be killed wore away, the enraged nobody began to take pride in long-distance murder.  

Then, in the novel, the man discovers he's alive but trapped inside a hologram.  People have been watching him from far away for quite some time, all scientists, all eager to see what the character named Bob would do next.  

Beyond being trapped inside a hologram, Bob The Character learned that, in the hologram, the mass of men and women, even the children were merely reflections of only five archetypes: large enough icons from a faraway star that used the holographic dramaturge marionettes as emblems with which to describe a strange planet locked in a present--with no one in the menagerie aware of time at all.  

Crystal Flow.  The drug.  It masked the masque perfectly, at least in the fictional account, one that as a sort of meta-modernistic full-caliber weapon of total war, and a creation of what Bob The Character had surreptitiously learned were aliens with huge intentions of destroying entire solar systems, and all for precious metals and magnetic cousins of granite.  Bob The Character called them the Harbingers--forward teams hired by a much more powerful civilization in faraway spot outside nearly all galaxies within range of it, a civilization that actually was in lockstep combat with a mimicry of its harbingers, albeit one with a series of planetary destruction that ranged all across the Milky Way galaxy. 

The surreptitiously-administered drug, Crystal Flow, carries with it a sense of omnipotence and even omnipresence.  In addition to the seductive euphoria, some in the story--at least early on--believe Crystal Flow can do almost anything--"like even shining your shoes!"  

Desertification.  Pollution.  Smog.  Extinct wildlife. Dead vegetation. And, in the end, nothing but salty, tideless seawater and and thousands of miles of cracked earth.  Why so?  

No one in the novel knows. 

Save for Bob The Character.  He knows the Harbingers are the bearers of a retrograde and distorted form of DNA that controls all their thoughts and deeds: destroy, destroy, destroy.  Planet to planet--destruction.  

Bob The Character, who continues to stumble upon what he takes for arcane information, thinks of Mars, a planet that, in his once-real life, had been discovered to have potentially been the foundation of a highly advanced yet entirely psychic civilization.  Telepathically, those Martians who survived, some alleged, had floated through the solar system and found Earth, a pleasantly warm companion and rescue location to start over.  Then came the Harbingers. Destroying anything and anyone, particularly those who had knowledge of the Harbinger's distorted form of DNA.  

Bob The Character, probably a little paranoid after being hunted down a few too many times, knew too much about the Harbinger masquerade and self-interested version of saintliness.  That was a sort of high-road masquerade to hide the low-road destruction of planetary vitality.  For the hell of it.  

Look.  We're way up here in a weather reporter's plum job: the determination of the weather from high up in an atmosphere.  That's right.  An entire weather studio floating through space-time like a sort of submarine blimp, whipping up smog and casting it downward, batting at the wind, shattering clouds, and interrupting any transmission available with static attacks.  

Arty Daleridge?  He's hilarious, just standing there and looking at what is left of his obviously carefully-landscaped front yard.  We should do a weather feature on Arty Daleridge.  You know: a Christmas special: "How Used Dirt Salesmanship Makes Life So Much Better For Them". 

Add a little lard, and what do you get as a noble participant in the prefab gentry?  If you're loyal, the lard-asses and dirt slingers'll give you maybe a cut in the earnings. Especially if you've been saved.  In a particular set of churchy churches. 

Here at Traffic Control 57 we are good actors.  Believe me.  On rush hour mornings, over car radios and live streaming broadcasts of all the news about the local weather, we report.  Listeners choose whether or not to go out or stay in. Most simply drive through heavy rainfall--just to get some payment or another for doing some stupid jobs that make no sense in regard to freedom or even personal liberties.  

"Traffic Control 57!  We're watching Highway 97 like a hawk this rush hour morning!  Heavy fog!  Drivers, visibility is almost zero out there--so be careful on your morning drive!"

Ah yes! With the chopper's blender-like blades just whirling away.  Stupid drivers.  They believe we're way high in the air on a zero visibility day!  

Where are we, really?  In the studio.  Surrounded by sound dampening black foam, sitting next to an expensive microphone and blending our voices, with high-tech computer technology that provides the necessary ambience of the sound of helicopter blades! 

Perfection!  Now we're using drones to watch football games for us! 

Back to Arty: In his almost-real world, he's standing next to the now dirt-clod covered parking. The sidewalk?  It's completely blocked.  It's just great watching Arty's three-doors-down neighbor Aurora Schwartz, an eighty-year-old woman confined to a wheelchair try to get down the hill by wheeling her motorized deal up the hill to the nearest Burger King. Her strife.  Powerful.  Very.  Her determination to win despite the oblivious of the digging equipment is a total inspiration to those of us who merely have to climb atop piles of dirt or go around it--onto places like Arty's lawn.  

Life is gorgeous from way high in the air.  

Then  Arty's novel. Bob The Character finds a fellow fugitive, a lovely woman who, as Bob The Character looks on, can flash the best smile a fugitive man can even bear to imagine.  Better she is one of the five actual humans from which the billions of holograms were developed.  She informs Bob The Character he's also not a holograms.  She and Bob  The Character continue fleeing from one page--and directly into the next page as if each page is an entirely new dimensional anomaly.  Then, this is where Bob The Character and his newfound companion, Sylvia The Beauty, must wait.  

Wait? Why wait?  Why not get away and find shelter from the gnawing "world eater" teeth of the Harbingers, the pets of an even more powerful alien species from a planet that has no galactic pull but merely floats in otherwise dead space.  Why do Bob The Character and his amazingly lovely companion, Sylvia The Beauty, a woman who in the novel can run at a fast pace with a fresh miniskirt that seems to appear around her cushy and sleek thighs every single day; why do they stop running?  Where does she get her laundry done?  Why does the story end without either a climax or a denouement?  

Because that's where the novelist, like the Holy Creator of all reality, moves his characters around like fateful puppets, stopped telling.  If anyone asks, just say this to them: 

It's where Arty Daleridge has stopped writing.  Imagine placing an entire science fiction novel, a well-written one, in a steel file cabinet and allowing it to stew until it is returned to the valiant author, Arty Daleridge, and thus led by Arty The God of science fiction to a surprising conclusion.  

Traffic Control 57 here.  Today is a billowy, breezy day, although air quality is a little dangerous, especially for those sensitive to ever-present smog, something we all know we shouldn't complain about because the freeway has a landlord: the just wonderful oil and gas industry.  The oil and gas industry, owned by deep-pocketed sponsors of the state government, sit in distant offices that seem to float way atop the downtown area, and are not only aware of the smog that can even kill asthmatic children and hurt adults with heart trouble, they simply adore the profits.  

Way up in space, the alien race that controls the Harbingers in Arty Daleridge's holographic fear fest, the Harbingers at this point are having a fun luncheon consisting of dead humans.  The mysterious Alien Race Of Bigness, as the story goes, gets off peeling the skin off the already striped-by-whips backs of even captured holograms.  Luscious licking and chewing, a sort of five-star nosh for Space Cadets without a name in the story by Arty Daleridge.   

The Harbingers?  Though manipulated from millions of miles away and ages in the past on the space-time continuum; they get a a exceptionally strong sort of Crystal Flow jolt out of the blood that is fictional and never fed by Alien manipulator-cannibals; not to them.

No, never that.  Don't feed the Harbingers.    

When Society Is Afraid of Grief And The Grievous, Angels

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

I wrote this short story to portray the grief that isn't televised.  Americans have such a hackneyed understanding of how grief works on the human mind, heart, soul, and most importantly, body.  Experiences in grief do not entail being obliterated by the wrong color of pencil or an incorrect greeting at some soiree.  The alienation, the nihilistic sensibility (and sense), the emptiness, the worry, anxiety for the future, regret for the past, distrust of the present--not available in the movies or on Entertainment Tonite or even Real Housewives of Frogcrotch Georgia.  Hence, a short story all lit up like a Christmas tree by someone with enough experience with grief and loss it's uncanny I can even think at all.  

Enjoy!  Bon Appetit!  Or better: Bone Ape-tit!

THIS GRIEF ENSUES

So what?  Buddy's mother died.  

No biggie.  Lives come and go in the real world.  Regardless, the woman who had borne him into the world--she was now gone. Yeah.  The guy (we barely knew him), heartbroken, sat alone in his room for what to him seemed like days.  

What would anyone do if no one calls?  Who really knows what a human would do?  We could imagine, for example, such a person, lost to something now gone away, usually the past, which is always gone the instant one realizes it is the past, might sit waiting for the telephone to ring.  Or maybe even something in the daily mail--delivered around 3:30 every afternoon except Sundays--that might clue him into any help at all in assisting him, Buddy, a grieving middle-aged man suddenly so much akin to the sort-of feeling purveyed by the old Richie Havens version of a classic, "Motherless Child"--that never arrived. 

If it had, whatever, what never arrived had arrived far too late for anything. 

Buddy believed himself to be no fool.  Perhaps he never was a fool.  Remembering Richie Havens with solo guitar at Woodstock, a man on fire, gave the suddenly autonomous recluse a sort of hope.  Wasn't much.  Somehow the man knew that there is indeed hope in simply going numb.  

In reality, no one did call.  There is nothing to answer to, Buddy told himself.  Sure.  He was in pain--lots of it.  One only loses one's mother once.  New Age holistic mandarins or swamis insist the opportunity to grieve is an opportunity never to miss.  Buddy wanted to feel that way, but failing to feel holistic-anything, he also realized he'd somehow been in such a place, landed in a corner after some unmitigated disaster, unable to move away from whatever it was that had destined him to a television set, a stereo and some dimestore mysteries to solve.  

It is up to each of us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, Buddy to himself chuckled.  "But what if you don't even have any boots?"  

Funny.  Terms like "I'm shakin' in my boots", best used in seducing interested women--that one really grabbed him, for some reason, at the flash of an instant when the numbness staggered loose of him and he was able to feel, well, something.  

He'd always rather enjoyed listening to men he called "peckers" sparring over a woman.  See him? he'd overhear. He's in very bad health.  Right.  As if love of any kind is something that only entails the perfectly healthy who, Buddy, saw once, had seen a prospect of social climbing, of gaining access, of treating a woman like a means to a greater end.  

But why would a grieving man think of such a thing at the moment he had started to almost feel? Who knows?  The mind is a tricky instrument.  It is to be used carefully even in simple imagination.  The hopeful mind, even in grief, though, often floats away into something slightly more pleasant even if a reverie or a memory is all-too-similar to present experience: the loss of his own mother.  She'd fought hard for him.  Sometimes with next to nothing but Hamburger Helper and half the meat required for the simple, pan cooked recipe.  

Buddy always tried to help her.  She had her own griefs, many of them, and thus it was complicated for any son--to reach her when she backed into her own private sense of blackness.  

Now her mother with so much blackness in her life--she was no longer alive on earth.  Perished.  Sometimes, he almost fully grasped a sort of axiom:  Sometimes the dead never really die. Death, in some way or another, stands like an angel in the hallway, a lovely angel, who in a mysterious hush, announced, "You're dying!" 

Then the angel disappears.  But something seems to have changed.  Apparently, such experiences are not common.  Sometimes such mysteries are given names.  The Holy Spirit.  Enlighenment.  Nirvana.  

So much bunk. 

Buddy chuckled in his moment of enlightenment--the realization angels exist in the imagination--and thought about the old Three Stooges episodes from the 1940s when Moe, always mean, knocks Curly or Larry in the head, maybe with a barbell, and demands, "Wake up and go to sleep!"  

What else is there in this life?  The aging man sighed to himself.  Never to be heard.  He already knew what it is like to not be heard.  Grief ensues.  Grief becomes a fact of one's changed personality, but also an additional burden one will carry as if one is riding the wind to nowhere for the rest of time.  

"Wake up and go to sleep!"  The meaning of life.  One Buddhist text Buddy had read indicated that a human's life begins in brilliance and ends in brilliance--or it begins in darkness and ends within such.  Apparently, the trick is not to feel anything at all.  

We must realize that Buddy had long been a bit of a loner.  On the outside, the man, no spring chicken, definitely demonstrated extroversion.  Inside, however, while no shadow lurked other than in nightmares from past traumas and what pop psychologists call "catastrophic thinking", he clearly expressed to himself and himself completely alone a sort of security of being in the face in the crowd category.  

Why not?  It hurts to have faith.  In this world at least.  

But yes, Buddy would listen for the good, for the sublime, for that instant of clarity, the sight that all is endlessness, of a consciousness with no borders.  Then all of it would go, perhaps smashed by another very real catastrophe. 

No one called him.  You have to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps even if you have no boots to use as something that somehow supports bootstraps.  Such a silly phrase.  A little like those kiddie books that proclaim on their covers, I CAN READ ALL BY MYSELF.  Right.  And all complications are measures of one's mettle. 

Buddy, contemplating, nodded his head as if greeting an old friend, quietly snorted.  "In fantasyland," he murmured aloud. 

Help is always on the way.  Usually not.  As in never.  Buddy's mother was dead.  

Yes, the aging man felt ridiculous.  Sitting at his PC, he dialed up the YouTube version of Carole King's "So Far Away": 

Cue it up, Buddy half-grinned.  

"So far away.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

It would be so fine to see your face at my door.  

Doesn't help to know you're just time away."

Sort of.  King likely wrote about unrequited love.  We know what that is: a feeling of love left behind in the dead letter office.  Irretrievable.  

What happens when people perish?  Where do even the very best people disappear to?  Buddy snorted again: "Nothing lasts.  It's all temporary.  It's like learning once and for all that, no matter who you think you are, you're still homeless as fuck."

Buddy felt a tremor.  As if he never should have spoken the words aloud.  

As we can tell, class, Buddy's status is not one of some mystified fool out there; no, it should be clear to us all that Buddy, our ward as we watch him from far off where he may not be aware we are all watching him for purposes of research, seems sensitive to the why's and wherefore's of his own life.  

Nobody called.  Grief is to be condemned to live through not only sadness, but anger, loss, emptiness, rage, senselessness, fear, even happiness.  Buddy wasn't beyond laughing at himself.  Perhaps that is a strength.  Perhaps it's nothing but weakness.  After all, why no friends at a percarious twist in the road?  

Who knows?  Is a life something to be rigged?  As if, "Your ship will come in...' Then the ship doesn't bother to show on the horizon.   

Sometimes Buddy felt as if he'd done something terribly wrong.  To be brought low by a fact of life only to be left with no solace at all seemed almost like a mistake of karma to him.  For him.  And by him.  

What's left to do when nothing is left but to stream a few sad songs and maybe shed a tear or two.  Buddy did do that.  He played an old Jackson Browne song, "To A Dancer", a song about a loss due to a perished love.  As he ran the lyrics through his head, he felt like he was on some dumb AM radio retrospective. "Here. On 19 on our classic songs list, Jackson Browne's 'To A Dancer'!" 

"I don't know what happens when people die.

Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try.

It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear,

But I can't sing it.  I can't help listening."

Seemed right, Buddy dreamed. Then the old defenses come to the rescue like reinforcements: Don't feel it.  Don't feel anything at all.  Be a rock.  Get stoned after being literally stoned to death.  Go have a beer.  Whatever it needs, just get free of the bad feelings.  

Freedom, the joke.  

It's not as if Buddy did not have people he saw as friends.  He'd indeed gone to a bar the night after his mother died.  Friends?  

"Bummer dude."  

"I'm sorry.  Here.  Lemme get you a beer.  It's on me." 

Others, like some irritating woman who'd latched onto him (she always blew smoke in his face and then told him, "I'm a socialist!" as if that was halfway meaningful), saying, "Dude. It'll all be over in a sec."  

Great advice from the ever not-really-knowing knowing.  

Or one friend.  He tried cheering him up:  "Well, man, you do have Palmala, and Pinkie, and Number One, and Second Fiddle, and Thumbilina, and it's easy to hand it off to the ladies."  Great.  An allusion to masturbation. Always good for a laugh.  

"Need some cigs?  Come on.  Let's get high and stanch some anxiety."  

Does that work?  Best to just let it all fade, go numb, hit survivor mode, become heartless in the face of serious emptiness.  

Class, we've seen how little dialogue Buddy has to share.  We do see quite easily Buddy feels alone and lost.  Buddy is in grief.  I know I'm grateful as your professor, students, knowledge and observation: Let's see what Buddy does next.  

Indeed.  Buddy, beset on all sides by what felt to him to be demons, halfway noted to himself that grieving his mother had made him feel vulnerable, conspicuous, and somewhat paranoid.  Buddy laughed.  What is it like, he mused, to be one of the studies in Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"? 

That's a black-and-white movie.  Buddy had already seen the film three times.  After that, no connection to real life at all.  Or Fellini's "Orchestra Rehearsal": an entire symphony spends nearly half the film, he seemed to remember, warming up.  Then the orchestra hall begins coming apart.  It's like the Picasso painting "Guernica."  

Life is like that.  Plenty and then some.  Then a middle-aged man who feels like he's got limited time left feels like both waiting and not waiting for some sort of answer or a reason or an actual validation of any dream at all are pointless exercises.  

Buddy, momentary expert on grief.  It takes grief to know it.  Just as it takes grief to turn one into a survior or a soldier.  Some lives do float like angels; others are not fated for much of anything. As we taught our research team, class, some lives are meant for the subject to do nothing at all.  

Buddy's mother: She'd cry out in both rage and grief over trauma that could not go away: "I can't do anything at all!"  

Um, torture.  Buddy's darker lights betrayed him.  It takes desperation to know desperation, and all the flowery platitudes and memes on Facebook or elsewhere, including churches, are essentially meaningless when the rubbery road meets the supposition of body-as-experiment, body-as-machine, body-as-toy.  

Buddy, no dull excuse for an intellectual; he'd heard that Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is almost unreadable unless one has knowledge of a seeming multitude of various Irish dialects.  Accidentally on purpose?  Joyce had sworn he was going to destroy literature.  In his case, while it's debatable, he did succeed in making his modernism illegible.  And great.  

Some lives fly.  Others go nowhere.  As if by design.  Lost girlfriends?  Dime a dozen.  Grief over such losses?  Unavoidable.  Buddy had longed long enough, and many times, enough to never let it show, to bottle it all in, and then move on to the next act.  

Ah, yes.  Life as an opera scene or something out of a cheap vaudeville wannabe thing set loose on people as some sort of arty demonstration.  That's like the sum-total burlesque of "Go.  Do new things" with no walk-around money after the landlord gets his usual lion's share.  

Beautiful.  Isn't life lovely?  There it is again: negativity.  More like a sort of law set up as a way to protect people with soft or even Pollyannaish understandings of the real world: Don't understand what Buddy would have likened to Conrad's concept of "The Dark Force" inside even the brightest of lives. And there he is, way back in a past unlike Buddy's present, standing accused of "imperialism enablement".  Crap. 

Some express a grocery list of nearly endless griefs many of us, class, cannot comprehend.  Buddy: a sensitive man, albeit a true empath, not one of those fusty people who present themselves as empathetic without knowing, class, what hells true empaths are forced to live through.  Write that down.  It'll be on the exam on Monday morning. 

Then there is the sense, Buddy pondered, of "Let's see how much that dude can take!"  Greatness, that one. Then bitterness, a bitch's brew that seems like the Philosopher's Stone to the naive and those in thrall of magical thinking.  

"Oh.  Your mom died? It's inevitable, man.  You'll get over it." 

In Buddy's grievous ideation, all ships never come in.  Rather they hang way out to sea simply to be seen.  Bitter?  Yes.  Be positive, he thought.  Always say yes.   

Buddy sat there, remembering Camus' "The Stranger".  A Frenchman shoots an Arab for no reason at all after his mother died.  Hilarious.  How does one meet absurdity without offering absurdity a taste of absurdity?  

Buddy stopped to drink a little orange juice. He didn't bother to shower.  His socks were dirty.  His jeans--a mess of dirt and daily living.  Then he stood up, opened his back door, and left.  

Aging and grievous, our subject, Buddy, will never again be seen.

Note:  A PRIZE WINNER!  A TOTALLY WINNING STORY SOON TO BE A HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER!!!