Almost Fiction, West Virginia
Cosima, New Age Princess
Cosima. Lovely and wispy, pretty, dyed blonde, sleepy like a weepy willow on an autumn day. Cosima, semi-conscious control freak, nearly anorexic, ever in fear of losing health or being sullied by unwanted disease, or heart trouble, or especially vitamin deficiencies. Ponderer of Ottmar Liebert, a name derived from Otto, and a nominative for "wealth" and "fame". Pretty boy. Plays guitar almost like a gypsy on a sunny day.
Whatever. Cosima wakes me up one morning. I stare up at her. Gawd. So beautiful.
Cosima, happy, enjoying herself in her new relationship, always eager to hit the nice restaurants in town, practically towers over me like a sea siren. Amazing. She looks better than she did when I met her.
"Baby, you're really filling up those jeans!" I say, complimenting how her figure is now slightly more fulsome than only weeks before.
"I need to lose some weight," Cosmia intones.
"No. Don't do that. You look fine."
"I pefer myself a little thinner."
Sadly, only those who get an inkling of fully understanding the pretty blonde (actually a redhead) see this obverse of her New Age countenance. Ever in fear of something, something lurking from her infancy or childhood, gives her a near-compulsive and definitely obsessive desire to contol whatever it is.
Yeah. We've all got that bug. Once in a while. But all the time? I suppose I could tell all of you as we sit here in one of her outdoor restaurant favorites, "I think she's afraid of growing old."
"I am too," one of you quips. The rest of you: you're thinking that too. New Age youthfulness? Or Old Age shame and guilt? Who's got the PhD to aid in making a surefire determination of this basically casual examination of Cosmia after the fact of her departure?
Gentlemen don't tell. Of course. That's the honorable and loyal way to keep secrets. But I'm puzzled. Why?
I could never do anything precisely enough to satisfy Cosmia, Princess of the New Age. "You really need to eat this," she might quip within a vague tonality of demand. "I like my men like that man."
Indeed. There we were, sweating it out in The Container Store one cool-suddenly-turned-warm December evening near Xmas. I had become her dress-up doll. Not a bad way to cooperate with gentle coddles alongside any girlfriend. Women like to turn out men, make men more presentable. But this?
"See him? He owns a major restaurant here. See how he's dressed? You need to look more like him."
I eyed the man closely. No blue jeans. Nope. Black ones. Tight ones. And weirder, calf-high boots. A velveteen black jacket, and a mane of near-wildish natural dishwater. "Doesn't he look stylish?"
Fine. I'd try. Maybe spill for a poet's shirt, one of those frilly, loose-fitting white jobs that make even the most mundane of creative characters look like chivalry all over. I'd try, I thought as the man breezed past, a few brittle plastic containers riding the top of what looked to me to be a kind of man-purse.
I did try to live up to the coddling, I tell all of you. It's not quite dessert. But from the looks of it, the egg custard pie is looking especially delish.
"You know what?" I say. "The role model in Cosima's eye turns out to be a transsexual. No, go ahead and laugh. I bet that guy has all kinds of control issues. It's odd how the controllers seem to identify one another without even pausing to reach consciousness or reason."
One of you: "You're such an intellectual."
Hey, people, stop tittering.
"Do you see me as a fashion plate?"
Why aren't my friends still laughing?
Obvious. I'm about as much of a fashion plate as any other aging slacker. Which is the point. I never felt like standing out, really. Cosima, though, did have a point: When she suggested I begin wearing more colorful shirts--pretty rainbows, Hawaiian jobs, that sort of thing, while I didn't take the urging well at the time, I now see my choice of grays, deep blues, and unobtrusive appearances, nowadays I note that, indeed, my clothing choices at the time seem to have been a reflection of my sense of vulnerability.
All that time in our relationship, I was white-knuckling it. I drank a lot of anxiety and worry down the drain when alone. In fact, I may have rebelled against Cosmia's directions mainly because I didn't want to call attention to myself.
She'd call it "my inner child". Damn her.
Was that an affectionate damn? Or a futile one?
I loved Cosmia, but Cosima would never reciprocate. "I cherish you," she'd say as if she was an all-wise female Buddha. What was that supposed to mean? One idea is that, indeed, Cosima was a doctrinaire feminist. A possession. Women in general I suspect hate being possessions of patriarchal men. Hence, in a classic round of uttered reactionism, I was a female's possession.
Now I know why Cosima wanted me to be a bauble. But even deeper, I always got the sense the New Age princess hid something. Was I one of those second-raters in waiting? Maybe some won't know what I mean. Perhaps I was Cosima's prop until Ottmar Liebert came around to claim her, Cosmia the willing one for him.
"I do cherish you..." The soft croon. Still itches me at times. Within that croon hid a sense of unrest too. Cosmia's digs were spotless. I couldn't dare to track in mud. She'd meet me at the door with a dustpan and a broom. Shoes--off.
Weird to be relegated to a restrictive identity as a sort of male geisha. A silk shirt. She wanted me for one. Hence, oftentimes around Cosima, I felt like a potted plant, a pretty (OK, I'm bragging) arm decorator. Someone to stand in for the real one, the invisible one.
How many times have people been locked into the fool position?
Needless to say, Cosima wanted me to move in with her. The old bum rush for that too. Pressure. She even said something alluding to that desire of hers: Her mother wasn't happy that at 43 she wasn't married.
Seriously? A doctrinaire feminist is worried her mother doesn't appreciate the fact she'd never married? What adds up with some women anyway? If we males fully understood the female mind, and vice versa, both man and woman in general would end up bored so thoroughly that the possibiilty of perpetuating the human race would in consequence become moot.
So there's that. Mark up a point for "my side". Want some Candy?
What happens when "my side" also has control issues? I'd been controlled--fiercely--by my mother. I never liked it being told to slather Brylcreem or Dep on my already stringy hair as a kid. Loathed that. All the other kids in 7th grade were long-haired like their older brothers. Or the dress pants in an era of tattered blue jeans. Why would any parent of a college student buy him dress pants in a world where jeans are not only more durable and less expensive but also what fits the personality?
Ponderousness. The ding-bats of the so-called Generation Gap--home again after years in the dark.
Cosima, on the other side of the proverbial coin, looked crazy hot in purple tights. She'd been a dancer--maybe she was still dancing on another channel, I don't know--but where she worked, I'd heard, she could control some of the most powerful executives in the accounting firm that only thought it had her.
No Nosferatu; no, not Cosima, New Age princess. If anyone was Nosferatu at the time, that would have been me. I didn't want to be seen--by anyone. I wanted a cool dark place to brood and to ponder and read without all the noise of some creepy social setting where everyone has to be either attentive to the social or off to somewhere else.
No, not Starbucks. Starbucks is fine. If the coffee company could shed its recently-acquired corporate riptide, it'd be finer than fine.
Still, as long as we're looking for the corporate nature of "an inhuman but technically legal citizen that spews money like an ideological ATM at the drop of a suggestion", I began picking up hints: real estate development.
Weird. There we are on "a vacay", speeding through a desert of many interpretative dance moves, and all the while I'm of the mind of being pals in a sort of Bob Hope and Jack Benny mode of early 21st Century "The Road To Nairobi" television skit.
What a put-on that must have been. Something wasn't right. Was I on a reconnaissance mission like a crash-test dummy? Lingering thoughts. With an icy companion who, as mentioned, cherished me.
Me. The good luck charm.
Long, winding roads through the Mojave. All the way to the LA coastline. Where Cosmia dragged me after a long hot rental car trip--all to "be with" the Pacific.
Wanna listen to the soft lappings of oceanic tides? Then by all means plug yourself into your iPod and listen to New Age pigeon poop.
By then, "evil" was lurking the testy heart of mine.
Control issues? Some obey them. Others don't. I don't. I rebel. When someone tries to lasso me or force me into a doggy's lunge leash against my will, I'll explode. Problem was, because I felt love for Cosima with little to no actual or verbal commitment to that, I began to sink. And in lieu of not sinking, I exploded in volleys of angry language.
Pent-up anger is horrific, not only for the addressee but also those who address. A loud speaker. I think I learned rebellion from my mom: She was backed into a corner almost all the time.
She lashed out. That was terrifying yet also inspirational.
So what's it like being stuck in a damp quonset hut in the middle of a party where a dancer doesn't want to get up and dance? My hands were cold. I was cold. I felt lost, abandoned. Yet nope: Cosmia did not reciprocate.
Cosmia had "too much on the line", I believe, and thus her need to control everything around in her own set of vulnerable moments meant "bauble off!"
Life as a woman's personal "clap-on/clap-off electronic and hand-friendly nursery call device.
I got sick. Deathly ill, after the vacay of dank resort. The winner of my discontent all over again. But I did break loose. Walked straight-on the night she and I returned to level ground. I put her "on restriction". Told her, "We need to see other people". Wasn't about to have another lossleader put a bucket over my candle.
Sometimes even a male feels as if he's been whored out. I certainly did. I went drunk for months. Even when a much more wholesome woman at the firm came on to me--
I was a goner. Sometimes you have to get gone again even when you're standing up for yourself. I tell you folks this. Standing up for oneself is often necessity: even when the choices of staying and letting go are almost abominable choices, one's gotta choose.
After that, one of Cosima's bigger feminist friends announced to the entire world that I was a lout.
Here ya go: Winning.
Let Us Now Reappraise Post Opinionists: The untold myth of Ramesh Ponnuru
If you ever meet me, Ramesh, on the streets of Washington DC, let us both hope this hopeful is appropriately dressed, enough so as not to frighten you via the horrors of hippiedom.
Relax. As people, at least to those who care to take a good look to see us; we must ask ourselves: Who cannot help but become post-slackers in these days of a rising yet confined set of opportunities like ours?
Dressage? Hay is for horses.
But who's most obedient? Who is too inflexible? Who has the very best of balances?
How about we see one another in DC's Brentwood? That designation cannot quite calculate itself into a congruent equivalence to the much more famous Brentwood, that of the famed O.J. Simpson white Bronco ride through maybe the Hollywood hills.
I'm not sure where the famed pro-football star and actor finally surrendered. All citations merely indicate the oddly-abbreviated acronym for the most populous of West Coast metropolitan areas: L.A.
While you likely do not know the following, I assure you that many of the most potent folk rock stars had a variety of opinions of the so-called City of the Angels. Here's one opinion:
"Well, it's hard to believe so you get up to leave
And you laugh at the door that you heard it all before
Oh, it's so good to know
That it's all just a show for you."
So there, Ramesh. Those lyrics were penned by Neil Young. From his October 15, 1973 release, "Time Fades Away". Neil, a transplant from Winnipeg, son of a Canadian journalist and sports writer and novelist, like many who moved to "the center of action" in the mid-1970s, played the fifth song on the record with a band called The Stray Gators.
"Fourteen junkies too weak to work
One sells diamonds for what they're worth
Down on Pain Street disappointment lurks...
You know how time fades away..."
That song? "Time Fades Away". A little obvious, isn't it.
Before we begin to see each other in Brentwood, Ramesh, I have a confession to make: Sometimes I feel all nationalistic and stuff. In fact, not long ago, in my very own ghetto here in suburban Dallas, I had another strange encounter with a sort of nationalism:
Some dude approached me near the bus stop atop the hill, all to explain to me who you are.
Don't get too paranoid. No one is out to get you. Not even the apparently ubiquitous commies--who are everywhere, who own the government, and are already planning, rumor has it, to take wealthy people's toys away from them in a big and reified reactionary push. Push! Push! Push!
Have I already muffed my confession? And what did I hear that late summer afternoon? I'd been listening to Danger Mouse on my Amazon clearance sale ear buds. Ha! I almost wrote "dear buds".
Anyway, once the stranger approached me close enough to whisper: "Hey. Wanna know the story of Ramesh Ponnuru?
"Hell yeah!" I almost shouted. The stranger, a scruffy white man with a sort of train engineer's cap, blue and white stripes in rumples atop his whitish hair, sat down almost as well as a confidence man in a 7-11.
"Here's the dope on Ramesh!" he hissed. "Ramesh is really an illegal immigrant. Worse, we all want to love Ponnuru--but he's the wrong color."
"Aw, come off it!" I hooted. "That's mean!"
"Mean. But true. The absolute truth."
He continued as if I hadn't objected at all: "Ramesh was a young boy who learned to run for the roses in faraway Bengali territory! You know that's for real. Someone gave me proof: a set of documents. Even a snapshot of Ponnuru as a very young boy!"
"I heard he is from Kansas. Some place like Prairie Fire, Kansas! Look it up, man. P-R-A-R-I-E F-I-R-E!"
A hiss like a cobra: "Don't say anything!"
Then continued: How did Ramesh become a journalist? Funny you didn't ask me that. Let me fully inform you..."
Thus proceeded the most outlandish story about the birth of a famous editor at National Review, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (enter--prize), and eminent newspaper columnist for the Washington Post.
"Ramesh was just a small boy. He lived in the kind of poverty we well-padded-fannies in the US call abject because it sounds scary."
Wait. Let's pause. Well-padded fanny? The stranger wore a soiled, sweaty, odorous and white tee shirt, and that train engineer's cap. In other words, he looked like any other lowlife that just comes out of nowhere to inform people about...what?
"Look. Ramesh as a six-year-old lived in poverty so abject that the town where he lived, a place that once had been verdant jungle, is a hardscrabble desert of dusty roads, dusty yards, if you can call them that, and dusty, ramshackle frame houses, some of which have been supported with wood filched from pine warehouse skids. Can you believe it?"
"Well, how'd the columnist get into Princeton?"
"Funny you should ask." Quite the retort, Ramesh. Why such animus from some dude at a bus stop?
"Because Ramesh, even as a young boy with an important chore, had a sort of 'light of Damascus' experience. What was it, you may ask. In parts of India, some of us know, firewood is so scarce that young children are sent out to forage--". The stranger paused as if for emphasis:
"--to forage...for wet cow chips!"
"Holy cow! Do people milk cattle before it?"
"I dunno. Anyhow, Ramesh, according to my sources, filtered out into what is left of his town's collective pasture, a sort of violation of the proverbial 'tragedy of the commons'. But Ramesh's personal self-interest depended on the collection of cattle crap. Can you believe it?"
"No, I cannot believe it. Not at all."
"Well, one day," the stranger, who continued to look suspiciously at what looked to be a second-hand wristwatch, behaved as if he had heard nothing from my reaction, went on, "Ramesh came upon the cow paddie of them all. A monster, almost a mountain of cow product! Thus, dutifully, the young six-year-old, he stooped down to gather what he could in his hands. Don't turn up your nose and think it's gross. That's how some in India live."
"Why is that important at all?"
"Ramesh was overjoyed. In a day or two, once the stuff dried, he knew his family would be able to keep the home-fires burning. That's right, buddy-boy. In India some people in areas where all the firewood has been taken, long have resorted to drying the stuff and then using them in ovens. Makes for a hot fire. Hot enough to cook a good stew of curry!"
"So? What's that have to do with me?"
"Listen! Once little Ramesh cupped as much of the wet chip in his small palms, he began to run for home. Mind you, Ramesh, despite his family poverty, spoke the Queen's English quite well. What did he begin shouting?"
"OK. Tell me. I'm just so curious," I groused.
"Ramesh shouted this: 'A SCOOP! MAMA! I GOT A SCOOP!'"
"Cool story, bro."
"Thus Ramesh, in a true fit of inspiration on the run, suddenly realized his fate was to be a crack journalist! Amazing how the Good Lord works--even on the Hindu!"
"Aw, come on. That's can't be true..."
"Sir! But it is! I have it on precise knowledge!"
What? The man reached into his right back pocket and produced photos: A young boy with his hands cupping an almost massive amount of stuff. I sat back, stunned. Every picture tells a story, and this story was definitely news to me.
"OK. So what's the bit about the head of National Review starting out in Prairie Fire, Kansas?"
"Look it up!"
"Why? I'm not sure I even care. I'm just sitting here waiting for the bus, man. What's up with this crap?"
"Kansas as the columnist's birthplace? That. Is. A. Cover. Story!"
"Wouldn't it be cooler," I quipped, "if it was Southern Kentucky? Got plenty of molehills up there..."
"Good advice," the stranger reacted. "But that's not true at all!"
"That A SCOOP weirdness is a little much," I commented. "So what's up with his excellent cotoure?
"Ramesh has come up quite amazingly in the world of nationalism," the stranger intoned.
"So? Nationalism this, nationalism that. India," I shot back, "is going through the throes of ethnic nationalism right now."
"Fake news! Crap a la Modi!"
"That's mod. I mean, odd."
Then the stranger began parroting the entire thing--with quotes from Friedrich Hayek!
"You don't understand economics, buddy boy, because you're a socialist! I mean, just look at you! You're out here wearing smelly jeans, and some tee shirt that shows a Hello Kitty with bandages across her forehead with the caption, HELLO ZOMBIE, and nobody knows what the hell it means, man. Here:"
The quote: "If socialists understood economics they wouldn't be socialists." Then this:
And there you go: absolute truth.
"Not buying".
"Not buying? That's communistic!"
That's like saying, "If Pee Wee Herman fans understood comeday they wouldn't be Pee Wee Herman".
"Maybe. I mean, who knows? Ever meet Pee Wee?"
"Nope. I mean, I know about his episode in a movie theater. That's nothing compared to the Epstein scandal."
That stranger, tattered but very sharp--in an agitprop kind of way.
"Look dude. I don't have a lot of money. I live low to the ground. See? Here I am in a big car culture of a city, and I'm riding the flippin' bus!"
"Because you're a commie."
Take this: "'The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them legal!' Now what's up, little man at the bus stop?"
"Quit trolling me," I said. "What the hell does 'treat' mean in that quote? Treat--as in 'doctor'? Or treat--as in 'Trick or treat'?"
Quotes within quotes. Whoa, buddy. This convo was really flying. The bus? It almost always comes on time. This time, like an elite guest, the entire bus seemed intent upon arriving late for some kind of emphasis lost on me.
"So. You're an expert in free market economics?"
"What I say is the absolute truth. Can't you hear? The words. The words are everything."
"I thought Ramesh was all about the Holy Spirit..."
"He is!"
"Then what about all the outcasts, the prostitutes, the cripples, the losers, the guys out fishing for their next meal? Did they count at all in Christianity?"
"That was then, this is now."
"Now? As in 'this is so Now, man!'?"
The stranger, looking right at me, lit a cigarette. But before he could blow smoke in my face, the bus, like the Great White Whale, appeared on the northern horizon like a messiah.
"Thar she blows!" I shouted.
The rest, of course, is totally historic.
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Sex, Drugs, And Rock-N-Roll: A really deep investigation
How could anyone know about anyone else? Why, for instances unknown to those who are less-than-superficial, would anyone judge a stranger or even a neighbor by the music he (or she) finds relateable.
Remember being somewhat torn by such quandaries? While I'm likely a poor example of such predicaments--which music is "the correct music", I do believe I may be capable of contributing to how I reacted.
After all, I minored in music performance. As a trombonist. Supposedly, I was awfully good. I'm not certain, though, that I ever believed that. As a music minor at Stephen F. Austin State University from 1972-76, I played at either second or first chair. Heavy competition for certain.
Like the time Nacogdoches, Texas, son Jimmy Battles, an evangelical before evangelicals were cool, one of those people who ascertained all my thoughts and deeds as a manifestation of "the unsaved", challenged me for first chair.
Battles was cunning. He knew I had weaknesses: If a musical score was a raft of "tricky rhythms", I'd often continue to trip-up until I finally caught the seeming intention of the score. Hence, Battles found one of the weirdest pieces, a thick-looking sheet of wild rhythmic changes he believed would assure him first chair.
My thoughts at that moment in early 1976? Why bother? What's so important about being first chair?
I certainly didn't have a music major's skill in the game. While I loved playing in the symphonic band, I didn't have a career in music in mind, really. I may have been good enough to play in a smallish or civic symphony orchestra, but I'd never get into a major one.
Financial issues had driven me to a minor in music. I'd already decided that, come all the hot water in the world, writing would be my choice. Poetry? That wouldn't pay. Hence, I opted for newswriting and editing. The music minor scored me a couple of scholarships. I'd done well in the Lake Highlands High School symphonic band--made it to second chair once--but no, I never was what we in high school called "a band mullet".
Remember? Mullet haircuts? The rage, come 1971. Friends all over, in and out of the band, sported what looked like hairy dead fishes on the tops of their heads. Meanwhile, in the late 1960s, the hippie world met Christianity, and indeed, that was kismet.
As a young, summarily unaware young journalist for SFA's Pine Log student newspaper (all about lumberjacks there, a university with one of the finest forestry programs in North America, a school with excellent math and science instruction), I had become the shoo-in for the popular music reviewer's position.
Shazaam. Hold my beer. No, wait. Let me keep my beer. I can do this with one hand. One bit of cred is that by my junior year, while I was lucky to be a select student at the university due to my supposedly unparalleled verbal reasoning skills, I was "partying down".
What did that mean? At the time, I had no idea what "partying down"meant. Everyone here in the East Texas area's biggest university was doing it. I was already fairly well known for spanning too much leisure time off in Beeragonia. I just made up that state's name. It's a country that rides the underground like a subway surfer.
Deep, eh?
Luckily, SFA's music department offered several courses in the history of both the blues and country or folk traditions in American music--as well as the history of music in the western world. I took all three. I loved all three. I did well in all three.
Even though the jazz and folk instructor was a little weird to me. He, like Battles, was a Southern Baptist. Didn't like either Dylan or The Beatles, believed jazz needed to be literally perfect, no missed notes, no strange connotations, straight ahead or bust.
As a "big time" music reviewer, my first stab at that craft involved the first really big-hit Fleetwood Mac album. Black-and-white cover, Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks caught in a ginned-up sort of magic seduction act on the cover. "Rhiannon", "World Turning", "Say You Love Me".
There I was, listening intently to what I took to be truly awesome musicianship and songwriting. So I wrote about it. The review might have run 600 words, short enough to fit into the smallish weekly (and free) school paper.
Seems to me that, in my alcohol- and marijuana-induced fog, I took a shot: Fleetwood Mac would be destined to be the hit group of the next decade. Boom. A sensation. That record was top drawer to much of the student body. As it well should have been. Fleetwood, MacVie, Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine MacVie: all seasoned professionals, Fleetwood and "Mac" began with John Mayall's legendary Bluesbreakers.
Then Battles entered the stadium. Total champ. He demanded, as a member of the music fraternity, that it is "your job to review our orchestral and band concerts, especially our stage band".
Seriously? By the time I began writing those short reviews I was on my way out. The stage band director had changed the "lab band" into a smallish ensemble "full of flair"-- like TGIF. Jazzy. Smooth. I was excluded in order, I believed, because the lab band professor wanted "all Christians". I didn't happen to be part of his particular sect--hence, "out out bright candle".
Meanwhile, the blossoming of the "black orchid" of Bipolar Disorder was beginning to bloom in the darkroom in the back of my mind. I did not realize it, but the mood swings and drinking were linked. All I knew is that sometimes I couldn't sleep due to anxiety, or could barely get out of bed and make it to any morning classes.
Of course, a good music reviewer's job is to both set down contexts and facts surrounding a record under "expert" scrutiny. Even then (I was 21) I could tell that many music reviews in Rolling Stone and Cream Music Magazine focused on the groovy music, but left the lyrics, some of them complex, out of the picture completely.
As writers?
I had already developed a sort of emotional affair with Fleetwood Mac. 1972's "Bare Trees" grooved me, not the other way around. "The Ghost":
"And then the winds start to blow
And the fire comes scorchin' down (oh, yeah)
And then the sky disappears
In the cloud with an awful sound (yeah)
And when you can't hold out
Then you run to the underground."
Hey! Autumn weather! Just like right now here in Dallas, Texas: Temperatures--much cooler. At last.
Oh yeah.
Almost better than the music of the latter, 1975's Mac breakthrough, I also, while still on an "album rock" backburner, began gaining popularity. I'd get calls from students all over campus, and off-campus: "Hey. You need to listen to Arrowsmith's 'Get Your Wings'--or, "Come on over, we'll party down, we're from New Jersey, and we want you to listen to our Bruce Springsteen's first two records."
Plenty of beer. I was "pop". I had connected with the town's smallish folk-rock scene. I'll never forget when Sissy Farenthold, running for Texas governor, held a rally, when some friends of mine pulled off a near-perfect rendition of the Allman Brothers' "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed". Impressive. The wondrous lead guitar became a studio musician and music teacher at Dallas' El Centro and also participated in a City-sponsored program for young artists.
Then the big challenge: the closed cage death match: "Battles v Hilgers in the contest of the century!"
Battles. In the music building's practice rooms literally every night. Hilgers, hitting the practice rooms, careful to get a room next to that of Battles. Battles, playing especially loud as if to say, "I'm all pumped up and I'm gonna win!" Hilgers, listening carefully while watching the score. Battles, striding out of the practice room, sneering at his opponent.
Come the first chair challenge. Battles plays especially loud. Hilgers uses his secret weapon: dynamics, i.e. loud and soft passages. Battles, a technical wonder. Hilgers, speeds up, slows down, adds what Hilgers interprets as style.
Anxious ensues after the performances are complete. Battles, Hilgers, both await the judges.
Finally, the judges return from the private office. Congratulate Battles for a great performance. But awards Hilgers first chair.
Yes, Battles, from a technical interpretation, had skills I didn't. But regardless, I was still of the mind that being number one in the college band was no big deal. In my own "Silent Way" (props to the Miles Davis 1969 breakthrough stylistic change!), all I'd done was outsmart yet another quite arrogant evangelical who'd already put himself on a pedestal called "I'm chosen, you're not."
Takes one to know one...
Whatever, first chair or not, my desire to learn how to improvise and get into the notch of backbeat swing and pushy jazz fusion stylistics were dashed. Not evangelical enough. Or this: "The lab band is to be reserved for music majors for now on."
Seriously? What was I going to do with all my years of training? I'd practiced like no tomorrow--for years. As was the practice in the LH band in the Seventies, Dallas Symphony Orchestra enlistees tutored the students. My mother had really put that six-and-a-half bucks a week on the line. Hell, she could barely afford a Friday night "out to eat" in the local Jack N The Box parking lot, she, my sister and I, noshing on Jumbo Jacks and to-die-for French Fries.
Sometimes even a milkshake.
No matter. I was also a popular music reviewer. Just to be "devilish", I'd add a few bars here and there. When the orchestra director angrily approached to demand I focus my writing on his orchestra's wonders, I smelled the sort of censorship folks like The Manhattan Institutes Christopher Rufo somewhat successfully tried on several major American universities.
How so? Censorship involves the demands a newspaper or movie company, television production team either does not produce information or entertainment as the censors desire--or its opposite: produce what the censors want--or else.
A two way street.
I told the professor who supervised the Pine Log student newspaper. She agreed with me. I am not certain if she spoke to the orchestra director. Needless to say, she suggested I behave like the King of England: Be Calm And Carry On.
I "did" Jethro Tull's "Minstrel In The Gallery", a Scottish change of style that threw me. I didn't want to listen to any more medieval music. I panned it. Result? The whirlwind. Lots of controversy and threats to keep me out of various circles in the dorms.
During an especially deep depression, I chose to review one of my musical idols: Joni Mitchell. She'd also switched styles away from folk and folk rock--to a jazz-inflected offering: "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns".
My mood? Humdrum. I halfheartedly wrote the review. The paper's supervisor said, "Gordon! You can do better! Rewrite this. We know you adore Mitchell's music."
That then-current switch from folk rock to a sort of folk rock-infused fusion still threw me. Now that I'm all grown up, I truly appreciate Mitchell and many others' gestures toward the jazz and blues ancestry of rock.
So. What about classical stuff? I didn't review any of it. But later in life, when my mood swings began to abate at times, I'd walk to the SMU area Sound Warehouse, a branch that had switched almost completely to classical, mainly to serve the Highland Park area's yen for classical music.
I remember purchasing one CD a month when I was unemployed. Stuff like Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, or Beethoven-penned quartets and quintets, or Prokofiev's solo piano concertos, Schoenberg's earthshaking twelve-tone and atonal wake-up calls. Brahms. Stravinsky. Aaron Copeland's "El Salon Mexico".
Long walks in the August sun? I'd managed to find a Sound Warehouse salesperson who helped me find what, in his opinion, were the best recordings he knew of. My favorite? Shostakovitch's Cello Concerto No. 1.
I recently purchased a new copy of this offering, one I could listen to day and night: Enrico Dindo (cello) and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
Which brings to mind a book I purchased several years ago. As an admirer of Dmitri Shostakovitch, and even more a fan of Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova. She's the fearless poet who told Stalin, "You will learn to fear me."
He did learn to fear her. She had the cooperation of the entire literary world. He couldn't just bump her off.
Culture warriors, perhaps it's time to take a look at Andy McSmith's nonfictioon account of the throes of geniuses under the dumb threats and imprisonment, "Fear And The Muse Kept Watch: The Russian Masters--from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovitch and Eisenstein--UNDER STALIN".
"I demand you produce reviews of the college orchestra!"
"Our lab band is now reserved for music majors only!"
Or Akhmatova: standing before Moscow's Lefortovo Prison--where her poet husband and their poet son were held for nearly two decades.
Or Pasternak, author of "Doctor Zhivago", also relatively immune of Stalin's culture vulture censorship bit, seen in a final photograph: He's smoking a cigarette in the icy field surrounding his dacha, the one "awarded" him by the Soviets who basically wanted the poet out of their hair.
Or Shostakovitch. Close listenings to Symphony No. 5, a commissioned work to celebrate the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, one of the most clever military victories in modern history: Icy, that February, 1943. Hundends of Nazi soldiers, including at least 22 generals: captured.
We should remember that the Red Army WWII game-changer would not have been possible without US-manufactured bombers and fighters.
Ever been censored? What would it take for the US to fully embrace a wholehearted and "journalistically balanced" education rather than some sort of propaganda festival as imagined by the kind of doctrinaire "apparatchiks" who are supposedly feeling all the oats. Not merely theirs, but all the oats.
As a Vietnam war veteran once told me: "Put 'em in the middle and get behind them!"
Meaning? Let's give the censors a really nice, WWII-style "tornado sandwich".
*
The One Adventure of One Jason Willick: A study in looking back
I know. I already know. I am a two-legged nuisance. But...but...but... Especially the red hot twerps who lurk behind the scenes and in darkness so deep even Bela Lugosi would probably trip on his own vampiric wingtips already know that bait-and-switch is "the way to go" in almost any episode of the performative world of cosmetic politics. They "no likee" when unapprehended slaves appear on their doorsteps with information they don't want to know.
Huddled masses? Brought to who again? Should we continue to beleive the hype? Is it mere hype?
Who actually knows?
But what about me and the millions like me? What about our rights to life? How do I insert myself into a prefab graveyard--where all too many see the light of freedom as a kind of afterthought? Where more see the freedom of others a matter of the seers putting themselves first all the livelong day.
Who lurks in the walnut-sized knots of heart in "our" highest earners? Earning what? Self-interest as widespread insularity?
Graveyards. That's where I fit in. I get some free baiting, and there they are, getting it up with all the switcheroos in the arsenal of excuses, alibis, and "the dog ate my homework" blah-blah.
Then they'll blame someone else for being coerced into taking even that trouble of blaming indeed.
To be a grave, or to be graven, or to get so flippin' grave over the slightest details of...what??? Foreign policy???
That. That's a euphemism. Foreign policy is the coherent equivalent for "let's look at every little person other than me and my friends".
In that regard, I'm a foreigner. Texas: foreign, fly-over country, a sort of desertified nonesuch laying in wait on the prairies where all the women wear bonnets, all the men ride rodeos as a "contact sport" with horses, and all the Jethros and Bubbas, the Cletuses, and Beaucephaluses are your "basic commoners".
I think of a song by Robbie Robertson, "Breaking All The Rules", a record from his classic adult alternative comeback, "Storyville":
"Grew up on the west side
Never even been to the east side
Don't know what they do with their lives
Over there over there."
Now feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for Texas. Texas never had the opportunity to become American. How'd that happen?
Remember the a la mode!
To be honest, now that we're writing all about the one adventure of one Jason Willick, columnist, I have to add that I don't know where the hell in Denver, Colorado, I might have enjoyed my infancy. I did grow up on the west side. Daddy'd made sure we lived close to the mountains, and alas, as a third grader on the walk home from Lasley Elementary, I distinctly remember the rich, beery aroma floating down from the Coors brewery "just up the road".
But no. This adventure has nothing to do with me. Who is this me anyway? Willick's the subject. Stanford graduate?
Ha! I remember Stanford's marching band stepping out during a Christmas or Thanksgiving televised football halftime. That was back in around 1973. And there it was: A fine marching band forming shapes on the gridiron.
What was wrong with that? There it was: In protest against the Vietnam conflict, the Stanford marching band formed this:
A giant toilet. And I was impressed.
Who really wants to be drafted when one hasn't completed the first semester at a state university? I know I didn't want that in my life. Nevertheless, I already knew from good parenting (not always consistently good) that duty means "doing stuff you don't wanna do because your role in being dutiful is never meant to be a pleasant one". Exactly. In some quarters, however, duty is altogether verboten. Why so?
I have no idea. For some, there is no such thing as duty. Rather, it's all about "personal liberties". But for whom?
To the draft office: I know I did drive my ancient Earl Sheibed 1966 gray Ford LTD back to Big D from Nacogdoches, Texas. I didn't want to take a physical to see if I was healthy enough to take some lead for a cause I didn't find agreeable. I went with a sense of duty for the country. Not merely my country. The whole country. Duty is not pleasant when you're waiting for a med-check like that. Damn. That stethescope was cold. But I got the checkup and was apparently good to go.
I was terrified. Because I knew I had a duty to the country and to the government. Now hear this: Only yesterday our WH wonder dog told the press the U.S. is "my country".
Really? Show me the mortgage.
Luckily, because my father died by his own hand only two or so years prior, I was designated 4H. Last surviving son. Of a father who deeply yearned to be a writer.
"Ain't me. I'm no fortunate son."
Many friends of mine did do their duty. Nearly all never came home. Homes that were in their "subjective valuations" suddenly meant "Nowhere is home anymore:.
OK. Now there is the case of one of the Washington Post's finest columnists. Does he carry a secret identity of "foreigner" all the way back to NYC; does he ride AmTrak? Flying back and forth could be fingered as "a waste of gas". I know I shouldn't dig into Willick's business. But hey: I'm pest du joeur all the time.
I had a horrific dream involving WaPo columnist Jason Willick. I'd been struggling a little at the time in how to best measure-up white space in "an epic poem" I was writing straight for "the drawer of transient existence"--which lurks near the entrance of my bedroom. I allow poems to sit in the dark for a while so I can then pull one out to see if it still flies. After all, you never know: You might be secure one day, only to hear all those hard-knocks on your front door, hard knocks that tell you you're being cleared out, moved, taken away.
I'm not the only one who feels that kind of "poetic trauma". A poet-friend of mine long ago told me her grandfather warned her: "Keep a suitcase under your bed because you never know when you may have to leave."
I remember her telling that, her voice rubato.
Of course I hugged her.
Anyway, in this particular dream, I had somehow become Jason Willick.
Context? There was none, not in my dream. Rather, I noted heavy, icy cold rainfall. The sky had been blue only moments before it seemed to me-as-Willick. Sudden weather--bad. The wind--high. One gust forced a nearby garage door to rise up and then slam shut, a startling noise that made me shiver even more as I stood, petrified, on somebody else's front lawn.
Scared, I reached into my left pocket. Nothing. Not even a Kleenex. I panicked. What could I do? Where could I go? What did this sudden expression of vulnerability mean?
What is vulnerability anyway? Right?
Nowhere to go. Seriously. My existence: suddenly a disjunct melodic line. No cars. But I could hear gusts of them--from somewhere unknown. Shoulders tensed. Neck stiffened. Nape hairs straight up. Then I thought I found solace:
Between houses. Word, dude. Then: slipped. Wet and very green. Rye grass. I plunged. Between two houses.
"Don't make me a victim
Don't make me the clown
With my arms reaching out
And my head hanging down"
Alas! White space! A space between meaningful buildings! Each ensconced within one single blanket of light fog.
Then a dog barked. A big dog. A massive Great Dane, I presume. I did not know this neighborhood. I did not know if I should give a yell or not.
Scrambling, I made a run for the next space between suburban houses. Made it. Almost tripped. Could've fallen into a window well; broken my leg.
Lucky an instant, I waited. For safety. Endless cloudiness began to loom into a darkness of heavy, thunderstruck clouds. Duty?
I had a duty to defend my life in my dream. But I was Jason Willick! How could I defend my life if in the dream it wasn't my life at all?
Fact-free, misapprehended, I could hear the sirens. What had I done?
This, friends and the other people, is a foreign affair.
That's like the time a close friend of mine, a recent history and pre-law graduate of New York University, received a graduation present: A trip to Europe. By himself. He only spoke English.
Later, after his bracing return to Dallas, Texas, the assassination city, he regaled how he'd learned to talk with his hands.
Lots of white space between the tiny pickets we call letters, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, The old saw: Read between the lines is literally (that word! Ugh!) pointless in a world of subjective valuation when subjective valuation bleeds all over both the letters and the white space. What word collides with another? What sparks do such collisions create?
In the dream as Jason Willick, I couldn't have found a spark. I was dripping wet, icy cold, no church or anything in sight.
My friend Clayton said he did well in France. Another friend, a lady friend, told me her tale of a torrid experience with a man in Venice. In both cases, I thought: "Wow."
Have I been to a foreign country? Well, yeah, sort of. I went to Matamoros, Mexico, right across the border from Brownsville. Spent the afternoon drinking "a Charlie's Special", a Charlie's Bar super agave tequilla drink that literally nailed my friends and I to a patio chair for an hour. Then, a cab: Off to "Boys Town" we rode.
Nice. We all still seemed to recall with recognition the grooviness of broken Coke bottle glass shards pressed into once-wet concrete at the top...of a thick wall to keep "foreigners" out. Those do not belong. Not in the bar.
Oof! An "eleven" of a double motel in the middle of a deserted wasteland. A federale. And an odor so pungently sickening, puddles of rainwater in a dirt courtyard, and women, several of them, all wending betwwen those puddles.
No, I did not "talk with my hands". While it cost us around 15 bucks a carload to get to Boys Town, when we anxiously waited for the cab driver to return, and when we hurtled into the white space of a back seat, he told us: $25.
More expensive to leave Boys Town than to get there. Boys Town, the metaphor.
What we saw of Matamoros exquisite beckoned but in a moribund way. Ancient buildings. And fear. Not of dope lords. In 1976, that bicentennial year, the border town seemed safe enough. But...watch your back: Gangsterism's everywhere.
But I could see, even then, hints of what could be next for the Matamoros experience: Wild traffic. Even the local buses sped through red lights, cars careened, people honked--all of it in a grand fiesta of self-interest. This was like a Krazy Kat cartoon from the Twenties.
Alas! The Mexican model: A tiny crown of exceptionally well-off individuals--surrounded by a huddling mass of your basic peasantry. Giant sombrero landed in the desert so to speak. I was horrified. Horrified. I still am horrified by the prospects of that kind of self-interest bleeding across the border and into this "Deep In The Heart Of Texas" deal.
Which it has.
I woke up from the dream before I knew of me-as-Jason-Willick had found safety. There I was, alone in my bed, sunny light peeking between Venetian Blinds (dusty sometimes), and the promise of hot coffee to enjoy.
Not too bad, really. To speak the truth, I'm grateful for what I have. Some people never have enough even when they already have more than enough. We could call such excessiveness a matter of "personal insecurity", not "personal liberty".
Surrounding ourselves with things is a natural instinct: Paleolithic man, living in outright fear of beast and brute, needed a sense of things being in their places, enough supplies to "hold out and hold on". Walls of stone, narrow entrances to keep the hoodoo out.
How to justify excess in 2025?
Easy! There's always "the imposition of homelessness" on which to rely in a pinch. These days, that one's on repeat. Indeed, on Thanksgiving, we'll all be treated by sentimental scenes as local news stations visit homeless shelters in both a loving tribute to the sort of poor Hugo's Jean Valjean witnessed--but it's also a veiled threat:
You'd better be thankful for what you have. You never know what could happen next. And my erstwhile (Bipolar survivor) friend: Keeping that suitcase under the bed. Her entire family at a time ago did not receive their "personal liberties",.
Of course I hugged my friend....
"We can't go on
Living in shame
Breakin' the rules
Of the game"
************
LET THEM NOT SAY
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: They did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we switnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We dd not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
- Jane Hirshfield
The Autobiography of Jim Geraghty: I Own The Entirety of All Worlds
[master of the Washington Post's Opinions section]
Before we get totally into my autobiography, I'd like to confront a letter I and only I have received--though my people--from the fopdoodle mail carriers of the State of Texas, through variously unworkable US Postal Service regional hubs, through sorting machines...I, Jim Geraghty, have coerced the entire world government of the statist coyotes that shall not have their bootheels on me, Jim Geraghty, to become "my individual". Thus those zombies "got crackin'" yet somehow did not exercise full control over the nastiness of a provocation actually written down by a Libbie.
No, not Libby's, my fine and probably nationalistic and privatized home of my sausage gravy which I sometimes add to my coffee (wink-wink) when I'm more interested in unconsciousness than in being awake.
Sordid writer: "Did you really troll the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2004?"
Troll? What kind of scum would bother with questioning my entirely unbiased and anonymous straight-arrow coverage of wardog fool John "Swiftboated" Kerry?
Then the ink-squirt questioner from some unknown berg called Dallas, Texas, had the temerity to tell me:
"Yesterday, a Saturday, I took a short stroll through the 'hood after I had power-walked my typical round. Saturday was a pretty day, much warmer in November than it used to be, back when smog here wasn't such a problem. But that's beside the point. After looking at all the picket-fenc-guarded but relatively inexpensive apartment buildings, one of which bore a particle board sign: NO ENTRY HERE NO ENTRY HERE as if to say, We welcome newcomers to our lovely accomodations. Mister Geraghty, I've really got to say that, despite the sabotaged front gate, the place looked OK.
"That's when I encountered a sixtyish man at a bus stop at the top of the hill. I gestured to him, and he began to talk.
"'You've gotta be careful around here." The man, sitting out on in the late afternoon glow of a November Saturday, actually the 52nd anniversary of the assassination of JFK, struck a resolute note. 'Just the other day, they shot a man right there on the sidewalk.'
"Sir, I stood aside a little. I didn't dare express or even feel the chill of fear. Instead I asked an important question: 'Really? What happened?'
"'They's killin' folks for no reason! Did you know they've been killin' four people--four!--in the last three weeks?'
"'For no reason?'
"'You gots to be careful 'round this place. Might look nice on the outside...'
"Mister Geraghty, I finished the man's sentence: '...because what looks pretty on the outside is sometimes very nasty where no one can see!'
"'All right! You know it. People here's scared all the time!'"
As Geraghty, I scoffed. Those lies! This is MY world. No ignorant pipsqueak from flyover country's going to be so presumptuous to believe I am going to be moved by a testimony with no proof at all.
MY area is crime free. MY street has no potholes. While the scoundrel went on and on in his letter that his "'hood's" telephone poles are becoming littered with the red, white and black tags that indicate the Bloods--who knows what one of those are?--are filtering into the area. The clearly socialistic excuse for a writer went on to suggest that, because my friends, the area's real estate developers, are planning to eradicate large parts of the area, many apartments are emptied, and thus are quietly transforming into something called 'the dope house', and hence, as people are shoved out by rising crime, the so-called Bloods are cashing in and developing a criminalized, gangsterish hegemony in the area.
So what? It's commercial activity. Whatever could be wrong with that? Besides, I have important plans to see the Broadway musical "Oliver!" here in DC. Of course, people who even dare to point out Charles Dickens, could have been requesting literate readers to examine the possibilities that "Oliver!", a cute little orphan raised in a workhouse where he joins a gang of pickpockets, is a Dickensian allusion to one Oliver Cromwell, religious independent, endowed with God's grace by default, The Lord Protector, Puritan gentryman, letter writer from "the congregation of the firstborn". Saved by God--with no proof, noo witnesses, no nothing but some testimony before the madding crowd.
My property. Uncommonly common and depressed, down on his luck. Like a bitch. Not very tall, ready to make a deal with anyone. A theocratic pickpocket.
Indeed. I like Broadway show tunes that like "Oliver!" I don't feel like being bothered by anyone refusing to take personal responsibility for the advent of gangsterism in this pathetic area. Besides, I know all about the dope culture. After all, I'm Irish. I grew up on the streets. Hard times. I never tell the public about how I was cradled, ladled, labeled, fabled and tabled as a poor youth who had to scam NYC's New College by sneaking into classrooms simply to hear recitations of Beethoven's famed Symphony No. 5, otherwise known in the third movement as "the knock of fate". Exclamation point that, bedtime prayer brothers!
I must confess something extremely important: My nose; it's almost always stuffy and, like George Floyd, I can't breathe my way out of the nose's stuffiness. Should I consider nasal surgery? No, not at a public hospital that forces people of my grace and verve to sit with denizens of the summary (and summarized by moi) "failures of personal responsibility"! What? As an all-Irish-all-the-time defendant of my perpetual childhood of even economic penury and preassigned disaster? I'll tell you more about me. More and more and more about me.
I, Jim Geraghty, basically ended up owning New University. Without dropping a dime on the place. An inheritance, but not inherited in any traditional means or methods. However, I remember strolling home, a purloined muffin half in, half out of my mouth, as I was deeply poor and depressed as a boy, when a tramp appeared at the corner. I was a a walking impoverishment, poor boys. I didn't know the difference between tramp, bum, street person or hobo. Nah. But I already know all there is to know. As an innocent six-year-old genius, I, Jim Geraghty, stooped to listen to the false hobo.
Because I'm blessed.
What did the cur tell me? More on that--like, later. First, I, Jim Geraghty, regaled the bum with my day's kill: "I just got out of a music appreciation class where we discussed the meaning of the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
The bum? Outrage. He shouted: "THE KNOCK OF FATE!"
I am, indeed. I'll knock the living cattle crap out of anyone who denies MY existence as first of all in line. Who cares if my economics bleeds all over the various and humanistic science of politics? After all, what's bloody about economics? When politics, however, bleeds into my abstract ideas that affect nothing but how to interpret a subjective valuation in a "this is absolutely that, but that is absolutely not this", what's left to chatter or prattle about?
Then, more outrageousness. The flippin' bum then began showing off how he could do 21 pullups on a water conduit. Said he never drinks. That he travels the roads because he likes his liberty. So what? Probably a dumb day laborer who refuses to pull weeds out of public parks.
As a young innocent at Yale, I happened to meet a woman who wore black leather and silver chains who protested that she is a biker chick. She's the one who clued me into the music appreciation class over at New College. We went. Lesbians always refer to themselves in past-tense. She was a lesbian after all. Probably not that big a loss for the anti-American gene pool.
I left music appreciation without her. .
O, the hard times I knew as a boy. Confronted by hippies even though I was born in 1975, those doomy and lazy people who made a claim they were not born to do my bidding. MY bidding. Not theirs.
Or the communistic details as heard in The Beatles' ditty, "I, Me Mine", or even worse, "Can't Buy Me Love". What wizards. How'd they get in the door over at I Heart Radio anyway?
Buy love? I sell love all day and all night! Love sales involve contacting my people and suggesting a huge donation to a Congressman will help them get MY DESIRES through some game called "Congress".
Sell your "Congress" on the streets of Yale, losers.
Last night, I dreamt of a six-footed animal. It looked like a male. Four extremities--normal. But then a fifth in that "left knee, right knee, and wee knee" sort of fashionableness, and then a sixth appendage: its head. That's right. The six-footed animal used his head as a foot. I woke up in absolute terror: A six-footed animal dragging its head on the ground.
The mind in a dream of favor: One-sixth of the extremities. But look at me:
MY insects are much better than the six-footed man!
As a boy, I remember landing in a homeless shelter. It was nothing, really. On Thanksgiving Day, as is normal for freeloaders, we were not to stay indoors on Turkey Day. Not that I am a freeloader. Freeloaders do not deserve to have contact with MY race of giants! Not on MY watch--which is obviously a Rolex.
Ever doxxed, boxed, swatted a tot? It's fun to get the message, play post office-style, to the subhumans used by MY people--to get the job done. Home alone? You bet. Land that little bitch at the four-way intersection and let him wait for Jesus! With a misdirected SWAT team to help him along.
The stupid homeless emergency shelter was packed that TG. Some of the idiots in cots laughed and called TG "TD". Turkey Day? Not! That is MY holiday! I own it! No, in my world Turkey Day is indeed a TD.
I am not a sport, yet I always shall call MY gratitude a TD all right: A touchdown, and you're the sport, sport.
Sport? Get a life, letter writer from flyover country. But first. Get out of my face.
But first, a message from our sponsors. Remember. If you have any stray dandelions in your backyard, just hire a couple of Latino day laborers. It's an EZ laff-fest. In order to prove that MY dandelions in MY backyard are MY aides who assist in MY personal responsibility, here's MY tip:
Bring in MY day laborers into MY yard and have them crouch on MY ground and then climb atop them as they kneel to MY pay and then lay atop MY day laborers and thus pick MY stray dandelions with MY fingers, the ones on the end of your right extremity--and then tell the entire world that all in MY world can be accomplished by your possession by ME.
Or get the free gift of deportation by MY ICE. And recall: NO CRUSHED ICE FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE PAID TO BE MINE
posted by Faceshaker at 11:28 AM
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