What's It Like To Be "Thowed Off"?

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

NICO!  LEGENDARY VELVET UNDERGROUND VOCALIST THROWN OFF THE MAVERICKS!

By Gordon Hilgers

This evening, after a quick trip to a faraway grocery store accessible to me only by transit bus, I had to coerce myself--to keep from telling a man who, it seems to me, may have had some problems with paranoia.  

"Wanna sit here so you can see the bus coming?" he asked.  "You can never tell what those Black drivers are gonna do.  They always see a white guy at the bus stop and keep going." 

"Really?"  

No, really, even if I cannot fully document my honesty in telling stories from my very own life, I believe it is possible to testify I almost never have that problem.  No, wait.  Let's call that problem "an issue".  

Seriously. I beg you to believe me.  I'm down on my knees.  In this world of subjective valuation, especially now that "the subjects" are usually the ones who reap the objective consequences of short-sighted subjectivity.  

Pardon me, sirs and ladies.  To be perfectly without lying, I would have used the word "myopic", but that's one of those "hard words" here in Texas, a place where David Brooks believes is loaded down with so many smart people immune to Reason or education, hard words that are unnecessary when one can say stuff like "prolly"  or "y'all's crazee!"  

No, I wouldn't label the stranger in thick black-and-red plaid flannel on a nice, cool evening under huge shade trees lining "the better part of town".  Nah. He seemed a little over-worried.  He went on: 

"DART [Dallas Area Rapid Transit] is now run by the Blacks!  Did you know that half the DART board is black?"

"No, I didn't know that.  Thank you for giving me the facts, sir."  

"Plus, all the neighborhoods are full of Black and Brown people!  Can you believe it?"  

"Where are you from?" I asked because, nope, he had no Texas accent. Add to that, no wind burns, no sunburn, no lousy weather all over his face. Weather?  Wonder what the poor man is like on the inside? Veritable hurricane? Does he spin to the left so much that he's been going around in circles like some kind of underwater merry-go-round beneath the surface of DC's Potomac River?  Maybe the merry-go-round perpetually and also chases its tail.  

How does the center spin? 

Maybe Axel Rose of Guns N Roses knows the answer and is eager to verify.  

"Oh.  I'm from all over."  

"Here in Dallas?  What's your neighborhood?"  

"All over. I've lived all over."  

Right, I thought.  And I'm the US Ambassador to the United Nations.  

"It's bad out there!" the man seemed to be telling me. "There is not one neighborhood where the Blacks and the Browns haven't taken over. I was on the light rail the other night, and the Blacks...they were having a crack party, right there on the train!  It was dangerous!"

"Why didn't you call the DART Police?"  

"Oh, I can't do that," he blubbered. "If I called the cops, those Blacks might have killed me!" 

"How would they know?"  

"Man!  You must come from a privileged background!  Don't you know that if I called the cops, they'd kill me--maybe on the next day!" 

"Well, I would hold my cell phone way way down where the crack party couldn't see me dialing the number!"  

"Oh, no, no!  They'd KNOW!"  

Who knew, I blubbered to myself, that I've now met an underground member of The Mass Mediums?

No, don't get me started about the lies and the people who live on lies.  Everyone knows pundits who redefine simple concepts for partisan or ideological gain are as full of lies as those who tell various unprovable truths.  Truth?  

That's squishy.  Only the squishes, as Ted Cruz might have archly commented, believe the truth is rock solid, absolute, and a matter of good versus evil versus good versus evil--until the contest between good and evil knocks down everything in the vicinity of this tiny corner of the universe.  

"Actually, my family was called, uh, let me see.  Lower middle class."  

"You're too privileged if you don't see the plain facts about the Brown and Black takeover of Dallas, Texas!"  

"Actually," I added for some weird reason, "my ancestors came to the US in the 1600s. Ancestors fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War!"  

"That's nothing."  

"I don't tell many people that," I added as if consolation.  "My mom told me, 'Gordon, don't worry, we're from the horse thief side of the family."  

Good to know.  See?  I'm as dishonest about my supposed American royalty as some crassly misinformed grandson of a flippin' bootlegger with "family ties" knee-deep in the mob.  

"But you don't see it.  Do you.  The only one who can save us is Donald Trump!"  

Welp, that was almost it for me.  

Luckily DART bus 23 arrived at that moment.  

"Good talking to you," I murmured. I didn't mean it, but that's where politeness helps cover up dishonesty.  Right?  

Ah, yes, another Mass Medium.  A streetside pundit.  I know if I'd stuck around to listen, I could get him to parrot the nonsense that modern Liberalism is socialism.  That happens a lot among fruitcakes.  I see that all the time.  Fruitcakes don't like modern Liberalism, and thus the convenient way to propagandize against their supposed "ideological opponents"; the convenient was is basically this: Become a two-legged label maker on stilts.  

Poor man.  He seemed terrified.  That's almost par for something I've found more and more disgusting about local TV news in Dallas.  Just the day before yesterday, the weatherman (remember the Weathermen?) told us in breathless breathiness that a horrific cold front was flooding in from the north and that the hard freeze could be, he seemed to say, the very beginning of the End of Days.  

Next up?  The weirdness of a variety of the old "if it bleeds it leads" stereotype that, and I summarize, a horrific development is occurring (I looked on a search engine, found nothing at all about this) in that--gasp!--a stadium where children will be playing is being built...and that it plans to sell beer and wine!!!

Whoa, Nellie.  I almost laughed outloud. But what good does that do?  After all, here in Texas, most local TV news anchors are "secret Clydesdales".  Horses.  Yoked to pull a boner on the people who watch.  

Some like beer--like, Brett Kavanaugh, for example?--and some find beer to be "a demon from the very pit of Hell!"  See it? Good or evil good or evil neener neener neener.  

Back in the Eighties where I was "a vital member of the Dallas counterculture of punks and wild partiers, I did like beer. I still find no problem with beer, but I don't drink it any longer: 18 years and counting with no Rotary Club membership at all.  

In the counterculture, we laughed about people who are "thrown off".  That means, they've outed themselves as profoundly out of their minds.  I started in on The old Texas twang: "You mean 'thowed off!'" 

You know: like paying some guy $37,759,333,488 because, as he has testified on TV, he can "thow a ball".  

Yay, big money!  

Or another one: "That chucklehead is a throwback."  It's a Texasism, at least traditionally.  You find a malformed fish, you throw it back. Counter-culturally, though, my friends and I used it like this: 

"See that Ronald Reagan?  He's a throwback.  To the 13th Century!"  

Ah, yes, we were such Mass Mediums during the days of Jesus and Mary Chain, a band the superficial may believe is horribly sacrilegious. The actual story, I've read, is that the British band saw an ad at the back of a comic book that advertised a pretty chain with a pendant of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on a nice silver chain.   

Funny how the superficial judge the counterculture.  After all, some crazy rightists still believe that when some dude throws up his right fist, that "giving power to the people" is communism, revolution, violent takeover, subversion.  

The Mass Mediums strike again.  

Too bad I didn't bring a nifty two-finger-thick digital recorder I sometimes use when on the bus when an image of my crazy poetry ploops out of nowhere.  Thus, I could have surrepticiously recorded the poor man in the red-and-black flannel plaid in order to convict him for "crazy", and for all time.  

Poetry?  What's that?  

"What you wanna do with your life, Gordon?"  

"Chase butterflies."