Welcome To The Poetry Of Casino Nation Dallas

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

Today, for an odd reason, I again began to ruminate on how I, first of all, was banned from what at the time was my only social activity, and second, how I opted to remain far outside what I now picture as a spoken word community more like a big brandy snifter full of scorpions than anything else.  

After nearly 11 years of choosing solitude (and a better network of likeminded people), I still feel that pain at times.  And to think all I did "wrong" was endure a serious manic episode.  

Isn't it obvious?  Other people endured smallish fragments of what I endured.  Three telephone calls to people, calls that were more calls for help than anything, resulted in posturing and neglect, and even incriminations.  At the end of the nonsense, I was left at the hands of people who do not really know me, do not care to know anything beyond what they've decided about me, and people who seem to think they had to enforce their worlds against someone they could not control.  

A big brandy snifter of scorpions--all of them stinging one another.  

That's not something I had never seen before.  I've written about a local spoken word clan that is obsessed with climbing some kind of ladder to the position of "number one".  As I began to improve my poetry, and also began to examine my role in the endless competitive atmosphere among many poets who only care for that, and much less for their relationship with the words they deploy, I could not help but note all the social climbing and literary politics involved among a knot of people who, today, have not improved their actual standing in any world whatsoever.  

Many seem to be in a fantasy where "beating others" is the way to "win."  Exactly.  Like Donald J. Trump: "winning".  But winning what?  

After my leukemia experience in 2007, I realized my own mortality.  Because of that realization, I decided to focus on improving my poetry.  In other words, I turned away from my relations with other poets and toward my relationship with the words and skills I use and possess.  That in itself has been deeply rewarding to me.  And yes: It's without all the dumb noise I had to put up with.  Like the time two supposed Beat poets got their noses out of line when I stood on a stage to whimsically inform a smallish crowd (always smallish crowds, leading observers to look at reasons behind lackluster audiences) that I was "THE hippie poet".  

Those two social climbers were already in a snit for me because I suggested that much of Allen Ginsberg's poetry has a political dimension.  After all, when you're a high school graduate purporting to be in the Ginsberg camp, it's angering for someone/anyone to dare suggesting something against your own prejudices and relative ignorance.  

Can anyone imagine the foolishness erupting from a difference of either opinion or a statement of fact?  

Anger among those two, I imagine, was or is the bottom line problem.  When these two, also purported socialists, joined in on a socialistic "Beat" thing that was going to go to the US/Mexico border and read poetry from the shores of the Rio Grande in a display of "total dissent", what I could hear from that was basically what the buzzards around the rim of the canyon might hear: 

Volleys into nowhere.  

As for me, I do know that my dissatisfaction with such displays of ignorant bids for superiority had risen in the months before the manic episode.  It's obvious I had begun acting out.  But it's also obvious that the host of the Mad Swirl monthly reading, Johnny Olson, was not only up in my face but also trying to step me out the door: He'd always place my position on the reading list dead last--when there was no one in the audience to even listen to me.  "I'm saving the best for last," he once quipped.  

Most people who've encountered his negative side see Johnny Olson as your basic dirtbag.  Approaching 50, he's more infatuated with scoring fucks than he is in the pathetic excuses for poetry he recites.  

So yeah.  I may have been acting out.  Within that zone, though, some of my own frustration with those people came from an informed position: I already knew that local acclaim was nowhere, really.  The agora of poetry, not only nationwide, not only international, but also throughout time, is far too big for a city with a low intellectual capacity at present to rightfully acclaim much of anything from a cultural perspective.  Most poets worth their salt in the city are not part of that gig.  

How many times did I sit in on Mad Swirl, clap on cue, complement younger poets, show enthusiasm, and more?  Sometimes, I felt like croaking after hearing another sad attempt at saying something profound from the precincts of a hollow stage. Problem was, because I am so poor, I usually didn't have the money to go out and entertain friends (or even myself). Hence, I used that reading for a sense of community.  And I was always friendly to those attending.  

Then BAM!  Just like that, I'm out. How dare me to have an expression of a serious mental/physical disorder?  All sorts of armchair psychiatrists militated that I should be isolated.  Once, at Mad Swirl, I yelled at a bartender.  Black mark.  Then, in the incident of 2014, I yelled and apparently threatened a director of Writer's Garret.  Black mark.  Did I get any "white marks" for being supportive of the entire spoken word community for nearly 30 years?  Nope.  Not that.  The need to exercise power over perceived interlopers is more important than any reasonable assessment.  

When I think about incidents relating to my apparently inability to get through to many of the more important people in that community, my mind recoils back to around 1997, when out of nowhere, the Writers Garret gave a big program to "most valuable players" in the community.  I was homeless.  I was losing contact with both the community and with the mainstream world in general.  Nevertheless, after three or four years of hard work reviewing poetry chaps, and writing articles about local culture, after really being a sort of yeoman in promoting the spoken word community, I was ignored.  

That hurt.  That hurt at the wrong time in my life.  I needed to be pulled in, not pushed out.  Didn't happen.  To whom should I have fallen to my knees out of supplication?  

In comparison, another man, much less a contributor to the general melee of spoken word in Dallas--he had an incident, a manic episode.  He was out of his mind for long enough to land at the Southern Baptist run shelter known as The Dallas Life Foundation.  In his case, a rescue operation was mounted: "We should not allow a man who has been rendered homeless due to mental illness."  

In contrast, I was long-term homeless when I finally wrote my way out of that.  

I went to the honors ceremony.  Some really divisive individuals were honored.  I appreciated many who received public admiration.  But after the ceremony, I asked one of the judges why I wasn't among those.  Hadn't I done a lot to publicize the smallish poetry community?  

"Your name did come up," he said. "but you didn't get enough votes."  

OK.  I'll buy it.  I wasn't angling for any number one position.  I only wanted to be a part of a community I'd actively sought to improve via public relations.  

Too bad, right?  

Might have helped me.  Nah.  Too much to ask.  

Odder still, after I had literally garnered a slice of fame from my writing for Endless Choices, a local street newspaper, writing that so advanced the cause of my community--the homeless community--that I was interviewed by Dallas Observer, profiled on WFAA television news, and invited to write a Viewpoints piece by The Dallas Morning News.  I'd used my writing quite effectively to gain a little justice for my people.  

Not surprisingly, that feat engendered nothing from the spoken word authorities.  Me?  Using words to achieve some social justice in contrast to spoken word poets who do nothing but complain about injustices?  

Inessential.  

One thing about myself I do understand when seen through the eyes of people who ignored me that moment: I'd been seen as a troublemaker by most people who did not know me.  When I shouted poems--I called them punk poems--from a stage at 500 Cafe in 1985-86--that apparently was horrible to those "grandees" who take themselves so seriously I'm surprised their faces haven't cracked from it.  Add to that my drinking.  Yes.  That was untoward.  But there is a vast difference between boozing it up for no reason and self-medicating, something many Bipolars are "guilty of".  

Don't ask for understanding from those who promote their sensitivities and their big rants about injustice.  

I wrote about how Dallas' most recent poet laureate first "friended" me on Facebook, and then "unfriended" me.  Gossip?  Backroom antics by foolish "intellectuals"?  Whatever.  It's always fun to be rejected by someone you've never even met solely on the basis of gossip from people determined never to understand the underlying circumstances of a person seen as some kind of hassle. 

When I think about hassles, I know I could have been far more outspoken about the people who pose as competent poets when in truth they're not.  I could really have rubbed some dirt into their eyes.  I didn't.  I have compassion.  I know everyone, myself included, has dreams.  

Lesson?  Don't yell at girls.  If so, your entire life will be discounted.  

Or something.  

Don't have a panic attack or you shall be isolated. 

Done.  

Don't acclaim all the poseurs to the skies or you shall be gossiped into a sort of concentration camp.  

And yet here Dallas is, a "city of the arts".  It's all so fake.  Many artists and some literary figures have had to yam-scram out of this place simply to save their careers. 

Beyond that, I've always wondered if my social justice work didn't generate trouble for me after I helped get the City of Dallas' secular homeless shelter, The Bridge, in a place appropriate to the community for which it is intended to serve.  

Real estate developers didn't like the location because they, in all their selfishly self-interested money-led excuses for wisdom, had plans for the area.  You know: get "the bad elements" out of the way so they could build condos for young professionals.  To promote the Dallas Farmers' Market to tourists, it needs to be located in the digs of luxury and suburbanization of the inner city.  Right.  Make an urban center look exactly like the Plano suburbs.  Which is no social contribution to culture.  All it does if fill wallets for people who already have too much power as it is.  

I remember the real estate developer I interviewed.  He wanted Endless Choices to be his voice.  He wanted us to defend his designs for the area in question.  He offered me an extra $200 a month to do that.  My publisher was initially on-board--until I told her, no, I could not because such a transaction would call my journalistic objectivity into question.  

The developer's self interest was such that the developer was willing to attempt to corrupt a journalist.  No surprise there. I bet that happens all the time in U.S.A. 2025.  

I didn't take the money, The Bridge took form in the area many homeless people knew as a familiar and somewhat out of the way spot to simply exist.  

So wrong.  Unsanctioned existence is out-of-line in the myopic eyes of the money men.  Do they invest in eyes?   Or only spectacles?  

Could be some developers developed grudges against me.  I really don't know.  And I don't care.  Just because those bozos have lots of money does not give them excuses to oppress those who might dissent  against their Great Big Plans to do the city the way they want to do the city.  

If my suspicions are on target, what does such a freak fest mean?  

It means that social and political equality doesn't mean crap to those with a sort of $$$ OCD.  

That crap is endemic in the United States, 2025.  

Hence my ruminations.  How important is an independent voice?  Or how much more important is it to be an "independent" voice that is in actuality nothing but a pet for the aggrandizement of powerful people who only want the bragging rights over a culture against which they are constantly in combat?  

A Washington Post article yesterday jogged my thinking to a degree.  The story amounted to worries and complaints over why it seems that culture here in the U.SA. during the Gen Z is decaying.  I asked the question: if a cultural creative is bidden to be nothing but a voice for people who don't care about anything but themselves and their $$$, why create?  There is a difference between authentic creativity's outcomes and outcomes overruled by commercialization's credos.  

Creativity and culture are nothing but "things" people like real estate investors and devleopers covet.  Might as well be a deck of nice playing cards, apropos for Casino Nation Dallas.  

Bring On The Atomizers For No Reason Whatsoever

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

Supposedly, I am a sovereign individual.  I don't know how that happened. I can't remember not being somewhat dependent on abstractions like money, or the rent, or bills, or expenses, inflation, social ostracism for failure to agree with, and of course, a mandate: 

You are sovereign, but not autonomous.  How does that work?  Apparently, in order to shift the blame from themselves, those who really rule the country want to put all the responsibility for a growing plethora of failures in justice, in equality, in simple humanity on those too powerless to challenge them--and all in the name of this big flag-waved excuse: 

"Liberty".  

Such an odd word.  We take for granted what liberty within the definitional interpretation of the political even means.  Generally, liberty means the state of being unrestricted by outside forms of force or coercion: Liberty points to the state of what Locke and others described as the realm of the noble savage: at liberty to pursue property, to be happy, to live one's life.  But in today's politicized interpretation, more often than not, "liberty" is the battle-cry of some of the more reactionary figures of America 2025, men arrogant enough to demand few to no restrictions in one realm and one realm only: 

Commerce.  

That's it.  We're all in a state of liberty.  Is that correct enough?  Just look at your pocketbook, or your wallet, or your bank account.  See how much liberty you have?  Isn't it amazing to be practically drained of liberty only weeks before Christmas?  

Some of the more adamantly doctrinaire instrumentalizers of "liberty" insist that private activities are personal ones.  And if the liberty of one's private activities, as homo faber, has been restricted in any form or fashion, one's "personal liberties" have been negated.  

Really?  I often barely have a penny to piss on, but insofar as "personal liberties", I'm closer to that center than all those disobedient paranoids who want the rest of us to believe we are all enslaved by "a big bad government" to the point that none of us are allowed to make any money.  

Which is a lie.  An excuse.  A worthless and pathetic con job. 

No, the vast majority of American citizens are not being prevented of that kind of dollarwise personal liberty by "a big bad government".  Nope.  The "big bad government" has nothing to do with how much the ever-paranoid and selfish to a fault "entrepreneurs" who pinch pennies in terms of their duty to those who have aided in their enrichment but are lavish in how they feed their license.  And too much of how those people roll has to do with redefining words like liberty in order to suit their own designs.  

License? Isn't that the little squarish plastic card that allows people to drive or helps to identify us?  In a way, license is "the big OK".  Do what you want.  Do it however you want.  See?  You've got the imprimatur of, well, what is giving you full on liberty to oppose, repress, suppress, oppress and then blame those with less power than you?  

Selfishness kills democracy.  

This concept is difficult to put into a short essay.  How does one define one's selfishness in terms of that selfishness's relation to all others in proximity to that selfishness?  Say you're a homeowner.  You've built a lavish home for yourself, your wife, your children.  You're happy there.  And it's all inside the home.   Your needs are fulfilled, your ability to take action on liberty is unsullied and unrestricted.  

Fine.  Then why is it you allow the world around you to go to the devil.  It's as if the devil will never arrive on your doorstep.  While you sit in your lavishness, that demon is creeping closer and closer until yes, it is at your doorstep all right.  And what do you do?  

Exercise insularity.  Yes, you withdraw into a place of safety.  Maybe you use your economic power to push your political representatives to blame someone else for the issue of a demon at your door.  Maybe you use your economic power to make that demon more uncomfortable.  Maybe you reject the idea of a demon waiting just beyond your private borderlines altogether.  

Insularity.  That's different from solitude.  Insularity bears requirements in its suitcase.  Because you and your instrumentalized "liberty" are so special, you and your instrumentalized "liberty" need protection from any and all demons.  What then to do?  Why not pick out some scapegoats.  Scapegoats make great targets for those who seek to deny responsibility for their own insularity and the decision to give themselves a near-divine status.  

Here.  Have some scapegoats: 

The government.  Liberals.  Blacks.  Undocumented individuals and families.  Administrative and regulatory agencies.  Muslims.  Poor people. The police.  The military.  Foreign interests such as China. Or Cuba. Or Venezuela. Or those who would forbid you from your excesses.  

See?  Pick one. You're special.  You need protection from....which one on the list?  How about your desire for protection from all of them? 

Perhaps, in your illusions and delusion, you're above all that.  You have great power.  You don't give one holy crap about the widening wealth gap and its consequent and subsequent power gap.  If you've got all the power, just as how you penny-pinch to keep "the mob" under control, you've decided that your ability to swing a deal or make a fortune entitles you to being a hog of power.  

Oh yeah.  You've got it all.  Those who don't? It's their problem, not yours. Still, cleverly, slowly, the demon gets closer and closer to your front door.  Maybe your back door too.  At the windows, on the roof, possibly even from beneath your foundations.  

You have a home.  You don't appreciate the noise of partying neighbors or the beeping of a dumpster truck outside, and especially the homeless people spotted nearby.  You're special.  You deserve protection from "enemies" or "threats" or "the other people".  

Nary one thought in your head you may be part of the problem.  Odd--is it not?--many people do not see themselves as so special that they deserve all the "personal liberties".  No.  Some of the wealthiest citizens see the intrinsic nature of their fortunate luck and its reliance on all around them--and thus choose...choose...to address the issues and travails of those around them.  

There.  That is the political.  

An important caveat: Instrumentalizing one's choice to help those who need a little boost, in other words, using that ability to choose to assist, renders that aid meaningless.  After all, if one's supposed benevolence is directed toward only those who support one's misdefined "personal liberty"--that's narcissistic, part of the problem, no solution.  

What does freedom mean to those disallowed from it?  If one does not go along to get along, why are those not entitled to freedom?   So.  Someone powerful has a stance.  He or she wishes to support that stance.  He or she may be "all aboard" in terms of charitability, but toward those who happen do disagree with that stance?  Nope.  No reciprocity allowed.  Don't adore the powerful actor's control issues?  You don't deserve freedom, i.e. the ability to act upon one's liberty.  

Liberty: bought and sold.  Like a consumer chotsky.  

Oh, but we do not need dissident or dissonant voices!  Be positive.  Agree with us--or else.  

Selfishness is infantile in that regard--or better, that disregard.  

We must school our children to be docile employees in order to boost our status.  We must privatize the right to an education in order to separate the poor from the wealthy, the poor having little to no resources to educate their children.  We must privatize the schools in order to cash-in on that, and also, to cash-in on the fulfilled demands the federal government pay us in our holy self-interest.  

Infantile.  Selfishness.  In what chicken coop were such "advocates" raised?

At this time, here in the U.S., 2025, I cannot help but note that the U.S. House of Representatives, peopled by an estimated 50 percent millionaires, is now conspiring to deprive the poor of the ACA, or Obamacare.  Medical expenses are high, of course they are.  Because of the too-high means to solution, many poor people are apparently to be cut away from their human right to be healthy.  And I cannot ask myself, What good is freedom of speech if one's ability to remain healthy has been repudiated by millionaires who may not understand how precarious life is for poor people who happen to fall ill.  

Classy, right?  So classy to appeal to one's love for privatized healthcare insurance companies by crushing what one sees as competition to those.  The value judgment isn't on those private companies; it's on those who celebrate absolute fealty to them to the point that high costs will kill, maim, and ruin countless lives due to the simple fact those lives aren't fraught with big money.  

Then, in a priggish and piggish retort designed to cover their fat asses, the same opponents of the ACA will decry the Liberals and Progressives and then pretend that it is they, the "conservatives" [read: rightist], are allied with the poor they actively work to ruin.  

Hypocrisy, selfishness, "personal liberties".  

Or take the issue of the same Representatives remaining fearful and silent as a complete goof in the White House treads over the law, over justice, over simple ethics, over moderation, over decency, and even flaunts his supposed ability to do so.  What's up with that game?  

Hypocrisy, selfishness, "personal liberties".  

Why so?  Because those Reps will be able to comfort themselves with the excuse of "we are only doing our jobs" in accordance to those who elected them: "don't bother with those who didn't financially support our campaigns; don't bother with those who disagree with our agendas."  

Not freedom.  More like unfreedom.  One status caste remains free; but only so long as those of "lower status" are not free to remain free.  

Where are those who see through the rotten cloth with which the hypocrites and the selfish wrap themselves like emperors?  

Where?  Where are those?  Why are voices of sanity left out?  Scapegoat: socialist, Liberal, Progressive, Democrat, homeless, Mexican, Muslim, etcetera.  

Battle cry?  "Natural rights!" Exactly, all the Neanderthals are exercising natural rights by force and by fraud.  Even the Australopithecus is self-interested.  Liberty is readily available in the savage world of blood, tooth and claw.  

Hypocrisy means that "liberty" is all about its framework we call freedom.  Or the Constitution.  

Just call all the scapegoats "bad hombres" or "leftist lunatics".  See? Problem solved.  

John Locke, one of the philosophical architects of the modern day concept of a democratic republic, suggested that if the people are faced with an unresponsive legislature, the people should overthrow that legislature, violently if need be.   While I wouldn't go so far as to advocate violence.  I would go so far as to register a warning to those selfish, hypocritical, and fear-based Representatives:  

The torches and pitchforks are coming for you.  The demons at your door are getting stronger every single time you try to put down those you've decided are not special at all.  

Who's the judge?  Who has the final say to who is and who isn't "special"?  Such a numb concept in many ways.  How about common sense?  Is that under new management as well?  

This weekend, Los Angeles law enforcement broke up a plot to bomb a number of "logistics centers" and commercial operations.  I've been watching the news about the Turtle Island Liberation Front and its more radical cousin, The Order of the Black Lotus, and while all of us acknowledge that violence is not the key to alleviating a variety of ills generated by status orders and by selfishness to the point of excising numerous individuals, what seems to be missing is any in-depth study or commentary as to why such anti-commercial mentalities begin in the minds of the dissatisfied.  Nope.  None of that.  

Root causes.  That seems always a subject to deny.   The homeless communities across the United States?  Why are the root causes--lack of good paying jobs, lack of access, lack of an ability to afford too-high rental rates--never addressed by our Representatives and especially by those who manipulate them from behind the scenes?  

What are the root causes of a planned terrorist attack?  What coerced those men and women to begin believing that violence is necessary?  What does such a terrorist plot mean within the greater schemes of oppression, repression, suppression, and the OCD dysfunction of needing more, and more, the endless need for more?  

Australopithecus, speak.  

"Don't coerce us; we're at liberty to coerce you.  Out of existence if you get uppity."  

When I heard about the reported nature of this Turtle Island Liberation Front, when I learned its bent is to strike back at commercialism's instrumentalized denial of climate change and dangers to the ability of the planet to ensure life for all of us, my mind turned immediately to Donald J. Trump's decision that, nope, climate change is "fake news!" and that the real problem is that climate change is a communist plot.  

That goof projects so much.  He thinks "climate" means "the weather", and if "the weather" is fine, "the climate" is perfectly healthy.  

Shortsightedness is called myopia for a reason.  Nothing supports myopia more than an inability to read.  But if all facts are "fake news", the narcissism behind the myopia, and vice versa, "wins".  Everyone on the planet loses, and thus, to the malignant narcissist, those who "disobey" with the narcissistic self image have been put into their places.  

Superficiality and, for reasons unknown, corrupt business activities are kissin' cousins.  

See only so far, thus justify your repudiation of facts you find "difficult" or "disagreeable".  And sadly, Real Estate Agent And Culture Decider 47 is only a symptom of a broader dysfunction: most of our more powerful political figures are basically inside the same plastic garbage bag of not wanting to see what on-the-ground experience among America's poor has to show them.  

Insularity: It's scary to see unhealthy people who can barely feed themselves.  Scapegoat them!  Right?  

Not right as in correct; right as in right and wrong.  Don't look.  If you don't look, whatever it is no longer exists.  And just to make certain, ensure that nobody who points out your myopic superficiality speaks to that as a serious question to ask.  

Atomization.  This is the suggested course: separate all potentially disobedient citizens into their own little, individual shells.  That way, alongside condemnations of "collectivity", you've got a disarmed public.  Sure.  Many may own weapons, but if "the mob" is deliberately divided against itself, who "wins"? 

Superficiality, embodied.  Hypocrites.  False patriots.   Indeed, "All Americans are sovereign individuals who have a right to take by force or by fraud, but only as long as they are separated from all others."  

Sure.  Then terrorists come along with powerful pipe bombs as a reminder of the Good Ship Lollipop's inability to reason.  After all, if one is excessively powerful, why bother to think?  You don't have to think.  All you need to do with your life is accumulate.  

So this: "I am against you, and you against I, and we are against others, and others are against us, and we are all unified in disunity, ain't it great?"

Great for whom?  

So much prattle about iffy economic theories.  No conversation at all about how a too-powerful economization of the political is distorting the health of a democratic republic.  Nope.  Not that.  That might fuel dissent.  As if dissent isn't rising.  

Face it: dissent is rising.  

What A Party Of Parties Means

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

Yeah, yeah.  We were trails at the end of the overly, ridiculously vaunted Reagan Revolution.  Sure.  We were involuntary ride-alongs.  

Some nights, one best friend and I sat up all night, drinking cheap beer while listening to community radio, the station practically nonexistent and located on an East Dallas sidestreet, Saturday nights devoted to new music, music that apparently had been forbidden by all the commercial rock stations in the entire DFW Metroplex.  

Why banned?  Perhaps because no one, no band, no performer, no commercial hire, none were willing to write anthems to the loony "liberties" the movie star president offered up like one of those strangers on a street-corner who shows you "the new rule book" for sale for only a few dollars with the promise of the best kiss anyone ever had.  Apparently, people banding together to defend their dignity at workplace and at home had become verboten anyway.  Why not dump an air traffic controllers union?  Why not admire The Iron Lady across the Atlantic who found it expedient to overturn British miners already in financial distress.  

There is no such thing as society, Margaret Thatcher declared.  As if she knew that, no, people only act as individuals, and that "collectives" cannot act in the "one mind" cited by the U.S.'s founding fathers.  

Nice to know, Maggie.  Got any other stultifying declarations for the peons to chew on?  

My buddy and I, up drinking cheap beer all Saturday night.  What for?  We leaned against a former kitchen sink on the second floor of a reconditioned quadraplex situated on Worth Street, near Junius, a street possibly named after Marcus Junius Brutus, assassin of Julius Caesar.  

Not that either of us knew that in 1983, 1984, '85, '86, '87....

Ramones--"The KKK Stole My Baby".  Black Flag.  The Clash.  Dead Kennedys.  Misfits.  Bad Religion.  Social Distortion.  The Cramps.  The Hugh Beaumont Experience.  Sex Pistols.  Butthole Surfers.  

Why not get the message, journalists of America?  Doubtless, the local daily, The Dallas Morning News, needed high security for the typical excuse: Our youth.  All borders, no future beyond employment.  

Classic rock like Vlasic Pickles.  Power to the pickles!  No battle cry necessary.  

Everybody drink.

The common and uncommonly commercialized message to America's youth was easy to see:  Once you become an adult, you leave behind the childish things we, commercializers, have deigned childish, and thus cut the cord to childhood, join a firm, and then, and then...

Die inside.  Become colorless.  Docile.  Willing to produce like hens in a galvanized steel warehouse somewhere way way out.  

My friend was, and still is, an artist.  I was, and still am, a poet and a prose writer.  Not good enough due to commercial uselessness.  Wanna get used?  Become a team player.  

This human-as-means-to-an-end echoes Kant's warning that no man should ever be treated merely as a means.  The height of both injustice and dehumanization.  Even if culture in DFW at the time was practically under the thrall of an armed guard.  For what reason?  

No humanity allowed unless it is instrumentalized to make the culturally disinterested lots of money.  Then we see, years later, Homer Simpson hollering "Doh!" every single time he makes a mistake.  

Buy a Doh-nut!"  Honestly.  What else must be lost to the uncultured mind that claims all culture as an instrument unto itself?  

Reagan offered us so so much.  Fewer regulations, lower taxes, less government.  How to translate this into a culture?  Easy.  "Let's do some crimes!", "Let's ride the public interest without payin'!", "Let's replace a horizontal organizing principle with status for ourselves!"  

Who knows, who cares, why bother?  

Everybody drink.  

My buddy and I, a little drunk, a little stoned.  Cultural wasteland.  Wants.  To.  Waste.  Blossoming culture.  

Why?  Who the fuck knows?  

Between the lines set down by the commercializers of everything that moves, at least we had some fun.  Like the big party in 1987, Ray's house in Oak Cliff.  After all, when the noose gets too tight for anyone practicing freedom to breathe--why not break some rules in response to a newly-unleashed vaudeville act for money and more power?  

I also remember how depressed I was.  I thought at the time that I had loved and lost.  Now I know the grief I felt that Saturday afternoon was all about Bipolar and nothing really about a rejection.  Well, OK.  After experiencing way more rejection than is necessary to "get the message across"--incomplete mothering, neglect, forced relocation to a hellish place called Texas, dysfunctional domestic "experiences", suicide father, rejection, rejection, rejection.  

Where was I that Saturday?  Premiering my third tape of my imaginary band, Big Fat High Tech.  Almost no music on that one, cassette that began with some AM radio preacher telling us all about the unknown and that the only protection from the unknown is--of course!!--Instrumentalized Jesus, Inc.!

We sat on a curb next to a garage, faced by a fence and a barking watchdog, all of us listening to what was essentially a tape of grief.  I know my friends that afternoon sat there listening out of respect, kindness and friendship.  Honestly, I was broken.  Badly broken.  The onslaught of Bipolar was, in a word, eating my lunch just like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would have done: 

Nice tornado sandwich, eh, "poet"???

After all, the commercializers do need to hack the wheat down to weeds.  It's all part of their game.  Resistance is futile.  Or so it seemed.  

Someone (I know who she is!) pinned up maybe 30 cartoons drawn by a talented friend, a friend who, while he thoroughly enjoyed drawing cartoons that broke many boundaries but were funny as hell;  friend who wanted to hide his avocation's products away out of fear that "the conventional life" might wish to forbid out of existence.  

There they were, many of his best cartoons, pinned up on the wall of the garage.  A statement.  A message to a man who'd refused a group show with Marion Henley, then a local cartoonist of her inimitable Maxine character: creative person with ridiculousness everywhere. And also with Dan Piraro, creator of "Bizarro" comics.  A big group show at The Mac.  They had begged and begged for my friend to participate.  

Why couldn't he?  

Isn't self-censorship just awesome and productive?  

Anyway, as we stoked the barbecue late in the afternoon--after my grief-fest--someone got the fantastic idea of playing stickball--batting a soccer ball around the backyard, with brooms, brooms on fire, courtesy of some oil-based lighter fluid.  

Actually, watching the swinging brooms lighting up the dusky lateness like tracer fire in the Vietnam war; that was pretty.  And fun.  Perhaps the neighbors were fearful of fire.  But who actually owns the fire hoses conveniently turned upon those who get too uppity in defense of actual culture?  

Sure.  Back in the Eighties, punk happened to be both an inflammatory subculture designed to "sell the subculture at the point of impact"--one buys, one examines, one may be changed--and as a commentary of so much damned moneymaking that it was weird the moneymakers wanted to cut off the NEA and NEH all for the wishy-washy nonsense of "sell yourselves!"  

As if artists need to get out and hunt the streets for something that pays and also exhausts them.  Gingrich?  The "leader" of the wolfpack that submarined both programs due to his jealous fears that someone somewhere was being an artist--whose job of course is the question the status quo.  

THOU SHALT NOT CHALLENGETH THE STATUS QUO BECAUSE OF STATUS

Then Gingrich began releasing pulp fiction he heralded as "the truth".  In other words: crass poseur destroys the real deal.  But one really does have to admit the little troll had plenty of energy.  

The party in the backyard continued.  After flaming stickball with a soccer ball, we began pumping out music.  Fine stereo system.  The two residents both were early IT programmers, both paid handsomely.  Both also expressed enthusiasm for those of us who were and are changing our own status quos in the name of a word bandied around here in 2025 as if it's KY jelly: 

F-R-E-E-D-O-M

Which requires independent voices.  Even if the Tories don't happen to like that cultural autonomy due to its unusually usual superiority over the product lines over at Walmart and elsewhere.  

Cultural autonomy?  Scary!  What's gonna happen if the culture gets out of "our hands" and begins its healthy critique of what it is we're trying to do to it?  

Always the same.  Autonomy for them, none for the rest of us--the means to their ends, and of course especially for the followers of their Great Big Ends.  

My crazy letters to Dallas Observer.  Pseudonyms:  Athena Stickseed, Otto Von Apparanin.  Critical of the commercialized hegemony waged by powerful conservatives frightened out of their wits "the mob" might catch them red-handed.  Best way to handle "the mob"?  Confine it.  Section it off.  Then raise the rent.  

The rent.  More than merely a price.  Think "wage gap".  Think "power gap".  Think "divided country".  

All night, we punks and lost humans played dumb things.  Like sneaking into the house's kitchen and opening up all the cabinet doors until one's ability to walk through the kitchen was all but impossible without closing the cupboards.

Appropriate?  No.  Cabinets with food must remain shut.  

Don't worry, paranoids.  We kept our commentary about you to ourselves.  Word has spread.  People talk.  People learn.  

After the outlaw cartoons were pinned on the wall of a garage, and after the burning soccer ball stickball game, even after the all cabinet open private demonstration, we drank.  A female and I found ourselves in a hallway closet with the stereo system.  Certainly liked that lady.  And drank.  Then, as the party began to wind-down, as was traditional with our band of recklessness, we slept on the floor; no one was allowed to drive home drunk.  

Which is more than I can say for "local witnesses of subcultural 'transgression' in the name of freedom".  Why not include them?  Because many of them are so goddamned drunk on dollar bills it's a wonder the entire country isn't guffawing at them.  

 

Are We Even Allowed To Dream Of Rescue Anymore?

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

How can anyone innocent of what Kurt Vonnegut once lampooned in "Breakfast of Champions" as "bad chemicals" in the brain?  I know I had no idea I was sick; all I knew was that something was wrong.  Yes, it was dark, deeply dark for me in 1983.  And like anyone in serious pain, anxiety and depression so deep the abyss seems the only possible home, I looked for help, anything, a beer, a friendship, a hope for love.  

Nothingness?  That panned out.  Like someone else's gold.  I was the gravel left to be washed away by the overflowing brook.  

Or that's how I felt.  In 1982, I recall, I attended a house party, all attendees artists.  I'd written one article for a tiny local magazine, Texas Arts Review, and stated a question: How does art transport a non-artist like me?  Non.  That became somewhat big in the smallish precincts of a consciousness fed in small doses by the remnants of the 1970s antiwar movement.  As in KNON.  Was that inspired by my essay about audience and the lack of audience?  On the bus or off the bus.  

We all should know by now:  Ignorance of intended or unintended meanings to framed or unframed artworks on white walls makes for this:  

Some pretty pictures.  

But as mentioned in a previous entry: pretty pictures--with supervision.  Self-appointed observers have some kind of needful lust to ensure no "kommies" are "drawin' wrong".  Stupid.  But also very Old South of them.  

Right, observers.  Let's all have a white wedding and give a rebel yell per Billy Idol, a perfect name for the bill that is apparently due for us to pay some losers who killed multitudes simply so they could enslave multitudes.  

Nevertheless, I met an interesting woman at the house party.  Let's call her Sue.  Sue was a medical student who used medical illustrations as inspiration for some awfully cosmic (and beautiful) paintings, prints, and illustrations.  

We chatted.  I felt an attraction between us.  However, Sue happened to be in a relationship with another artist, a fairly nice fellow with a yen for the outsiderism that seemed to be striking the city hard,  

Oh yeah.  Enter the observers.  After all, they don't wanna any of that there drawin' wrong.  Nah.  A word for men of letters only.  

Pursuers of "peaceniks".  So scary to see humans bid for peace.  

Anyway, after learning Sue was attached, I really didn't know what to do about that attraction.  Maybe I was on a one-way street.  Likely, I wasn't ready for primetime.  

Still, I developed a crush.  Even today, I believe a girlfriend could have helped.  But also--maybe not.  After all, the manic-depression plaguing me was only growing. Each episode a "little trauma", not over the wrong shirt at the store or the incorrect slip covers for a chair.  Nope.  Little traumas that interrupt one's consciousness to the point one is off-base, perhaps for months.  

One aspect of manic-depression of course is obsession.  I was obsessed.  I'd felt attraction.  That was something onto which I wanted to grab hold.  Whatever had happened that moment led me to simply leave the conversation after getting all stoked-up by "the wrong attraction".  As if attraction is ever wrong.  

Maybe in Dallas' observer-laden wartime all the time mentality, any "incorrect attraction" is marked for maybe Quentin Tarrantino's Death List.  You know: suspected "kommie", "kill it off".  

Paranoid fools, motivated by what is not even there at all.  The Old South.  White wedding.  Rebel yell.  And look!  The little observer machines miss the boat almost every single time. 

Ooops!  I'd written for "an incorrect magazine".  Was the editor of Texas Arts a "suspected kommie"?  Who knows, who cares, why bother?  Only infantile reactionaries are afraid of a political-economic order that cannot work at a state (statist) level.  No matter.  ERADICATE, ERADICATE, ERADICATE.

Then wonder where all the artist went to.  

But remember?  Dallas, 1983, was THE INTERNATIONAL CITY!  Wowie.  No one I know was even remotely impressed by that boosterism.  Dallas, in my opinion, even then, constituted the world's largest small town.  Only those qualified by big bucks qualify as citizens here.  The Old South: Is Dallas one of the Two Towers from Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring? 

A little sugar.  A whole lot of aspirin.  The hangover of losing so badly that, here we are, 160 years later, and damned fools want vengeance?  Pussies. 

My crush on Sue persisted.  She was pretty cute, a Slavic princess.  Had the big feet one might find among neolithic women who frequented bogs while in search of herbs and medicinal plants.  

With manic-depression, it could be said, the carrier of a hereditary syndrome is an automatic victim.  Bipolar 1--the possession.  Something to wear on a key-chain that rattles "really good" whenever its "kommie self" enters the room.  

At least to bruisers and losers.  Remember: Opinions that do not follow the reckless laws of "anarchy for the many, big money for a minuscule few" is going to be unwanted, especially here in a highly militaristic "super-giant tiny town".  

Maybe those observer types could have felt between their legs to find the Cold War. 

Ultimately, the crush on Sue brought me down in flames. I don't know whether to blame myself or not in terms of my obsession.  While I was summarily unaware of how a hereditary dysfunction was controlling my thoughts and actions and especially my ability to respond emotionally without the dysfunctional baggage that comes from "bad chemicals in the brain", perhaps "kommienizm" is the key to defeating the baggage.  What.  The fuck.  Ever.  

I went to a warehouse party.  It was a big shindig in Deep Ellum, an area that cradled most of the city's artists--cheap studio space, more room for things like supplies and possibly even some food for artists.  In 1983, the local arts community (The Dallas Morning News called it "a scene" because it could not resist trivializing whatever it is out there it cannot fully control) was small, closely-knit, and thus, "outlawed ideas" such as postmodernism and modernism and even neo-impressionism were spoken of in conversations as if such concepts were dangerous drugs that might "defeat" the Old South for a second time.  Or something equally necessary.  

Sue happened to be there.  As was her sculptor boyfriend.  I struggled around, tripping on all the conversations I could barely hear.  Some there, people suspicious of the fact that I'd somehow scored a few book reviews at DMN, didn't like the idea of "a journalist" in their midst.  As if I'd talk, or write, or even comprehend what was happening among a group where socializing was (and probably still is) writ in terminology.  

Oh!  What is this miniature battle scene with the battery-operated tanks with pole atop them so that, whenever one speeds beneath a hanging egg, the egg bursts!  KOMMIE!!!!!

Nah.  Maybe a gesture meant to generate something not considered important at all among the "leaders" of the smallest town of 800,000 that has ever existed this side of the Land of Oz: thought.  Food for thought.  

Nope.  "Not Happy Meal enough!"  

We must be positive!  No.  No logical positivism here.  There is no such thing as the categorical imperative or pure reason that cannot be conveniently instrumentalized by the Klan Of The Observers. 

Maybe that's how I felt that night.  I was confused.  My mind wasn't working well at all.  Stray thoughts.  Racing thoughts.  Out of kilter emotionality.  What was happening?  Then, the obsession.  A little like that dangling rope lurking just within reach of the straining hands of a drowning man.  

Something solid like a hand to hold.  

In some ways, a hand to hold is the essence of why artists bother to create.  Life is usually uncertainty for all of us.  Artists are brave enough to ask of uncertainty a little Truth and Beauty.  However, if not instrumentalized to support the Klan Of The Observers", even that is "incorrect in an ideological circus act that pretends to be real."  

Yes, I felt limitations that night.  When I saw Sue leaving the big party, I followed her outside, ostensibly to ask her for a ride home.  Sue had a brand new "good times van", a beautiful vehicle, shiny, attractive, roomy.  

"I'm sorry but I can't do that."  

Drunk and literally losing my mind, I tried crawling into the back of the van.  But was removed.  This is when I burst into tears, dysfunction and obsession for something solid all over my face.  I got drunk enough to get dizzy after that.  Self-medication: If I get euphoric, I'll lose the pain.  That's how that works.  

Dizzy.  Not exactly the old Tommy Roe song from the Sixties.  

Interestingly, a female stranger, a pretty platinum-leaning blonde rescued me.  I now understand she knew what I needed.  "I'll take you home," she said.  She took me to her apartment.  Took me to bed, and because she was self-aware enough to see I was stinkin' drunk, she simply held me in her arms.  

To be comforted as such was to lift me even if only a little.  

The next day, a sunny Saturday, the pretty blonde returned me to my minuscule efficiency at 201 McKinney Avenue, 1983.  

Rescue.  For some reason, the word reminds me of the William Golding novel, "Lord of the Flies".  We should all remember that novel's plot: children survivors of a shipwreck find an uninhabited island, work together for sake of survival, begin to thrive only a little, while meanwhile hoping for rescue.  Then the picture flips: animus and its consequent animosity emerges as "competition" hell-bent on "winning" a thing ends up as a blazing disaster.  Children die from the warlike slippage for which competition is almost never blamed.  

At least the fiery holocaust's smoke alerts kind soldiers who find the island, intervene, and return the children to the safety of actual civilization.  

Among Dallas's Klan Of The Observers, such forms of rescue are "ideologically incorrect" because the 160-year-old design of vengeance may suffer.  

Remember: after that counterclockwise wheel spins out of control, a much larger clockwise wheel begins its sweep, thereupon rendering the Lost Cause moot and even ridiculous as a burlesque of elephants like the ballet in Disney's Fantasia.  

I don't know what happened to Sue.  I'd heard many years later that, as yet another refugee in flight away from the Big Duh, she's thrived due to her ability to craft something apparently terribly frightening to the Big Shot movers in town: 

A-R-T

A First Foray Toward Romance Before Leukemia Struck

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

In 2006, as I sat in on the one poetry reading I attended, a monthly spoken word festival of young, often amateurish explorers, exhibitionists, hobbyists, and youthful poets looking for a way to speak to their own versions of the ineffable, I remember how a fatigue began to reach into me.  

I don't really know what had happened.  I think I was a little bored.  It's not as if I was mouthing off about being bored. But in my case, I was beginning to grow as a poet; I'd begun to develop a deeper and much farther reaching understanding of the craft and its necessary critical mind.  While it was nice to see acquaintances there, as for the readings, my activity there involved sitting quietly, silently giving younger poets respect and applause, and then perhaps greeting people, feeling affection and  community.  

Then I'd go home.  As for community, the spoken word reading met my needs.  I've always appreciated solitude, rarely get lonely, and am usually interested in my surroundings and the various stimuli of books and music and some television, my walks, my talks with neighbors, and generally, living a small corner of a life that would be more expansive had I possessed the money I would need to have more of a social life.  

Social lives require some money.  Furthermore, I don't know many people, save for true friends, willing to drive all the way into far North Dallas simply for a visit.  I find meeting spots to meet various friends: a coffee shop here, a restaurant there, a drive into the arty environments in South Dallas at times.  All of that is fulfilling.  

Perhaps I had become a little depressed in 2006.  I'm not certain.  But I began to drift away from the poetry performances themselves, and toward a pretty bartender who always worked on the Wednesday evening monthly readings.  

Attracted to her beauty, yes, that seems a likely excuse perhaps expressed by spectators and onlookers.  But, since connection with the reading seemed to have broken down a bit, I sensed connection with the pretty bartender.  There was more there for me than sexual attraction.  In fact, due to the medication, an antidepressant, I was basically emotional flat-lined: No ups, no downs, merely a sort of straight ahead overreliance on the mind's grasp of the memories of what emotions were.  

What?  Connection?  That pulled me up to the bar.  A couple flutes of red wine (with  glass stems serving as flowery stems themselves, the wine looks like a blossomed rose), a little chatting, and soon the bartender and I were relating on a level I found connective.  I enjoyed conversing with her more than I did listening to young poets who would return time and again--sometimes for years--never improving one bit.  What was all that about?  

Over a period of several months, then, the bartender and I became friends, and also, due to the stirrings of attraction, we also began to flirt.  I really did like the woman.  Despite her reputation as a real siren, a lovely lure to men who can't see past, say, the breasts.  She was a sort of metalhead cowgirl.  Liked to dress as a cowgirl--one picture of her and a friend playing pool at a local Deep Ellum bar struck me as if photography from the Thirties: two never-do-well ladies out hitting pool balls into various pockets.  

We became even closer over time.  I began visiting the bar on Monday nights, a few times on Saturday afternoons.  You know: looking for palpable connection on days that, even in hot summer weather, cooled me.  Not much wine necessary.  Not at all.  

At the time, I'd received an offer from a Boston-area 'zine called The Seed.  The editor had seem some of my MySpace blog entries, some of which dealt with musical likes and dislikes, and asked me if I would review an album or two.  I accepted, and soon, mail arrived: a CD of a Boston-local band up for review.  

I think I did a good job.  The editor asked me for ideas.  I suggested, "Hey, Dallas has a lot of good bands, and I go to a bar where the bartender has all sorts of connections, and even brings in relatively unknown groups to play on the small stage on off-nights."  

I told the pretty bartender.  She was elated.  Let's give some groups a little national exposure.  She selected a band to play at the bar, I attended, greeted the band members, asked if I could review their performance for The Seed, and also asked to interview the members.  Of course they accepted.  Many unknown musicians (and poets, and writers, and artists) crave such exposure.  

Better than operating in a complete vacuum.  

I remember when the first band arrived.  They were pretty good: some folk rock, a little more of a harder sound.  The bar?  It was nearly empty.  But the band would be paid nevertheless.  

The bartender slipped out from behind the bar, and she and I stood listening.  She looked at me, I at her, and we put our arms around one another.  Nice.  Connection.  

Each night I'd show, the bartender brought out a bottle of Tuaca, a liqueur, and ordered up two shots.  That was our statement of friendship.  Connection. 

I always ordered wine from her.  Not much.  At least most of the time.  As for her and her love life?  I never really asked.  I do remember how she and I would meet at the end of the bar itself, chat and joke, and that some men hovering at the bar, some of them literally leering at her, seemed indignant toward me.  What?  I was overweight.  I didn't dress all that snappy.  What's up with "that guy"?  Why's he getting so much attention from (maybe) Helen of Troy?  

Yes, she was a coveted beauty.  As for me, I could feel sexual attraction growing between us.  Special connection.  We'd play.  Joke.  Talk quietly.  Chat about poetry at the reading.  What strategy did I have for all this?  Nothing really.  I simply know from my own personal experience (I was a "pretty" man when younger, attractive enough to have to fight confusion over which young lady was for real and which wasn't) that beautiful women often don't like unsolicited attention that is leveled solely on their physical attributes.  

I noted something deeper than the bartender's tough-girl sheen.  

I remember how one time, when she was on break, she slipped around to my side of the bar, and there I stood as she sat on a barstool: we were arm in arm.  The proverbial "warm fuzzies" felt like connection.  With added excitement.  Especially heartening for a Bipolar on flat-line meds.  

Soon, however, something changed.  I'm still a little confused by the development.  She'd begun an affair with a very seriously alcoholic man who, as if playing to her attraction to music, played acoustic guitar like a master.  Yeah, he was good at that, even while shickered.  

He'd show--like the night he drunkenly flirted with the pretty bartender while sitting right next to me.  I sat with my back to them as they cavorted.  At one point, though, as the bartender lit a candle, placing it closer to me than to him, I felt a little too confident perhaps.  Maybe that was stymied some by my trust issues.  

Man!  Was that guy ever drunk.  He almost couldn't maintain his balance on the barstool.  He was loud.  Often funny in a coarse way.  What was hilarious to me is that the one big scene with him I remember most is that this particular night was karaoke night.  I signed up.  As did he.  

When my turn came, when the hostess of the karaoke event asked me what song I wanted to limn, I told her, "Little Red Riding Hood", the old Sam the Sham song I had adored when I was, like, 12.  

I got up there and began growling from the stage, really belting it out with my best whiskey voice.  Loudly.  Then, the drunk guitarist joined me on stage, and from behind me, began howling like a wolf.  Steal some thunder while drunk driving like a Sunday driver on the lam while driving blind?  Whatever.  

The bartender complimented me: "That was real good!"  

The drunken guitar player?  He began scribbling weird pictures, supposedly of the bartender: a stick figure with sewn-up gashes all over her.  Yeah, yeah, I got that already.  She did strike me as somewhat wounded; but how much of that woundedness had to do with her behavior or her self esteem?  Women with low self esteem often quietly waste themselves on frippery.  

I asked if I could use a napkin near him, he pushed it over to me, and this is when I began to pen out a crazy diagram: I added the words "Patti Smith" and "Iggy Pop" to the diagram.  

The drunken guitarist seemed fascinated by that.  

The bartender and I never really went much farther than that.  I know now I was not ready, not sophisticated enough to keep up with the pretty bartender.  As a sense of emptiness grew inside me, I began writing on the old MySpace blog about how lonely I was.  I hadn't felt lonely before.  I think that the opportunity for connection, seemingly broken in my subjective interpretation, led me to...trust issues, issues that always got in my way.  

This happens to people who have been hurt too many times.  But I'm not blaming anyone here.  Twists in straight roads occur.  I could have learned to ride along and take the unexpected in stride.  

But rather than bending with the breeze, I clammed up, began to feel outright hurt over the matter.  Always that manifestation of trust issues: I am not good enough.  

One Monday night, I took bus and train to visit the pretty bartender.  I didn't know what I felt, really.  A little hurt.  Plenty of distrust.  

She and I were alone at the bar.  But what had happened?  She wouldn't speak to me.  Seriously confused in many ways, I was unfamiliar with the various ways I could have chosen to see this non-speaking gesture of hers.  She quietly washed bottles and glasses, slid around quietly.  Was she simply spending her quiet moments with me?  Or was she telling me to scram?  

I'm certain the incident could have been seen in one of at least two ways of seeing.  Rather, I ordered no less than seven flutes of red wine.  When that wasn't enough to stanch the distrust and misunderstanding and hurt, I began ordering vodka and lime drinks--doubles.  After two of them, the pretty bartender told me she was calling a cab to take me home.  

I felt like I was being 86ed.  Indeed, I was truly acting out.  Hurt overwhelmed trust.  

When the cab arrived, I told her goodbye, started up the stairs out of the speakeasy-designed bar, then turned, loudly called her a whore or a bitch (I really do not remember), and turned to leave, only to fall on the stairs.  I remember feeling broken that night.  Hurt beyond measure.  Maybe I'd needed to express that hurt--not merely to her, but to everyone.  I really do not know.  I just made the wrong guess.  That's how I now see the flirtation's ongoing commencement: That moment could have turned differently had I simply understood.  

She called an ambulance.  As the MICU paramedics loaded me onto a stretcher (I was nearly passed out from the over-the-top expression of distrust), the pretty bartender fetched my wallet, used it to pay my bill, and then I woke in the emergency room.  Apparently some of my physical chemistry was off.  

I brushed that off.  But I'd hurt my right knee.  And it did not heel.  In fact, my right knee began to swell.  I remember trying to ignore that pain as I tried writing out something/anything to distract myself.  

A special bottle of wine perhaps?  Lifted from the top shelf of the bar?  I do remember that.  

Two weeks later, I was diagnosed with leukemia.  Trust issues plus off-balance bodily chemistry, compulsive recourse to diet Dr. Peppers, and suddenly, in the middle of July, 2007, I was walking to catch a bus to answer an oncology warning that I was indeed very sick.  

Who knows how cause and effect tend to work together.  So much tangled in the end of how I'd sabotaged what might have been plenty of fun with a person I really did like.  

The outburst?  It led to me being banned from the bar.  Rightfully, the owner dressed-me down: "No one should ever speak to a woman the way you did." 

Ouch!  

Thankfully, after plenty of time with a psychotherapist, I've learned to expand my insight enough to function much more confidently in the regard of even flirting with women.  As I continue to make important breakthroughs in learning about a past flurry of sexual traumas when I was very small, I'm beginning to feel fresh air blowing through me.  

 

In Honor Of the Land Ho's Of The New-Old West!

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

Pure fun.  A kind of garage culture, defined as "anything is possible if it's automated or vehicular", at least for the purposes of this rant, seems to exist inside the highest reaches of what only can be labeled as "money culture".  

No one has to be "against money" to observe the distortions obsessive/compulsive possession as money creates zombies of otherwise fine men (and women).  The possessed.  What do the possessed want to do?  

Possess every little thing, every single shiny object, and thus, at least in some of the more malevolent cases, possess others, possess the lives of strangers, possess, possess, possess: a sort of sickness.  

I call such pushovers for that kind of wealth acquisition to be the sort of zombie-vampires one sees in AMC's The Walking Dead.  

Here in Dallas, for example, a move by property developers is now out to swallow a classic building by a highly respected Japanese architect: I. M. Pei's oddly shaped Dallas City Hall.  I remember when the building--big, angular, forward jutting, and a little like the bow of a huge Japanese battleship streaming into Dallas-as-harbor--celebrated its completion.  

"The International City!"  That was the booster-talk of the time.  I am not certain Dallas, Texas, actually qualifies as an international city in the technical sense.  An international city is one that has designated itself as autonomous or semi-autonomous, and thus disconnected or sovereign, z sort of city-state that is not part of any larger nation or state.  The Free City of Danzig qualified, as does the Free Territory of Trieste; Krakow, Tangier, Shanghai, Beijing, the building of the United Nations, and...

Dallas?  Seriously?  Who knew Dallas possesses its own currency?  Or is a law to and of itself? 

Wait.  Back in the 1980s, when Japan was outperforming the United States in heavy manufacturing etc, Dallas suddenly became "all-powerful"! A competitor with Japan!  Who knew a city that began as the only legal red light district this side of Las Vegas, Nevada, possessed such a status?  That's right: a city of whorehouses.  When trail drivers hit the tiny, nearly unpopulated area next to the ever-stagnant Trinity River, they approached the place for some stuff:  a room, a hot bath, lots and lots of demon rum, and of course the ready and willing ladies of the night.  

Supposedly, that's arcane history.  When the city began to grow in the early 20th Century, that after Dallas, now a fashion capitol, made and shipped Confederate military uniforms to all places at battle stations in the defense of slavery.  All kinds of tunnels still crisscross the western end of the downtown business district.  The tunnels at the time of the US Civil War included small-gauge railroad tracks with which to ship in cotton, and ship out completed military gear.  I once worked in Founders Square in western downtown Dallas.  At one wall in the lovely building's atrium--in the basement--sits a wall.  Behind it: a tunnel.  

One goes right under the famed Triple Underpass where JFK was murdered.  

Dallas suddenly "The Japan of the Old West".  Weird, eh?  It's not that the heritage of the city is abominable; no, it's part of the Old West.   Even if the Southern Baptists invaded the town in the years after the loss of the Old South in the Civil War didn't like Dallas' reputation as a sort of buckskin Riviera for cowboys and trail drivers dusty and thirsty after months of pushing cows toward Fort Worth--that doesn't mean Dallas has to cover up: Whoa, naked heritage!   

I definitely bet that early version of a red light town qualifies as "international city" all the way.  No laws, no rules, no nothing but the buying and selling of women, and later, of slaves, and of course, of all the land some of the city's biggest "world eaters" can get their hands on. 

I guess one way to "buy freedom" is to buy all the land out from under the United States.  Right: democracy as an impediment to obsessive-compulsive people who simply do not know how to just stop it.  

From what I've heard, the property that serves as the foundation beneath Dallas City Hall was once a public meeting place where people gathered under the trees to discuss public policy long before the town was wealthy enough to support the building of public edifices with which to celebrate how freedom frames licentiousness masquerading as liberty.  

Buy that! Liberty is love is for sale.  

What's weird about liberty is that, once liberty has been sold, it is no longer liberty.   I think for example about how an entire ideological mass movement in the United States, 2025, is based on an argument in defense of "natural law".  While there is a reality where Nature abides by its own set of laws--that's usually chaos, savagery, and a world before civilization--once Nature's laws are instrumentalized into an ideological tool, Natural Law is no longer natural.  Nope.  It's another tool, instrumentalized in order to "get some stuff".  That's called instrumental reason, and it's a tool of dominion. 

Right.  Declare oneself as a defender of natural law, and what do you get?  Troglodytes in expensive suits in huge mansions with walls and security guards, alarms, and enough luxury to surround anyone with a sense of King's X out and away from the realities all around that someone.  

According to the ideologues, "natural law" trumps "civil law", and most especially the federal government.  This is quite similar to an evangelical platitude that man's laws are subservient to God's Laws.  

God?  Or Nature? Maybe both.  Apparently, only an elite few, those "natural law dependent", have the money to purchase both and put them on a shelf in case "the government" interrupts their hoarding. 

What's especially ironic is the ideological mass movement's leaders have employed the domination tool of ideology in order to command and control "subjects" (not citizens) buy confining all ideologically naive individuals, families and orders, including corporate ones, into a box that can be conveniently moved around to the liking of those dogmatic and doctrinaire "movers", those who know exactly what those "backdoor limitations" can do for them, not for their self-declared "charges", i.e. the soldiers of the movement, the expendables, the ignorant, politically naive, and the old stand-by of Ronald Reagan's "true believers". 

Don't cross that boundary line!  That's the essence of ideological enslavement.  Adhere to it--at all costs--or else.  

Totalitarianism 101.  

In that regard, once an ideology, an excellent organizing tool, has taken hold and has become solid, all else, all we call freedom or liberty, is under the thrall of "the box".  

Nice going, guys.  Any other ways to imitate Stalin or Lenin?  They too employed ideologies in order to "keep the subjects from getting uppity".  

Dallas City Hall, shackled on a big box in the public square: Who's buyin'?  

Why would property developers want such land so badly? Is there magic in the ground?  If that's the original spot where early Dallasites gathered--what's up with privatizing more heritage?  One explanation of course is "for the dirt of it all!".  We know how that goes: make the dirt private, and then expand one's power to the point where even eternity will not bear the weightiness of the need to possess everything and anything in sight, and probably beyond sight.  

Power.  Wealth.  Wealth gap.  Power gap.  The South shall fizz again!  

For some reason, I managed to stop to laugh about the TV show "Designing Women".  Don't talk about the agenda, just do the agenda.  Apparently, the ladies of the plantation all used mental telepathy to control the...

...property. 

Seriously?  Probably not seriously at all.  War from the four corners of the earth = excessive wealth = instrumentalized money for the sake of raw power.  

Rawlings.  That is a now nearl-forgotten Old South slang term for Plantation Slaves who had been flayed until their backs were bloody, scarred, and likely, left unhealed.  Thence, should a slave make a break for freedom, the blood and scar tissue would be "no problem, goblin!" for slave hunters with bloodhounds.  

Pink.  Flayed.  

I suppose that's one way to "whiten up" the Blacks.  

"We are hear to raise the savage races into civilization!" might have been the defensive whorling wave of excuses and alibis.  After all, according to such non-thought, only whites have the civilization.  Blacks, browns, and other subjects of 19th Century political and economic imperialism "just couldn't have" what was narrowly-constituted as liberty.  Oops!  That requires a mentality that judges "inferior races" as animals. That cannot think.  Even if animals are known to dream.  

Bestial. Not among the savages.  Among the troglodytes enslaved by false pride, arrogance, hubris, vanity, and of course, economic violence. 

Interesting, eh?  The most doctrinaire of the ideological mass movement slightly summarized earlier declare something called "the non-aggression principle" or NAP: Should a conveniently-defined "oppressive or coercive force" endanger the obsessive-compulsive overreach for more stuff as a means of self-interested power, well, well, well, that's automatically wrong and is thus to be targeted in the name of self defense.  

Wow. Who could have concocted such a lame excuse--all to protect excessive grabbiness for more money and its translation into....

Totalitarianism 101.  

???

Furthermore, I also learned that rumors abound about a group of real estate developers also have their eyes on The Bridge, the city's first non-evangelical or religion-based homeless shelter.  That's something I know I fought for as an advocacy journalist in 2000-2002.  At the time, I remember, Dallas' then overwrought disdain for what some termed as an invasion of homeless tramps, bums, whatever, had also granted Dallas a number-one winner position: One of the meanest cities in the United States as interpreted by its general and often officialized treatment of unfortunate humans without roofs under which to lay their heads.  

Didn't Jesus self-describe in such a way?  

ENOUGH OF THAT!  Those who "command the Bible, especially the New Testament" need to keep that one down and out. 

A nice bumper sticker: INSTRUMENTALIZE JESUS.  Right.  Turn the widely-proclaimed Son of God into another tool that is found only in the higher circles of hardware stores.  Which of course sell construction equipment and earth movers.  

Matthew 4: 11: Jesus, quietly studying his situation and his understanding of his mission as a newly officialized rabbi, way out in the desert where he can get a little peace of mind--he's taken to a mountaintop.  He can see everything from the peak.  This is where Satan suggests that if he, Jesus, bows down to the devil, he, Jesus, will have dominion over all the earth.  

What did Jesus say if we used today's euphemistic parlance:  

"Meh."  He declared his kingdom was not one of temporal authority.  Nope.  Jesus wasn't a real estate developer.  Odd too that he lost his temper in the Temple when he found moneychangers selling animal sacrifices in the foyer of the Holy of Holies.  What happened next?  Jesus was executed for vandalism.  

Then, weirdly, when ancient Rome, the all-purpose instrumentalizer and commercial power, began to droop from overextending its empire to the point the empire was indefensible, who came along?  

A group the Romans named Vandals.  How apropos.  

Weirdly, at least in contrast to Catholic Church agitprop, the Vandals, although a peripatetic civilization that had no need for real estate possession, turned out to be more civilized than the moribund remnants of a once-powerful republic.  Especially odd is that the Roman empire thrived because the republic it violently replaced had provided it a solid foundation from which to...get more stuff.  

We hear horrific stories about Attila The Hun.  How savage he was.  Maybe because he defeated the once-valiant Roman legions, he was then impugned through history as a horrific savage and bloodthirsty military leader.  Nah.  He merely established an empire--just as had Rome.  

Way to go, ideologues of 2025 U.S.A.  Anyone challenge the need to go all grabby in an excessive way is conveniently labeled the instant it begins to mount arguments to push back the grab-asses: socialist!  Prepackaged, fill-in-the-blank fear tactics.  

Usually those with the most to fear when reality comes calling use fear tactics.  As if socialism in the US was a threat.  It isn't.  But then, what with left and right serving as little battle banners the unrighteous right deploys as a defense of the either-or totalitarian variety, what about the foundational structure of how reality relates to the human lives left to struggle at the hands of the compulsively grabby?  

The root conditions don't change.  How we interpret root conditions is subject to Ptomkin Village proportions of a pent-up change that, left unaddressed, will spill over not only the grabby wealthy (lots of wealth is not grabby) but all over every citizen's life.  

Not a fine place to end a republic in favor of acquisitions.  

So.  Developers are rumored to be pushing from behind the scenes the destruction of The Bridge--because that secular shelter was, in the wanton eyesight of that group of developers, in the wrong place.  What is supposedly "right" for that bunch?  

More condos!  Next to the Farmer's Market!  How lovely!  Let's make the unfortunate move their asses!  They don't have any money anyway!  

When I first "was rendered" homeless by circumstances I did not know how to control at the time, much of those circumstances being "the early stages of Bipolar Disorder recovery", I remember how a homeless woman took me to the Farmer's Market. 

"You won't get any fresh vegetables or fruits at the shelters," she told me. "Go to the Farmer's Market if you need those!  Most stalls offer people samples!"  

Great idea.  She and I wended our ways through the crowded market, reaching for slices of apples, of oranges, of carrots, squash, even spinach leaves.  Wonderful.  Fresh vegetables and fruits are essential to omnivores such as human beings.  

Until we reached the stall of the guy called "the Watermelon Man".  I took a sample.  But I was not dressed appropriately.  The Watermelon Man snapped at me: "GET OUTTA HERE YOU GODDAMNED BUM!" 

Welcome to Dallas, the International City.  All the Jesus prattle and pabulum--faked.  All the liberty--only for the moneyed elite.  All that freedom?  Takes money, honey.  Or something.  I really did feel that way, and to this day, I have not forgotten how it felt to be laid low and to want to rise up and better myself through a difficult and painful situation--only to be labeled a goddamned bum, and then rousted by some idiot-head with a long silvery knife.  

On a Sunday afternoon.  

I'm certain I took it too hard.  The Watermelon Man was only one deeply self-interested individual.  Like many, perhaps, he was afraid of the sight of poverty.  America, in that sensibility, is not about "those people".  We, in other words, as homeless individuals, were kinks in the conduit, buzz-kills, outsiders who messed with comfortable illusions of superiority and pride of place and means.  

So yeah.  Move a secular shelter away from where developers want to build.  In 2001, when the City of Dallas was planning for The Bridge, the same malcontented developers were incensed at people like me, people who stood to defend perhaps the most ghettoized community in DFW: homeless community.  

Yes, a community.  A sovereign-by-default community.  One with a need for defenders, not land ho's.  

NIMBY, a.k.a. Not In My Backyard", apparently does not play when developers begin twaddling with the "back yards" of homeless people and their advocates.  Do you feel a pain in the ass?  Call the SEC or the FHA.  Even if both are "under new management".  

At least your complaint will be part of the historical record.  As in who really wants a commercial empire to shift into a political one via a propagandistic foray of scare tactics of some kind of vast socialist conspiracy.  

Here's a fun axiom: "If you can't join 'em, beat 'em."  Maybe that was the under-the-breath motto of 19th Century white supremacist slave owners.  

After all, almost all adults want their innocence back.  Those who still possess it due to their strength under the chaos of "natural law" are reminders, apparently to those who can't seem to preserve their own innocence.  

Finally, Thanksgiving Day.  My sister, brother-in-law, and I are speeding along a rural road near Celina, a small exurban area north of DFW.  The last few years, the ride, to me, thrilled: 

Old cedar and juniper forest, with oaks, blackjack oaks, pecan trees, and lovely fields full of rolled hay and Angus cattle grazing, weather nice, the treescape on both roadsides an amazing, exhilarating experience for me.  

I live in an urban area with some local greenbelt nearby.  Nothing of that compares to driving down a winding rural road full of so much nature as to be nearly intoxicating.  

However, this ride northward into exurbia took me into a saddening surprise: Plowed forest, plowed fields, barren dirt, no cattle in many spots.  Why?  

Development.  

It's as if no urban sprawl is enough urban sprawl.  I've mentioned in earlier entries that, in 2010, as family and I flew from New Mexico to DFW airport--at Thanksgiving's aftermath--nearly half the journey eastward was filled with a vast urban city of incandescence.  Granted, the plane had slowed.  Yet, given the rate of air pollution, and in this case light pollution, what is up with all the metropolitan sprawl?  

Likely, the usual reason is at play: big money to be made.  Cut whatever down, plow under the grass and wild weeds and sunflowers and havens for rabbits, bobcats, coyotes and foraging animals, and look: 

More money to be made.  

No one I know, not even myself, objects to someone moderately making money off real estate.  But the now excessive urban sprawl in the DFW area is out-of-control.  

Endless expansion is like an old science fiction novel:   Explorers searching for Earth after hundred years of silence from the planet home of their ancestors finally find the place: What once was lovely in their imaginations had been replaced by unsettling reality: The entire planet was wrapped in a coat of steel and concrete.  And all inhabitants were gone.  

In other words, way to go, development obsessives; way to go.  And no, Jesus isn't going to clean up after you.  Give up on that excuse.  

My Two Jobs For, Like, Forever

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

I'm certain some of expertise and genius have heard the sad tale before:  A person of some skill and creative imagination decides to honor his parents the best way he knows how to do: By accomplishing, in my case, what my father wished for his own life, what my father could not accomplish as a data processing manager at the U.S. Postal Service.  

My father?  He longed to have been a writer all his life.  Why not honor my father by becoming a writer as a way to say, "Here, Daddy.  I will become your best wishes because I love you to the skies and back!"  

I've told the story: I would wake early on a weekday morning--and see my father busily reading literature.  He had a tattered first edition paperback of Kerouac's "On The Road".  He read Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer, secreted away copies of Miller's "Sexus", "Plexus" and "Nexus".  Certainly, my father had an interesting taste in literature in 1967.  Those tastes today likely could fit into the Outlaw School of American Literature.  

I did squirrel away an inheritance after my father shot himself in the head with a .38 Special on September 29, 1970: His "novel", poorly written, pen on paper, unreadable cursive, folded into two pieces, and titled "Gerard".  Seems to me he offered me a vocalized summary of his book.  

He'd written it while a United States Navy radio operator who provided rear-guard surveillance duties at the Battle of Coral Sea, and later in Saipan, and still later in Okinawa.  Doubtless, his radio operator's job was complex: He had to work with code talkers: men who spoke in a language indecipherable to enemies, mainly because Native American languages often did not have dictionaries or grammars. 

Hence, because my father had a yen for those past accomplishments in speaking English to code talkers, as a U.S. Postal Service data processing manager who played a part in the USPS's first experiments with computer technology (complete with punch cards, stacks of which he gave me) he learned American Indian Sign Language, and hired a deaf secretary, an action that earned enough public admiration that he was commended by president Lyndon Baines Johnson for his commitment to providing stable and amenable working conditions for the disabled.  

Hard to top that in a current (and currency) world whirl of self- and selfish- interest.  Amirite?

  Remember?  That's highly radioactive material that can kill if touched by conservative plutocrats scared shitless by the possibility that popular music might escape their irritable grasping for more, and then more, and then still more, an activity of excess that demands control of all forms of mass media, especially pop music in the United States, Land of the Free.  

Don't worry.  Censorship like that is SoCiAl.  It's "immune" from the law, and apparently, from the First Amendment: buy it, shut it down, protect thyself from self-fulfilling prophesies concerning the "commies" or something dumb like that.   

More ironic is that my father was also going deaf.  But he happened to be a highly intelligent and proactive human being: learning ASL helped employ a woman with a hearing disability.  It must have been really cool to watch him signing dictation to his secretary.  And, while he was slowly going deaf himself, I remember how he went to a costume party dressed as Harpo Marx.  

As Marx, my daddy looked pretty funny with a fuzzy white wig on his head.  his bicycle horn?  Honk!  Honk!  

Yeah, daddy was a hit.  

The punch cards?  The novel?  Lost to theft-by-corporation: While transitioning from homelessness to "life in the real world" after nearly five years of relative horror, relative freedom from obligation, while a caring friend of mine (a socialist?) gave me $250 to help pay back rent for my Public Storage obligations.  

What happened?  Anxiety from that transition (homelessness to housed transitions suffer close to an 88 percent recidivism rate due to the upswing of stuffed emotional trauma from being stigmatized by society for being unfortunate), led me to an old stand-by stopgap: I drank much of that money away.  The rest?  One dollar hamburgers, the Texas Burger, from a Wendy's down the street from where I lived.  

Really?  Did a homeless vagrant have trouble readjusting to the mainstream?  Oh boo hoo hoo.  

That reaction, and recourse to drinking down anxiety and trauma, is a Bipolar-adjacent syndrome called by psychiatrists "self-medication".  

Yup, yup, I was a mess for nearly a year.  Hard times: Lost possessions via underpayment to Public Storage (the new assistant district manager cared not for transitions or adjustments; he only wanted his money), a torn-up office couch, and a mattress on the floor.  Boy!  Isn't reentry to the mainstream fantastic?  

I was terrified.  

I remember sitting up all night for many months and listening to Art Bell of Coast To Coast AM, and that kept my mind on spurious information and conspiracy theories, few of which hold water, unless of course, as metaphors for other types of alien invasions, etc.  

Regardless, no matter the issues, I continued to write.  I'd begun writing at 13.  Possibly earlier, really.  I made up and drew my own comic books.  Clearly enough for me at least, I had "the creative bug".  The creative bug has never left me.  And why should it?  Should the creative bug just get out of the psyche when "adulthood" comes calling?  

That kind of adulthood is surrender.  And as an outlaw poet acquaintance of mine once said, "Submit but never surrender!"  Get your writing to publications, but don't allow them to force you into compromise.  

Independence, however, in the commercial world, while much hyped by rightist "conservatives" and rightist libertarians, is actually nothing but hype when the humanities are involved.  Poetry?  Who needs it?  

All this time--from my life as "homeless man in the library eight hours a day" to today, I've been interested in how what is called Reason has been instrumentalized into a tool of what is known as "management".  Maverick political scientist Sheldon S. Wolin labeled the consequences of the imposition of instrumentalized Reason a name: 

Managed Democracy.  

Another label he coined: Inverted Totalitarianism.  

What's that?  According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism involves a democratic-republican face underneath which reside the autocratic values of run-of-the-mill capitalist values.  I'm not wholly sold on that concept, but I can understand interpreting today's often unbalanced intertwined relation between capitalism and democracy in such a way.  Wolin's ideas, some of which are now beginning to really gain steam, especially among those of us who are critical of capitalism while remaining loyal to its ideals no matter how far capitalists stray from whatever leading principles the fads of conventional currents should but often do not command them to follow.  

Does democracy need a manager?  Some awfully furious "conservatives" (who are all business all the time and thus do not qualify for that honorific) believe it does.  Why so?  Because those all-capitalism-all-the time versions of "the new man" don't like being told what to do.  What?  A regulation?  Let's bully it out of existence because there is money to be made.  

Fine.  Who gets hurt?  Why does that who have to get hurt in some bum rush for more and more? Who.  Really.  Knows.  

Another observer of current strains in a traditional rivalry between capitalism and democracy, David Rothkopf, has written numerous books in regard to how capitalism and democracy either relate in a healthy or in a dysfunctional way.  He's also written extensive studies on how the social and the political also either relate or become vying adversaries for "turf".  

But what does that have to do with my long-upheld two jobs situation?  The employee goes home, eats, rests, then goes to work at kitchen table, writing and learning to write until either 10 p.m. or late into the night, depending on how hard inspiration strikes.  For years.  And years.  And years.  Through employment and unemployment, plenitude or hunger, alienation or not.  

Hey.  I did get a few letters to the editor into alternative newspapers!  Ain't it great?  Love the support.  Even when one knows plenty and thus has plenty to add, "the agenda" which has now conquered American journalism has no room for those who actually know a few things and also know how to write about those few things in a relatable way.  

Yeah, yeah.  the STEM-dependent advocates of what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci once advised for a wholesale remake of higher education into solely technical and productivity subjects; they'll troll those of us who actually know political science is one of the humanities.  Funny, too.  Yesterday, I read an article in the November 2025 issue of The Nation that details how the University of Chicago has all-but-shut-down its humanities opportunities.  Apparently the opportunity cost of maintaining the human element in a world of too much capitalism is so much that it is to be vanquished in favor of fancy architectural excesses as rad and beautiful buildings.  The UC library, The Nation reveals, does not allow people to actually browse the stacks.  Why?  

Probably "for the sake of automation":  Why bother with allowing humans to wander the approximately four-thousand-year wide agora of knowledge when a machine can select a volume to spit out of a cage like the crazy sluggo-job in Orwell's 1984?  

STEM-dependence: three-legged animals out to hog the culture right out of us.  For the money.  

I had to learn how to write poetry the hard way: Because I lacked the funding to continue into higher post-graduate MFA-style education in creative writing, I ACTUALLY WENT TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, checked out books, AND READ THEM.  Can you believe it?  

Lucky for me, Frances Bell, one of the most noteworthy librarians in the United States at the time, stood eager to assist me with reading advice: She was in charge of the poetry in the Humanities Division.  Like my father, Frances longed to be a writer (of poetry) herself.  Frances, always struggling to get me to wake up and see the world's intimate relation between life and language, often to no avail, never lost patience.  To this day, I do not know why she didn't lose patience.  I was a little rowdy as a 20-something to cultivate the tranquility necessary to even begin a poem that offers the overworked and tired "a safe space", a place to go and be rewarded via contemplation and imagination.  Nope.  I was busy being an outlaw, a punk, a troublemaker and rabblerouser, a personification I labeled "a literary terrorist".  

It was fun.  I learned a little.  But I had years to go.  

One of Frances' best friends once stopped by to give me some advice: "As you mature both intellectually and as an adult," he predicted, "your poetry will improve."  

Unforgettable.  I am happy to have met people like Frances and her friends.  One coworker, Steve Housewright, lived with an avant-garde musical composer, Jerry Hunt, one of Philip Glass's friends and colleagues.  The environment at the Dallas Public Library was, and likely is, a rich one for aspiring devotees to a craft we call poetry.  A craft.  As in "done by hand", not by some AI machine that shucks humanity and inspiration in favor of "some audience kudos and props!"  Dumb tech bros: they see everything in black and white bits and bytes.  That definitely bites.  At least when the arts and letters are concerned.  I don;t know how many poets much more accomplished than I am who laugh outloud at tech folks with AI poetry machines--which can calculate, but not qualify.  

Oops.  I must have used an "ideologically incorrect" concept: what is quality?  A price label?  Or a human experience?  If the latter, whose experience is "better" than the others?  And which one is allowed more status: vocation or avocation? 

On the so-called front of the plastic arts--painting and sculpture--most people I know who are perhaps "excessively creative" work as artisans during the day--simply to feed themselves.  

No government support for the people who cultivate and garden the culture.  OH NO!  THAT IS NOT TO BE HAD!  

We know from where that nonsense ushers.  It ushers from some dude in Georgia who writes crappy pulp novels he claims are about war, gallantry, and power: Newt Gingrich.  And more, we in the creative community know exactly what Gingrich wants for we creative individuals and groups:  

To pay the piper by "sell, sell, sell".  Really?  How come there is almost no pay, pay, pay?  According to Gramsci again, an important observation about the fascism he lived to tell about: Fascists will seek more than anything to destroy the autonomy of the subject classes (not moneyed elites) in order to force them into a state of dependence, not independence.  Hence, no valuable critiques and critics who not only take an adversarial stance that defines independence, but expands and allows a culture to grow.  Nope.  Not that.  We must color between the lines or be socially or culturally imprisoned by third-rate writers like Newt Gingrich.  

I do applaud him for trying.  He does not applaud me or anyone like me.  In fascism there is no such thing as reciprocity.  

I read the letters and newspaper columns of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci not as a true believer but as one who has C-H-O-S-E-N to study the harbinger of the American New Left.  Right.  That's the leftovers.  Old hat.  The used-to-be's, correct?   

Why so?  Because that's what the more fascist oriented want the Official Culture to believe.  

Here's a bit of a notes-summary from reading his writings about forming blocs: 

"Deus absconditis--hidden God, i.e. per Gramsci and predecessors, if a superstructure (like a concept or a majority-accepted conceit or social construct) overlays what he determines to be "the actual structure" (always economic to him), then a theological interpretation of on-the-ground conditions hides the actuality behind a masquerade: However, while religion is a socio-cultural construction, basic right and wrong simply are--no matter how interpreted by either religion or an economic abstraction."

I get it.  If an economic interpretation (homo economicus) overlays all we understand about a state or a civilization, but also underlies variants of theological thought, that is nothing but a pretense, a masquerade, a sort of Trick-Or-Treat Halloween visitor: Gimme some treats or I'll pull a trick you might not like!  

"Hence," my note goes on, "we see Gramsci's point: his socialism must always be dynamic, not abstract or conceptual.  He tried to link that with his notion that the Marxist dialectic is in fact the basis of civilization...Interesting observation: Ethnic identity politics and social mores appeared almost serendipitously alongside "national conservatism" and its focus on white dominion, re nationalism.  Two of a kind?  Call and response?"  "Facts of culture are not culture itself."  "Gramsci suggests that ethnic politics as part of the cultural struggle for hegemony (dominance or critical mass) between its presence as an aspect of capitalist dominion versus what is actual, while not necessarily real can be used or instrumentalized via empiricism to thus produce social/cultural stimuli taken from the whole conflict on the struggle's front and then paired with practical reasoning to serve as a weapon or tool of that struggle for dominion."  "The tactical key to the struggle, then, is to aggravate both offense and defense in order to inflame and irritate.  (state-as-force v revolution-->to libertarian use of "non-coercion" to undermine the state.  See: Lenin".  

Is that a lot to swallow? Gramsci is noteworthy for his concept that communist revolution should only be loosely based on Leninist internationalism, but rather be tailor-made for each country's society.  

If that's the case, the reactionaries on the American right are falling in line--as planned.  Hey.  How's that weather?  

Shhh!  Don't allow independent writers tell this story.  That might bust some design--as Old South, Catholicism, Protestantism, neo-Nazism, and "post-Soviet" communism vye for complete control of the US-as-latest-lamb-chowder.  The US, supposedly "the coveted bitch of the playas on the scene".  

Now that's laughable. 

Funny how the short-sighted ignore the obvious in favor of spreading fear of communism while at the same time marching to the tune of the New Left, a movement that never disappeared at all.  

Sigh.  But what does this have to do with my vocation/avocation problem?  It has to do with the possibility that many independent writers and especially poets can serve as proverbial canaries in the coal mines--all subsidiaries of Charles Koch and his "team playas".  

What's weird is that, after I finally gained an opportunity to move out of the shelter 2001, I eagerly joined a program specifically designed to aid those with mental health issues that are either homeless or in danger of being so.  While that program is like Section 8, it comes with two necessities for those of us prone to panic attacks or outright manic episodes: advocates and caseworkers.  It's a good system for those of us willing to work.  

You know: to better ourselves and our lives. 

Here in Dallas, most Section 8 housing is handled by a little fiefdom called Dallas Housing Authority.  It's been accused all too many times by rightist critics of being too lenient in allowing dopers and crack dealers places to create dope houses.  Which might be true.  Thus, should anyone act out or get uppity, DHA is liable to pitch "the offender" to the streets.  This is why I have opted to remain in the housing program that protects something called...

my self-interests.  Which, apparently, are of a much lower station on the caste bar that commandeth all things--at least in its collective mindsets, swingsets, and concretized settings.  

My job as a poet is a difficult, complicated one.  Using words to create a kind of art is difficult.  As writing, though, its use of metaphor and connotation aren't really much different from the skills journalists deploy: they're only deployed in a way designed not necessarily inform with facts and data so much as to elucidate, describe and foster the human element.  

Sans that, a citizenship of zombie machines might welcome a Skynet situation where the robotized and three-legged STEM-dependent can follow Gramsci's diktats that all education must depose of all but courses in productivity, economics, accounting and mathematics.  

That way, a culture is alienated from itself.  What a wonder!  

Wonder indeed.  An employee or a professional rides home from a hard day, half exhausted from simply trying to keep nose above water, only to find a "freedom" in fast food or TV or maybe drinks at the bar or social time with friends, girlfriends or lovers.  Maybe that's enough.  After all, who needs the entirely plebeian vocalizations of Luciano Pavarotti here in an American culture oft misinformed to the degree of ignorance of the Old World mission of opera: entertainment for the plebeian masses.  

An acquaintance 20 years ago, a relatively intellectually-ignorant woman I had befriended as a sort of friend via alienation, scored a job working for The Dallas Symphony.  She sometimes passed out tickets to symphonies and other events offered at the gloriously beautiful Morton H. Myerson hall.   

When the woman offered me two tickets to see a DSO performance of Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5, I leapt a the chance to hear my favorite symphony life.  A Vietnam veteran friend of mine and I, casually dressed as would any bohemians (or, like, people), drove through baking August heat to hear the performance.  I remember being a sweaty mess as I found my seat and then reveled in beauty.  

What's the 5th about?  It's one commissioned by Stalin himself--to celebrate the Red Army victory at Stalingrad, by far one of the most deft surprise attacks in all human history.  And Shostakovitch, complaining all the way via musical gesture at the irritant of being forced to compose for a brute, completes the job to the point that, sometimes,when I listen to Vassily Patrenko conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's version of the work, I'll discover tears.  

After all, without that stunning surprise attack, the West would no longer exist.  Yes, the West was that close to extermination at the hands of an entirely-reactionary autocratic mess of a government.  Yeah, yeah, the Nazi Wehrmacht was an amazement of efficiency and effectiveness; the government sucked eggs.  Really lousy.  Nothing but servile wannabes for Hitler's attention out-competing one another.  Idiocy, Inc.  

Whatever.  Most tyrannies and dictatorships coerce independent writers into either silence or collaboration.  And when a culture war tightens up against independent voices, what happens is quite interesting; the target voices become shrill, loud, colorful, very very bourgeoise and operatic or performative.  

Little pets who do a trick for Dear Leader.  

Of course, resistance to that kind of ideological narcissism has always amounted to mice in the walls eating the electrical wires.  Those noted to being "non-cooperative" or "nuisances" may end up caught up in dragnets when, after all, the conventional culture, usually under the gun itself, refuses to protect the dissident by bringing them into visible protection.  Worthy poets of the Soviet variety: both Akhmatova and Pasternak won Nobel Prizes, and Stalin couldn't liquidate them because then the world would see through his lies that the USSR was the culture upon which the world's should be modeled.  

Akhmatova to Stalin: "You will learn to fear me."  He did.  

Stalin's apparatchiks scoured the poetry of Pasternak for clues to the political dissidence they seemed to sense.  How can one find dissidence in a poem about lilacs? 

Hilarious.  What is fun about the use of metaphor is that tyrants only see what they want to see.  Metaphor is after all squishy and uninterpretable.  That's why they're metaphors, not signs attempting metonymy.  

Which job must independently creative individuals and groups choose?  

Right.  Let's let the narrowed minds of ever-concretized ideologues order us to become their pets or meet extermination in an American gulag called ostracism. 

Concrete shoes?  Lots of ideologues wear theirs to work every single day of the week, especially Sundays.  

Poems never were made-to-order or Ukranian brides ads in the backs of adventure magazines.  For some reason, America's rightist pretenders to "conservatism" find that important factor in culture hard to stomach. 

Hope that tastes good enough to give them pause in the newly-planned evangelical skulk into Hollywood and the arts so that all the movies will be about this: 

Warrior Jesus.  Quite a costume for the Prince of Peace.