Just wondering

Who is it that keeps coming here from Cocoa Beach, Florida? You're one of the great mysteries of this blog. I often wonder who you are. I also wonder what Happened to Sarah from Mississippi. She used to comment here all the time and then she disappeared. She left behind a cryptic hint as to her email address. I figured it out and wrote her. I never heard back.
What's to do in Cocoa Beach now that you can't watch the space shuttle taking off? The weather there must be awful this time of year. The weather here at the other end of the country is overcast and somewhat chilly. I like it. I like it here but that's a long story.
I had a little adventure for a couple of months. It was good. I'd do it again. What do you do for adventures in Cocoa Beach?

Life's A Gas- Southern Culture on the Skids (Buy) 

In the summer time there are little frogs in my bathroom. I like them. They're almost tame. Sometimes They'll stand on my foot to keep from getting washed down the shower drain.

I know I should be concerned about politics right now, but I get so pissed off when I try that I stopped trying- for the moment. If anybody wants to actually, you know, do something, count me in. I mostly listen to music. Music is good.

I'm crazy now but I won't be crazy long.

Beloved leader of the people, Mick Farren, was unhappy about some of the rehab industry ghouls hoping to turn a buck off the recent death of a popular singer. I share his disgust. However, he described one celebrity rehab guru as an, "unctuous TV network 12 step fascist". I have no problems with calling the guy an unctuous fascist and God knows I don't have much use for TV networks but Mick, like a lot of people doesn't know nothin' about the the 12 steps. I wrote him the following, 


"Chairman Mick, As a hypnotized 12 step zombie who has lost all sense of self and surrendered all independent thought to the anonymous mind control cult, I can assure you that anyone who claims to be representing the 12 steps or any anonymous group associated with them is, by definition, a fucking fraud. Truth is that all of the various groups ending in A are composed of anonymous amateurs. People who share a common problem and seek a common solution. There are no leaders. There are no professionals. There is no money. I have hung around people professing to be anarchists since my teens. The closest thing I've seen to pure anarchy is a good 12 step group. It's true, you can go to meetings of some 12 step groups and hear some incredibly stupid things being said. That's because anybody is welcome, no one can be denied membership and anyone can say whatever he wants. Even if he's an idiot and a fool. 
Speaking only for myself, 19 years ago I was clinging to a shotgun, hallucinating rather vividly and drinking myself to a lonesome and early death. Fate in the form of the crazy girl I was living with intervened and I was introduced to a group of people, many of them almost as crazy as me, who had found a way out of the madness that had engulfed me. They came from all kinds of backgrounds, professed all kinds of beliefs. The only thing they agreed on was a simple plan that included helping other people who suffered from their condition. 
19 years later, is my life without problems? Of course not. This is life, not Candyland. I can say that my life means something to me, that I care deeply about the people around me, that I am curious and eager to see what life will throw at me next. 
Comrade, I know a fuck of a lot dead people. Many of them were smarter, more talented and better looking than me. I don't envy them even though I still love a lot of them. 
Amy Winehouse was more talented than most of the dead people I know but she died about the same as the rest of them. Truth is that there are also a lot of famous and talented people in 12 step groups. You don't know about them. You're not supposed to. I've met plenty of them. When they come into "the rooms" as we call them, they're exactly the same as the newest fuck-up loser to crawl through the door. 
I'm not saying the 12 steps work for everyone. I don't actually know everyone. We haven't been introduced. They worked pretty good for me."


I've been pretty wrung out lately. Your heart can take you on a hell of a ride. I did a lot of stupid shit. I did a few things that were flat out fucked up. I did a few things that I'll smile about till the day I die. I'll do what I can to clean up my part of the mess. It won't be easy but it will be OK. 


Honest, there's no significance to my choice of songs. I've been listening to The Greenhornes a lot lately. This was playing while I typed. 


Don't Come Running To Me- The Greenhornes (buy) 

The secret world of compulsive writers.

Tim, from Poop In The Pipes dropped by for coffee today. Tim is like me, he writes because he has to.

Look, I have posted some fairly personal and emotional stuff lately. Let me make something clear, what I'm doing here is called writing. I am not ranting. I am not engaging in emotional diatribes. I am thinking my feelings through as best I can and then writing them down while they are still fresh. I review what I've written. I make revisions. I discard drafts and start again. I am trying to take raw emotions and make them into something like literature.

You can dislike what I've written. That's OK. Just understand that I am trying to take my experiences of life and understand them by writing about them in a conscious and deliberate way. If I was a songwriter or a painter some of you might understand what I am trying to do. You might enjoy my work and say that I was "passionate".  You might even understand that, even though I usually write in the first person, I am not always the person who speaks in my writing.

I have friends in the real world. I have a support network. I am part of other people's support networks. There are wise elders and trusted counselors in my life. I don't write because I have no outlets. I write because I have to.

And what exactly is it you do with them when they can't take a joke?

I'll probably regret this.

Yep, sure enough. I regretted it.

Shit happens.

I was kidnapped by a mermaid. She took me to her underwater lair and showed me the secret pleasures of the sea. Now I find myself washed up on shore, wandering the waterfront where the other sailors consider me mad.

Damn, life, boy, it's the only thing worth living for. 

The Clovers- Lovey Dovey (Buy)

This happened to me.

One time I got up really early in the morning and went for a walk. It was winter time and everything was covered in rime frost. As the sun rose, the frost lit up in brilliant yellows and reds. It dawned on me that everything I thought I knew was actually on fire. Soon enough the world I thought was real would be nothing but dust and ashes.

When I got home from the walk I started to run a high fever. I was feverish all that day.

This was not a bad experience at all.

What I hate and why I hate it so much.

I sure am glad I don't have a television. I mostly stay away from newspapers too. It's not hard to keep track of whatever I find interesting. I like the internet. I can filter out some amount of the crap that is being fed to me.

So Mr. Hope and Change is escalating four wars while negotiating cuts in social security and medicaid. Let's get clear on something, sociopathy is the norm. We live in a society where virtually everyone has embraced the role of victim or perpetrator. Most of us are happy to play either part depending on which role the masters demand of us. Our job at the moment is to uncomplainingly shovel babies into the jaws of Moloch, 24/7. Whatever it takes to keep us on the job is what we can expect. The word from on high is that Moloch hungers and we must have our rations cut to satisfy him. Buckle down and hope for better times. His appetites cannot be denied.

So that's what our free enterprise system looks like to me; a world of slaves who feed themselves to an inhuman archon and struggle to meet his expectations; a death camp where the prisoners guard each other while they wait for their time in the ovens.

But what about our exciting lives? Our favorite shows? The edifying spectacle of news and information that forms our opinions. Why am I talking shit when some woman has murdered her own child? Am I incapable of compassion? Why can't I see that I am engaged in idle chatter while a terrible injustice has gone unpunished?

My fucking point exactly. A woman has failed to meet her assigned role. Her job is to prepare that young life for destruction not to destroy it herself. Who does she think she is? That child will never be free to know the joys of subservience. Isn't that woman contemptible? Well, I suppose she is and even our bleak world has it's bright moments. Everyone deserves their chance at whatever happiness this world might afford them. No one should be murdered. Right?  Especially not by their own mother.

Let's get clear on something else. Society talks a lot of shit. We find it convenient to talk shit about protecting the innocent but societies reproduce themselves. Every institution in any society exists to perpetuate that society and regardless of any pious hypocrisy, when ever an institution, the family, the church, what fucking ever, is doing something again and again, no matter how little you like it, that is one of it's functions. Brutality, terror, rape, murder and incest are as common as bullshit in our society and that's because they are functions of society. I'll admit they're some of the more extreme functions but they serve the same purpose as every other mechanism: to produce properly functioning members of society.

And so what if some percentage of society is broken and insane? Let them serve as a warning to the rest of us. Let them bear the burden of society's dark side. Let them remind us of what good mommies and daddies and babies are supposed to be like. So long as we have bad TV mommies to hate we don't need to look at the whole evil institution or question our compliance with it. The archon reigns supreme and we live at his sufferance.

I know that I'm damaged and not quite sane. I know that anyone I will ever love will be damaged and insane. I know this too. Of the many damaged and insane people I have ever loved the only ones I will ever love without reservation are the ones who have declared war on the system of mental slavery, who struggle to break their "mind forg'd manacles". 

Look, I will not do all of your home work for you. Google the word "archon". Consider the possibility that you live in a false world created by a false god. Consider the possibility that you have worshipped him all of your life.

I am hurt and angry right now. I am not avoiding the specifics of my feelings. My mood will change. My heart will lighten. I will not worship the god of this world.

Not quite dead poets

I once lived in a place that looked almost exactly the same as this. It was a tad crude but I was happy.

I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up here. I've turned into a facebook asshole; flirting with elderly high school crushes and posting you tube videos with witty comments.

So, once again, the writing bug bit me at an odd moment and I went into a long reminiscence about a landlord I had more than twenty years ago. We had a falling out when his wife decided she didn't like my girlfriend and evicted us. I'm glad I had a chance to make up with him a few days before he died. He dropped stone dead while working. He was always working. I doubt that death will find me working.

Here's what I had to say.

"Good news is that it's been a hell of a spring for birds. I've got bluejays, house finches, and gold finches at my feeders. In the winter I also had juncos and sulfur crested sparrows. A pair of western bluebirds are nesting right outside my kitchen and a pair of hawks are nesting up high above them. Wild turkeys, which had disappeared from the county back in the '40's are now so common that everybody is sick of them. An immense herd of tom turkeys wanders back and forth through my yard, gobbling and displaying.
I was renting from an old time bird watcher, and Klan sympathizer and general racist nut case, when the first turkeys were seen around here. He was thrilled. He was a hell of an odd guy but we got along. He knew more about local wildlife than anyone I ever met and he managed his farm using old time sustainable practices. He composted religiously. He had planted douglas firs as windbreaks when he was very young and they had grown into magnificent stands of trees around the property. He made it a point to leave hedgerows and wildlife corridors around his orchards.
There was an old Pomo indian shell mound/midden heap in his lower pasture. He told me about it but he swore me to secrecy. "If anyone finds out about it, I'll have the goddam government all over me telling me how to run this place." He did spray chemicals on his orchard but I have never seen as many different birds as I saw around there.
He and his wife were both addicted to pain pills and they were mean as cat shit when they got a few drinks in them. His wife was a literal castrating bitch. The old man got prostate cancer and the doctors cut off his balls to try and stop it from spreading. I rarely saw her as happy as she was the day he came home without his nuts. I think she kept them in a jar and hid them.
He was quite well to do and lived very comfortably but he worked constantly. When he was in his 70's he was stronger than I was in my early 30's. He worked every day, all day, on his many cars and trucks, or cutting down old trees and bucking and splitting them for firewood. He had a beautiful old barn full of every kind of tool you can imagine, many of them antiques handed down to him but still in use. He had a complete set of 19th century hand logging tools.
For all of his tough guy bluster he was really a gentle guy. He knew and loved the wild animals around his property. I never liked his wife, partly because she made him kill some of the hawks after one of them killed some of her pet chickens. It clearly cause him great pain to go out after those beautiful hawks. The old lady gloated over their corpses.
I always figured he was such a racist because he was trying to add a little glamor and excitement to his life. He was extraordinarily privileged and comfortable and I suppose that seemed sort of dull to him. He liked to imagine that he was facing all sorts of adversity but he was tough enough to handle it. I'm sure that his fantasies about having to protect himself from the government, the Jews and the Blacks were very pleasing to him."

I'm back to work two days a week. I'd like more money but I don't want more work. I actually love my commute. I get up early, ride an express bus to San Francisco, stop for coffee and then head over the Bay Bridge to West Oakland. I love sightseeing along the way. I get to see all of the construction on the new Bay Bridge and I see how many ships are in the port of Oakland. I like living in the country but I am not an anti industrial neo hippy. I love seeing big, big things. The port is the product of thousands of years of human endeavor. People have been crossing seas and trading goods since before we took up agriculture.

After working 22 years for a bridge, I love bridges. The new Bay Bridge is huge and might actually be beautiful. I love seeing the hundreds of cranes, work boats and barges working on it. I feel lucky to even look at all that knowledge and skill in action.

I'm doing paperwork and learning the Department of Transportation's new system for quantifying bus safety. It makes some sense and it holds bus companies responsible for some of their unsafe behavior. Ever since deregulation in the '80's the trend has been to let companies engage in wildly unsafe practices and then hold the drivers responsible for accidents. I am really unimpressed by the performance of the Democrats in Congress and the White House but Obama's appointees at the DOT and the Department of Labor might actually do the world a small amount of good.

I'm lighting candles to the Virgin of Guadelupe and Kali Ma, keeping the spiritual road open and trying to do my little bit to make the physical highways safe.

The Victory Travelers- I Know I've Been Changed (buy)

In which I offer criticism of a major American poet.

So, my friend, Alice, posted this video on Facebook and I had to make an observation. This is by way of getting some general bitching outta the way.

I dunno, isn't she bitching because the old timers won't let her work harder? I had just turned 19. I was a new hire at Ford's Dearborn Assembly Plant, the mothership of the Ford Motor Company. I was given a pointless, but easy job on my first day. I wanted the boss to like me. I wanted the job to work out. I threw myself into it.

After about an hour an old timer, a battle hardened veteran, a grizzled old autoworker in his late twenties walked up to me smoking a cigarette.

He watched me work for a minute then said, "Kid, come 'ere a minute. Do you like work? Lemme tell you somethin' kid. The more work you show 'em you can do, the more work they'll provide yer ass. Slow down."

He meant that, if I let them, they would work me until my back was ruined. Until my knees and shoulders were grinding bone on bone. Until I lost a finger, or maybe a hand in the gears of some machine. Until the smoke and fumes had destroyed my lungs. Until my heart gave out or the cancer ate me alive. He was trying to tell me to pace myself for a life time.

I'm glad Patti ran away to become an artist but that doesn't mean she understood what was going on. I love Patti but this time she got it wrong.

Honest, my faithful anonymous reader in Cocoa Beach, I'm working on an original post here at Poetry Is For Assholes. Trouble is I'm not much for work. If you catch my drift.

Poetry is also for dogs

I really should do more with this blog. I didn't want all of February to go by without a post.

More posts at other people's blogs

So, I watched this movie, "Agora". It gave me a lot to think about. My friend, Ish, at The Cahokian, wrote about the movie. I liked what he had to say.

I am an occasional communicant in the Episcopal Church. I don't talk about my religion much. I figure my behavior will say more than my words. Besides, I don't feel like answering a bunch of questions. I don't have good answers for all of them. I don't believe Jesus rode dinosaurs. I do think evolution is a perfectly sound scientific idea. I don't think it's a very good creation myth. I do believe women have every right to choose in matters concerning their own bodies. I can't justify the Spanish Inquisition. I don't think there's an invisible old white man in the sky who hates us and punishes us. I do favor secular society and the separation of church and state. I am afraid of the Christian Right. I do think they are fascists.

As usual, I save my best stuff for other people's blogs. Here's my first impressions after reading Ish's comments on "Agora":

"I'm familiar with Hypatia's story and I want to see this film. As one of your Christian friends I do have to jump in with something. I wasn't in Alexandria so I don't know for sure, but Roman Paganism was not kind, open minded or nature loving. I think Alexandria's brutal Christian mobs had more in common with Paris's brutal mobs during the French Revolution than with the mobs that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are threatening to unleash. I think many of the violent and intolerant Christians imagined, falsely, that they had been empowered by Rome's decision to make Christianity the state religion. I think it was Reinhold Niebhur who said "Religion is very good in the hands of good people and very bad in the hands of bad people."
Still trying to take in the history of Christianity and relate it to Christ's ministry. I haven't gotten very far."

So, I was happy when I got ahold of a rental copy of "Agora". Here's what I wrote to Ish after seeing the film:

"I got a chance to see Agora. Wow. A great film that asks more questions than it answers. Here's a question for you. Haven't you ever wanted to smash all of their idols? Haven't you ever despised the long thoughtful moments that make up the life of Hypatia, knowing that every leisurely moment was purchased with years of suffering by a slave? Haven't you ever been willing to see the whole body of their knowledge smashed and burned, knowing that their universities are monuments to oppression and cruelty?
I know I've felt that way more than a few times. What would it look like if I was allowed to act on my anger? Could I stop myself at some decent moment and only destroy what needs to be destroyed?
I know that I pray in a church that was built by former Confederate generals who were hoping to recreate the decadent morality of the southern elite in a California valley. I know that the head of my church, The Archbishop Of Canterbury, presides over the church from Lambeth Palace, a palace built with profits made in the gigantic slave plantations of the Caribbean. I know that millions of young women were worked to early deaths to pay for that splendid building.
How much of this am I willing to see destroyed? If I was given free rein to destroy all that I despise what would prevent me from becoming a monster?
I suppose the good news is that I am not likely to have to answer those questions in real life. I lead a quiet, pleasant life paid for, in part, by the suffering of countless others.
I remember when we were young radicals, people from other tendencies would criticize us for refusing to compromise with reformists and labor bureaucrats. We were afraid to dirty our hands is what they said. Is that idealistic avoidance nothing more than privilege? What if saving your soul is the best you can hope for; knowing that you've betrayed your ideals in the endless battles of life?
Damn, too much to think about. I've got errands to run."

Poetry is for assholes and I know I'm one. Who the fuck can afford the luxury of philosophy? Who the fuck can do without it? Please, no glib replies.

I know I've worked up a pretty good ukulele version of "There Ain't Nothin' To Do" by The Dead Boys.

Oh hell, Happy new year.

Do people still come here? It seems they do. I keep meaning to post something, really I do. I'll try again in 2011. Dope City Free Press has been on a hell of a roll. Tim's blog, Poop In The Pipes, is great. Daisy Deadhead at Daisy's Dead Air is always interesting. Brown Femi Power will always be a hero to me. Nazz Nomad continues to rattle his sword at the world. Brother Ib at Siblingshot In The Bleachers is back with a new addition to his household. The Cahokian has emerged as one of my big fave blogs. Princess Sparkle Pony is swell as ever. Doc 40 is now broadcasting from Brighton, England. Civic Center continues to expose me to high culture in my own town. Blogging is not as dead as some people would have it.

So I'm listening to Gospel music and Cotton mill music and reading Chris Hedges.

Honest, I'll try and talk about it soon.

Here's Cheetah Chrome, by the banks of the Wabash in my old Indiana home. He's playing with some old friends and acquaintances. That Frankie Camaro was a rockin' motherfucker.



Happy New Year everyone.